Six months later, di Salis continues, Nelson is seen to be acting in an unknown capacity with the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
“Holy smoke,” says Guillam softly, and Molly Meakin gives his hand a hidden squeeze.
“And a report from the Cousins,” says di Salis, “undated as usual but well attested, has Nelson down as an informal adviser to the Munitions and Ordnance Committee of the Ministry of Defence.”
Rather than orchestrate this revelation with his customary range of mannerisms, di Salis again contrives to keep rock-still to great effect.
“In terms of eligibility, Chief,” he goes on quietly, “from an operational standpoint, we on the China side of your house would regard this as one of the key positions in the whole of the Chinese administration. If we could pick ourselves one slot for an agent inside the mainland, Nelson’s might well be the one.”
“Reasons?” Smiley enquires, still alternating between his jottings and the open folder before him.
“The Chinese navy is still in the Stone Age. We do have a formal interest in Chinese technical intelligence, naturally, but our real priorities—like those of Moscow, no doubt—are strategic and political. Beyond that, Nelson could supply us with the total capacity of all Chinese shipyards. Beyond that again, he could tell us the Chinese submarine potential, which has been frightening the daylights out of the Cousins for years. And of ourselves too, I may add, off and on.”
“So think what it’s doing for Moscow,” an old burrower murmurs out of turn.
“The Chinese are supposedly developing their own version of the Russian G-2 class submarine,” di Salis explains. “No one knows a lot about it. Have they their own design? Have they two or four tubes? Are they armed with sea-to-air missiles or sea-tosea? What is the financial appropriation for them? There’s talk of a Han class. We had word they laid one down in ’seventy-one. We’ve never had confirmation. In Dairen in ’sixty-four, they allegedly built a G class armed with ballistic missiles but it still hasn’t been officially sighted. And so forth and so on,” he says deprecatingly, for, like most of the Circus, he has a rooted dislike of military matters and would prefer the more artistic targets.
“For hard and fast detail on those subjects the Cousins would pay a fortune,” di Salis says. “In a couple of years, Langley could spend hundreds of millions in research, over-flights, satellites, listening devices, and God knows what—and still not come up with an answer half as good as one photograph. So if Nelson—” He lets the sentence hang, which is somehow a lot more effective than making it finite.
Connie whispers, “Well done, Doc,” but still for a while nobody else speaks; they are held back by Smiley’s jotting, and his continued examination of the folder.
“Good as Haydon,” Guillam mutters. “Better. China’s the last frontier. Toughest nut in the trade.”
Smiley sits back, his calculations apparently finished.
“Ricardo made his trip a few months after Nelson’s formal rehabilitation,” he says.
Nobody sees fit to question this.
“Tiu travels to Shanghai, and six weeks later Ricardo—”
In the far background, Guillam hears the bark of the Cousins’ telephone switched through to his room, and it is a thing he afterwards avers most strongly—whether in truth or with hindsight—that the unloveable image of Sam Collins was at this point conjured out of his subconscious memory like a djinni out of a lamp, and that he wondered yet again how he could ever have been so unthinking as to let Sam Collins deliver that vital letter to Martello.
“Nelson has one more string to his bow, Chief,” di Salis continues, just as everyone is assuming he is done. “I hesitate to offer it with any confidence, but in the circumstances I dare not omit it altogether. A barter report from the West Germans, dated a few weeks ago. According to their sources, Nelson is lately a member of what we have for want of information dubbed the Peking Tea Club, an embryonic body which we believe has been set up to coordinate the Chinese intelligence effort. He came in first as an adviser on electronic surveillance, and was then co-opted as a full member. It functions, so far as we can fathom, somewhat as our own Intelligence Steering Group. But I must emphasize that this is a shot in the dark. We know absolutely nothing about the Chinese services, and nor do the Cousins.”
For once at a loss for words, Smiley stares at di Salis, opens his mouth, closes it, then pulls off his glasses and polishes them.
“And Nelson’s motive?” he asks, still oblivious to the steady bark of the Cousins’ bell. “A shot in the dark, Doc? How would you see that?”
