A Legacy of Spies

by John le Carré

  ‘Why’s George seeing him now?’ – and I suppose I meant, at a time like this.

  ‘The Swiss gentleman? Well, he’s a material witness, isn’t he, son? The Swiss gentleman. Like it or not. He was in the grounds – all right, in error, a fellow birdwatcher like myself, these things can happen – but at the relevant time, to his misfortune. George naturally wishes to know if the gentleman saw or heard anything of interest that could shed light. Maybe poor Tulip addressed him in some manner. It’s a delicate situation, if you think about it. We’re in a highly secret facility, and Tulip is not officially landed in the UK, so the Swiss gentleman stumbled into what we might call a security hornets’ nest. That has to be taken into account, regardless.’

  I was hearing him but not really listening: ‘I need to see her, Oliver,’ I said.

  To which, unsurprised, he replied: ‘Then remain right here, son, while I refer that one upward, and don’t move on any account.’

  With which he strode into the long grass of the abandoned croquet lawn, once more murmuring into his walkie-talkie. At his gesture, I followed him down to the massive door of the Stoop. He rapped, then stood back. After a delay, the door creaked open, and there stood Ash Meadows himself, a fifty-year-old former rugby player in red braces and check flannel shirt, smoking his habitual pipe.

  ‘Sorry about this, old chap,’ he said, standing back for me; so I said I was sorry too.

  On a ping-pong table at the centre of the great barn lay the effigy of a slender woman in a zipped-up body bag. She was lying on her back, toes upward.

  ‘Poor girl never knew she was called Tulip till she got here,’ Ash was reminiscing in the breezy voice he had evidently developed for speaking in the presence of the dead. ‘Soon as she knew she was Tulip, God help anyone who called her anything else. Sure you want to do this?’

  He meant: was I ready for him to pull back the zip fastener. I was.

  Her face, for the first time since I knew it, expressionless. Her auburn hair plaited and bound with green ribbon, the plait lying beside her head. Eyes closed. I never till now saw her sleep. The neck a slough of blues and greys.

  ‘All done, Peter, old boy?’

  He closed the zip anyway.

  *

  I follow Mendel into the fresh air. Ahead of me, the grass mound rises to a clump of chestnut trees. There’s a nice view from the top: the main house, a pine forest, surrounding fields. But I have scarcely started my ascent when Mendel puts a hand across my path.

  ‘We stay down here, if you don’t mind, son. No point in being conspicuous,’ he says.

  And I suppose it’s not surprising that I didn’t think to question his reason for saying this.

  Then there’s a period – I can’t do the minutes – when we just seem to wander about pointlessly. Mendel tells me about his beekeeping. Then he tells me about this rescue dog Poppy, a Golden Labrador, that his wife is mad about. Poppy, I seem to remember, was a dog not a bitch. I also remember being secretly surprised, because I don’t think I knew Oliver Mendel had a wife.

  Bit by bit I talk back at him. When he asks me how things are going in Brittany, and how the crops are looking, and how many cows we keep, I give him an accurate and lucid account, which presumably is what he’s waiting for, because when we get to the gravel path that leads past the Stoop to the coach house, he steps away from me and says something curt into his walkie-talkie. And when he comes back to me, he’s no longer the casual conversationalist, he’s all copper once more:

  ‘Now, son. Your attention, please. You’re about to meet the other half of the story. You’ll see what you see, you won’t react in any shape or form, and you will remain entirely silent regarding what you have seen thereafter. That’s not my orders. That’s George’s, personal for you. Furthermore, son, if by any chance you’re still blaming yourself for that poor lady’s suicide, you can lay off now. Got that? That’s not George speaking. That’s me. Do you speak Swiss at all?’

  He was smiling, and to my surprise so was I. The direction of our casual walk took on a chilling purpose. I had momentarily forgotten the Swiss gentleman. I had assumed Mendel was making kindly small talk. Now the mysterious birdwatcher who had trespassed by mistake came rushing back in full force. At the further end of the defile stood Fawn. Behind him rose the stone steps to an olive-green entrance marked DANGER OF DEATH, KEEP OUT.

