A Murder of Quality AND Call for the Dead

by John le Carré

  “Well, in 1943 I was recalled. My trade cover was rather thin by then I think, and I was getting a bit shopsoiled.” He stopped and took a cigarette from Guillam’s case.

  “But don’t let’s get Dieter out of perspective,” he said. “He was my best agent, but he wasn’t my only one. I had a lot of headaches of my own—running him was a picnic by comparison with some. When the war was over I tried to find out from my successor what had become of Dieter and the rest of them. Some were resettled in Australia and Canada, some just drifted away to what was left of their home towns. Dieter hesitated, I gather. The Russians were in Dresden, of course, and he may have had doubts. In the end he went—he had to really, because of his mother. He hated the Americans, anyway. And of course he was a socialist.

  “I heard later that he had made his career there. The administrative experience he had picked up during the war got him some Government job in the new republic. I suppose that his reputation as a rebel and the suffering of his family cleared the way for him. He must have done pretty well for himself.”

  “Why?” asked Mendel.

  “He was over here until a month ago running the Steel Mission.”

  “That’s not all,” said Guillam quickly. “In case you think your cup is full, Mendel, I spared you another visit to Weybridge this morning and called on Elizabeth Pidgeon. It was George’s idea.” He turned to Smiley: “She’s a sort of Moby Dick, isn’t she—big white man-eating whale.”

  “Well?” said Mendel.

  “I showed her a picture of that young diplomat by the name of Mundt they kept in tow there to pick up the bits. Elizabeth recognized him at once as the nice man who collected Elsa Fennan’s music case. Isn’t that jolly?”

  “But—”

  “I know what you’re going to ask, you clever youth. You want to know whether George recognized him too. Well, George did. It’s the same nasty fellow who tried to lure him into his house in Bywater Street. Doesn’t he get around?”

  Mendel drove to Mitcham. Smiley was dead tired. It was raining again and cold. Smiley hugged his greatcoat round him and, despite his tiredness, watched with quiet pleasure the busy London night go by. He had always loved travelling. Even now, if he had the choice, he would cross France by train rather than fly. He could still respond to the magic noises of a night journey across Europe, the oddly cacophonous chimes and the French voices suddenly waking him from English dreams. Ann had loved it too and they had twice travelled overland to share the dubious joys of that uncomfortable journey.

  When they got back Smiley went straight to bed while Mendel made some tea. They drank it in Smiley’s bedroom.

  “What do we do now?” asked Mendel.

  “I thought I might go to Walliston tomorrow.”

  “You ought to spend the day in bed. What do you want to do there?”

  “See Elsa Fennan.”

  “You’re not safe on your own. You’d better let me come. I’ll sit in the car while you do the talking. She’s a Yid, isn’t she?”

  Smiley nodded.

  “My dad was Yid. He never made such a bloody fuss about it.’

  12

  DREAM FOR SALE

  She opened the door and stood looking at him for a moment in silence.

  “You could have let me know you were coming,” she said.

  “I thought it safer not to.”

  She was silent again. Finally she said: “I don’t know what you mean.” It seemed to cost her a good deal.

  “May I come in?” said Smiley. “We haven’t much time.”

  She looked old and tired, less resilient perhaps. She led him into the drawing-room and with something like resignation indicated a chair.

  Smiley offered her a cigarette and took one himself. She was standing by the window. As he looked at her, watched her quick breathing, her feverish eyes, he realized that she had almost lost the power of self-defence.

  When he spoke, his voice was gentle, concessive. To Elsa Fennan it must have seemed like a voice she had longed for, irresistible, offering all strength, comfort, compassion and safety. She gradually moved away from the window and her right hand, which had been pressed against the sill, trailed wistfully along it, then fell to her side in a gesture of submission. She sat opposite him, her eyes upon him in complete dependence, like the eyes of a lover.