Di Salis gives an enormous shrug, so that his tallow hair bucks like a floor-mop. “Oh, anybody’s guess,” he says waspishly. “Who believes in motive these days? It would have been perfectly natural for him to respond to Centre’s recruitment overtures while a student in Leningrad, of course, provided they were made in the right way. Not a disloyal thing at all. Not doctrinally, anyway. Russia was China’s big elder brother. Nelson needed merely to be told he had been chosen as one of a special vanguard of vigilantes. I see no great art to that.”
Outside the room, the green phone just goes on ringing, which is remarkable. Martello is not usually so persistent. Only Guillam and Smiley are allowed to pick it up. But Smiley has not heard it, and Guillam is damned if he will budge while di Salis is extemporising on Nelson’s possible reasons for becoming Karla’s mole.
“When the Cultural Revolution came, many people in Nelson’s position believed that Mao had gone mad,” di Salis explains, still reluctant to theorise. “Even some of his own generals thought so. The humiliations Nelson suffered made him conform outwardly—while inwardly, perhaps, he remained bitter— who knows?—and vengeful.”
“The alimony payments to Drake started at a time when Nelson’s rehabilitation was barely complete,” Smiley objects mildly. “What is the presumption there, Doc?”
All this is just too much for Connie, and once again she brims over. “Oh, George, how can you be so naïve? You can find the line, dear, ’course you can! Those poor Chinese can’t afford to hang a top technician in the cupboard half his life and not use him! Karla saw the drift, didn’t he, Doc? He read the wind and went with it. He kept his poor little Nelson on a string and as soon as he started to come out of the wilderness again he had his legmen get alongside him: ‘It’s us, remember? Your friends! We don’t let you down! We don’t spit on you in the street! Let’s get back to business!’ You’d play it just the same way yourself, you know you would!”
“And the money?” Smiley asks. “The half million?”
“Stick and carrot! Blackmail implicit, rewards enormous. Nelson’s hooked both ways.”
But it is di Salis, Connie’s outburst notwithstanding, who has the last word: “He’s Chinese. He’s pragmatic. He’s Drake’s brother. He can’t get out of China—”
“Not yet,” says Smiley softly, glancing at the folder again.
“—and he knows very well his market value to the Russian service. ‘You can’t eat politics, you can’t sell them, and you can’t sleep with them,’ Drake liked to say. So you might as well make money out of them.”
“Against the day when you can leave China and spend it,” Smiley concludes and, as Guillam tiptoes from the room, silently closes the folder and takes up his sheet of jottings. “Drake tried to get him out and failed, so he took the Russians’ money till . . . till what? Till Drake has better luck, perhaps.”
In the background, the insistent snarling of the green telephone has finally ceased.
“Nelson is Karla’s mole,” Smiley remarks at last, once more almost himself. “He’s sitting on a priceless crock of Chinese intelligence. That alone we could do with. He’s acting on Karla’s orders. The orders themselves are of inestimable value to us. They would show us precisely how much the Russians know about their Chinese enemy, and even what they intend toward him. We could take backbearings galore. Yes, Peter?”
In the breaking of trag
ic news there is no transition. One minute a concept stands, the next it lies smashed, and for those affected the world has altered irrevocably. As a cushion, however, Guillam had used official Circus stationery and the written word. By writing his message to Smiley in signal form, he hoped that the sight of it would prepare him in advance. Walking quietly to the desk, the form in his hand, he laid it on the glass sheet and waited.
“About Charlie Marshall, the other pilot, by the way,” Smiley asked of the gathering, still oblivious. “Have the Cousins run him to earth yet, Molly?”
“His record is much the same as Ricardo’s,” Molly Meakin replied, glancing queerly at Guillam. Still at Smiley’s side, he looked suddenly grey and middle-aged and ill. “Like Ricardo, he flew for the Cousins in the Laos war, Mr. Smiley. They were contemporaries at Langley’s secret aviation school in Oklahoma. They dumped him when Laos ended and have no further word on him. Enforcement say he has ferried opium, but they say that of all of the Cousins’ pilots.”
“I think you should read that,” Guillam said, pointing firmly at the message.
