Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

by John le Carré

  “Where are the mikes, Millie?” Smiley had returned to the drawing-room.

  They were in pairs, Millie murmured, bedded behind the wallpaper: two pairs to each room on the ground floor, one to each room upstairs. Each pair was connected with a separate recorder. He followed her up the steep stairs. The top floor was unfurnished save for an attic bedroom that contained a grey steel frame with eight tape machines, four up, four down.

  “And Jefferson knows all about this?”

  “Mr. Jefferson,” said Millie primly, “is run on a basis of trust.” That was the nearest she came to expressing her disapproval of Smiley, or her devotion to Christian ethics.

  Downstairs again, she showed him the switches that controlled the system. An extra switch was fitted in each finger panel. Any time Jefferson or one of the boys, as she put it, wanted to go over to record, he had only to get up and turn down the left-hand light switch. From then on, the system was voice-activated; that is to say, the tape deck did not turn unless somebody was speaking.

  “And where are you while all this goes on, Millie?”

  She remained downstairs, she said, as if that were a woman’s place.

  Smiley was pulling open cupboards, lockers, walking from room to room. Then back to the scullery again, with its view to the canal. Taking out a pocket torch, he signalled one flash into the darkness of the garden.

  “What are the safety procedures?” Smiley asked as he thoughtfully fingered the end light switch by the drawing-room door.

  Her reply came in a liturgical monotone. “Two full milk bottles on the doorstep, you may come in and all’s well. No milk bottles and you’re not to enter.”

  From the direction of the sunroom came a faint tapping. Returning to the scullery, Smiley opened the glazed door and after a hastily murmured conversation reappeared with Guillam.

  “You know Peter, don’t you, Millie?”

  Millie might, she might not; her little hard eyes had fixed on him with scorn. He was studying the switch panel, feeling in his pocket as he did so.

  “What’s he doing? He’s not to do that. Stop him.”

  If she was worried, said Smiley, she should ring Lacon on the basement phone. Millie McCraig didn’t stir, but two red bruises had appeared on her leathery cheeks and she was snapping her fingers in anger. With a small screwdriver Guillam had cautiously removed the screws from either side of the plastic panel, and was peering at the wiring behind. Now, very carefully, he turned the end switch upside down, twisting it on its wires, then screwed the plate back in position, leaving the remaining switches undisturbed.

  “We’ll just try it,” said Guillam, and while Smiley went upstairs to check the tape deck, Guillam sang “Old Man River,” in a low Paul Robeson growl.

  “Thank you,” said Smiley with a shudder, coming down again. “That’s more than enough.”

  Millie had gone to the basement to ring Lacon. Quietly, Smiley set the stage. He put the telephone beside an armchair in the drawing-room, then cleared his line of retreat to the scullery. He fetched two full bottles of milk from the icebox and placed them on the doorstep to signify, in the eclectic language of Millie McCraig, that you may come in and all’s well. He removed his shoes and took them to the scullery, and having put out all the lights, took up his post in the armchair just as Mendel made his connecting call.

  On the canal towpath, meanwhile, Guillam had resumed his vigil of the house. The footpath is closed to the public one hour before dark: after that it can be anything from a trysting place for lovers to a haven for down-and-outs; both, for different reasons, are attracted by the darkness of the bridges. That cold night Guillam saw neither. Occasionally an empty train raced past, leaving a still greater emptiness behind. His nerves were so taut, his expectations so varied, that for a moment he saw the whole architecture of that night in apocalyptic terms: the signals on the railway bridge turned to gallows; the Victorian warehouses to gigantic prisons, their windows barred and arched against the misty sky. Closer at hand, the ripple of rats and the stink of still water. Then the drawing-room lights went out; the house stood in darkness except for the chinks of yellow to either side of Millie’s basement window. From the scullery a pin of light winked at him down the unkempt garden. Taking a pen torch from his pocket, he slipped out the silver hood, sighted it with shaking fingers at the point from which the light had come, and signalled back. From now on, they could only wait.

