A Murder of Quality AND Call for the Dead

by John le Carré

  “This is Elizabeth Pidgeon. She may be able to help. Darling, we want to find out a Mrs Fennan, a club member. Didn’t you tell me something about her?”

  “Oh, yes, Ludo.” She must have thought she sounded sweet. She smiled vapidly at Mendel, put her head on one side and twined her fingers together. Mendel jerked his head towards her.

  “Do you know her?” asked Mrs Oriel.

  “Oh yes, Ludo. She’s madly musical; at least I think she must be because she always brings her music. She’s madly thin and odd. She’s foreign, isn’t she, Ludo?”

  “Why odd?” asked Mendel.

  “Oh, well, last time she came she got in a frightful pet about the seat next to her. It was a club reservation, you see, and simply hours after twenty past. We’d just started the panto season and there were millions of people wanting seats so I let it go. She kept on saying she was sure the person would come because he always did.”

  “Did he?” asked Mendel.

  “No. I let the seat go. She must have been in an awful pet because she left after the second act, and forgot to collect her music case.”

  “This person she was sure would turn up,” said Mendel, “is he friendly with Mrs Fennan?”

  Ludo Oriel gave Mendel a suggestive wink.

  “Well, gosh, I should think so, he’s her husband, isn’t he?”

  Mendel looked at her for a minute and then smiled: “Couldn’t we find a chair for Elizabeth?” he said.

  “Gosh, thanks,” said the Virgin, and sat on the edge of an old gilt chair like the prompter’s chair in the wings. She put her red, fat hands on her knees and leant forward, smiling all the time, thrilled to be the centre of so much interest. Mrs Oriel looked at her venomously.

  “What makes you think he was her husband, Elizabeth?” There was an edge to his voice which had not been there before.

  “Well, I know they arrive separately, but I thought that as they had seats apart from the rest of the club reservations, they must be husband and wife. And of course he always brings a music case too.”

  “I see. What else can you remember about that evening, Elizabeth?”

  “Oh, well, lots really because, you see, I felt awful about her leaving in such a pet and then later that night she rang up. Mrs Fennan did, I mean. She said her name and said she’d left early and forgotten her music case. She’d lost the ticket for it, too, and was in a frightful state. It sounded as if she was crying. I heard someone’s voice in the background, and then she said someone would drop in and get it if that would be all right without the ticket. I said of course, and half an hour later the man came. He’s rather super. Tall and fair.”

  “I see,” said Mendel; “thank you very much, Elizabeth, you’ve been very helpful.”

  “Gosh, that’s OK.” She got up.

  “Incidentally,” said Mendel. “This man who collected her music case—he wasn’t by any chance the same man who sits beside her in the theatre, was he?”

  “Rather. Gosh, sorry, I should have said that.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Well, just to say here you are, sort of thing.”

  “What kind of voice had he?”

  “Oh, foreign, like Mrs Fennan’s—she is foreign, isn’t she? That’s what I put it down to—all her fuss and state—foreign temperament.”

  She smiled at Mendel, waited a moment, then walked out like Alice.

  “Cow,” said Mrs Oriel, looking at the closed door. Her eyes turned to Mendel. “Well, I hope you’ve got your five quids’ worth.”

  “I think so,” said Mendel.

  11

  THE UNRESPECTABLE CLUB

  Mendel found Smiley sitting in an armchair fully dressed. Peter Guillam was stretched luxuriously on the bed, a pale green folder held casually in his hand. Outside, the sky was black and menacing.

  “Enter the third murderer,” said Guillam as Mendel walked in. Mendel sat down at the end of the bed and nodded happily to Smiley, who looked pale and depressed.

  “Congratulations. Nice to see you on your feet.”

  “Thank you. I’m afraid if you did see me on my feet you wouldn’t congratulate me. I feel as weak as a kitten.”

  “When are they letting you go?”

  “I don’t know when they expect me to go—”

  “Haven’t you asked?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’d better. I’ve got news for you. I don’t know what it means but it means something.”

