Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

by John le Carré

  “Good night, Roddy.”

  “Love to Ann, mind.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  And now it was pouring with rain, Smiley was soaked to the skin, and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.

  3

  “Sheer lack of will-power,” he told himself as he courteously declined the suggestions of a lady in a doorway. “One calls it politeness, whereas in fact it is nothing but weakness. You featherhead, Martindale. You pompous, bogus, effeminate, nonproductive—” He stepped widely to avoid an unseen obstacle. “Weakness,” he resumed, “and an inability to live a self-sufficient life independent of institutions”—a puddle emptied itself neatly into his shoe—“and emotional attachments that have long outlived their purpose. Viz., my wife; viz., the Circus; viz., living in London. Taxi!”

  Smiley lurched forward but was already too late. Two girls, giggling under one umbrella, clambered aboard in a flurry of arms and legs. Uselessly pulling up the collar of his black overcoat, he continued his solitary march. “Shop-soiled white hope,” he muttered furiously. “Little bit of sandstone in the street. You bombastic, inquisitive, impertinent—”

  And then, of course, he remembered far too late that he had left the Grimmelshausen at his club.

  “Oh, damn!” he cried sopra voce, halting in his tracks for greater emphasis. “Oh, damn—oh, damn—oh, damn.”

  He would sell his London house: he had decided. Back there under the awning, crouching beside the cigarette machine, waiting for the cloudburst to end, he had taken this grave decision. Property values in London had risen out of proportion; he had heard it from every side. Good. He would sell and with a part of the proceeds buy a cottage in the Cotswolds. Burford? Too much traffic. Steeple Aston—that was a place. He would set up as a mild eccentric, discursive, withdrawn, but possessing one or two lovable habits such as muttering to himself as he bumbled along pavements. Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn’t these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one’s own generation. And if Ann wanted to return—well, he would show her the door.

  Or not show her the door, according to—well, how much she wanted to return.

  Consoled by these visions, Smiley arrived at the King’s Road, where he paused on the pavement as if waiting to cross. To either side, festive boutiques. Before him, his own Bywater Street, a cul-de-sac exactly 117 of his own paces long. When he had first come to live here, these Georgian cottages had a modest, down-at-heel charm, with young couples making do on fifteen pounds a week and a tax-free lodger hidden in the basement. Now steel screens protected their lower windows, and for each house three cars jammed the curb. From long habit, Smiley passed these in review, checking which were familiar, which were not; of the unfamiliar, which had aerials and extra mirrors, which were the closed vans that watchers like. Partly he did this as a test of memory to preserve his mind from the atrophy of retirement, just as on other days he learnt the names of the shops along his bus route to the British Museum; just as he knew how many stairs there were to each flight of his own house and which way each of the twelve doors opened.

  But Smiley had a second reason, which was fear, the secret fear that follows every professional to his grave. Namely, that one day, out of a past so complex that he himself could not remember all the enemies he might have made, one of them would find him and demand the reckoning.

  At the bottom of the street, a neighbour was exercising her dog; seeing him, she lifted her head to say something, but he ignored her, knowing it would be about Ann. He crossed the road. His house was in darkness; the curtains were as he had left them. He climbed the six steps to the front door. Since Ann’s departure, his cleaning woman had also left: no one but Ann had a key. There were two locks, a Banham deadlock and a Chubb Pipekey, and two splinters of his own manufacture, splits of oak each the size of a thumbnail, wedged into the lintel above and below the Banham. They were a hangover from his days in the field. Recently, without quite knowing why, he had started using them again; perhaps he didn’t want her to take him by surprise. With the tips of his fingers he discovered each in turn. The routine over, he unlocked the door, pushed it open, and felt the midday mail slithering over the carpet.

  What was due? he wondered. German Life and Letters? Philology? Philology, he decided; it was already overdue. Putting on the hall light, he stooped and peered through his post. One “account rendered” from his tailor for a suit he had not ordered but that he suspected was one of those presently adorning Ann’s lover; one bill from a garage in Henley for her petrol (what, pray, were they doing in Henley, broke, on the ninth of October?); one letter from the bank regarding a local cashing facility in favour of the Lady Ann Smiley at a branch of the Midland Bank in Immingham.

