Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  “Mother Felicity is expecting you,” said Sister Beatitude in a shy whisper.

  A scream would fill the entire house, thought Smiley. He noticed potted plants out of reach. At a door marked “OFFICE” his escort thumped lustily, then shoved it open. Mother Felicity was a large, inflamed-looking woman with a disconcerting worldliness in her gaze. Smiley sat opposite her. An ornate cross rested on her large bosom, and while she spoke, her heavy hands consoled it with a couple of touches. Her German was slow and regal.

  “So,” she said. “So, you are Herr Lachmann, and Herr Lachmann is an acquaintance of Herr Glaser, and Herr Glaser is this week indisposed.” She played on these names as if she knew as well as he did they were lies. “He was not so indisposed that he could not telephone, but he was so indisposed that he could not bicycle. That is correct?”

  Smiley said it was.

  “Please do not lower your voice merely because I am a nun. We run a noisy house here and nobody is the less pious for it. You look pale. You have a flu?”

  “No. No, I am well.”

  “Then you are better off than Herr Glaser, who has succumbed to a flu. Last year we had an Egyptian flu, the year before it was an Asian flu, but this year the malheur seems to be our own entirely. Does Herr Lachmann have documents, may I ask, which legitimise him for who he is?”

  Smiley handed her a Swiss identity card.

  “Come. Your hand is shaking. But you have no flu. By occupation, professor,” she read aloud. “Herr Lachmann hides his light. He is Professor Lachmann. Of which subject is he professor, may one ask?”

  “Of philology.”

  “So. Philology. And Herr Glaser, what is his profession? He has never revealed it to me.”

  “I understand he is in business,” Smiley said.

  “A businessman who speaks perfect Russian. You also speak perfect Russian, Professor?”

  “Alas, no.”

  “But you are friends.” She handed back the identity card. “A Swiss-Russian businessman and a modest professor of philology are friends. So. Let us hope the friendship is a fruitful one.”

  “We are also neighbours,” Smiley said.

  “We are all neighbours, Herr Lachmann. Have you met Alexandra before?”

  “No.”

  “Young girls are brought here in many capacities. We have godchildren. We have wards. Nieces. Orphans. Cousins. Aunts, a few. A few sisters. And now a professor. But you would be very surprised how few daughters there are in the world. What is the family relationship between Herr Glaser and Alexandra, for example?”

  “I understand he is a friend of Monsieur Ostrakov.”

  “Who is in Paris. But is invisible. As also is Madame Ostrakova. Invisible. As also, today, is Herr Glaser. You see how difficult it is for us to come to grips with the world, Herr Lachmann? When we ourselves scarcely know who we are, how can we tell them who they are? You must be very careful with her.” A bell was ringing for the end of rest. “Sometimes she lives in the dark. Sometimes she sees too much. Both are painful. She has grown up in Russia. I don’t know why. It is a complicated story, full of contrasts, full of gaps. If it is not the cause of her malady, it is certainly, let us say, the framework. You do not think Herr Glaser is the father, for instance?”

  “No.”

  “Nor do I. Have you met the invisible Ostrakov? You have not. Does the invisible Ostrakov exist? Alexandra insists he is a phantom. Alexandra will have a quite different parentage. Well, so would many of us!”

  “May I ask what you have told her about me?”

  “All I know. Which is nothing. That you are a friend of Uncle Anton, whom she refuses to accept as her uncle. That Uncle Anton is ill, which appears to delight her, but probably it worries her very much. I have told her it is her father’s wish to have someone visit her every week, but she tells me her father is a brigand and pushed her mother off a mountain at dead of night. I have told her to speak German but she may still decide that Russian is best.”

  “I understand,” said Smiley.

  “You are lucky, then,” Mother Felicity retorted. “For I do not.”

  Alexandra entered and at first he saw only her eyes: so clear, so defenceless. In his imagination, he had drawn her, for some reason, larger. Her lips were full at the centre, but at the corners already thin and too agile, and her smile had a dangerous luminosity. Mother Felicity told her to sit, said something in Russian, gave her a kiss on her flaxen head. She left, and they heard her keys jingle as she strode off down the corridor, yelling at one of the sisters in French to have this mess cleared up. Alexandra wore a green tunic with long sleeves gathered at the wrists and a cardigan over her shoulders like a cape. She seemed to carry her clothes rather than wear them, as if someone had dressed her for the meeting.

