Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  The time was ten-thirty but it could have been three in the morning, because along its borders, West Berlin goes to bed with the dark. Inland, the island-city may chat and drink and whore and spend its money; the Sony signs and rebuilt churches and conference halls may glitter like a fair-ground; but the dark shores of the border-land are silent from seven in the evening. Close to the halo stood a Christmas tree, but only the upper half of it was lit, only the upper half was visible from across the river. It is a place of no compromise, thought Guillam, a place of no third way. Whatever reservations he might occasionally have about the Western freedom, here, at this border, like most other things, they stopped dead.

  “George?” said Guillam softly, and cast Smiley a questioning glance.

  A labourer had lurched into the halo. He seemed to rise into it as they all did the moment they stepped out of the bird walk, as if a burden had fallen from their backs. He was carrying a small brief-case and what looked like a rail man’s lamp. He was slight of build. But Smiley, if he had noticed the man at all, had already returned to the collar of his brown overcoat and his lonely, faraway thoughts. “If he comes, he’ll come on time,” Smiley had said. Then why do we get here two hours early? Guillam had wanted to ask. Why do we sit here, like two strangers, drinking sweet coffee out of little cups, soaked in the steam of this wretched Turkish kitchen, talking platitudes? But he knew the answer already. Because we owe, Smiley would have said if he had been in a talking mood. Because we owe the caring and the waiting, we owe this vigil over one man’s effort to escape the system he has helped create. For as long as he is trying to reach us, we are his friends. Nobody else is on his side.

  He’ll come, Guillam thought. He won’t. He may. If this isn’t prayer, he thought, what is?

  “More coffee, George?”

  “No, thank you, Peter. No, I don’t think so. No.”

  “They seem to have soup of some sort. Unless that was the coffee.”

  “Thank you, I think I’ve consumed about all I can manage,” said Smiley, in quite a general tone, as if anyone who wished to hear was welcome.

  “Well, maybe I’ll just order something for rent,” said Guillam.

  “Rent? I’m sorry. Of course. God knows what they must live on.”

  Guillam ordered two more coffees and paid for them. He was paying as he went, deliberately, in case they had to leave in a hurry.

  Come for George’s sake, he thought; come for mine. Come for all our damn sakes, and be the impossible harvest we have dreamed of for so long.

  “When did you say the baby was due, Peter?”

  “March.”

  “Ah. March. What will you call it?”

  “We haven’t really thought.”

  Across the road, by the glow of a furniture shop that sold reproduction wrought iron and brocade and fake muskets and pewter, Guillam made out the muffled figure of Toby Esterhase in his Balkan fur hat, affecting to study the wares. Toby and his team had the streets, Sam Collins had the observation post: that was the deal. For the escape cars, Toby had insisted on taxis, and there they stood, three of them, suitably shabby, in the darkness of the station arches, with notices in their windscreens saying “OUT OF SERVICE,” and their drivers standing at the Imbiss-stand, eating sausages in sweet sauce out of paper dishes.

  The place is a total minefield, Peter, Toby had warned. Turks, Greeks, Yugoslavs, a lot of crooks—even the damn cats are wired, no exaggeration.

  Not a whisper anywhere, Smiley had ordered. Not a murmur, Peter. Tell Collins.

  Come, thought Guillam urgently. We’re all rooting for you. Come.

  From Toby’s back, Guillam lifted his gaze slowly to the top-floor window of the old house where Collins’s observation post was sited. Guillam had done his Berlin stint, he had been part of it a dozen times. The telescopes and cameras, the directional microphones, all the useless hardware that was supposed to make the waiting easier; the crackle of the radios, the stink of coffee and tobacco; the bunk-beds. He imagined the co-opted West German policeman who had no idea why he had been brought here, and would have to stay till the operation was abandoned or successful—the man who knew the bridge by heart and could tell the regulars from the casuals and spot the smallest bad omen the moment it occurred: the silent doubling of the watch, the Vopo sharpshooters easing softly into place.

  And if they shoot him? thought Guillam. If they arrest him? If they leave him—which they would surely like to, and had done before to others—bleeding to death, face downward in the bird walk not six feet from the halo?

  Come, he thought, less certainly, willing his prayers into the black skyline of the East. Come all the same.

  A fine, very bright pin-light flitted across the west-facing upper window of the observation house, bringing Guillam to his feet. He turned round to see Smiley already half-way to the door. Toby Esterhase was waiting for them on the pavement.

  “It’s only a possibility, George,” he said softly, in the tone of a man preparing them for disappointment. “Just a thin chance, but he could be our man.”