  “Well, well,” said Guillam; “everyone’s got news for everyone else. Isn’t that exciting. George has been looking at my family snaps”—he raised the green folder a fraction of an inch—“and recognizes all his old chums.”

  Mendel felt baffled and rather left out of things. Smiley intervened: “I’ll tell you all about it over dinner tomorrow evening. I’m getting out of here in the morning, whatever they say. I think we’ve found the murderer and a lot more besides. Now let’s have your news.” There was no triumph in his eyes. Only anxiety.

  Membership of the club to which Smiley belonged is not quoted among the respectable acquisitions of those who adorn the pages of Who’s Who. It was formed by a young renegade of the Junior Carlton named Steed-Asprey, who had been warned off by the Secretary for blaspheming within the hearing of a South African bishop. He persuaded his former Oxford landlady to leave her quiet house in Hollywell and take over two rooms and a cellar in Manchester Square which a monied relative put at his disposal. It had once had forty members who each paid fifty guineas a year. There were thirty-one left. There were no women and no rules, no secretary and no bishops. You could take sandwiches and buy a bottle of beer, you could take sandwiches and buy nothing at all. As long as you were reasonably sober and minded your own business, no one gave twopence what you wore, did or said, or whom you brought with you. Mrs Sturgeon no longer devilled at the bar, or brought you your chop in front of the fire in the cellar, but presided in genial comfort over the ministrations of two retired sergeants from a small border regiment.

  Naturally enough, most of the members were approximate contemporaries of Smiley at Oxford. It had always been agreed that the club was to serve one generation only, that it would grow old and die with its members. The war had taken its toll of Jebedee and others, but no one had ever suggested they should elect new members. Besides, the premises were now their own, Mrs Sturgeon’s future had been taken care of and the club was solvent.

  It was a Saturday evening and only half a dozen people were there. Smiley had ordered their meal, and a table was set for them in the cellar, where a bright coal fire burned in a brick hearth. They were alone, there was sirloin and claret; outside the rain fell continuously. For all three of them the world seemed an untroubled and decent place that night, despite the strange business that brought them together.

  “To make sense of what I have to tell you,” began Smiley at last, addressing himself principally to Mendel, “I shall have to talk at length about myself. I’m an intelligence officer by trade as you know—I’ve been in the Service since the Flood, long before we were mixed up in power politics with Whitehall. In those days we were understaffed and underpaid. After the usual training and probation in South America and Central Europe, I took a job lecturing at a German university, talent spotting for young Germans with an agent potential.” He paused, smiled at Mendel and said: “Forgive the jargon.” Mendel nodded solemnly and Smiley went on. He knew he was being pompous, and didn’t know how to prevent himself.

  “It was shortly before the last war, a terrible time in Germany then, intolerance run mad. I would have been a lunatic to approach anyone myself. My only chance was to be as nondescript as I could, politically and socially colourless, and to put forward candidates for recruitment by someone else. I tried to bring some back to England for short periods on students’ tours. I made a point of having no contact at all with the Department when I came over because we hadn’t any idea in those days of the efficiency of German Counter Intelligence. I ne
ver knew who was approached, and of course it was much better that way. In case I was blown, I mean.

  “My story really begins in 1938. I was alone in my rooms one summer evening. It had been a beautiful day, warm and peaceful. Fascism might never have been heard of. I was working in my shirt sleeves at a desk by my window, not working very hard because it was such a wonderful evening.”

  He paused, embarrassed for some reason, and fussed a little with the port. Two pink spots appeared high on his cheeks. He felt slightly drunk though he had had very little wine.

  “To resume,” he said, and felt an ass. “I’m sorry, I feel a little inarticulate … Anyway, as I sat there, there was a knock on the door and a young student came in. He was nineteen, in fact, but he looked younger. His name was Dieter Frey. He was a pupil of mine, an intelligent boy and remarkable to look at.” Smiley paused again, staring before him. Perhaps it was his illness, his weakness, which brought the memory so vividly before him.

