Karla Trilogy Digital Collection Featuring George Smiley : Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley###s People (9781101570852)

by Le Carre, John

  “Approved,” wrote the Minister a week later, “provided always . . .”

  There were no provisions. A glance at the first row of figures showed Smiley all he needed to know: already by May of that year, when that interview at Acton took place, Toby Esterhase had personally made no fewer than eight trips on the Witchcraft budget, two to Paris, two to The Hague, one to Helsinki, and three to Berlin. In each case the purpose of the journey was curtly described as “Collecting product.” Between May and November, when Control faded from the scene, he made a further nineteen. One of these took him to Sofia, another to Istanbul. None required him to be absent for more than three full days. Most took place at weekends. On several such journeys, he was accompanied by Bland.

  Not to put too fine an edge on it, Toby Esterhase, as Smiley had never seriously doubted, had lied in his teeth. It was nice to find the record confirming his impression.

  Smiley’s feelings towards Roy Bland had at that time been ambivalent. Recalling them now, he decided they still were. A don had spotted him, Smiley had recruited him; the combination was oddly akin to the one that had brought Smiley himself into the Circus net. But this time there was no German monster to fan the patriotic flame, and Smiley had always been a little embarrassed by protestations of anti-Communism. Like Smiley, Bland had no real childhood. His father was a docker, a passionate trade-unionist, and a Party member. His mother died when Bland was a boy. His father hated education as he hated authority, and when Bland grew clever the father took it into his head that he had lost his son to the ruling class and beat the life out of him. Bland fought his way to grammar school and in the holidays worked his fingers, as Toby would say, to the bones, in order to raise the extra fee. When Smiley met him in his tutor’s rooms at Oxford, he had the battered look of someone just arrived from a bad journey.

  Smiley took him up, and over several months edged closer to a proposition, which Bland accepted—largely, Smiley assumed, out of animosity towards his father. After that he passed out of Smiley’s care. Subsisting on odd grants undescribed, Bland toiled in the Marx Memorial Library and wrote leftish papers for tiny magazines that would have died long ago had the Circus not subsidized them. In the evenings he disputed loud and long at smoky meetings in pubs and school halls. In the vacations he went to the Nursery, where a fanatic called Thatch ran a charm school for outward-bound penetration agents, one pupil at a time. Thatch trained Bland in tradecraft and carefully nudged his progressive opinions nearer to his father’s Marxist camp. Three years to the day after his recruitment, partly thanks to his proletarian pedigree, and his father’s influence at King Street, Bland won a year’s appointment as assistant lector in economics at the University of Poznan. He was launched.

  From Poland he applied successfully for a post at the Budapest Academy of Sciences, and for the next eight years he lived the nomadic life of a minor left-wing intellectual in search of light, often liked but never trusted. He staged in Prague, returned to Poland, did a hellish two semesters in Sofia and six in Kiev, where he had a nervous breakdown, his second in as many months. Once more the Nursery took charge of him, this time to dry him out. He was passed as clean, his networks were given to other fieldmen, and Roy himself was brought into the Circus to manage, mainly from a desk, the networks he had recruited in the field. Recently, it had seemed to Smiley, Bland had become very much Haydon’s colleague. If Smiley chanced to call on Roy for a chat, like as not Bill was lounging in his armchair surrounded by papers, charts, and cigarette smoke; if he dropped in on Bill, it was no surprise to find Bland, in a sweat-soaked shirt, padding heavily back and forth across the carpet. Bill had Russia, Bland the satellites; but already in those early days of Witchcraft, the distinction had all but vanished.

  They met at a pub in St. John’s Wood—still May—half past five on a dull day and the garden empty. Roy brought a child, a boy of five or so, a tiny Bland, fair, burly, and pink-faced. He didn’t explain the boy, but sometimes as they talked he shut off and watched him where he sat on a bench away from them, eating nuts. Nervous breakdowns or not, Bland still bore the imprimatur of the Thatch philosophy for agents in the enemy camp: self-faith, positive participation, Pied Piper appeal, and all those other uncomfortable phrases which in the high day of the cold-war culture had turned the Nursery into something close to a moral-rearmament centre.