  We climbed. Fawn led the way. We arrived in a hayloft. Mildewed horses’ tack hung from old hooks. We passed between bales of rotting hay until we came to the Submarine, a purpose-built isolation cell for instructing trainees in the unlovely arts of resisting and administering harsh interrogation. No refresher course I had attended was complete without a taste of its windowless padded walls, hand-to-foot manacles and head-splitting sound effects. The door was of blackened steel, with a sliding eyehole for seeing in, but never out.

  Fawn keeps his distance. Mendel advances to the Submarine, ducks forward, slides back the eyehole, backs away again, nods to me: your turn. And under his breath, in a rush:

  ‘Only she never hanged herself, did she, son? Our birdwatching friend did it for her.’

  On my training stints, there had never been furniture inside the Submarine. You either lay on the stone floor or paced it in pitch darkness while the loudspeakers screamed at you until you couldn’t take it any more, or the directing staff decided you’d had enough. But these two unlikely occupants of the Submarine have been provided with the luxury of a red-baize card table and two perfectly decent chairs.

  In one chair sits George Smiley, looking the way only George looks when he’s conducting an interrogation: a bit put out, a bit pained, as if life is one long discomfort for him and no one can make it tolerable except just possibly you.

  And across from George in the other chair sits a powerful blond man of my own age with fresh bruises round his eyes, one bare leg bandaged and stuck in front of him, and his hands manacled, palms upward on the table like a beggar’s.

  And when he turns his head, I see exactly what by now I’m expecting to see: an old scar like a sabre-slash, running the length of his right cheek.

  And though I can barely see them for the bruises, I know he has blue eyes, because that’s what it said in the criminal record that three years back I had stolen for George Smiley after he’d been bludgeoned nearly to death by the man who is sitting in front of him now.

  Interrogating – or negotiating? The prisoner’s name – how could I forget it? – is Hans-Dieter Mundt. He is a former member of the East German Steel Mission in Highgate, which enjoyed official but not diplomatic status.

  During his London tour, Mundt killed an East London car dealer who knew too much for his liking. When he tried to kill George, it was for the same reason.

  And now here’s the same Mundt sitting in the Submarine, a KGB-trained Stasi assassin pretending to be a Swiss ornithologist caught in a deer trap, while Doris who wished to be known only as Tulip is lying dead not fifty feet away from him. Mendel is plucking at my arm. It’s only a short car ride to wherever we’re going, Peter. George will be joining us later.

  ‘What’s happened to Harper and Lowe?’ I ask him when we’re safely in the car, this being the only topic that comes to mind.

  ‘Meadows sent Harper off to hospital to get his face fixed. Lowe’s holding his hand. Our ornithologist friend didn’t come quietly when he was released from that trap he walked into, put it that way. He required some serious assistance, as you will have observed.’

  *

  ‘I have two pieces of paper for you, Peter,’ Smiley is saying, and hands me the first of them.

  It is two o’clock in the morning. We are alone in the same front room of the same semi-detached police house somewhere on the edge of the New Forest. Our host, an old friend of Mendel’s, has lit us a coal fire and brought us a tray of tea and sugar biscuits before retiring upstairs with his wife. We ha
ve neither drunk the tea nor touched the biscuits. The first piece of paper is a plain white English postcard, no stamp. There are scratch marks on it as if it’s been shoved through something narrow, perhaps under a door. The address side is blank. On the business side, there is an inked, blue-black, hand-printed message in German, capitals only.

  I AM A GOOD SWISS FRIEND WHO CAN TAKE YOU TO YOUR GUSTAV. MEET ME AT THE FOOTBRIDGE 0100 HOURS. ALL WILL BE ARRANGED. WE ARE CHRISTIAN PEOPLE. [No signature.]

  ‘Why wait till she got all the way to England?’ I manage to ask George after a long delay. ‘Why not kill her in Germany?’

  ‘To protect their source, obviously,’ Smiley replies in a tone to reproach me for my slow-wittedness. ‘The tip-off came from Moscow Centre, who very naturally insisted on discretion. Not a car accident or some equally contrived event. Better a self-inflicted death that will cause the greatest possible dismay in the enemy camp. I see that as entirely logical, don’t you? Well, don’t you, Peter?’

  The anger is in the iron control of his habitually gentle voice, in the rigidity of his normally fluid features. Anger as self-disgust. Anger at the monstrosity of what he has had to do, in defiance of every decent instinct.

