Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  “So that was when the dream became a nightmare, sir,” said Grigoriev humbly. “They told me also that I could say goodbye to my week-end of love. Little Evdokia would have to get her fun elsewhere, they said. Then one of them laughed.”

  Now a great fear had seized Grigoriev, he said, and by the time he had entered the first room and advanced upon the second door, he was so scared his knees were shaking. He even had time to be scared for his beloved Evdokia. Who could this supernatural person be, he wondered in awe, that he could know almost before Grigoriev himself knew, that he was pledged to meet Evdokia for the week-end?

  “So you knocked on the door,” said Smiley, as he wrote.

  And I was ordered to enter! Grigoriev went on. His enthusiasm for confession was mounting; so was his dependence upon his interrogator. His voice had become louder, his gestures more free. It was as if, says Toby, he was trying physically to coax Smiley out of his posture of reticence; whereas in reality it was Smiley’s feigned indifference which was coaxing Grigoriev into the open. And I found myself not in a large and splendid office at all, sir, as became a senior official and a great Soviet fighter, but in a room so barren it would have done duty for a prison cell, with a bare wood desk at the centre, and a hard chair for a visitor to sit on:

  “Imagine, sir, a great Soviet fighter and a powerful man! And all he had was a bare desk, which was illuminated only by a most inferior light! And behind it sat this priest, sir, a man of no affectation or pretence at all—a man of deep experience, I would say—a man from the very roots of his country—with small, straight eyes, and short grey hair, and a habit of holding his hands together while he smoked.”

  “Smoked what?” Smiley asked, writing.

  “Please?”

  “What did he smoke? The question is plain enough. A pipe, cigarettes, cigar?”

  “Cigarettes. American, and the room was full of their aroma. It was like Potsdam again, when we were negotiating with the American officers from Berlin. ‘If this man smokes American all the time,’ I thought, ‘then he is certainly a man of influence.’” Rounding on Toby again in his excitement, Grigoriev put the same point to him in Russian. To smoke American, chain smoke them, he said: imagine the cost, the influence necessary to obtain so many packets!

  Then Smiley, true to his pedantic manner, asked Grigoriev to demonstrate what he meant by “holding his hands together” while he smoked. And he looked on impassively while Grigoriev took a brown wood pencil from his pocket and linked his chubby hands in front of his face, and held the pencil in both of them, and sucked at it in caricature, like someone drinking two-handed from a mug.

  “So!” he explained, and with another volatile switch of mood, shouted something in high laughter to Toby in Russian, which Toby did not see fit, at the time, to translate, and in the transcription is rendered only as “obscene.”

  The priest ordered Grigoriev to sit, and for ten minutes described to him the most intimate details of Grigoriev’s love affair with Evdokia, and also of his indiscretions with two other girls, who had both worked for him as secretaries, one in Potsdam and one in Bonn, and had ended up, unknown to Grigorieva, by sharing his bed. At which point, if Grigoriev was to be believed, he made a show of courage, and rose to his feet, demanding to know whether he had been brought half-way across Russia in order to attend a court of morals: “To sleep with one’s secretary was not an unknown phenomenon, I told him, even in the Politburo! I assured him that I had never been indiscreet with foreign girls, only Russians. ‘This too I know,’ he says. ‘But Grigorieva is unlikely to appreciate the distinction.’”

  And then, to Toby’s continuing amazement, Grigoriev gave vent to another burst of throaty laughter; and though both de Silsky and Skordeno discreetly joined in, Grigoriev’s mirth outlived everybody’s, so that they had to wait for it to run down.

  “Kindly tell us, please, why the man you call the priest summoned you,” Smiley said, from deep in his brown overcoat.

  “He advised me that he had special work for me in Berne on behalf of the Thirteenth Directorate. I should reveal it to nobody, not even to my Ambassador, it was too secret for any of them. ‘But,’ says the priest, ‘you shall tell your wife. Your personal circumstances render it impossible for you to make a conspiracy without the knowledge of your wife. This I know, Grigoriev. So tell her.’ And he was right,” Grigoriev commented. “This was wise of him! This was clear evidence that the man was familiar with the human condition.”