  “So what’s the deal?” Bland asked affably.

  “There isn’t one really, Roy. Control feels that the present situation is unhealthy. He doesn’t like to see you getting mixed up in a cabal. Nor do I.”

  “Great. So what’s the deal?”

  “What do you want?”

  On the table, soaked from the earlier rain fall, was a cruet set left over from lunchtime, with a bunch of paper-wrapped cellulose toothpicks in the centre compartment. Taking one, Bland spat the paper onto the grass and began working his back teeth with the fat end.

  “Well, how about a five-thousand-quid backhander out the reptile fund?”

  “And a house and a car?” said Smiley, making a joke of it.

  “And the kid to Eton,” Bland added, and winked across the concrete paving to the boy while he went on working with the toothpick. “I’ve paid, see, George. You know that. I don’t know what I’ve bought with it but I’ve paid a hell of a lot. I want some back. Ten years’ solitary for the fifth floor; that’s big money at any age. Even yours. There must have been a reason why I fell for all that spiel, but I can’t quite remember what it was. Must be your magnetic personality.”

  Smiley’s glass was still going, so Bland fetched himself another from the bar, and something for the boy as well.

  “You’re an educated sort of swine,” he announced easily as he sat down again. “An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function: who dreamed that one up?”

  “Scott Fitzgerald,” Smiley replied, thinking for a moment that Bland was proposing to say something about Bill Haydon.

  “Well, Fitzgerald knew a thing or two,” Bland affirmed. As he drank, his bulging eyes slid sideways toward the fence, as if in search of someone. “And I’m definitely functioning, George. As a good Socialist, I’m going for the money. As a good capitalist, I’m sticking with the revolution, because if you can’t beat it spy on it. Don’t look like that, George. It’s the name of the game these days: you scratch my conscience, I’ll drive your Jag, right?” He was already lifting an arm as he said this. “With you in a minute!” he called across the lawn. “Set one up for me!”

  Two girls were hovering on the other side of the wire fence.

  “Is that Bill’s joke?” Smiley asked, suddenly quite angry.

  “Is what?”

  “Is that one of Bill’s jokes about materialist England, the pigs-in-clover society?”

  “Could be,” said Bland, and finished his drink. “Don’t you like it?”

  “Not too much, no. I never knew Bill before as a radical reformer. What’s come over him all of a sudden?”

  “That’s not radical,” Bland retorted, resenting any devaluation of his Socialism, or of Haydon. “That’s just looking out the bloody window. That’s just England now, man. Nobody wants that, do they?”

  “So how do you propose,” Smiley demanded, hearing himself at his pompous worst, “to destroy the acquisitive and competitive instincts in Western society without also destroying . . .”

  Bland had finished his drink; and the meeting, too. “Why should you be bothered? You’ve got Bill’s job. What more do you want? Long as it lasts.”

  And Bill’s got my wife, Smiley thought as Bland rose to go; and, damn him, he’s told you.

  The boy had invented a game. He had laid a table on its side and was rolling an empty bottle onto the gravel. Each time, he started the bottle higher up the table-top. Smiley left before it smashed.

  Unlike Esterhase, Bland had not even bothered to lie. Lacon’s files made no pretence of his involvement with the Witchcraft operation:

  “Sourc
e Merlin,” wrote Alleline, in a minute dated soon after Control’s departure, “is in every sense a committee operation . . . I cannot honestly say which of my three assistants deserves most praise. The energy of Bland has been an inspiration to us all . . .” He was replying to the Minister’s suggestion that those responsible for Witchcraft should be honoured in the New Year’s list. “While Haydon’s operational ingenuity is at times little short of Merlin’s own,” he added. The medals went to all three; Alleline’s appointment as Chief was confirmed, and with it his beloved knighthood.