  “Is Anton dead?” she asked, and Smiley noticed that there was no natural link between the expression on her face and the thoughts in her head.

  “No, Anton has a bad flu,” he replied.

  “Anton says he is my uncle but he is not,” she explained. Her German was good, and he wondered, despite what Karla had said to Grigoriev, whether she had that from her mother too, or whether she had inherited her father’s gift for languages, or both. “He also pretends he has no car.” As her father had once done, she watched him without emotion, and without commitment. “Where is your list?” she asked. “Anton always brings a list.”

  “Oh, I have my questions in my head.”

  “It is forbidden to ask questions without a list. Questions out of the head are all completely forbidden by my father.”

  “Who is your father?” Smiley asked.

  For a time he saw only her eyes again, staring at him out of their private lonely place. She picked up a roll of Scotch tape from Mother Felicity’s desk, and lightly traced the shiny surface with her finger.

  “I saw your car,” she said. “‘BE’ stands for ‘Berne.’”

  “Yes, it does,” said Smiley.

  “What kind of car does Anton have?”

  “A Mercedes. A black one. Very grand.”

  “How much did he pay for it?”

  “He bought it second-hand. About five thousand francs, I should imagine.”

  “Then why does he come and see me on a bicycle?”

  “Perhaps he needs the exercise.”

  “No,” she said. “He has a secret.”

  “Have you got a secret, Alexandra?” Smiley asked.

  She heard his question, and smiled at it, and nodded a couple of times as if to someone a long way off. “My secret is called Tatiana,” she said.

  “That’s a good name,” said Smiley. “Tatiana. How did you come by that?”

  Raising her head, she smiled radiantly at the icons on the wall. “It is forbidden to talk about it,” she said. “If you talk about it, nobody will believe you, but they put you in a clinic.”

  “But you are in a clinic already,” Smiley pointed out.

  Her voice did not lift, it only quickened. She remained so absolutely still that she seemed not even to draw breath between her words. Her lucidity and her courtesy were awesome. She respected his kindness, she said, but she knew that he was an extremely dangerous man, more dangerous than teachers or police. Dr. Rüedi had invented property and prisons, and many of the clever arguments by which the world lived out its lies, she said. Mother Felicity was too close to God, she did not understand that God was somebody who had to be ridden and kicked like a horse till he took you in the right direction.

  “But you, Herr Lachmann, represent the forgiveness of the authorities. Yes, I am afraid you do.”

  She sighed, and gave him a tired smile of indulgence, but when he looked at the table he saw that she had seized hold of her thumb, and was forcing it back upon itself till it looked like snapping.

  “Perhaps you are my father, Herr Lachmann,” she suggested with a smile.

  “No, alas, I have no children,” Smiley replied.

  “Are you God?”

  “No, I’m
just an ordinary person.”

  “Mother Felicity says that in every ordinary person, there is a part that is God.”

  This time it was Smiley’s turn to take a long while to reply. His mouth opened, then with uncharacteristic hesitation closed again.

  “I have heard it said too,” he replied, and looked away from her a moment.

  “You are supposed to ask me whether I have been feeling better.”

  “Are you feeling better, Alexandra?”

  “My name is Tatiana,” she said.

  “Then how does Tatiana feel?”

  She laughed. Her eyes were delightfully bright. “Tatiana is the daughter of a man who is too important to exist,” she said. “He controls the whole of Russia, but he does not exist. When people arrest her, her father arranges for her to be freed. He does not exist but everyone is afraid of him. Tatiana does not exist either,” she added. “There is only Alexandra.”

  “What about Tatiana’s mother?”

  “She was punished,” said Alexandra calmly, confiding this information to the icons rather than to Smiley. “She was not obedient to history. That is to say, she believed that history had taken a wrong course. She was mistaken. The people should not attempt to change history. It is the task of history to change the people. I would like you to take me with you, please. I wish to leave this clinic.”