  Tarr tossed the incoming telegram back to Ben, together with the one-time pad from the safe.

  “Come on,” he said, “earn your pay. Unbutton it.”

  “It’s personal for you,” Ben objected. “Look. ‘Personal from Alleline decypher yourself.’ I’m not allowed to touch it. It’s the tops.”

  “Do as he asks, Ben,” said Mackelvore, watching Tarr.

  For ten minutes, no word passed between the three men. Tarr was standing across the room from them, very nervous from the waiting. He had jammed the gun in his waistband. His jacket lay over a chair. The sweat had stuck his shirt to his back all the way down. Ben was using a ruler to read off the number groups, then carefully writing his findings on the block of graph paper before him. To concentrate, he put his tongue against his teeth, and now he made a small click as he withdrew it. Putting aside his pencil, he offered Tarr the tearsheet.

  “Read it aloud,” Tarr said.

  Ben’s voice was kindly, and a little fervent. “ ‘Personal for Tarr from Alleline decypher yourself. I positively require clarification and/or trade samples before meeting your request. Quote information vital to safeguarding of the service unquote does not qualify. Let me remind you of your bad position here following your disgraceful disappearance stop urge you confide Mackelvore immediately repeat immediately stop Chief.’ ”

  Ben had not quite finished before Tarr began laughing in a strange, excited way.

  “That’s the way, Percy boy!” he cried. “Yes repeat no! Know why he’s stalling, Ben, darling? He’s sizing up to shoot me in the bloody back! That’s how he got my Russki girl. He’s playing the same tune, the bastard.” He was ruffling Ben’s hair, shouting at him, laughing. “I warn you, Ben: there’s some damn lousy people in this outfit, so don’t you trust the one of them, I’m telling you, or you’ll never grow up strong!”

  Alone in the darkness of the drawing-room, Smiley also waited, sitting in the housekeeper’s uncomfortable chair, his head propped awkwardly against the earpiece of the telephone. Occasionally he would mutter something and Mendel would mutter back; most of the time they shared the silence. His mood was subdued, even a little glum. Like an actor, he had a sense of approaching anti-climax before the curtain went up, a sense of great things dwindling to a small, mean end; as death itself seemed small and mean to him after the struggles of his life. He had no sense of conquest that he knew of. His thoughts, as often when he was afraid, concerned people. He had no theories or judgements in particular. He simply wondered how everyone would be affected; and he felt responsible. He thought of Jim and Sam and Max and Connie and Jerry Westerby, and personal loyalties all broken; in a separate category he thought of Ann and the hopeless dislocation of their talk on the Cornish cliffs; he wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion; he wished he could just get up and walk out before it happened, but he couldn’t. He worried, in a quite paternal way, about Guillam, and wondered how he would take the late strains of growing up. He thought again of the day he buried Control. He thought about treason and wondered whether there was mindless treason in the same way, supposedly, as there was mindless violence. It worried him that he felt so bankrupt; that whatever intellectual or philosophical precepts he clung to broke down entirely now that he was faced with the human situation.

  “Anything?” he asked Mendel, into the telephone.

  “A couple of drunks,” said Mendel, “singing ‘See the jungle when it’s wet with rain.’ ”

  “Never heard of it.”

  Changing t
he telephone to his left side, he drew the gun from the wallet pocket of his jacket, where it had already ruined the excellent silk lining. He discovered the safety catch, and for a moment played with the idea that he didn’t know which way was on and which way off. He snapped out the magazine and put it back, and remembered doing this hundreds of times on the trot, in the night range at Sarratt before the war; he remembered how you always shot with two hands, sir, one to hold the gun and one the magazine, sir; and how there was a piece of Circus folklore which demanded that he should lay his index finger along the barrel and pull the trigger with his second. But when he tried it the sensation was ridiculous and he forgot about it.

  “Just taking a walk,” he murmured, and Mendel said “Righty-ho.”