  ‘Shepherded is Mundt’s expression of choice,’ he continues, neither waiting for my answer nor expecting one. ‘We shepherd her to Prague, we shepherd her to England, we shepherd her to Camp 4. Then we strangle her and hang her up. Never I. Always the collective we. I told him that he was despicable to me. I like to think it got through.’ And as if he has forgotten: ‘Oh, and the other piece of paper is for you’ – handing me a folded sheet of Basildon Bond stationery with ‘Adrien’ scrawled large across it, this time in soft pencil. The handwriting neat and painstaking. No needless flourishes. An earnest German schoolgirl writes to her English penfriend.

  My darling Adrien, my Jean-François.

  You are all the men I love. Please God love you also.

  Tulip

  ‘I asked you whether you propose to keep it as a memento or burn it?’ Smiley is repeating to my dazed ear in the same voice of frozen anger. ‘I suggest the second. Millie McCraig happened on it. It was propped against Tulip’s vanity mirror.’

  Then without apparent emotion he watches me as I kneel before the fire and lay Doris’s letter, still folded, like an offering on the burning coals. And it occurs to me, amid all the turbulent feelings that are wrenching at me, that George Smiley and I are closer than we wish to know in matters of failed love. I dance badly. George, according to his errant wife, refuses to dance at all. And still I have not spoken a word.

  ‘There are certain useful conditions attached to the arrangement I have just made with Herr Mundt,’ he goes on relentlessly. ‘The tape recording of our conversation, for example. His masters in Moscow and Berlin would not be impressed by it, we agreed. We also agreed that his work for us, capably managed by both sides, will advance him in his distinguished career in the Stasi. He will return to his comrades a conquering hero. The bigwigs in the Directorate will be pleased with him. Moscow Centre will be pleased with him. Emmanuel Rapp’s job is going begging. Let him apply for it. He assured me that he would. As his fortunes rise in Berlin and Moscow, and his access rises accordingly, perhaps a day will come when he will be able to tell us who betrayed Tulip and certain others of our agents who have met a premature end. We have much to look forward to, you and I, have we not?’

  And still, so far as I remember it, I say nothing, whereas Smiley in closing has something very important to say.

  ‘You, I and only the very fewest are owners of this extremely privileged information, Peter. As far as Joint Steering and the Service at large are concerned, we were greedy, we brought Tulip here too hastily, we paid no regard to her deeper feelings. In consequence she hanged herself. Which is the version that must be trumpeted to Head Office and all out-stations. There must be no exceptions anywhere where Joint holds sway. And that, I am afraid, inevitably includes our friend Alec Leamas.’

  *

  We cremated her in the name of Tulip Brown, a Russian-born woman of faith who had fled the Communist persecution and settled to a solitary life in England. Brown, it was explained to the retired Orthodox priest unearthed by the ladies of Covert who also arranged the tulips on the coffin, was the name she had given herself out of fear of retribution. The priest, an old Occasional, asked no inconvenient questions. We were six: Ash Meadows, Millie McCraig, Jeanette Avon and Ingeborg Lugg from Covert, Alec Leamas and me. George had business elsewhere. The service over, the women departed and we three men went off in search of a pub.

  ‘What the fuck did the stupid bloody woman go and do it for?’ Alec complained, head in hands, as we sat over our Scotches. ‘All the trouble we went to.’ And in the same tone of mock indignation: ‘If she’d told me what she was going to do, I’d never have bloody bothered.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I said loyally, taking myself to the bar and ordering three more of the same.

  ‘Suicide’s a decision certain people have taken early in their lives,’ Doc Meadows was pontificating when I returned. ‘They may not know it, but it’s in them, Alec. Then one day, something comes along that triggers it. Can be totally trivial, like leaving your wallet on the bus. Can be drastic, like your best pal dying. But the intention was always there. And the result’s the same.’

  We drank. Another silence, broken this time by Alec:

  ‘Maybe all joes are suicides. Some just don’t get around to it, poor bastards.’ And then: ‘Anyway, who’s going to tell the boy?’

  Boy? Of course. He meant Gustav.

  ‘George says we leave that one to the opposition,’ I replied, to which Alec growled, ‘Jesus, what a planet,’ and went back to his whisky.