  “Dieter was a very handsome boy, with a high forehead and a lot of unruly black hair. The lower part of his body was deformed, I think by infantile paralysis. He carried a stick and leant heavily upon it when he walked. Naturally he cut a rather romantic figure at a small university; they thought him Byronic and so on. In fact I could never find him romantic myself. The Germans have a passion for discovering young genius, you know, from Herder to Stefan George— somebody lionized them practically from the cradle. But you couldn’t lionize Dieter. There was a fierce independence, a ruthlessness about him which scared off the most determined patron. This defensiveness in Dieter derived not only from his deformity, but his race, which was Jewish. How on earth he kept his place at university I could never understand. It was possible that they didn’t know he was a Jew—his beauty might have been southern, I suppose, Italian, but I don’t really see how. To me he was obviously Jewish.

  “Dieter was a socialist. He made no secret of his views even in those days. I once considered him for recruitment, but it seemed futile to take on anyone who was so obviously earmarked for concentration camp. Besides he was too volatile, too swift to react, too brightly painted, too vain. He led all the societies at the university—debating, political, poetry and so on. In all the athletic guilds he held honorary positions. He had the nerve not to drink in a university where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year.

  “That was Dieter, then: a tall, handsome, commanding cripple, the idol of his generation; a Jew. And that was the man who came to see me that hot summer evening.

  “I sat him down and offered him a drink, which he refused. I made some coffee, I think, on a gas ring. We spoke in a desultory way about my last lecture on Keats. I had complained about the application of German critical methods to English poetry, and this had led to some discussion—as usual—on the Nazi interpretation of ‘decadence’ in art. Dieter dragged it all up again and became more and more outspoken in his condemnation of modern Germany and finally of Nazism itself. Naturally, I was guarded— I think I was less of a fool in those days than I am now. In the end he asked me point blank what I thought of the Nazis. I replied rather pointedly that I was disinclined to criticize my hosts, and that anyway I didn’t think politics were much fun. I shall never forget his reply. He was furious, struggled to his feet and shouted at me: ‘Von Freude ist nicht die Rede!’—‘We’re not talking about fun!’” Smiley broke off and looked across the table to Guillam: “I’m sorry, Peter, I’m being rather long-winded.”

  “Nonsense, old dear. You tell the story in your own way.” Mendel grunted his approval; he was sitting rather stiffly with both hands on the table before him. There was no light in the room now except the bright glow of the fire, which threw tall shadows on the roughcast wall behind them. The port decanter was three parts empty; Smiley gave himself a little and passed it on.

  “He raved at me. He simply did not understand how I could apply an independent standard of criticism to art and remain so insensitive to politics, how I could bleat about artistic freedom when a third of Europe was in chains. Did it mean nothing to me that contemporary civilization was being bled to death? What was so sacred about the eighteenth century that I could throw the twentieth away? He had come to me because he enjoyed my seminars and thought me an enlightened man, but he now realized that I was worse than all of them.

  “I let him go. What else could I do? On paper he was suspect anyway—a rebellious Jew with a university place still mysteriously free. But I watched him. The term was nearly over and the long vacation soon to begin. In the closing debate of the term three days later he was dreadfully outspoken. He really frightened people, you know, and they grew silent and apprehensive. The end of the term came and Dieter departed without a word of farewell to me. I never expected to see him again.

  “It was about six months before I did. I had been visiting friends near Dresden, Dieter’s home town, and I arrived half an hour early at the station. Rather than hang around on the platform I decided to go for a stroll. A couple of hundred metres from the station was a tall, rather grim seventeenth-century house. There was a small courtyard in front of it with tall iron railings and a wrought-iron gate. It had apparently been converted into a temporary prison: a group of shaven prisoners, men and women, were being exercised in the yard, walking round the perimeter. Two guards stood in the centre with tommy guns. As I watched I caught sight of a familiar figure, taller than the rest, limping, struggling to keep up with them. It was Dieter. They had taken his stick away.