“Marshall must be our next step,” Smiley said. “We have to maintain the pressure.”
Picking up the signal form at last, he held it critically to his left side, where the reading-light was brightest. He read with his eyebrows raised and his lids lowered. As always, he read twice. His expression did not change, but those nearest him said the movement went out of his face.
“Thank you, Peter,” he said quietly, laying the paper down again. “And thank you everyone else. Connie and the Doc, perhaps you’d stay behind. I trust the rest of you will get a good night’s sleep.”
Among the younger sparks this hope was greeted with cheerful laughter, for it was well past midnight already.
The girl from upstairs slept, a neat brown doll along the length of one of Jerry’s legs, plump and immaculate by the orange night-light of the rain-soaked Hong Kong sky. She was snoring her head off, and Jerry was staring through the window thinking of Lizzie Worthington. He thought of the twin claw marks on her chin and wondered again who had put them there. He thought of Tiu, imagining him as her jailer, and he rehearsed the name horse-writer until it really annoyed him. He wondered how much more waiting there was, and whether at the end of it he might have a chance with her, which was all he asked: a chance. The girl stirred, but only to scratch her rump. From next door, Jerry heard a ritual clicking as the habitual mah-jong party washed the pieces before distributing them.
The girl had not been unduly responsive to Jerry’s courtship at first—a gush of impassioned notes jammed through her letterbox at all hours of the previous few days—but she did need to pay her gas bill. Officially, she was the property of a businessman, but recently his visits had become fewer and most recently had ceased altogether, with the result that she could afford neither the fortune-teller nor mah-jong, nor the stylish clothes she had set her heart on for the day she broke into Kung Fu films. So she succumbed, but on a clear financial understanding.
Her main fear was of being known to consort with the hideous kwailo, and for this reason she had put on her entire outdoor equipment to descend the one floor: a brown raincoat with transatlantic brass buckles on the epaulettes, plastic yellow boots, and a plastic umbrella with red roses. Now this equipment lay around the parquet floor like armour after the battle, and she slept with the same noble exhaustion. So that when the phone rang her only response was a drowsy Cantonese oath.
Lifting the receiver, Jerry nursed the idiotic hope it might be Lizzie, but it wasn’t.
“Get your ass down here fast,” Luke said. “And Stubbsie will love you. Move it. I’m doing you the favour of our career.”
“Where’s here?” Jerry asked.
“Downstairs, you ape.”
He rolled the girl off him but she still didn’t wake.
The roads glittered with unexpected rain and a thick halo ringed the moon. Luke drove as if they were in a jeep: in high gear with hammer changes on the corners. Fumes of whisky filled the car.
“What have you got, for Christ’s sake?” Jerry demanded. “What’s going on?”
“Great meat. Now shut up.”
“I don’t want meat. I’m suited.”
“You’ll want this one. Man, you’ll want this one.”
They were heading for the harbour tunnel. A flock of cyclists without lights lurched out of a side turning, and Luke had to mount the central reservation to avoid them.
“Look for a damn great building site,” Luke said. A patrol car overtook them, all lights flashing. Thinking he was going to be stopped, Luke lowered his window.
“We’re press, you idiots!” he screamed. “We’re stars, hear me?”
Inside the patrol car as it passed they had a glimpse of a Chinese sergeant and his driver, and an august-looking European perched in the back like a judge. Ahead of them, to the right of the carriage-way, the promised building site sprang into view: a cage of yellow girders and bamboo scaffolding alive with sweating coolies. Cranes, glistening in the wet, dangled over them like whips. The floodlighting came from the ground and poured wastefully into the mist.
“Look for a low place just near,” Luke ordered, slowing down to sixty. “White. Look for a white place.”
Jerry pointed to it: a two-storey complex of weeping stucco, neither new nor old, with a twenty-foot stand of bamboos by the entrance, and an ambulance. The ambulance stood open and the three attendants lounged in it, smoking, watching the police who milled around the forecourt as if it were a riot they were handling.
“He’s giving us an hour’s start over the field.”
“Who?”
“Rocker. Rocker is. Who do you think?”