  And what the devil, he demanded of this document, are they doing in Immingham? Who ever had a love affair in Immingham, for goodness’ sake? Where was Immingham?

  He was still pondering the question when his gaze fell upon an unfamiliar umbrella in the stand, a silk one with a stitched leather handle and a gold ring with no initial. And it passed through his mind with a speed which has no place in time that since the umbrella was dry it must have arrived there before six-fifteen when the rain began, for there was no moisture in the stand either. Also that it was an elegant umbrella and the ferrule was barely scratched, though it was not new. And that therefore the umbrella belonged to someone agile—even young, like Ann’s latest swain. But that since its owner had known about the wedges and known how to put them back once he was inside the house, and had the wit to lay the mail against the door after disturbing and no doubt reading it, then most likely he knew Smiley, too; and was not a lover but a professional like himself, who had at some time worked closely with him and knew his handwriting, as it is called in the jargon.

  The drawing-room door was ajar. Softly he pushed it further open.

  “Peter?” he said.

  Through the gap he saw by the light of the street two suède shoes, lazily folded, protruding from one end of the sofa.

  “I’d leave that coat on if I were you, George, old boy,” said an amiable voice. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

  Five minutes later, dressed in a vast brown travelling coat, a gift from Ann and the only one he had that was dry, George Smiley was sitting crossly in the passenger seat of Peter Guillam’s extremely draughty sports car, which he had parked in an adjoining square. Their destination was Ascot, a place famous for women and horses. And less famous, perhaps, as the residence of Mr. Oliver Lacon, of the Cabinet Office, a senior adviser to various mixed committees and a watchdog of intelligence affairs. Or, as Guillam had it less reverentially, Whitehall’s head prefect.

  While, at Thursgood’s school, wakefully in bed, Bill Roach was contemplating the latest wonders that had befallen him in the course of his daily vigil over Jim’s welfare. Yesterday Jim had amazed Latzy. Thursday he had stolen Miss Aaronson’s mail. Miss Aaronson taught violin and scripture; Roach courted her for her tenderness. Latzy, the assistant gardener, was a D.P., said Matron, and D.P.s spoke no English, or very little. D.P. meant Different Person, said Matron, or anyway, foreign from the war. But yesterday Jim had spoken to Latzy, seeking his assistance with the car club, and he had spoken to him in D.P., or whatever D.P.s speak, and Latzy had grown a foot taller on the spot.

  The matter of Miss Aaronson’s mail was more complex. There were two envelopes on the staffroom sideboard Thursday morning after chapel when Roach called for his form’s exercise books, one addressed to Jim and one to Miss Aaronson. Jim’s was typewritten. Miss Aaronson’s was handwritten, in a hand not unlike Jim’s own. The staffroom, while Roach made these observations, was empty. He helped himself to the exercise books and was quietly taking his leave when
Jim walked in by the other door, red and blowing from his early walk.

  “On your way, Jumbo, bell’s gone,” stooping over the sideboard.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Foxy weather, eh, Jumbo?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “On your way, then.”

  At the door, Roach looked round. Jim was standing again, leaning back to open the morning’s Daily Telegraph. The sideboard was empty. Both envelopes had gone.

  Had Jim written to Miss Aaronson and changed his mind? Proposing marriage, perhaps? Another thought came to Bill Roach. Recently, Jim had acquired an old typewriter, a wrecked Remington that he had put right with his own hands. Had he typed his own letter on it? Was he so lonely that he wrote himself letters, and stole other people’s as well? Roach fell asleep.

  4

  Guillam drove languidly but fast. Smells of autumn filled the car, a full moon was shining, strands of mist hung over open fields, and the cold was irresistible. Smiley wondered how old Guillam was and guessed forty, but in that light he could have been an undergraduate sculling on the river; he moved the gear lever with a long flowing movement as if he were passing it through water. In any case, Smiley reflected irritably, the car was far too young, for Guillam. They had raced through Runnymede and begun the run up Egham Hill. They had been driving for twenty minutes and Smiley had asked a dozen questions and received no answer worth a penny, and now a nagging fear was waking in him that he refused to name.