  The gun still in his hand, he returned to the scullery, listening for a creak in the floorboards that might give him away, but the floor must have been concrete under the tatty carpet; he could have jumped and caused not even a vibration. With his torch he signalled two short flashes, a long delay, then two more. At once Guillam replied with three short.

  “Back again.”

  “Got you,” said Mendel.

  He settled, thinking glumly of Ann: to dream the impossible dream. He put the gun in his pocket. From the canal side, the moan of a hooter. At night? Boats moving at night? Must be a car. What if Gerald has a whole emergency procedure that we know nothing about? A call-box to call-box, a car pick-up? What if Polyakov has after all a legman, a helper whom Connie never identified? He’d been through that already. This system was built to be watertight, to accommodate meetings in all contingencies. When it comes to tradecraft, Karla is a pedant.

  And his fancy that he was being followed? What of that? What of the shadow he never saw, only felt, till his back seemed to tingle with the intensity of his watcher’s gaze; he saw nothing, heard nothing, only felt. He was too old not to heed the warning. The creak of a stair that had not creaked before; the rustle of a shutter when no wind was blowing; the car with a different number plate but the same scratch on the offside wing; the face on the Metro that you know you have seen somewhere before: for years at a time these were signs he had lived by; any one of them was reason enough to move, change towns, identities. For in that profession there is no such thing as coincidence.

  “One gone,” said Mendel suddenly. “Hullo?”

  “I’m here.”

  Somebody had just come out of the Circus, said Mendel. Front door, but he couldn’t be certain of the identification. Mackintosh and hat. Bulky and moving fast. He must have ordered a cab to the door and stepped straight into it.

  “Heading north, your way.”

  Smiley looked at his watch. Give him ten minutes, he thought. Give him twelve; he’ll have to stop and phone Polyakov on the way. Then he thought, Don’t be silly, he’s done that already from the Circus.

  “I’m ringing off,” said Smiley.

  “Cheers,” said Mendel.

  On the footpath, Guillam read three long flashes. The mole is on his way.

  In the scullery Smiley had once more checked his thoroughfare, shoved some deck-chairs aside, and pinned a string to the mangle to guide him because he saw badly in the dark. The string led to the open kitchen door, and the kitchen led to the drawing-room and dining-room both; it had the two doors side by side. The kitchen was a long room, actually an annexe to the house before the glass scullery was added. He had thought of using the dining-room but it was too risky, and besides from the dining-room he couldn’t signal to Guillam. So he waited in the scullery, feeling absurd in his stockinged feet, polishing his spectacles because the heat of his face kept misting them. It was much colder in the scullery. The drawing-room was close and overheated but the scullery had these outside walls, and this glass and this concrete floor beneath the matting, which made his feet feel wet. The mole arrives first, he thought; the mole plays host: that is protocol, part of the pretence that Polyakov is Gerald’s agent.

  A London taxi is a flying bomb.

  The comparison rose in him slowly, from deep in his unconscious memory. The clatter as it barges into the crescent, the metric tick-tick as the bass notes die. The cut-off: where has it stopped, which house—when all of us on the street are waiting in the dark, crouching under tables or clutching at pieces of string—which house? Then the slam of the door, the explosive anti-climax: if you can hear it, it’s not for you.

  But Smiley heard it, and it was for him.

  He heard the tread of one pair of feet on the gravel, brisk and vigorous. They stopped. It’s the wrong door, Smiley thought absurdly; go away. He had the gun in his hand; he had dropped the catch. Still he listened, heard nothing. You’re suspicious, Gerald, he thought. You’re an old mole, you can sniff there’s something wrong. Millie, he thought; Millie has taken away the milk bottles, put up a warning, headed him off. Millie’s spoilt the kill. Then he heard the latch turn, one turn, two; it’s a Banham lock, he remembered—my God, we must keep Banham’s in business. Of course: the mole had been patting his pockets, looking for his key. A nervous man would have it in his hand already, would have been clutching it, cosseting it in his pocket all the way in the taxi; but not the mole. The mole might be worried but he was not nervous. At the same moment the latch turned, the bell chimed—housekeepers’ taste again: high tone, low tone, high tone. That will mean it’s one of us, Millie had said; one of the boys, her boys, Connie’s boys, Karla’s boys. The front door opened, someone stepped into the house, he heard the shuffle of the mat, he heard the door close, he heard the light switches snap and saw a pale line appear under the kitchen door. He put the gun in his pocket and wiped the palm of his hand on his jacket, then took it out again and in the same moment he heard a second flying bomb, a second taxi pulling up, and footsteps fast. Polyakov didn’t just have the key ready, he had his taxi money ready, too: do Russians tip, he wondered, or is tipping undemocratic? Again the bell rang, the front door opened and closed, and Smiley heard the double chink as two milk bottles were put on the hall table in the interest of good order and sound tradecraft.