  They followed him without another word. The cold was ferocious. They passed a tailor’s shop with two dark-haired girls stitching in the window. They passed wall posters offering cheap ski holidays, death to Fascists, and to the Shah. The cold made them breathless. Turning his face from the swirling snow, Guillam glimpsed a children’s adventure playground made of old railway sleepers. They passed between black, dead buildings, then right, across the cobbled road, in pitch-frozen darkness to the river bank, where an old timber bullet-shelter with rifle slits offered them the whole span of the bridge. To their left, black against the hostile river, a tall wooden cross, garnished with barbed wire, bore memory to an unknown man who had not quite escaped.

  Toby silently extracted a pair of field-glasses from his overcoat and handed them to Smiley.

  “George. Listen. Good luck, okay?”

  Toby’s hand closed briefly over Guillam’s arm. Then he darted away again, into the darkness.

  The shelter stank of leaf-mould and damp. Smiley crouched to the rifle slit, the skirt of his tweed coat trailing in the mud, while he surveyed the scene before him as if it held the very reaches of his own long life. The river was broad and slow, misted with cold. Arc lights played over it, and the snow danced in their beams. The bridge spanned it on fat stone piers, six or eight of them, which swelled into crude shoes as they reached the water. The spaces between them were arched, all but the centre, which was squared off to make room for shipping, but the only ship was a grey patrol boat moored at the eastern bank, and the only commerce it offered was death. Behind the bridge, like its vastly bigger shadow, ran the railway viaduct, but like the river it was derelict, and no trains ever crossed. The warehouses of the far bank stood monstrous as the hulks of an earlier barbaric civilisation, and the bridge with its yellow bird walk seemed to leap from half-way up them, like a fantastic light-path out of darkness. From his vantage point, Smiley could scan the whole length of it with his field-glasses, from the floodlit white barrack house on the eastern bank, up to the black sentry tower at the crest, then slightly downhill again towards the western side: to the cattle pen, the pillbox that controlled the gateway, and finally the halo.

  Guillam stood but a few feet behind him, yet Guillam could have been back in Paris for all the awareness Smiley had of him: he had seen the solitary black figure start his journey; he had seen the glimmer of the cigarette-end as he took one last pull, the spark of it comet towards the water as he tossed it over the iron fencing of the bird walk. One small man, in a worker’s half-length coat, with a worker’s satchel slung across his little chest, walking neither fast nor slowly, but walking like a man who walked a lot. One small man, his body a fraction too long for his legs, hatless despite the snow. That is all that happens, Smiley thought; one little man walks across a bridge.

  “Is it him?” Guillam whispered. “George, tell me! Is it Karla?”

  Don’t come, thought Smiley. Shoot,
Smiley thought, talking to Karla’s people, not to his own. There was suddenly something terrible in his foreknowledge that this tiny creature was about to cut himself off from the black castle behind him. Shoot him from the sentry tower, shoot him from the pillbox, from the white barrack hut, from the crow’s-nest on the prison warehouse, slam the gate on him, cut him down, your own traitor, kill him! In his racing imagination, he saw the scene unfold: the last-minute discovery by Moscow Centre of Karla’s infamy; the phone calls to the frontier—“Stop him at any cost!” And the shooting, never too much—enough to hit a man a time or two, and wait.

  “It’s him!” Guillam whispered. He had taken the binoculars from Smiley’s unresisting hand. “It’s the same man! The photograph that hung on your wall in the Circus! George, you miracle!”

  But Smiley in his imagination saw only the Vopo’s searchlights converging on Karla as if he were a hare in the headlights, so dark against the snow; and Karla’s hopeless old man’s run before the bullets threw him like a rag doll over his own feet. Like Guillam, Smiley had seen it all before. He looked across the river into the darkness again, and an unholy vertigo seized him as the very evil he had fought against seemed to reach out and possess him and claim him despite his striving, calling him a traitor also; mocking him, yet at the same time applauding his betrayal. On Karla has descended the curse of Smiley’s compassion; on Smiley the curse of Karla’s fanaticism. I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other’s frontiers, we are the no-men of this no-man’s-land.

  “Just keep moving,” Guillam was murmuring. “Just keep moving, let nothing stop you.”

  Approaching the blackness of the sentry tower, Karla took a couple of shorter steps and for a moment Smiley really thought he might change his mind and give himself up to the East Germans. Then he saw a cat’s tongue of flame as Karla lit a fresh cigarette. With a match or a lighter? he wondered. To George from Ann with all my love.

  “Christ, he’s cool!” said Guillam.

  The little figure set off again, but at a slower pace, as if he had grown weary. He is stoking up his courage for the last step, thought Smiley, or he is trying to damp his courage down. He thought again of Vladimir and Otto Leipzig and the dead Kirov; he thought of Haydon and his own life’s work ruined; he thought of Ann, permanently stained for him by Karla’s cunning and Haydon’s scheming embrace. He recited in his despair a whole list of crimes—the tortures, the killings, the endless ring of corruption—to lay upon the frail shoulders of this one pedestrian on the bridge, but they would not stay there: he did not want these spoils, won by these methods. Like a chasm, the jagged skyline beckoned to him yet again, the swirling snow made it an inferno. For a second longer, Smiley stood on the brink, at the smouldering river’s edge.