  “I’m surprised they didn’t throw you out with the rest of us,” he said, not very pleasantly, as he hauled the skirts of his coat more tightly round him. “You had all the qualifications: good at your work, loyal, discreet.”

  “They put me in charge of scalp-hunters.”

  “Oh, my Lord,” said Smiley with a shudder, and, pulling up his collar round his ample chins, he abandoned himself to that memory in place of others more disturbing: Brixton, and the grim flint schoolhouse that served the scalp-hunters as their headquarters. The scalp-hunters’ official name was Travel. They had been formed by Control on Bill Haydon’s suggestion in the pioneer days of the cold war, when murder and kidnapping and crash blackmail were common currency, and their first commandant was Haydon’s nominee. They were a small outfit, about a dozen men, and they were there to handle the hit-and-run jobs that were too dirty or too risky for the residents abroad. Good intelligence work, Control had always preached, was gradual and rested on a kind of gentleness. The scalp-hunters were the exception to his own rule. They weren’t gradual and they weren’t gentle either, thus reflecting Haydon’s temperament rather than Control’s. And they worked solo, which was why they were stabled out of sight behind a flint wall with broken glass and barbed wire on the top.

  “I asked whether ‘lateralism’ was a word to you.”

  “It most certainly is not.”

  “It’s the ‘in’ doctrine. We used to go up and down. Now we go along.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “In your day, the Circus ran itself by regions. Africa, satellites, Russia, China, South East Asia, you name it: each region was commanded by its own juju man; Control sat in heaven and held the strings. Remember?”

  “It strikes a distant chord.”

  “Well, today everything operational is under one hat. It’s called London Station. Regions are out, lateralism is in. Bill Haydon’s Commander London Station, Roy Bland’s his number two, Toby Esterhase runs between them like a poodle. They’re a service within a service. They share their own secrets and don’t mix with the proles. It makes us more secure.”

  “It sounds a very good idea,” said Smiley, studiously ignoring the innuendo.

  As the memories once more began seething upward into his conscious mind, an extraordinary feeling passed over him: that he was living the day twice, first with Martindale in the club, now again with Guillam in a dream. They passed a plantation of young pine trees. The moonlight lay in strips between them.

  Smiley began, “Is there any word of—” Then he asked, in a more tentative tone, “What’s the news of Ellis?”

  “In quarantine,” said Guillam tersely.

  “Oh, I’m sure. Of course. I don’t mean to pry. Merely, can he get around and so on? He did recover; he can walk? Backs can be terribly tricky, I understand.”

  “The word says he manages pretty well. How’s Ann, I didn’t ask.”

  “Fine. Just fine.”

  It was pitch dark inside the car. They had turned off the road and were passing over gravel. Black walls of foliage rose to either side, lights appeared, then a high porch, and the steepled outline of a rambling house lifted above the treetops. The rain had stopped, but as Smiley stepped into the fresh air he heard all round him the restless ticking of wet leaves.

  Yes, he thought, it was raining when I came here before, when the name Jim Ellis was headline news.

  They had washed and, in the lofty cloakroom, inspected Lacon’s climbing kit mawkishly dumped on the Sheraton chest of drawers. Now they sat in a half-circle facing one empty chair. It was the ugliest house for miles around and Lacon had picked it up for a song. “A Berkshire Camelot,” he had once called it, explaining it away to Smiley, “built by a teetotal millionaire.” The drawing-room was a great hall with stained-glass windows twenty feet high and a pine gallery over the entrance. Smiley counted off the familiar things: an upright piano littered with musical scores, old portraits of clerics in gowns, a wad of printed invitations. He looked for the Cambridge University oar and found it slung over the fireplace. The same fire was burning, too mean for the enormous grate. An air of need prevailing over wealth.

  “Are you enjoying retirement, George?” Lacon asked, as if blurting into the ear trumpet of a deaf aunt. “You don’t miss the warmth of human contact? I rather would, I think. One’s work, one’s old buddies.”

