Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

by John le Carré

  Camilla was asleep. He lay awake beside her, waiting for tomorrow when, at Smiley’s request, he intended to steal the file on the Prideaux affair, otherwise known as the Ellis scandal or—more locally—Operation Testify.

  14

  It had been, till that moment, the second happiest day of Bill Roach’s short life. The happiest was shortly before the dissolution of his household, when his father discovered a wasps’ nest in the roof and recruited Bill to help him smoke them out. His father was not an outdoor man—not even handy—but after Bill had looked up wasps in his encyclopaedia they drove to the chemist together and bought sulphur, which they burned on a charger under the eave, and did the wasps to death.

  Whereas today had seen the formal opening of Jim Prideaux’s car-club rally. Till now they had only stripped the Alvis down, refurbished her, and put her together again, but today, as the reward, they had laid out—with the help of Latzy, the D.P.—a slalom of straw bales on the stony side of the drive. Then each in turn had taken the wheel and, with Jim as timekeeper, puffed and shunted through the gates to the tumult of their supporters. “Best car England ever made” was how Jim had introduced his car. “Out of production, thanks to Socialism.” She was now repainted, she had a racing Union Jack on the bonnet, and she was undoubtedly the finest, fastest car on earth. In the first round, Roach had come third out of fourteen, and now in the second he had reached the chestnut trees without once stalling, and was all set for the home lap and a record time. He had never imagined that anything could give him so much pleasure. He loved the car, he loved Jim, and he even loved the school, and for the first time in his life he loved trying to win. He could hear Jim yelling, “Easy, Jumbo,” and he could see Latzy leaping up and down with the improvised chequered flag; but as he clattered past the post he already knew that Jim wasn’t watching him any more but glaring down the course towards the beech trees.

  “Sir, how long, sir?” he asked breathlessly, and there was a small hush.

  “Timekeeper!” sang Spikely, chancing his luck. “Time, please, Rhino.”

  “Was very good, Jumbo,” Latzy said, also looking at Jim.

  For once, Spikely’s impertinence, like Roach’s entreaty, found no response. Jim was staring across the field, towards the lane that formed the eastern border. Beside him stood a boy named Coleshaw, whose nickname was Cole Slaw. He was a lag from Three B, and famous for sucking up to staff. The ground lay very flat just there before lifting to the hills; often after a few days’ rain it flooded. For this reason there was no good hedge beside the lane but a post-and-wire fence; and no trees, either—just the fence, the flats, and sometimes the Quantocks behind, which today had vanished in the general whiteness. The flats could have been a marsh leading to a lake, or simply to the white infinity. Against this washed-out background strolled a single figure, a trim, inconspicuous pedestrian, male and thin-faced, in a trilby hat and grey raincoat, carrying a walking stick that he barely used. Watching him also, Roach decided that the man wanted to walk faster but was going slowly for a purpose.

  “Got your specs on, Jumbo?” asked Jim, staring after the man, who was about to draw level with the next post.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who is he, then? Looks like Solomon Grundy.”

  “Don’t know, sir.”

  “Never seen him before?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Not staff, not village. So who is he? Beggarman? Thief? Why doesn’t he look this way, Jumbo? What’s wrong with us? Wouldn’t you, if you saw a bunch of boys flogging a car round a field? Doesn’t he like cars? Doesn’t he like boys?”

  Roach was still thinking up an answer to all these questions when Jim started speaking to Latzy in D.P., using a murmured, level sort of tone, which at once suggested to Roach that there was a complicity between them, a special foreign bond. The impression was strengthened by Latzy’s reply, plainly negative, which had the same unstartled quietness.

  “Sir, please, sir, I think he’s to do with the church, sir,” said Cole Slaw. “I saw him talking to Wells Fargo, sir, after chapel.”

  The vicar’s name was Spargo and he was very old. It was Thursgood legend that he was in fact the great Wells Fargo in retirement. At this intelligence, Jim thought awhile and Roach, furious, told himself that Coleshaw was making the story up.

  “Hear what they talked about, Cole Slaw?”