  Her hands were fighting each other furiously while she continued to smile at the icons.

  “Did Tatiana ever meet her father?” he asked.

  “A small man used to watch the children walk to school,” she replied. He waited but she said no more.

  “And then?” he asked.

  “From a car. He would lower the window but he looked only at me.”

  “Did you look at him?”

  “Of course. How else would I know he was looking at me?”

  “What was his appearance? His manner? Did he smile?”

  “He smoked. Feel free, if you wish. Mother Felicity likes a cigarette occasionally. Well, it’s only natural, isn’t it? Smoking calms the conscience, I am told.”

  She had pressed the bell: reached out and pressed it for a long time. He heard the jingle of Mother Felicity’s keys again, coming towards them down the bare corridor, and the shuffle of her feet at the door as she paused to unlock it, just like the sounds of any prison in the world.

  “I wish to come with you in your car,” said Alexandra.

  Smiley paid her bill and Alexandra watched him count the notes out under the lamp, exactly the way Uncle Anton did it. Mother Felicity intercepted Alexandra’s studious look and perhaps she sensed trouble, for she glanced sharply at Smiley as if she suspected some misconduct in him. Alexandra accompanied him to the door and helped Sister Beatitude open it, then shook Smiley’s hand in a very stylish way, lifting her elbow up and outward, and bending her front knee. She tried to kiss his hand but Sister Beatitude prevented her. She watched him to the car and she began waving, and he was already moving when he heard her screaming from very close, and saw that she was trying to open the car door and travel with him, but Sister Beatitude hauled her off and dragged her, still screaming, back into the house.

  Half an hour later in Thun, in the same café from which he had observed Grigoriev’s visit to the bank a week before, Smiley silently handed Toby the letter he had prepared. Grigoriev was to give it to Krassky tonight or whenever they met, he said.

  “Grigoriev wants to defect tonight,” Toby objected.

  Smiley shouted. For once in his life, shouted. He opened his mouth very wide, he shouted, and the whole café sat up with a jolt—which is to say that the barmaid looked up from her marriage advertisements, and of the four card-players in the corner, one at least turned his head.

  “Not yet!”

  Then, to show that he had himself completely under control, he repeated the words quietly: “Not yet, Toby. Forgive me. Not yet.”

  Of the letter that Smiley sent to Karla by way of Grigoriev, no copy exists, which is perhaps what Smiley intended, but there can be little doubt of the substance, since Karla himself was anyway a self-professed exponent of the arts of what he liked to call pressure. Smiley would have set out the bare facts: that Alexandra was known to be his daughter by a dead mistress of manifest anti-Soviet tendencies, that he had arranged her illegal departure from the Soviet Union by pretending that she was his secret agent; that he had misappropriated public money and resources; that he had organised two murders and perhaps also the conjectured official execution of Kirov, all in order to protect his criminal scheme. Smiley would have pointed out that the accumulated evidence of this was quite sufficient, given Karla’s precarious position within Moscow Centre, to secure his liquidation by his peers in the Collegium; and that if this were to happen, his daughter’s future in the West—where she was residing under false pretences—would be uncertain, to say the least. There would be no money for her, and Alexandra would become a perpetual and ailing exile, ferried from one public hospital to another, without friends, proper papers, or a penny to her name. At worst, she would be brought back to Russia, to have visited upon her the full wrath of her father’s enemies.

  After the stick, Smiley offered Karla the same carrot he had offered him more than twenty years before, in Delhi: save your skin, come to us, tell us what you know, and we will make a home for you. A straight replay, said Saul Enderby later, who liked a sporting metaphor. Smiley would have promised Karla immunity from prosecution for complicity in the murder of Vladimir, and there is evidence that Enderby obtained a similar concession through his German liaison regarding the murder of Otto Leipzig. Without question, Smiley also threw in general guarantees about Alexandra’s future in the West—treatment, maintenance, and, if necessary, citizenship. Did he take the line of kinship, as he had done before, in Delhi? Did he appeal to Karla’s humanity, now so demonstrably on show? Did he add some clever seasoning, calculated to spare Karla humiliation and, knowing his pride, head him off perhaps from an act of self-destruction?