  “You must have been terribly lonely,” he said. “No one can stand it for ever. It takes courage, too, and it’s hard to be brave alone. They never understand that, do they? They never know what it costs—the sordid tricks of lying and deceiving, the isolation from ordinary people. They think you can run on their kind of fuel—the flag waving and the music. But you need a different kind of fuel, don’t you, when you’re alone? You’ve got to hate, and it needs strength to hate all the time. And what you must love is so remote, so vague when you’re not part of it.” He paused. Soon, he thought, soon you’ll break. He prayed desperately that she would accept him, accept his comfort. He looked at her. Soon she would break.

  “I said we hadn’t much time. Do you know what I mean?”

  She had folded her hands on her lap and was looking down at them. He saw the dark roots of her yellow hair and wondered why on earth she dyed it. She showed no sign of having heard his question.

  “When I left you that morning a month ago I drove to my home in London. A man tried to kill me. That night he nearly succeeded— he hit me on the head three or four times. I’ve just come out of hospital. As it happens I was lucky. Then there was the garage man he hired the car from. The river police recovered his body from the Thames not long ago. There were no signs of violence—he was just full of whisky. They can’t understand it—he hadn’t been near the river for years. But then we’re dealing with a competent man, aren’t we? A trained killer. It seems he’s trying to remove anyone who can connect him with Samuel Fennan. Or his wife, of course. Then there’s that young blonde girl at the Repertory Theatre …”

  “What are you saying?” she whispered. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  Smiley suddenly wanted to hurt her, to break the last of her will, to remove her utterly as an enemy. For so long she had haunted him as he had lain helpless, had been a mystery and a power.

  “What games did you think you were playing, you two? Do you think you can flirt with power like theirs, give a little and not give all? Do you think that you can stop the dance—control the strength you give them? What dreams did you cherish, Mrs Fennan, that had so little of the world in them?”

  She buried her face in her hands and he watched the tears run between her fingers. Her body shook with great sobs and her words came slowly, wrung from her.

  “No, no dreams. I had no dream but him. He had one dream, yes … one great dream.” She went on crying, helpless, and Smiley, half in triumph, half in shame, waited for her to speak again. Suddenly she raised her head and looked at him, the tears still running down her cheeks. “Look at me,” she said. “What dream did they leave me? I dreamt of long golden hair and they shaved my head, I dreamt of a beautiful body and they broke it with hunger. I have seen what human beings are, how could I believe in a formula for human beings? I said to him, oh I said to him a thousand times: ‘Only make no laws, no fine theories, no judgements, and the people may love, but give them one theory, let them invent one slogan, and the game begins again.’ I told him that. We talked whole nights away. But no, that little boy must have his dream, and if a new world was to be built, Samuel Fennan must build it. I said to him, ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘They have given you all you have, a home, money and trust. Why do you do it to them?’ And he said to me: ‘I do it for them. I am the surgeon and one day they will understand.’ He was a child, Mr Smiley, they led him like a child.”

  He dared not speak, dared put nothing to the test.

  “Five years ago he met that Dieter. In a ski hut near Garmisch. Freitag told us later that Dieter had planned it that way—Dieter couldn’t ski anyway because of his legs. Nothing seemed real then; Freitag w
asn’t a real name. Fennan christened him Freitag like Man Friday in Robinson Crusoe. Dieter found that so funny and afterwards we never talked of Dieter but always of Mr Robinson and Freitag.” She broke off now and looked at him with a very faint smile: “I’m sorry,” she said; “I’m not very coherent.”

  “I understand,” said Smiley.

  “That girl—what did you say about that girl?”

  “She’s alive. Don’t worry. Go on.”

  “Fennan liked you, you know. Freitag tried to kill you … why?”

  “Because I came back, I suppose, and asked you about the eight-thirty call. You told Freitag that, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, God,” she said, her fingers at her mouth.

  “You rang him up, didn’t you? As soon as I’d gone?”