  Smiley turned a page and continued writing. “Go on, please,” he said.

  First, said the priest, Grigoriev was to open a Swiss bank account. The priest handed him a thousand Swiss francs in one hundred notes and told him to use them as the first payment. He should open the account not in Berne, where he was known, nor in Zurich, where there was a Soviet trade bank.

  “The Vozhod,” Grigoriev explained gratuitously. “This bank is used for many official and unofficial transactions.”

  Not in Zurich, then, but in the small town of Thun, a few kilometres outside Berne. He should open the account under the name of Glaser, a Swiss subject: “But I am a Soviet diplomat!” Grigoriev had objected. “I am not Glaser, I am Grigoriev!”

  Undeterred, the priest handed him a Swiss passport in the name of Adolf Glaser. Every month, said the priest, the account would be credited with several thousand Swiss francs, sometimes even ten or fifteen. Grigoriev would now be told what use to make of them. It was very secret, the priest repeated patiently, and to the secrecy belonged both a reward and a threat. Very much as Smiley himself had done an hour before, the priest baldly set out each in turn. “Sir, you should have observed his composure towards me,” Grigoriev told Smiley incredulously. “His calmness, his authority in all circumstances! In a chess game he would win everything, merely by his nerves.”

  “But he was not playing chess,” Smiley objected drily.

  “Sir, he was not,” Grigoriev agreed, and with a sad shake of his head resumed his story.

  A reward, and a threat, he repeated.

  The threat was that Grigoriev’s parent Ministry would be advised that he was unreliable on account of his philandering, and that he should therefore be barred from further foreign postings. This would cripple Grigoriev’s career, also his marriage. So much for the threat.

  “This would be extremely terrible for me,” Grigoriev added, needlessly.

  Next the reward, and the reward was substantial. If Grigoriev acquitted himself well, and with absolute secrecy, his career would be furthered, his indiscretions overlooked. In Berne he would have an opportunity to move to more agreeable quarters, which would please Grigorieva; he would be given funds with which to buy himself an imposing car which would be greatly to Grigorieva’s taste; also he would be independent of Embassy drivers, most of whom were “neighbours,” it was true, but were not admitted to this great secret. Lastly, said the priest, his promotion to Counsellor would be accelerated in order to explain the improvement in his living standards.

  Grigoriev looked at the heap of Swiss francs lying on the desk between them, then at the Swiss passport, then at the priest. And he asked what would happen to him if he said he would rather not take part in this conspiracy. The priest nodded his head. He too, he assured Grigoriev, had considered this third possibility, but unfortunately the urgency of the need did not provide for such an option.

  “So tell me what I must do with this money,” Grigoriev had said.

  It was routine, the priest replied, which was another reason why Grigoriev had been selected: “In matters of routine, I am told you are excellent,” he said. Grigoriev, though he was by now scared half-way out of his skin by the priest’s words, had felt flattered by this commendation.

  “He had heard good reports of me,” he explained to Smiley with pleasure.

  Then the priest told Grigoriev about the mad girl.

  Smiley did not budge. His eyes as he wrote were almost closed, but he wrote all the time—though God knows what he wrote,
says Toby, for George would never have dreamed of consigning anything of even passing confidentiality to a notepad. Now and then, says Toby, while Grigoriev continued talking, George’s head lifted far enough out of his coat collar for him to study the speaker’s hands, or even his face. In every other respect he appeared remote from everything and everybody inside the room. Millie McCraig was in the doorway, de Silsky and Skordeno kept still as statues, while Toby prayed only for Grigoriev to “keep talking, I mean talking at any price, who cares? We were hearing of Karla’s tradecraft from the horse’s mouth.”

  The priest proposed to conceal nothing, he assured Grigoriev—which, as everyone in the room but Grigoriev at once recognised, was a prelude to concealing something.