  “When I thought about it afterwards, of course, I realized that the Gestapo would scarcely arrest the most popular member of the university while he was still up. I forgot about my train, went back into the town and looked for his parents in the telephone book. I knew his father had been a doctor so it wasn’t difficult. I went to the address and only his mother was there. The father had died already in a concentration camp. She wasn’t inclined to talk about Dieter, but it appeared that he had not gone to a Jewish prison but to a general one, and ostensibly for ‘a period of correction’ only. She expected him back in about three months. I left him a message to say I still had some books of his and would be pleased to return them if he would call on me.

  “I’m afraid the events of 1939 must have got the better of me, because I don’t believe I gave Dieter another thought that year. Soon after I returned from Dresden my Department ordered me back to England. I packed and left within forty-eight hours, to find London in a turmoil. I was given a new assignment which required intensive preparation, briefing and training. I was to go back to Europe at once and activate almost untried agents in Germany who had been recruited against such an emergency. I began to memorize the dozen-odd names and addresses. You can imagine my reaction when I discovered Dieter Frey among them.

  “When I read his file I found he had more or less recruited himself by bursting in on the consulate in Dresden and demanding to know why no one lifted a finger to stop the persecution of the Jews.” Smiley paused and laughed to himself; “Dieter was a great one for getting people to do things.” He glanced quickly at Mendel and Guillam. Both had their eyes fixed on him.

  “I suppose my first reaction was pique. The boy had been right under my nose and I hadn’t considered him suitable— what was some ass in Dresden up to? And then I was alarmed to have this firebrand on my hands, whose impulsive temperament could cost me and others our lives. Despite the slight changes in my appearance and the new cover under which I was operating, I should obviously have to declare myself to Dieter as plain George Smiley from the university, so he could blow me sky high. It seemed a most unfortunate beginning, and I was half resolved to set up my network without Dieter. In the event I was wrong. He was a magnificent agent.

  “He didn’t curb his flamboyance, but used it skilfully as a kind of double bluff. His deformity kept him out of the Services and he found himself a clerical job on the railways. In no time he worked his way to a position of real responsibility and the quantity of information he obt
ained was fantastic. Details of troop and ammunition transports, their destination and date of transit. Later he reported on the effectiveness of our bombing, pinpointed key targets. He was a brilliant organizer and I think that was what saved him. He did a wonderful job on the railways, made himself indispensable, worked all hours of the night and day; became almost inviolate. They even gave him a civilian decoration for exceptional merit and I suppose the Gestapo conveniently lost his file.

  “Dieter had a theory that was pure Faust. Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective. He used to say that the greatest mistake man ever made was to distinguish between the mind and the body: an order does not exist if it is not obeyed. He used to quote Kleist a great deal: ‘if all eyes were made of green glass, and if all that seems white was really green, who would be the wiser?’ Something like that.

  “As I say, Dieter was a magnificent agent. He even went so far as to arrange for certain freights to be transported on good flying nights for the convenience of our bombers. He had tricks all his own—a natural genius for the nuts and bolts of espionage. It seemed absurd to suppose it could last, but the effect of our bombing was often so widespread that it would have been childish to attribute it to one person’s betrayal—let alone a man so notoriously outspoken as Dieter.

  “Where he was concerned my job was easy. Dieter put in a lot of travelling as it was—he had a special pass to get him around. Communication was child’s play by comparison with some agents. Occasionally we would actually meet and talk in a café, or he would pick me up in a Ministry car and drive me sixty or seventy miles along a main road, as if he were giving me a lift. But more often we would take a journey in the same train and swap briefcases in the corridor or go to the theatre with parcels and exchange cloakroom tickets. He seldom gave me actual reports but just carbon copies of transit orders. He got his secretary to do a lot—he made her keep a special float which he ‘destroyed’ every three months by emptying it into his briefcase in the lunch hour.