  He was a string bean of a man, graceless and boyish: church and spy establishment, said Haydon, the Circus wit. His father was a dignitary of the Scottish church and his mother something noble. Occasionally the smarter Sundays wrote about him, calling him “new-style” because he was young. The skin of his face was clawed from hasty shaving.

  “Oh, I think I manage very well, really, thank you,” said Smiley politely. And to draw it out: “Yes. Yes, I’m sure I do. And you? All goes well with you?”

  “No big changes, no. All very smooth. Charlotte got her scholarship to Roedean, which was nice.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “And your wife, she’s in the pink and so on?”

  His expressions were also boyish.

  “Very bonny, thank you,” said Smiley, trying gallantly to respond in kind.

  They were watching the double doors. From far off they heard the jangle of footsteps on a ceramic floor. Smiley guessed two people, both men. The doors opened and a tall figure appeared half in silhouette. For the fraction of a moment, Smiley glimpsed a second man behind him, dark, small, and attentive; but only the one man stepped into the room before the doors were closed by unseen hands.

  “Lock us in, please,” Lacon called, and they heard the snap of the key. “You know Smiley, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I think I do,” said the figure as he began the long walk towards them out of the far gloom. “I think he once gave me a job, didn’t you, Mr. Smiley?”

  His voice was as soft as a southerner’s drawl, but there was no mistaking the colonial accent. “Tarr, sir. Ricki Tarr from Penang.”

  A fragment of firelight illuminated one side of the stark smile and made a hollow of one eye. “The lawyer’s boy, remember? Come on, Mr. Smiley, you changed my first nappies.”

  And then, absurdly, they were all four standing, and Guillam and Lacon looked on like godparents while Tarr shook Smiley’s hand once, then again, then once more for the photographs.

  “How are you, Mr. Smiley? It’s real nice to see you, sir.”

  Relinquishing Smiley’s hand at last, he swung away in the direction of his appointed chair, while Smi
ley thought, Yes, with Ricki Tarr it could have happened. With Tarr, anything could have happened. My God, he thought; two hours ago I was telling myself I would take refuge in the past. He felt thirsty, and supposed it was fear.

  Ten? Twelve years ago? It was not his night for understanding time. Among Smiley’s jobs in those days was the vetting of recruits: no one taken on without his nod, no one trained without his signature on the schedule. The cold war was running high, scalp-hunters were in demand, the Circus’s residencies abroad had been ordered by Haydon to look out for likely material. Steve Mackelvore from Djakarta came up with Tarr. Mackelvore was an old pro with cover as a shipping agent, and he had found Tarr angry drunk, kicking round the docks looking for a girl called Rose, who had walked out on him.

  According to Tarr’s story, he was mixed up with a bunch of Belgians running guns between the islands and up-coast. He disliked Belgians and he was bored with gunrunning and he was angry because they’d stolen Rose. Mackelvore reckoned he would respond to discipline and was young enough to train for the type of mailfist operation that the scalp-hunters undertook from behind the walls of their glum Brixton schoolhouse. After the usual searches, Tarr was forwarded to Singapore for a second look, then to the Nursery at Sarratt for a third. At that point Smiley came into the act as moderator at a succession of interviews, some hostile. Sarratt Nursery was the training compound, but it had space for other uses.

  Tarr’s father was an Australian solicitor living in Penang, it seemed. The mother was a small-time actress from Bradford who came East with a British drama group before the war. The father, Smiley recalled, had an evangelical streak and preached in local gospel halls. The mother had a small criminal record in England, but Tarr’s father either didn’t know or didn’t care. When the war came, the couple evacuated to Singapore for the sake of their young son. A few months later, Singapore fell and Ricki Tarr began his education in Changi jail under Japanese supervision. In Changi the father preached God’s charity to everyone in sight, and if the Japs hadn’t persecuted him his fellow prisoners would have done the job for them. With Liberation, the three of them went back to Penang. Ricki tried to read for the law but more often broke it, and the father turned some rough preachers loose on him to beat the sin out of his soul. Tarr flew the coop to Borneo. At eighteen he was a fully paid-up gunrunner playing all seven ends against the middle around the Indonesian islands, and that was how Mackelvore stumbled on him.