  In a private psychiatric clinic in Switzerland, said the priest, there was confined a young Russian girl who was suffering from an advanced state of schizophrenia: “In the Soviet Union this form of illness is not sufficiently understood,” said the priest. Grigoriev recalled being strangely touched by the priest’s finality. “Diagnosis and treatment are too often complicated by political considerations,” the priest went on. “In four years of treatment in our hospitals, the child Alexandra has been accused of many things by her doctors. ‘Paranoid reformist and delusional ideas . . . An over-estimation of her own personality . . . Poor adaptation to the social environment . . . Over-inflation of her capabilities . . . A bourgeois decadence in her sexual behaviour.’ Soviet doctors have repeatedly ordered her to renounce her incorrect ideas. This is not medicine,” said the priest unhappily to Grigoriev. “It is politics. In Swiss hospitals, a more advanced attitude is taken to such matters. Grigoriev, it was essential that the child Alexandra should go to Switzerland!”

  It was by now clear to Grigoriev that the high official was personally committed to the girl’s problem, and familiar with every aspect of it. Grigoriev himself was already beginning to feel sad for her. She was the daughter of a Soviet hero—said the priest—and a former official of the Red Army who, in the guise of a traitor to Russia, was living in penurious circumstances among counter-revolutionary Czarists in Paris.

  “His name,” the priest said now, admitting Grigoriev to the greatest secret of all, “his name,” he said, “is Colonel Ostrakov. He is one of our finest and most active secret agents. We rely on him totally for our information regarding counter-revolutionary conspirators in Paris.”

  Nobody in the room, says Toby, showed the least surprise at this sudden deification of a dead Russian deserter.

  The priest, said Grigoriev, now proceeded to sketch the manner of the heroic agent Ostrakov’s life, at the same time initiating Grigoriev into the mysteries of secret work. In order to escape the vigilance of imperialist counter-intelligence, the priest explained, it was necessary to invent for an agent a legend or false biography that would make him acceptable to anti-Soviet elements. Ostrakov was therefore in appearance a Red Army defector who had “escaped” into West Berlin, and thence to Paris, abandoning his wife and one daughter in Moscow. But in order to safeguard Ostrakov’s standing among the Paris émigrés, it was logically necessary that the wife should suffer for the traitorous actions of the husband.

  “For after all,” said the priest, “if imperialist spies were to report that Ostrakova, the wife of a deserter and renegade, was living in good standing in Moscow—receiving her husband’s salary, for example, or occupying the same apartment—imagine the effect this would have upon the credibility of Ostrakov!”

  Grigoriev said he could imagine this well. The priest, he explained in parenthesis, was in no sense authoritarian in his manner, but rather treated Grigoriev as an equal, doubtless out of respect for his academic qualifications.

  “Doubtless,” Smiley said, and made a note.

  Therefore, said the priest somewhat abruptly, Ostrakova and her daughter Alexandra, with the full agreement of her husband, were transferred to a far province and given a house to live in, and different names, and even—in their modest and selfless way—of necessity, their own legend also. Such, said the priest, was the painful reality of those who devoted themselves to special work. And consider, Grigoriev—he went on intently—consider the effect that such deprivation, and subterfuge, and even duplicity, might have upon a sensitive and perhaps already unbalanced daughter: an absent father whose very name had been eradicated from her life! A mother, who before being removed to safety, was obliged to endure the full brunt of public disgrace! Picture to yourself, the priest insisted—you, a father—the strains upon the young and delicate nature of a maturing girl!

  Bowing to such forceful eloquence, Grigoriev was quick to say that as a father he could picture such strains easily; and it occurred to Toby at that moment, and probably to everybody else as well, that Grigoriev was exactly what he claimed to be: a humane and decent man caught in the net of events beyond his understanding or control.

