Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

by John le Carré

  And Ann? Did Ann know? Was that the shadow that fell over them that day on the Cornish cliffs?

  For a space, that was how Smiley stood: a fat, barefooted spy, as Ann would say, deceived in love and impotent in hate, clutching a gun in one hand, a bit of string in the other, as he waited in the darkness. Then, gun still in hand, he tiptoed backward as far as the window, from which he signalled five short flashes in quick succession. Having waited long enough to read the acknowledgement, he returned to his listening post.

  Guillam raced down the canal towpath, the torch jolting wildly in his hand, till he reached a low arched bridge and a steel stairway that led upward in zigzags to Gloucester Avenue. The gate was closed and he had to climb it, ripping one sleeve to the elbow. Lacon was standing at the corner of Princess Road, wearing an old country coat and carrying a briefcase.

  “He’s there. He’s arrived,” Guillam whispered. “He’s got Gerald.” “I won’t have bloodshed,” Lacon warned. “I want absolute calm.”

  Guillam didn’t bother to reply. Thirty yards down the road Mendel was waiting in a tame cab. They drove for two minutes, not so much, and stopped the cab short of the crescent. Guillam was holding Esterhase’s door key. Reaching number 5, Mendel and Guillam stepped over the gate, rather than risk the noise of it, and kept to the grass verge. As they went, Guillam glanced back and thought for a moment he saw a figure watching them—man or woman, he couldn’t tell—from the shadow of a doorway across the road; but when he drew Mendel’s attention to the spot there was nothing there, and Mendel ordered him quite roughly to calm down. The porch light was out. Guillam went ahead; Mendel waited under an apple tree. Guillam inserted the key, felt the lock ease as he turned it. Damn fool, he thought triumphantly, why didn’t you drop the latch? He pushed open the door an inch and hesitated. He was breathing slowly, filling his lungs for action. Mendel moved forward another bound. In the street two young boys went by, laughing loudly because they were nervous of the night. Once more Guillam looked back but the crescent was clear. He stepped into the hall. He was wearing suede shoes and they squeaked on the parquet; there was no carpet. At the drawing-room door he listened long enough for the fury to break in him at last.

  His butchered agents in Morocco, his exile to Brixton, the daily frustration of his efforts as daily he grew older and youth slipped through his fingers; the drabness that was closing round him; the truncation of his power to love, enjoy, and laugh; the constant erosion of the standards he wished to live by; the checks and stops he had imposed on himself in the name of tacit dedication—he could fling them all in Haydon’s sneering face. Haydon, once his confessor; Haydon, always good for a laugh, a chat, and a cup of burnt coffee; Haydon, a model on which he built his life.

  And more. Now that he saw, he knew. Haydon was more than his model, he was his inspiration, the torch-bearer of a certain kind of antiquated romanticism, a notion of English calling which—for the very reason that it was vague and understated and elusive—had made sense of Guillam’s life till now. In that moment, Guillam felt not merely betrayed but orphaned. His suspicions, his resentments for so long turned outward on the real world—on his women, his attempted loves—now swung upon the Circus and the failed magic that had formed his faith. With all his force he shoved open the door and sprang inside, gun in hand. Haydon and a heavy man with black hair were seated either side of a small table. Polyakov—Guillam recognised him from the photographs—was smoking a very English pipe. He wore a grey cardigan with a zip down the front, like the top half of a track suit. He had not even taken the pipe from his mouth before Guillam had Haydon by the collar. With a single heave he lifted him straight out of his chair. He had thrown away his gun and was hurling Haydon from side to side, shaking him, and shouting. Then suddenly there seemed no point. After all, it was only Bill and they had done a lot together. Guillam had drawn back long before Mendel took his arm, and he heard Smiley, politely as ever, inviting “Bill and Colonel Viktorov,” as he called them, to raise their hands and place them on their heads till Percy Alleline arrived.

  “There was no one out there, was there, that you noticed?” Smiley asked of Guillam, while they waited.