  “Sir, no, sir. They were looking at pew lists, sir. But I could ask Wells Fargo, sir.”

  “Our pew lists? Thursgood pew lists?”

  “Yes, sir. School pew lists. Thursgood’s. With all the names, sir, where we sit.”

  And where the staff sit, too, thought Roach sickly.

  “Anybody sees him again, let me know. Or any other sinister bodies, understand?” Jim was addressing them all, making light of it now. “Don’t hold with odd bods hanging about the school. Last place I was at, we had a whole damn gang. Cleared the place out. Silver, money, boys’ watches, radios—God knows what they didn’t pinch. He’ll pinch the Alvis next. Best car England ever made, and out of production. Colour of hair, Jumbo?”

  “Black, sir.”

  “Height, Cole Slaw?”

  “Sir, six foot, sir.”

  “Everybody looks six foot to Cole Slaw, sir,” said a wit, for Coleshaw was a midget, reputedly fed on gin as a baby.

  “Age, Spikely, you toad?”

  “Ninety-one, sir.”

  The moment dissolved in laughter; Roach was awarded a re-drive and did badly, and the same night lay in an anguish of jealousy that the entire car club, not to mention Latzy, had been recruited wholesale to the select rank of watcher. It was poor consolation to assure himself that their vigilance would never match his own; that Jim’s order would not outlive the day; or that from now on he must increase his efforts to meet what was clearly an advancing threat.

  The thin-faced stranger disappeared, but next day Jim paid a rare visit to the churchyard; Roach saw him talking to Wells Fargo before an open grave. Thereafter Bill Roach noticed a steady darkening of Jim’s face, and an alertness which at times was like an anger in him, as he stalked through the twilight every evening, or sat on the hummocks outside his trailer, indifferent to the cold or wet, smoking his tiny cigar and sipping his vodka as the dusk closed on him.

  PART II

  15

  The Hotel Islay in Sussex Gardens—where, on the day after his visit to Ascot, George Smiley under the name of Barraclough had set up his operational headquarters—was a very quiet place, considering its position, and perfectly suited to his needs. It lay a hundred yards south of Paddington Station, one of a terrace of elderly mansions cut off from the main avenue by a line of plane trees and a parking patch. The traffic roared past it all night. But the inside, though it was a fire-bowl of clashing wallpapers and copper lampshades, was a place of extraordinary calm. Not only was there nothing going on in the hotel, there was nothing going on in the world, either, and this impression was strengthened by Mrs. Pope Graham, the proprietor, a major’s widow with a terribly langorous voice that imparted a sense of deep fatigue to Mr. Barraclough or anyone else who sought her hospitality. Inspector Mendel, whose informant she had been for many years, insisted that her name was plain Graham. The Pope had been added for grandeur or out of deference to Rome.

  “Your father wasn’t a Green Jacket, was he, dear?” she enquired, with a yawn, as she read Barraclough in the register. Smiley paid her fifty pounds’ advance for a two-week stay, and she gave him Room 8 because he wanted to work. He asked for a desk and she gave him a rickety card table; Norman, the boy, brought it. “It’s Georgian,” she said with a sigh, supervising its delivery. “So you will love it for me, won’t you, dear? I shouldn’t lend it to you, really; it was the Major’s.”

  To the fifty, Mendel privately had added a further twenty on account, from his own wallet—“dirty oncers,” as he called them—which he later recovered from Smiley. “No smell to nothing, is there?” he said.

  “You cou
ld say so,” Mrs. Pope Graham agreed, demurely stowing the notes among her nether garments.

  “I’ll want every scrap,” Mendel warned, seated in her basement apartment over a bottle of the one she liked. “Times of entry and exit, contacts, life-style, and most of all,” he said, lifting an emphatic finger, “most of all—and more important than you can possibly know, this is—I’ll want suspicious persons taking an interest or putting questions to your staff under a pretext.” He gave her his state-of-the-nation look. “Even if they say they’re the Guards Armoured and Sherlock Holmes rolled into one.”

  “There’s only me and Norman,” said Mrs. Pope Graham, indicating a shivery boy in a black overcoat to which had been stitched a velvet collar of beige. “And they’ll not get far with Norman—will they, dear; you’re too sensitive.”