  For the last several years, the priest continued in a voice heavy with regret, the girl Alexandra—or, as she used to call herself, Tatiana—had been, in the Soviet province where she lived, a wanton and a social outcast. Under the pressures of her situation she had performed a variety of criminal acts, including arson and theft in public places. She had sided with pseudo-intellectual criminals and the worst imaginable anti-social elements. She had given herself freely to men, often several in a day. At first, when she was arrested, it had been possible for the priest and his assistants to stay the normal processes of law. But gradually, for reasons of security, this protection had to be withdrawn, and Alexandra had more than once been confined to State psychiatric clinics that specialised in the treatment of congenital social malcontents—with the negative results the priest had already described.

  “She has also on several occasions been detained in a common prison,” said the priest in a low voice. And, according to Grigoriev, he summed up this sad story as follows: “You will readily appreciate, dear Grigoriev, as an academic, a father, as a man of the world, how tragically the ever-worsening news of his daughter’s misfortunes affected the usefulness of our heroic agent Ostrakov in his lonely exile in Paris.”

  Yet again, Grigoriev had been impressed by the remarkable sense of feeling—he would call it even a sense of direct personal responsibility—that the priest, through his story, inspired.

  His voice arid as ever, Smiley made another interruption.

  “And the mother is by now where, Counsellor, according to your priest?” he asked.

  “Dead,” Grigoriev replied. “She died in the province. The province to which she had been sent. She was buried under another name, naturally. According to the story as he told it to me, she died of a broken heart. This also placed a great burden on the priest’s heroic agent in Paris,” he added. “And upon the authorities in Russia.”

  “Naturally,” said Smiley, and his solemnity was shared by the four motionless figures stationed round the room.

  At last, said Grigoriev, the priest came to the precise reason why Grigoriev had been summoned. Ostrakova’s death, coupled with the dreadful fate of Alexandra, had produced a grave crisis in the life of Moscow’s heroic foreign agent. He was even for a short time tempted to give up his vital work in Paris in order to return to Russia and take care of his deranged and motherless child. Eventually, however, a solution was agreed upon. Since Ostrakov could not come to Russia, his daughter must come to the West, and be cared for in a private clinic where she was accessible to her father whenever he cared to visit her. France was too dangerous for this purpose, but in Switzerland, across the border, treatment could take place far from the suspicious eye of Ostrakov’s counter-revolutionary companions. As a French citizen, the father would claim the girl and obtain the necessary papers. A suitable clinic had already been located and it was a short drive from Berne. What Grigoriev must now do was take over the welfare of this child, from the moment she arrived there. He must visit her, pay the clinic, and report weekly to Moscow on her progress, so that the information could at once be relayed to her father.
This was the purpose of the bank account, and of what the priest referred to as Grigoriev’s Swiss identity.

  “And you agreed,” said Smiley, as Grigoriev paused, and they heard his pen scratching busily over the paper.

  “Not immediately. I asked him first two questions,” said Grigoriev, with a queer flush of vanity. “We academics are not deceived so easily, you understand. First, I naturally asked him why this task could not be undertaken by one of the many Swiss-based representatives of our State Security.”

  “An excellent question,” Smiley said, in a rare mood of congratulation. “How did he reply to it?”

  “It was too secret. Secrecy, he said, was a matter of compartments. He did not wish the name of Ostrakov to be associated with the people of the Moscow Centre mainstream. As things were now, he said, he would know that if ever there was a leak, Grigoriev alone was personally responsible. I was not grateful for this distinction,” said Grigoriev, and smirked somewhat wanly at Nick de Silsky.

  “And what was your second question, Counsellor?”

  “Concerning the father in Paris: how often he would visit. If the father was visiting frequently, then surely my own position as a substitute father was redundant. Arrangements could be made to pay the clinic directly, the father could visit from Paris every month and concern himself with his own daughter’s welfare. To this the priest replied that the father could come only very seldom and should never be spoken of in discussions with the girl Alexandra. He added, without consistency, that the topic of the daughter was also acutely painful to the father and that conceivably he would never visit her at all. He told me I should feel honoured to be performing an important service on behalf of a secret hero of the Soviet Union. He grew stern. He told me it was not my place to apply the logic of an amateur to the craft of professionals. I apologised. I told him I indeed felt honoured. I was proud to assist however I could in the anti-imperialist struggle.”