  “Quiet as the grave,” said Mendel, answering for both of them.

  37

  There are moments that are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur. For Guillam and all those present, this was one. Smiley’s continued distraction and Haydon’s indifference; his frequent cautious glances from the window; Polyakov’s predictable fit of indignation, his demands to be treated as became a member of the Diplomatic Corps—demands that Guillam from his place on the sofa tersely threatened to meet; the flustered arrival of Alleline and Bland; more protestations and the pilgrimage upstairs, where Smiley played the tapes; the long glum silence that followed their return to the drawing-room; the arrival of Lacon and finally of Esterhase and Fawn; Millie McCraig’s silent ministrations with the teapot: all these events and cameos unrolled with a theatrical unreality that, much like the trip to Ascot an age before, was intensified by the unreality of the hour of day. It was also true that these incidents, which included at an early point the physical constraint of Polyakov—and a stream of Russian abuse directed at Fawn for hitting him, heaven knows where, despite Mendel’s vigilance—were like a silly subplot against Smiley’s only purpose in convening the assembly: to persuade Alleline that Haydon offered Smiley’s one chance to treat with Karla, and to save, in humanitarian if not professional terms, whatever was left of the networks that Haydon had betrayed. Smiley was not empowered to conduct these transactions, nor did he seem to want to; perhaps he reckoned that between them Esterhase and Bland and Alleline were better placed to know what agents were still theoretically in being. In any event he soon took himself upstairs, where Guillam heard him once more restlessly padding from one room to the other as he continued his vigil from the windows.

  So while Alleline and his lieutenants withdrew with Polyakov to the dining-room to conduct their business alone, the rest of them sat in silence in the drawing-room, either looking at Haydon or deliberately away from him. He seemed unaware that they were there. Chin in hand, he sat apart from them in a corner, watched over by Fawn, and he looked rather bored. The conference ended, they all trooped out of the dining-room and Alleline announced to Lacon, who insisted on not being present at the discussions, that an appointment had been made three days hence at this address, by which time “the Colonel will have had a chance to consult his superiors.” Lacon nodded. It might have been a board meeting.

  The departures were even stranger than the arrivals. Between Esterhase and Polyakov in particular, there was a curiously poignant farewell. Esterhase, who would always rather have been a gentleman than a spy, seemed determined to make a gallant occasion of it, and offered his hand, which Polyakov struck petulantly aside. Esterhase looked round forlornly for Smiley, perhaps in the hope of ingratiating himself further with him, then shrugged and flung an arm across Bland’s broad shoulder. Soon afterwards they left together. They didn’t say goodbye to anybody, but Bland looked dreadfully shaken and Esterhase seemed to be consoling him, though his own future at that moment could hardly have struck him as rosy. Soon afterwards a radio cab arrived for Polyakov and he, too, left without a nod to anyone. By now, the conversation had died entirely; without the Russian present, the show became wretchedly parochial. Haydon remained in his familiar bored pose, still watched by Fawn and Mendel, and stared at in mute embarrassment by Lacon and Alleline. More telephone calls were made, mainly for cars. At some point Smiley reappeared from upstairs and mentioned Tarr. Alleline phoned the Circus and dictated one telegram to Paris saying that he could return to England with honour, whatever that meant; and a second to Mackelvore saying that Tarr was an acceptable person, which again seemed to Guillam a matter of opinion.

  Finally, to the general relief, a windowless van arrived from the Nursery, and two men got out whom Guillam had never seen before, one tall and limping
, the other doughy and fair-haired. With a shudder Guillam realised they were inquisitors. Fawn fetched Haydon’s coat from the hall, went through the pockets, and respectfully helped him into it. At this point, Smiley gently interposed himself and insisted that Haydon’s walk from the front door to the van should take place without the hall light on, and that the escort should be large. Guillam, Fawn, even Alleline, were pressed into service, and finally, with Haydon at its centre, the whole motley group shuffled through the garden to the van.