  They had started walking along the tow-path, Guillam leading, Smiley reluctantly following. The halo burned ahead of them, growing as they approached it. Like two ordinary pedestrians, Toby had said. Just walk to the bridge and wait, it’s normal. From the darkness around them, Smiley heard whispered voices and the swift, damped sounds of hasty movement under tension. “George,” someone whispered. “George.” From a yellow phone-box, an unknown figure lifted a hand in discreet salute, and he heard the word “triumph” smuggled to him on the wet freezing air. The snow was blurring his glasses, he found it hard to see. The observation post stood to their right, not a light burning in the windows. He made out a van parked at the entrance, and realised it was a Berlin mail van, one of Toby’s favourites. Guillam was hanging back. Smiley heard something about “claiming the prize.”

  They had reached the edge of the halo. An orange rampart blocked the bridge and the chicane from sight. They were out of the eye-line of the sentry-box. Perched above the Christmas tree, Toby Esterhase was standing on the observation scaffold with a pair of binoculars, calmly playing the cold-war tourist. A plump female watcher stood at his side. An old notice warned them they were there at their own risk. On the smashed brick viaduct behind them Smiley picked out a forgotten armorial crest. Toby made a tiny motion with his hand: thumbs up, it’s our man now. From beyond the rampart, Smiley heard light footsteps and the vibration of an iron fence. He caught the smell of an American cigarette as the icy wind wafted it ahead of the smoker. There’s still the electric gateway, he thought; he waited for the clang as it slammed shut, but none came. He realised he had no real name by which to address his enemy: only a code-name, and a woman’s at that. Even his military rank was a mystery. And still Smiley hung back, like a man refusing to go on stage.

  Guillam had drawn alongside him and seemed to be trying to edge him forward. He heard soft footsteps as Toby’s watchers gathered to the edge of the halo, safe from view in the shelter of the rampart, waiting with bated breath for a sight of the catch. And suddenly, there he stood, like a man slipping into a crowded hall unnoticed. His small right hand hung flat and naked at his side, his left held the cigarette timidly across his chest. One little man, hatless, with a satchel. He took a step forward and in the halo Smiley saw his face, aged and weary and travelled, the short hair turned to white by a sprinkling of snow. He wore a grimy shirt and a black tie: he looked like a poor man going to the funeral of a friend. The cold had nipped his cheeks low down, adding to his age.

  They faced each other; they were perhaps a yard apart, much as they had been in Delhi jail. Smiley heard more footsteps and this time it was the sound of Toby padding swiftly down the wooden ladder of the scaffold. He heard soft voices and laughter; he thought he even heard the sound of gentle clapping, but he never knew; there were shadows everywhere, and once inside the halo, it was hard for him to see out. Paul Skordeno slipped forward and stood himself one side of Karla; Nick de Silsky stood the other. He heard Guillam telling someone to get that bloody car up here before they come over the bridge and get him back. He heard the ring of something metal falling onto the icy cobble, and knew it was Ann’s cigarette-lighter, but nobody else seemed to notice it. They exchanged one more glance and perhaps each for that second did see in the other something of himself. He heard the crackle of car tyres and the sounds of doors opening, while the engine kept running. De Silsky and Skordeno moved towards it, and Karla went with them though they didn’t touch him; he seemed to have acquired already the submissive manner of a prisoner; he had learned it in a hard school. Smiley stood back and the three of them marched softly past him, all somehow too absorbed by the ceremony to pay attention to him. The halo was empty. He heard the quiet closing of the car’s doors and the sound of it driving away. He heard two other cars leave after it, or with it. He didn’t watch them go. He felt Toby Esterhase fling his arms round his shoulders, and saw that his eyes were filled with tears.

  “George,” he began. “All your life. Fantastic!”

  Then something in Smiley’s stiffness made Toby pull away, and Smiley himself stepped quickly out of the halo, passing very close to Ann’s lighter on his way. It lay at the halo’s very edge, tilted slightly, glinting like fool’s gold on the cobble. He thought of picking it up, but somehow there seemed no point and no one else appeared to have seen it. Someone was shaking his hand, someone else was clapping him on the shoulder. Toby quietly restrained them.

  “Take care, George,” Toby said. “Go well, hear me?”

  Smiley heard Toby’s team leave one by one until only Peter Guillam remained. Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and though the wind appeared a little stronger, the snow was still swirling in all directions.

  Peter Guillam touched his arm.

  “Come on, old friend,” he said. “It’s bedtime.”

  From long habit, Smiley had taken off his spectacles and was absently polishing them on the fat end of his tie, even though he had to delve for it among the folds of his tweed coat.

  “George, you won,” said Guillam, as they wal
ked slowly towards the car.

  “Did I?” said Smiley. “Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did.”