“Why?”
“Because he hit me, I guess. He loves me. He loves you, too. He said to bring you specially.”
“Why?”
The rain fell steadily.
“Why? Why? Why?” Luke echoed, furious. “Just hurry!”
The bamboos were out of scale, higher than the wall. A couple of orange-clad priests were sheltering against them, clapping cymbals. A third held an umbrella. There were flower stalls and hearses and from somewhere out of sight the sounds of leisurely incantation. The entrance lobby was a jungle swamp reeking of formaldehyde.
“Big Moo’s special envoy,” said Luke.
“Press,” said Jerry.
The police nodded them through, not looking at their cards.
“Where’s the Superintendent?” said Luke.
The smell of formaldehyde was awful. A young sergeant led them. They pushed through a glass door to a room where old men and women, maybe thirty of them, mostly in pyjama suits, waited phlegmatically as if for a late train, under shadowless neon lights and an electric fan. One old man was clearing out his throat, snorting onto the green tiled floor. Seeing the giant kwailos, they stared in polite amazement. The pathologist’s office was yellow. Yellow walls; yellow blinds, closed; an airconditioner that wasn’t working. The same green tiles, easily washed down.
“Great smell,” said Luke.
“Like home,” Jerry agreed.
Jerry wished it was battle. Battle was easier. The sergeant told them to wait while he went ahead. They heard the squeak of trolleys, low voices, the clamp of a freezer door, the low hiss of rubber soles. A volume of Gray’s Anatomy lay next to the telephone. Jerry turned the pages, staring at the illustrations. Luke perched on a chair. An assistant in short rubber boots and overalls brought tea. White cups, green rims, and the Hong Kong monogram with a crown.
“Can you tell the sergeant to hurry, please?” said Luke. “You’ll have the whole damn town here in a minute.”
“Why us?” said Jerry again.
Luke poured some tea onto the tiled floor, and while it ran into the gutter he topped up the cup from his whisky flask. The sergeant returned, beckoning quickly with his slender hand. They followed him back through the waiting-room. This way there was no door, just a corridor, and a turn like a
public lavatory, and they were there.
The first thing Jerry saw was the trolley chipped to hell; there’s nothing older or more derelict than worn-out hospital equipment, he thought. The walls were covered in green mould, green stalactites hung from the ceiling, a battered spittoon was filled with used tissues. They clean out the noses, he remembered, before they pull down the sheet to show you. It’s a courtesy, so that you aren’t shocked. The fumes of formaldehyde made his eyes run. A Chinese pathologist was sitting at the window, making notes on a pad. A couple of attendants were hovering, and more police. There seemed to be a general sense of apology around; Jerry couldn’t make it out.
The Rocker was ignoring them. He was in a corner, murmuring to the august-looking gentleman from the back of the patrol car, but the corner wasn’t far away and Jerry heard “slur on our reputation” spoken twice, in an indignant, nervous tone. Over the body lay a white sheet with a blue cross on it, made in two equal lengths. So that they can use it either way round, Jerry thought. It was the only trolley in the room. The only sheet. The rest of the exhibition was inside the two big freezers with the wooden doors, walk-in size, big as a butcher’s shop. Luke was going out of his mind with impatience.
“Jesus, Rocker!” he called across the room. “How much longer you going to keep the lid on this? We got work to do.”
No one bothered with him. Tired of waiting, Luke yanked back the sheet. Jerry looked, and looked away. The autopsy room was next door, and he could hear the sound of sawing, like the snarling of a dog.
No wonder they’re all so apologetic, Jerry thought stupidly. Bringing a round-eye corpse to a place like this.
“Jesus Christ,” Luke was saying. “Holy Christ. Who did it to him? How do you make those marks? That’s a triad thing. Jesus.”
The dampened window gave on to the courtyard. Jerry could see the bamboos rocking in the rain and the liquid shadows of an ambulance delivering another customer, but he doubted whether any of them looked like this. A police photographer had appeared and there were flashes. A telephone extension hung on the wall. The Rocker was talking into it. He still hadn’t looked at Luke, or at Jerry.
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