  Lord save me, thought Smiley in horror as he stared at the old icebox beside him; it never crossed my mind: suppose he had wanted to put them back in the fridge?

  The strip of light under the kitchen door grew suddenly brighter as the drawing-room lights were switched on. An extraordinary silence descended over the house. Holding the string, Smiley edged forward over the icy floor. Then he heard voices. At first they were indistinct. They must still be at the far end of the room, he thought. Or perhaps they always begin in a low tone. Now Polyakov came nearer: he was at the trolley, pouring drinks.

  “What is our cover story in case we are disturbed?” he asked in good English.

  “Lovely voice,” Smiley remembered; “mellow like yours. I often used to play the tapes twice, just to listen to him speaking.” Connie, you should hear him now.

  From the further end of the room still, a muffled murmur answered each question. Smiley could make nothing of it. “Where shall we regroup?” “What is our fallback?” “Have you anything on you that you would prefer me to be carrying during our talk, bearing in mind I have diplomatic immunity?”

  It must be a catechism, Smiley thought; part of Karla’s school routine.

  “Is the switch down? Will you please check? Thank you. What will you drink?”

  “Scotch,” said Haydon, “a bloody great big one.”

  With a feeling of utter disbelief, Smiley listened to the familiar voice reading aloud the very telegram that Smiley himself had drafted for Tarr’s use only forty-eight hours ago.

  Then, for a moment, one part of Smiley broke into open revolt against the other. The wave of angry doubt that had swept over him in Lacon’s garden, and that ever since had pulled against his progress like a worrying tide, drove him now on to the rocks of despair, and then to mutiny: I refuse. Nothing is worth the destruction of another human being. Somewhere the path of pain and betrayal must end. Until that happened, there was no
future; there was only a continued slide into still more terrifying versions of the present. This man was my friend and Ann’s lover, Jim’s friend and—for all I know—Jim’s lover, too; it was the treason, not the man, that belonged to the public domain.

  Haydon had betrayed. As a lover, a colleague, a friend; as a patriot; as a member of that inestimable body that Ann loosely called the Set: in every capacity, Haydon had overtly pursued one aim and secretly achieved its opposite. Smiley knew very well that even now he did not grasp the scope of that appalling duplicity; yet there was a part of him that rose already in Haydon’s defence. Was not Bill also betrayed? Connie’s lament rang in his ears: “Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves . . . You’re the last, George, you and Bill.” He saw with painful clarity an ambitious man born to the big canvas, brought up to rule, divide and conquer, whose visions and vanities all were fixed, like Percy’s, upon the world’s game; for whom the reality was a poor island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the water. Thus Smiley felt not only disgust, but, despite all that the moment meant to him, a surge of resentment against the institutions he was supposed to be protecting: “The social contract cuts both ways, you know,” said Lacon. The Minister’s lolling mendacity, Lacon’s tight-lipped moral complacency, the bludgeoning greed of Percy Alleline: such men invalidated any contract—why should anyone be loyal to them?

  He knew, of course. He had always known it was Bill. Just as Control had known, and Lacon in Mendel’s house. Just as Connie and Jim had known, and Alleline and Esterhase; all of them had tacitly shared that unexpressed half-knowledge which was like an illness they hoped would go away if it was never owned to, never diagnosed.