  “Same with his incoming letters,” said the Inspector. “I’ll want postmarks and times posted where legible, but no tampering or holding back. Same with his objects.” He allowed a hush to fall as he eyed the substantial safe that formed such a feature of the furnishings. “Now and then, he’s going to ask for objects to be lodged. Mainly they’ll be papers, sometimes books. There’s only one person allowed to look at those objects apart from him.” He pulled a sudden piratical grin: “Me. Understand? No one else can even know you’ve got them. And don’t fiddle with them, or he’ll know because he’s sharp. It’s got to be expert fiddling. I’m not saying any more,” Mendel concluded. Though he did remark to Smiley, soon after returning from Somerset, that if twenty quid was all it cost them, Norman and his protectress were the cheapest baby-sitting service in the business.

  In which boast he was pardonably mistaken, for he could hardly be expected to know of Jim’s recruitment of the entire car club; or the means by which Jim was able subsequently to trace the path of Mendel’s wary investigations. Nor could Mendel, or anyone else, have guessed the state of electric alertness to which anger, and the strain of waiting, and perhaps a little madness, had seemingly brought Jim.

  Room 8 was on the top floor. Its window looked onto the parapet. Beyond the parapet lay a side street with a shady bookshop and a travel agency called Wide World. The hand towel was embroidered “Swan Hotel Marlow.” Lacon stalked in that evening carrying a fat briefcase containing the first consignment of papers from his office. To talk, the two men sat side by side on the bed while Smiley played a transistor wireless to drown the sound of their voices. Lacon took this mawkishly; he seemed somehow too old for the picnic. Next morning on his way to work, Lacon reclaimed the papers and returned the books that Smiley had given him to pad out his briefcase. In this role Lacon was at his worst. His manner was offended and off-hand; he made it clear he detested the irregularity. In the cold weather, he seemed to have developed a permanent blush. But Smiley could not have read the files by day, because they were on call to Lacon’s staff and their absence would have caused an uproar. Nor did he want to. He knew better than anyone that he was desperately short of time. Over the next three days this procedure varied very little. Each evening on his way to take the train from Paddington, Lacon dropped in his papers, and each night Mrs. Pope Graham furtively reported to Mendel that the sour gangly one had called again—the one who looked down his nose at Norman. Each morning, after three hours’ sleep and a disgusting breakfast of undercooked sausage and overcooked tomato—there was no other menu—Smiley waited for Lacon to arrive, then slipped gratefully into the cold winter’s day to take his place among his fellow men.

  They were extraordinary nights for Smiley, alone up there on the top floor. Thinking of them afterwards—though his days between were just as fraught, and on the surface more eventful—he recalled them as a single journey, almost a single night. “And you’ll do it,” Lacon had piped shamelessly in the garden. “Go forwards, go backwards?” As Smiley retraced path after path into his own past, there was no longer any difference between the two: forwards or backwards, it was the same journey and its destination lay ahead of him. There was nothing in that room, no object among that whole magpie collection of tattered hotel junk, that separated him from the rooms of his recollection. He was back on the top floor of the Circus, in his own plain office with the Oxford prints, just as he had left it a year ago. Beyond his door lay the low-ceilinged anteroom where Control’s grey-haired ladies, the mothers, softly typed and answered telephones; while here in the hotel an undiscovered genius along the corridor night and day tapped patiently at an old machine. At the anteroom’s far end—in Mrs. Pope Graham’s world there was a bathroom there, and a warning not to use it—stood the blank door that led to Control’s sanctuary: an alley of a place, with old steel cupboards and old red books, a smell of sweet dust and jasmine tea. Behind the desk Control himself, a carcass of a man by then, with his lank grey forelock and his smile as warm as a skull.