  Certainly he gave Karla very little time to make up his mind. For that too is an axiom of pressure, as Karla was well aware: time to think is dangerous, except that in this case, there is reason to suppose that it was dangerous to Smiley also, though for vastly different reasons: he might have relented at the eleventh hour. Only the immediate call to action, says the Sarratt folklore, will force the quarry to slip the ropes of his restraint and, against every impulse born or taught to him, sail into the blue. The same, on this occasion, may be said to have applied equally to the hunter.

  27

  It’s like putting all your money on black, thought Guillam, staring out of the window of the café: everything you’ve got in the world, your wife, your unborn child. Then waiting, hour by hour, for the croupier to spin the wheel.

  He had known Berlin when it was the world capital of the cold war, when every crossing point from East to West had the tenseness of a major surgical operation. He remembered how on nights like these, clusters of Berlin policemen and Allied soldiers used to gather under the arc lights, stamping their feet, cursing the cold, fidgeting their rifles from shoulder to shoulder, puffing clouds of frosted breath into each other’s faces. He remembered how the tanks waited, growling to keep their engines warm, their gun barrels picking targets on the other side, feigning strength. He remembered the sudden wail of the alarm klaxons and the dash to the Bernauerstrasse or wherever the latest escape attempt might be. He remembered the fire-brigade ladders going up; the orders to shoot back; the orders not to; the dead, some of them agents. But after tonight, he knew that he would remember it only like this: so dark you wanted to take a torch with you into the street, so still you could have heard the cocking of a rifle from across the river.

  “What cover will he use?” he asked.

  Smiley sat opposite him across the little plastic table, a cup of cold coffee at his elbow. He looked somehow very small inside his overcoat.

  “Something humble,” Smiley said. “Something tha
t fits in. Those who cross here are mostly old-age pensioners, I gather.” He was smoking one of Guillam’s cigarettes and it seemed to take all his attention.

  “What on earth do pensioners want here?” Guillam asked.

  “Some work. Some visit dependents. I didn’t enquire very closely, I’m afraid.”

  Guillam remained dissatisfied.

  “We pensioners tend to keep ourselves to ourselves,” Smiley added, in a poor effort at humour.

  “You’re telling me,” said Guillam.

  The café was in the Turkish quarter because the Turks are now the poor whites of West Berlin, and property is worst and cheapest near the Wall. Smiley and Guillam were the only foreigners. At a long table sat a whole Turkish family, chewing flat bread and drinking coffee and Coca-Cola. The children had shaven heads and the wide, puzzled eyes of refugees. Islamic music was playing from an old tape-recorder. Strips of coloured plastic hung from the hardboard arch of an Islamic doorway.

  Guillam returned his gaze to the window, and the bridge. First came the piers of the overhead railway, next the old brick house that Sam Collins and his team had discreetly requisitioned as an observation centre. His men had been moving in surreptitiously these last two days. Then came the halo of sodium arc lights, and behind it lay a barricade, a pillbox, then the bridge. The bridge was for pedestrians only, and the only way over it was a corridor of steel fencing like a bird walk, sometimes one man’s width and sometimes three. Occasionally one crossed, keeping a meek appearance and a steady pace in order not to alarm the sentry tower, then stepping into the sodium halo as he reached the West. By daylight the bird walk was grey; by night for some reason yellow, and strangely bright. The pillbox was a yard or two inside the border, its roof just mastering the barricade, but it was the tower that dominated everything, one iron-black rectangular pillar at the bridge’s centre. Even the snow avoided it. There was snow on the concrete teeth that blocked the bridge to traffic, snow swarmed round the halo and the pillbox and made a show of settling on the wet cobble; but the sentry tower was immune, as if not even the snow would go near it of its own free will. Just short of the halo, the bird walk narrowed to a last gateway and a cattle pen. But the gateway, said Toby, could be closed electrically at a moment’s notice from inside the pillbox.