  “Yes, yes. I was frightened. I wanted to warn him to go, him and Dieter, to go away and never come back, because I knew you’d find out. If not today then one day, but I knew you’d find out in the end. Why would they never leave me alone? They were frightened of me because they knew I had no dreams, that I only wanted Samuel, wanted him safe to love and care for. They relied on that.”

  Smiley felt his head throbbing erratically. “So you rang him straight away,” he said. “You tried the Primrose number first and couldn’t get through.”

  “Yes,” she said vaguely. “Yes, that’s right. But they’re both Primrose numbers.”

  “So you rang the other number, the alternative …”

  She drifted back to the window, suddenly exhausted and limp; she seemed happier now—the storm had left her reflective and, in a way, content.

  “Yes. Freitag was a great one for alternative plans.”

  “What was the other number?” Smiley insisted. He watched her anxiously as she stared out of the window into the dark garden.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  He came and stood beside her at the window, watching her profile. His voice was suddenly harsh and energetic.

  “I said the girl was all right. You and I are alive, too. But don’t think that’s going to last.”

  She turned to him with fear in her eyes, looked at him for a moment, then nodded. Smiley took her by the arm and guided her to a chair. He ought to make her a hot drink or something. She sat down quite mechanically, almost with the detachment of incipient madness.

  “The other number was 9747.”

  “Any address—did you have an address?”

  “No, no address. Only the telephone. Tricks on the telephone. No address,” she repeated, with unnatural emphasis, so that Smiley looked at her and wondered. A thought suddenly struck him—a memory of Dieter’s skill in communication.

  “Freitag didn’t meet you the night Fennan died, did he? He didn’t come to the theatre?”

  “No.”

  “That was the first time he had missed, wasn’t it? You panicked and left early.”

  “No … yes, yes, I panicked.”

  “No you didn’t! You left early because you had to, it was the arrangement. Why did you leave early? Why?”

  Her hands hid her face.

  “Are you still mad?” Smiley shouted. “Do you still think you can control what you have made? Freitag will kill you, kill the girl, kill, kill, kill. Who are you trying to protect, a girl or a murderer?”

  She wept and said nothing. Smiley crouched beside her, still shouting.

  “I’ll tell you why you left early, shall I? I’ll tell you what I think. It was to catch the last post that night from Weybridge. He hadn’t come, you hadn’t exchanged cloakroom tickets, had you, so you obeyed the instructions, you posted your ticket to him and you have got an address, not written down but remembered, remembered for ever: ‘If there is a crisis, if I do not come, this is the address’: is that what he said? An address never to be used or spoken of, an address forgotten and remembered for ever? Is that right? Tell me!”

  She stood up, her head turned away, went to the desk and found a piece of paper and a pencil. The tears still ran freely over her face. With agonizing slowness she wrote the address, her hand faltering and almost stopping between the words.

  He took the paper from her, folded it carefully across the middle and put it in his wallet.

  Now he would make her some tea.

  She looked like a child rescued from the sea. She sat on the edge of the sofa holding the cup tightly in her frail hands, nursing it against her body. Her thin shoulders were hunched forward, her feet and ankles pressed tightly together. Smiley, looking at her, felt he had broken something he should never have touched because it was so fragile. He felt an obscene, coarse bully, his offerings of tea a futile recompense for his clumsiness.

  He could think of nothing to say. After a while, she said: “He liked you, you know. He really liked you … he said you were a clever little man. It was quite a surprise when Samuel called anyone clever.” She shook her head slowly. Perhaps it was the reaction that made her smile: “He used to say there were two forces in the world, the positive and the negative. ‘What shall I do then?’ he would ask me. ‘Let them ruin their harvest because they give me bread? Creation, progress, power, the whole future of mankind waits at their door: shall I not let them in?’ And I said to him: ‘But Samuel, maybe the people are happy without these things?’ But you know he didn’t think of people like that.

  “But I couldn’t stop him. You know the strangest thing about Fennan? For all that thinking and talking, he had made up his mind long ago what he would do. All the rest was poetry. He wasn’t coordinated, that’s what I used to tell him …”

  “… and yet you helped him,” said Smiley.