  18

  Which left me Bill, thought Smiley. In the course of most London nights, there is one respite from alarm. Ten, twenty minutes, thirty, even an hour, and not a drunk groans or a child cries or a car’s tyres whine into a collision. In Sussex Gardens it happens around three. That night it came early, at one, as Smiley stood once more at his dormer window peering down like a prisoner at Mrs. Pope Graham’s sand patch, where a Bedford van had recently parked. Its roof was daubed with slogans: “Sydney 90 Days,” “Athens Non-Stop,” “Mary Lou Here We Come.” A light glowed inside, and he presumed some children were sleeping there in unmarried bliss. “Kids,” he was supposed to call them. Curtains covered the windows.

  Which left me Bill, he thought, still staring at the closed curtains of the van and its flamboyant globe-trotting proclamations; which left me Bill, and our friendly little chat in Bywater Street—just the two of us, old friends, old comrades-at-arms, “sharing everything,” as Martindale had it so elegantly, but Ann sent out for the evening so that the men could be alone. “Which left me Bill,” he repeated hopelessly, and felt the blood rise, and the colours of his vision heighten, and his sense of moderation begin its dangerous slide.

  Who was he? Smiley had no focus on him any more. Each time he thought of him, he drew him too large, and different. Until Ann’s affair with him, he thought he knew Bill pretty well, his brilliance and its limitations. He was of that pre-war set that seemed to have vanished for good, which managed to be disreputable and high-minded at the same time. His father was a high court judge, two of his several beautiful sisters had married into the aristocracy; at Oxford he favoured the unfashionable right rather than the fashionable left, but never to the point of strain. From his late teens he had been a keen explorer and amateur painter of brave, if over-ambitious, stamp; several of his paintings now hung in Miles Sercombe’s fatuous palace in Carlton Gardens. He had connections in every embassy and consulate across the Middle East and he used them ruthlessly. He took up remote languages with ease, and when 1939 came, the Circus snapped him up; they had had their eye on him for years. He had a dazzling war. He was ubiquitous and charming; he was unorthodox and occasionally outrageous. He was probably heroic. The comparison with Lawrence was inevitable.

  And it was true, Smiley conceded, that Bill in his time had fiddled with substantial pieces of history; had proposed all sorts of grand designs for restoring England to influence and greatness—like Rupert Brooke, he seldom spoke of Britain. But Smiley, in his rare moments of objectivity, could remember few that ever got off the ground.

  It was the other side of Haydon’s nature, by contrast, that as a colleague he had found easier to respect: the slow-burning skills of the natural agent runner; his rare sense of balance in the playing back of double agents and the mounting of deception operations; his art of fostering affection, even love, though it ran against the grain of other loyalties.

  As witness, thank you, my wife.

  Perhaps Bill really is out of scale, Smiley thought hopelessly, still grappling for a sense of proportion. Picturing him now, and putting him beside Bland, Esterhase, even Alleline, it did truthfully seem to Smiley that all of them were, to a great or small extent, imperfect imitations of that one original, Haydon. That their affectations were like steps towards the same unobtainable ideal of the rounded man, even if the ideal was itself misconceived, or misplaced; even if Bill was utterly unworthy of it. Bland in his blunt impertinence, Esterhase in his lofty artificial Englishness, Alleline with his shallow gift of leadership—without Bill they were a disarray. Smiley also knew, or thought he knew—the idea came to him now as a mild enlightenment—that Bill in turn was also very little by himself: that while his admirers (Bland, Prideaux, Alleline, Esterhase, and all the rest of the supporters’ club) might find in him completeness, Bill’s real trick was to use them, to live through them to complete himself, here a piece, there a piece, from their passive identities, thus disguising the fact that he was less, far less, than the sum of his apparent qualities . . . and finally submerging this dependence beneath an artist’s arrogance, calling them the creatures of his mind . . .

  “That’s quite enough,” said Smiley aloud.

  Withdrawing abruptly from this insight, dismissing it irritably as yet another theory about Bill, he cooled his overheated mind with the recollection of their last meeting.

  “I suppose you want to grill me about bloody Merlin,” Bill began. He looked tired and nervy; it was his time for commuting to Washington. In the old days he would have brought an unsuitable girl and sent her to sit with Ann upstairs while they talked their business; expecting Ann to bolster his genius to her, thought Smiley cruelly. They were all of the same sort: half his age, bedraggled art school, clinging, surly; Ann used to say he had a supplier. And once, to shock, he brought a ghastly youth called Steggie, an assistant barman from one of the Chelsea pubs, with an open shirt and a gold chain round his midriff.