  10

  I have ceased staring at the library wall: Nelson, who has replaced Pepsi, is troubled by my inattention. I dutifully resume reading the report that in my grief and remorse I compiled on Smiley’s orders, omitting no detail, however extraneous, in my mission to observe the one secret that none but the fewest would ever share.

  SUB-SOURCE TULIP. DEBRIEF AND SUICIDE.

  Debrief conducted by Ingeborg Lugg (Covert) and Jeanette Avon (Covert). In periodic attendance: Dr med. Ashley Meadows, Covert Occasional.

  Drafted and collated by PG and approved by H/Covert Marylebone for submission to Treasury Oversight Committee. Advance copy to H/Joint Steering for comment.

  Avon and Lugg are Covert’s star debriefers, middle-aged, mid-European women of long operational experience.

  1. Reception of TULIP and transfer to Camp 4.

  On her arrival by RAF plane at Northolt, Tulip underwent no landing formalities, thereby at no point officially entering the UK. Describing himself as ‘the appointed representative of a Service that is very proud of you’, Dr Meadows made a brief speech of welcome in the VIP reception room in the transit area, and presented her with a bouquet of English roses which appeared to affect her deeply, for she held them silently to her face throughout the journey.

  She was then driven directly by closed van to Camp 4. Avon (workname ANNA), being a qualified nurse with befriending skills, sat with Tulip in the back, providing comfort and conversation. Lugg (workname LOUISA) and Dr Meadows (workname FRANK) sat forward with the driver, it being felt that a bonding between Avon and Tulip was more likely to succeed if the two were left alone in the rear of the vehicle. All three of us are fluent German-speakers, Level 6.

  On the drive Tulip alternately dozed and excitedly pointed out features of the landscape that would entertain her son Gustav on his arrival in the UK, which she appeared to consider imminent. She also indicated with enthusiasm paths and areas where she would like to bicycle, also with Gustav. She asked twice after ‘Adrien’ and, on being told we knew of no Adrien, changed the object of her enquiry to Jean-François. Dr Meadows then informed her that the courier Jean-François had been called away on urgent
duty, but would no doubt make himself known in due course.

  Accommodation in the guest wing of Camp 4 comprises a master bedroom, living room, kitchenette and sunroom, the latter being a nineteenth-century glass and timber extension overlooking the outdoor (unheated) swimming pool. All spaces, including the sunroom and pool area, are equipped with concealed microphones and special facilities.

  Directly behind the swimming pool stands a coppice of coniferous trees from which some, not all, lower branches have been stripped. Fallow deer are commonplace, and frequently to be seen disporting themselves in the swimming pool. Due to the wire perimeter, the deer are effectively a domestic herd confined to the estate, thereby adding to Camp 4’s air of cultivated charm and tranquillity.

  First, we introduced Tulip to Millie McCraig (ELLA) who, at the request of the H/Covert Ops, had already that day been installed as safe house keeper. At the request of H/Covert, microphones were installed at salient positions, and those still active from previous operations, disconnected.

  The safe house keeper’s personal quarters at Camp 4 are situated directly behind the guest suite, at the end of a short corridor. An internal telephone connects the two apartments, enabling the guest to summon assistance at any time of night. At McCraig’s suggestion, Avon and Lugg occupied bedrooms in the main house, thereby providing Tulip with an all-female environment.

  Camp 4’s permanent security guards, Harper and Lowe, share quarters in the coach house. Both men are keen gardeners. Harper as a qualified gamekeeper controls the estate’s wildlife population. The coach house also contains a spare bedroom, which was commandeered by Dr Meadows.

  2. Debriefing, days 1–5.

  The initial period of debriefing was set at 2–3 weeks extendable, plus follow-up sessions of unspecified length, although this was not revealed to Tulip. Our immediate task was to settle her in, reassure her that she was among friends, speak confidently of her future (with Gustav), which by the end of the first evening we felt we had achieved to our cautious satisfaction. She was informed that Dr Meadows (Frank) was one of several interviewers with special interests, and that there would be others who, like Frank, would come and go during our sessions. She was further informed that the Herr Direktor (H/Covert) was absent while attending to urgent matters relating to Dr Riemeck (MAYFLOWER) and other members of the network, but was greatly looking forward to the honour of shaking her hand on his return.