  “Yes, I helped him. He wanted help so I gave it him. He was my life.”

  “I see.”

  “That was a mistake. He was a little boy, you know. He forgot things just like a child. And so vain. He had made up his mind to do it and he did it so badly. He didn’t think of it as you do, or I do. He simply didn’t think of it like that. It was his work and that was all.

  “It began so simply. He brought home a draft telegram one night and showed it to me. He said: ‘I think Dieter ought to see that’—that was all. I couldn’t believe it to begin with—that he was a spy, I mean. Because he was, wasn’t he? And gradually, I realized. They began to ask for special things. The music case I got back from Freitag began to contain orders, and sometimes money. I said to him: ‘Look at what they are sending you—do you want this?’ We didn’t know what to do with the money. In the end we gave it away mostly, I don’t know why. Dieter was very angry that winter, when I told him.”

  “What winter was that?” asked Smiley.

  “The second winter with Dieter—1956 in Mürren. We met him first in January 1955. That was when it began. And shall I tell you something? Hungary made no difference to Samuel, not a tiny bit of difference. Dieter was frightened about him then, I know, because Freitag told me. When Fennan gave me the things to take to Weybridge that November I nearly went mad. I shouted at him: ‘Can’t you see it’s the same? The same guns, the same children dying in the streets? Only the dream has changed, the blood is the same colour. Is that what you want?’ I asked him: ‘Would you do this for Germans, too? It’s me who lies in the gutter, will you let them do it to me?’ But he just said: ‘No, Elsa, this is different.’ And I went on taking the music case. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know. I think perhaps I do.”

  “He was all I had. He was my life. I protected myself, I suppose. And gradually I became a part of it, and then it was too late to stop … And then you know,” she said, in a whisper; “there were times when I was glad, times when the world seemed to applaud what Samuel was doing. It was not a pretty sight for us, the new Germany. Old names had come back, names that had frightened us as children. The dreadful, plump pride returned, you could see it even in the photographs in the papers, they marched with the old rhythm. Fennan felt that too, but then thank God he hadn’t seen what I saw.

  “We we
re in a camp outside Dresden, where we used to live. My father was paralysed. He missed tobacco more than anything and I used to roll cigarettes from any rubbish I could find in the camp—just to pretend with. One day a guard saw him smoking and began laughing. Some others came and they laughed too. My father was holding the cigarette in his paralysed hand and it was burning his fingers. He didn’t know, you see.

  “Yes, when they gave guns to the Germans again, gave them money and uniforms, then sometimes—just for a little while— I was pleased with what Samuel had done. We are Jews, you know, and so …”

  “Yes, I know, I understand,” said Smiley. “I saw it too, a little of it.”

  “Dieter said you had.”

  “Dieter said that?”

  “Yes. To Freitag. He told Freitag you were a very clever man. You once deceived Dieter before the war, and it was only long afterwards that he found out, that’s what Freitag said. He said you were the best he’d ever met.”

  “When did Freitag tell you that?”

  She looked at him for a long time. He had never seen in any face such hopeless misery. He remembered how she had said to him before: “The children of my grief are dead.” He understood that now, and heard it in her voice when at last she spoke:

  “Why, isn’t it obvious? The night he murdered Samuel.

  “That’s the great joke, Mr Smiley. At the very moment when Samuel could have done so much for them—not just a piece here and a piece there, but all the time—so many music cases—at that moment their own fear destroyed them, turned them into animals and made them kill what they had made.

  “Samuel always said: ‘They will win because they know and the others will perish because they do not: men who work for a dream will work for ever’—that’s what he said. But I knew their dream, I knew it would destroy us. What has not destroyed? Even the dream of Christ.”

  “It was Dieter then, who saw me in the park with Fennan?”

  “Yes.”

  “And thought—”

  “Yes. Thought that Samuel had betrayed him. Told Freitag to kill Samuel.”