  “Well, they do say you write the reports,” Smiley explained.

  “I thought that was Bland’s job,” said Bill with his foxy grin.

  “Roy makes the translations,” said Smiley. “You draft the covering reports; they’re typed on your machine. The material’s not cleared for typists at all.”

  Bill listened carefully, brows lifted, as if at any moment he might interrupt with an objection or a more congenial topic, then hoisted himself from the deep armchair and ambled to the bookcase, where he stood a full shelf higher than Smiley. Fishing out a volume with his long fingers, he peered into it, grinning.

  “Percy Alleline won’t do,” he announced, turning a page. “Is that the premise?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “Which means that Merlin won’t do, either. Merlin would do if he were my source, wouldn’t he? What would happen if Bloody Bill here pottered along to Control and said he’d hooked a big fish and wanted to play him alone? ‘That’s very nifty of you, Bill, boy,’ Control would say. ‘You do it just the way you want, Bill, boy—’course you do. Have some filthy tea.’ He’d be giving me a medal by now, instead of sending you snooping round the corridors. We used to be rather a classy bunch. Why are we so vulgar these days?”

  “He thinks Percy’s on the make,” Smiley said.

  “So he is. So am I. I want to be head boy. Did you know that? Time I made something of myself, George. Half a painter, half a spy—time I was all something. Since when was ambition a sin in our beastly outfit?”

  “Who runs him, Bill?”

  “Percy? Karla does—who else? Lower-class bloke with upper-class sources, must be a bounder. Percy’s sold out to Karla; it’s the only explanation.” He had developed the art, long ago, of deliberately misunderstanding. “Percy’s our house mole,” he said.

  “I meant who runs Merlin? Who is Merlin? What’s going on?”

  Leaving the bookcase, Haydon took himself on a tour of Smiley’s drawings. “This is a Callot, isn’t it,” unhooking a small gilt frame and holding it to the light. “It’s nice.” He tilted his spectacles to make them magnify. Smiley was certain he had looked at it a dozen times before. “It’s very nice. Doesn’t anyone think my nose should be out of joint? I am supposed to be in charge of the Russian target, you know. Given it my best years, set up networks, talent-spotters, all mod cons. You chaps on the fifth floor have forgotten what it’s like to run an operation where it takes you three days to post a letter and you don’t even get an answer for your trouble.�
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  Smiley, dutifully: Yes, I have forgotten. Yes, I sympathise. No, Ann is nowhere in my thoughts. We are colleagues, after all, and men of the world; we are here to talk about Merlin and Control.

  “Along comes this upstart Percy, damn Caledonian street-merchant, no shadow of class, shoving a whole wagonload of Russian goodies. Bloody annoying, don’t you think?”

  “Very.”

  “Trouble is, my networks aren’t very good. Much easier to spy on Percy than—” He broke off, tired of his own thesis. His attention had settled on a tiny van Mieris head in chalk. “And I fancy this very much,” he said.

  “Ann gave it me.”

  “Amends?”

  “Probably.”

  “Must have been quite a sin. How long have you had it?”

  Even now, Smiley remembered noticing how silent it was in the street. Tuesday? Wednesday? And he remembered thinking: No, Bill. For you I have so far received no consolation prize at all. As of this evening, you don’t even rate a pair of bedroom slippers . . . Thinking but not saying.

  “Is Control dead yet?” Haydon asked.

  “Just busy.”

  “What does he do all day? He’s like a hermit with the clap, scratching around all on his own in that cave up there. All those bloody files he reads—what’s he about, for God’s sake? Sentimental tour of his unlovely past, I’ll bet. He looks sick as a cat. I suppose that’s Merlin’s fault, too, is it?”

  Again Smiley said nothing.

  “Why doesn’t he eat with the cooks? Why doesn’t he join us instead of grubbing around for truffles up there? What’s he after?”

  “I didn’t know he was after anything,” said Smiley.