  “It’s simply a precaution,” Smiley insisted. No one was disposed to argue with him. Haydon climbed in, and the inquisitors followed, locking the grille from inside. As the doors closed, Haydon lifted one hand in an amiable, if dismissive, gesture directed at Alleline.

  So it was only afterwards that separate things came back to Guillam and single people came forward for his recollection: the unqualified hatred, for instance, which Polyakov directed against everyone present, from poor little Millie McCraig upwards, and which actually distorted him; his mouth curved in a savage, uncontrollable sneer, he turned white and trembled, but not from fear and not from anger. It was just plain hatred, of the sort that Guillam could not visit on Haydon, but then Haydon was of his own kind.

  For Alleline, in the moment of his defeat, Guillam discovered a sneaking admiration: Alleline at least had shown a certain bearing. But later Guillam was not so sure whether Percy realised, on that first presentation of the facts, quite what the facts were: after all, he was still Chief, and Haydon was still his Iago.

  But the strangest thing to Guillam, the insight that he took away with him and thought over much more deeply than was commonly his policy, was that despite his banked-up anger at the moment of breaking into the room, it required an act of will on his own part—and quite a violent one, at that—to regard Bill Haydon with much other than affection. Perhaps, as Bill would say, he had finally grown up. Best of all, on the same evening he climbed the steps to his flat and heard the familiar notes of Camilla’s flute echoing in the well. And if Camilla that night lost something of her mystery, at least by morning he had succeeded in freeing her from the toils of double-cross to which he had latterly consigned her.

  In other ways also, over the next few days, his life took on a brighter look. Percy Alleline had been dispatched on indefinite leave; Smiley had been asked to come back for a while and help sweep up what was left. For Guillam himself there was talk of being rescued from Brixton. It was not till much, much later that he learned that there had been a final act; and he put a name and a purpose to that familiar shadow which had followed Smiley through the night streets of Kensington.

  38

  For the next two days George Smiley lived in limbo. To his neighbours, when they noticed him, he seemed to have lapsed into a wasting grief. He rose late and pottered round the house in his dressing gown, cleaning things, dusting, cooking himself meals and not eating them. In the afternoon, quite against the local by-laws, he lit a coal fire and sat before it reading among his German poets or writing letters to Ann, which he seldom completed and never posted. When the telephone rang, he went to it quickly, only to be disappointed. Outside the window the weather continued foul, and the few passers-by—Smiley studied them continuously—were huddled in Balkan misery. Once Lacon called with a request from the Minister that Smiley should “stand by to help clear up the mess at Cambridge Circus, were he called upon to do so”—in effect, to act as night watchman till a replacement for Percy Alleline could be found. Replying vaguely, Smiley prevailed on Lacon to take extreme care of Haydon’s physical safety while he was at Sarratt.

  “Aren’t you being a little dramatic?” Lacon retorted. “The only place he can go is Russia, and we’re sending him there any way.”

  “When? How soon?”

  The details would take several more days to arrange. Smiley disdained, in his state of anti-climactic reaction, to ask how the interrogation was progressing meanwhile, but Lacon’s manner suggested that the answer would have been “badly.” Mendel brought him more solid fare.

  “Immingham railway station’s shut,” he said. “You’ll have to get out at Grimsby and hoof it or take a bus.”

  More often, Mendel simply sat and watched him, as one might an invalid. “Waiting won’t make her come, you know,” he said once. “Time the mountain went to Mohammed. Faint heart never won fair lady, if I may say so.”

  On the morning of the third day, the doorbell rang and Smiley answered it so fast that it might have been Ann, having mislaid her key as usual. It was Lacon. Smiley was required at Sarratt, he said; Haydon insisted on seeing him. The inquisitors had got nowhere and time was running out. The understanding was that if Smiley would act as confessor, Haydon would give a limited account of himself.

  “I’m assured there has been no coercion,” Lacon said.