  This mental transposition was so complete in Smiley that when his phone rang—the extension was an extra, payable in cash—he had to give himself time to remember where he was. Other sounds had an equally confusing effect on him, such as the rustle of pigeons on the parapet, the scraping of the television mast in the wind, and—in rain—the sudden river gurgling in the roof valley. For these sounds also belonged to his past, and in Cambridge Circus were heard by the fifth floor only. His ear selected them, no doubt, for that very reason: they were the background jingle of his past. Once in the early morning, hearing a footfall in the corridor outside his room, Smiley actually went to the bedroom door expecting to let in the Circus night coding clerk. He was immersed in Guillam’s photographs at the time, puzzling out, from far too little information, the likely Circus procedure under lateralism for handling an incoming telegram from Hong Kong. But instead of the clerk he found Norman, barefooted in pyjamas. Confetti was strewn over the carpet and two pairs of shoes stood outside the opposite door, a man’s and a girl’s, though no one at the Islay—least of all Norman—would ever clean them.

  “Stop prying and go to bed,” said Smiley. And when Norman only stared: “Oh, do go away, will you? ”—And nearly, but he stopped himself in time, “You grubby little man.”

  “Operation Witchcraft,” read the title on the first volume Lacon had brought to him that first night. “Policy regarding distribution of Special Product.” The rest of the cover was obliterated by warning labels and handling instructions, including one that quaintly advised the accidental finder to “return the file UNREAD” to the Chief Registrar at the Cabinet Office. “Operation Witchcraft,” read the second. “Supplementary estimates to the Treasury, special accommodation in London, special financing arrangements, bounty, etc.” “Source Merlin,” read the third, bound to the first with pink ribbon. “Customer Evaluations, cost effectiveness, wider exploitation; see also Secret Annexe.” But the secret annexe was not attached, and when Smiley asked for it there was a coldness.

  “The Minister keeps it in his personal safe,” Lacon snapped.

  “Do you know the combination?”

  “Certainly not,” he retorted, now furious.

  “What is the title of it?”

  “It can be of no possible concern to you. I entirely fail to see why you should waste your time chasing after this material in the first place. It’s highly secret and we have done everything humanly possible to keep the readership to the minimum.”

  “Even a secret annexe has to have a title,” said Smiley mildly.

  “This has none.”

  “Does it give the identity of Merlin?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. The Minister would not want to know, and Alleline would not want to tell him.”

  “What does ‘wider exploitation’ mean?”

  “I refuse to be interrogated, George. You’re not family any more, you know. By rights, I should have you specially cleared, as it is.”

  “Witchcraft-cleared?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do we have a list of people who have been cleared in that way?”

  It was in the policy file, Lacon retorted, and all but
slammed the door on him before coming back, to the slow chant of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” introduced by an Australian disc-jockey. “The Minister—” He stopped, and began again. “He doesn’t like devious explanations. He has a saying: he’ll only believe what can be written on a postcard. He’s very impatient to be given something he can get his hands on.”

  Smiley said, “You won’t forget Prideaux, will you? Just anything you have on him at all; even scraps are better than nothing.”

  With that, Smiley left Lacon to glare awhile, then make a second exit: “You’re not going fey, are you, George? You realise that Prideaux had most likely never even heard of Witchcraft before he was shot? I really do fail to see why you can’t stick with the primary problem instead of rootling around in . . .” But by this time he had talked himself out of the room.

  Smiley turned to the last of the batch: “Operation Witchcraft, correspondence with Department.” “Department” being one of Whitehall’s many euphemisms for the Circus. This volume was conducted in the form of official minutes between the Minister on the one side, and on the other—recognisable at once by his laborious schoolboy hand—Percy Alleline, at that time still consigned to the bottom rungs of Control’s ladder of beings.

  A very dull monument, Smiley reflected, surveying these much-handled files, to such a long and cruel war.

  16

  I t was this long and cruel war that in its main battles Smiley now relived as he embarked upon his reading. The files contained only the thinnest record of it; his memory contained far more. Its protagonists were Alleline and Control, its origins misty. Bill Haydon—a keen, if saddened, follower of those events—maintained that the two men learned to hate each other at Cambridge during Control’s brief spell as a don and Alleline’s as an undergraduate. According to Bill, Alleline was Control’s pupil and a bad one, and Control taunted him, which he certainly might have.