  Sarratt was a sorry place after the grandeur that Smiley remembered. Most of the elms had gone with the disease; pylons burgeoned over the old cricket field. The house itself, a sprawling brick mansion, had also come down a lot since the heyday of the cold war in Europe, and most of the better furniture seemed to have disappeared, he supposed into one of Alleline’s houses. He found Haydon in a Nissen hut hidden among the trees.

  Inside, it had the stink of an army guardhouse, black-painted walls and high-barred windows. Guards manned the rooms to either side and they received Smiley respectfully, calling him “sir.” The word, it seemed, had got around. Haydon was dressed in denims, he was trembling, and he complained of dizziness. Several times he had to lie on his bed to stop the nosebleeds he was having. He had grown a half-hearted beard: apparently there was a dispute about whether he was allowed a razor.

  “Cheer up,” said Smiley. “You’ll be out of here soon.”

  He had tried, on the journey down, to remember Prideaux, and Irina, and the Czech networks, and he even entered Haydon’s room with a vague notion of public duty: somehow, he thought, he ought to censure him on behalf of right-thinking men. He felt instead rather shy; he felt he had never known Haydon at all, and now it was too late. He was also angry at Haydon’s physical condition, but when he taxed the guards they professed mystification. He was angrier still to learn that the additional security precautions he had insisted on had been relaxed after the first day. When he demanded to see Craddox, head of Nursery, Craddox was unavailable and his assistant acted dumb.

  Their first conversation was halting and banal.

  Would Smiley please forward the mail from his club, and tell Alleline to get a move on with the horse-trading with Karla? And he needed tissues, paper tissues for his nose. His habit of weeping, Haydon explained, had nothing to do with remorse or pain; it was a physical reaction to what he called the pettiness of the inquisitors, who had made up their minds that Haydon knew the names of other Karla recruits, and were determined to have them before he left. There was also a school of thought which held that Fanshawe, of the Christ Church Optimates, had been acting as a talent-spotter for Moscow Centre as well as for the Circus, Haydon explained. “Really, what can one do with asses like that?” He managed, despite his weakness, to convey that his was the only level head around. They walked in the grounds, and Smiley established with something close to despair that the perimeter was not even patrolled any more, either by night or by day. After one circuit, Haydon asked to go back to the hut, where he dug up a piece of floorboard and extracted some sheets of paper covered in hieroglyphics. They reminded Smiley forcibly of Irina’s diary. Squatting on the bed, he sorted through them, and in that pose, in that dull light, with his long forelock dangling almost to the paper, he might have been lounging in Control’s room, back in the sixties, propounding some wonderfully plausible and quite inoperable piece of skulduggery for England’s greater glory. Smiley did not bother to write anything down, since it was common ground between them that their conversation was being recorded anyway. The statement began with a long apologia, of which he afterwards recalled only a few sentences.

  “We
live in an age where only fundamental issues matter . . .

  “The United States is no longer capable of undertaking its own revolution . . .

  “The political posture of the United Kingdom is without relevance or moral viability in world affairs . . .”

  With much of it, Smiley might, in other circumstances, have agreed; it was the tone, rather than the music, that alienated him.

  “In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen . . .

  “The cold war began in 1917 but the bitterest struggles lie ahead of us, as America’s death-bed paranoia drives her to greater excesses abroad . . .”

  He spoke not of the decline of the West, but of its death by greed and constipation. He hated America very deeply, he said, and Smiley supposed he did. Haydon also took it for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.

  Finally he came to his own case. At Oxford, he said, he was genuinely of the right, and in the war it scarcely mattered where one stood as long as one was fighting the Germans. For a while, after ’45, he said, he had remained content with Britain’s part in the world, till gradually it dawned on him just how trivial this was. How and when was a mystery. In the historical mayhem of his own lifetime he could point to no one occasion; simply he knew that if England were out of the game, the price of fish would not be altered by a farthing. He had often wondered which side he would be on if the test ever came; after prolonged reflection he had finally to admit that if either monolith had to win the day, he would prefer it to be the East.