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

by Le Carre, John

  Jerry read the signal a second time.

  “Plane leaves for Bangkok one one hundred,” Masters said. He wore his watch on the inside of his wrist, so that its information was private to himself. “Hear me?”

  Jerry grinned. “Sorry, sport. Slow reader. Thanks. Too many big words. Lot to get the old mind round. Look, left my things at the hotel.”

  “My houseboys are at your royal command.”

  “Thanks, but if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to avoid the official connection.”

  “Please yourself, sir, please yourself.”

  “I’ll find a cab at the gates. There and back in an hour. Thanks,” he repeated.

  “Thank you.”

  Sarratt man provided a smart piece of tradecraft for the kiss-off. “Mind if I leave that there?” he asked, nodding to his scruffy portable where it lay beside Masters’s golf-ball I.B.M.

  “Sir, it shall be our most treasured possession.”

  If Masters had bothered to look at him at that moment, he might have hesitated when he saw the purposeful brightness in Jerry’s eye. If he had known Jerry’s voice better perhaps, or noticed its particularly friendly huskiness, he might also have hesitated. If he had seen the way Jerry clawed at his forelock, arm across his body in an attitude of instinctive self-concealment, or responded to Jerry’s sheepish grin of thanks as the probationer returned to drive him to the gates in the blue jeep—well, again he might have had his doubts. But Major Masters was not only an embittered professional with a lot of disillusionment to his credit. He was a Southern gentleman suffering the stab of defeat at the hands of unintelligible savages; and he hadn’t too much time just then for the contortions of a bone-weary overdue Brit using his expiring spookhouse as a post office.

  A mood of festivity attended the leavetaking of the Circus’s Hong Kong operations party, and it was only enriched by the secrecy of the arrangements. The news of Jerry’s reappearance triggered it. The content of his signal intensified it and coincided with word from the Cousins that Drake Ko had cancelled all his social and business engagements and withdrawn to the seclusion of his house, Seven Gates, in Headland Road. A photograph of Ko, taken in long shot from the Cousins’ surveillance van, showed him in quarter-profile, standing in his own large garden, at the end of an arbour of rose-trees, staring out to sea. The concrete junk was not visible, but he was wearing his floppy beret.

  “Like a latter-day Jay Gatsby, my dear!” Connie Sachs cried in delight as they all pored over it. “Mooning at the blasted light at the end of the pier, or whatever the ninny did!”

  When the van returned that way two hours later, Ko was in the identical pose, so they didn’t bother to re-shoot. More significant was the fact that Ko had ceased to use the telephone altogether—or at least those lines on which the Cousins ran a tap.

  Sam Collins also sent a report, the third in a stream, but by far his longest to date. As usual it arrived in a special cover addressed to Smiley personally, and as usual he discussed its contents with nobody but Connie Sachs. And at the very moment when the party was leaving for London Airport, a last-minute message from Martello advised them that Tiu had returned from China and was at present closeted with Ko in Headland Road.

  But the most important ceremony, then and later in Guillam’s recollection, and the most disturbing, was a small war party held in Martello’s rooms in the Annexe, which, exceptionally, was attended not only by the usual quintet of Martello, his two quiet men, Smiley, and Guillam, but also by Lacon and Saul Enderby as well, who significantly arrived in the same official car. The purpose of the ceremony—called by Smiley—was the formal handing over of the keys. Martello was now to receive a complete portrait of the Dolphin case, including the all-important link with Nelson. He was to be indoctrinated, with certain minor omissions which only showed up later, as a full partner in the enterprise.

  How Lacon and Enderby muscled in on the occasion, Guillam never quite knew and Smiley was afterwards understandably reticent about it. Enderby declared in a fat voice that he had come along in the “interest of good order and military discipline.” Lacon looked more than usually wan and disdainful. Guillam had the strongest impression they were up to something, and this was further strengthened by his observation of the interplay between Enderby and Martello: in short, these buddies cut each other so dead they put Guillam in mind of two secret lovers meeting at communal breakfast in a country house, a situation in which he often found himself.

  It was the scale of the thing, Enderby explained at one point. Case was blowing up so big he really thought there ought to be a few official flies on the wall. It was the Colonial lobby, he explained at another. Wilbraham was raising a stink with Treasury.

  “All right, so we’ve heard the dirt,” said Enderby, when Smiley had finished his lengthy summary and Martello’s praises had all but brought the roof down. “Now whose finger’s on the trigger, George, point one?” he demanded to know, and after that the meeting became very much Enderby’s show, as meetings with Enderby usually did. “Who calls the shots when it gets hot? You, George? Still? I mean you’ve done a good planning job, I grant you, but it’s old Marty here who’s providing the artillery, isn’t it?”

  At which Martello had another bout of deafness, while he beamed upon all the great and lovely British people he was privileged to be associated with, and let Enderby go on doing his hatchet-work for him.

  “Marty, how do you see this one?” Enderby pressed, as if he really had no idea; as if he never went fishing with Martello, or gave lavish dinners for him, or discussed top-secret matters out of school.

  A strange insight came to Guillam at this moment, though he kicked himself afterwards for making too little of it. Martello knew. The revelations about Nelson, which Martello had affected to be dazzled by, were not revelations at all, but restatements of information that he and his quiet men already possessed. Guillam read it in their pale, wooden faces and their watchful eyes. He read it in Martello’s fulsomeness. Martello knew.

  “Ah, technically this is George’s show, Saul,” Martello reminded Enderby loyally, in answer to his question, but with just enough spin on the “technically” to put the rest in doubt. “George is on the bridge, Saul. We’re just there to stoke the engines.”

  Enderby staged an unhappy frown and shoved a matchstick between his teeth. “George, how does that grab you? You content to let that happen, are you? Let Marty chuck in the cover, the accommodation out there, communications, all the cloak-and-dagger stuff, surveillance, charging round Hong Kong and what-not? While you call the shots? Bit like wearing someone else’s dinner-jacket, I’d have thought.”

  Smiley was firm enough but, to Guillam’s eye, a deal too concerned with the question and not nearly concerned enough with the thinly veiled collusion.

  “Not at all,” said Smiley. “Martello and I have a clear understanding. The spearhead of the operation will be shared by ourselves. If supportive action is required, Martello will supply it. The product is then halved. If one is thinking in terms of a dividend for the American investment, it comes with the partition of the product. The responsibility for obtaining it remains ours.” He ended strongly: “The letter of agreement setting all this out has of course long been on file.”

  Enderby glanced at Lacon. “Oliver, you said you’d send me that. Where is it?”

  Lacon put his long head on one side and pulled a dreary smile at nothing in particular. “Kicking around your Third Room, I should think, Saul.”

  Enderby tried another tack: “And you two guys can see the deal holding up in all contingencies, can you? I mean, who’s handling the safe houses, all that? Burying the body sort of thing?”

  Smiley again: “Housekeeping Section has already rented a cottage in the country, and is preparing it for occupation,” he said stolidly.

  Enderby took the wet matchstick from his mouth and broke it into the ashtray. “Could have had my place if you’d asked,” he muttered absently. “Bags of room. Nobody ever there
. Staff. Everything.” But he went on worrying at his theme. “Look here. Answer me this one. Your man panics. He cuts and runs through the back streets of Hong Kong. Who plays cops-and-robbers to get him back?”

  Don’t answer it. Guillam prayed. He has absolutely no business to plumb around like this! Tell him to get lost!

  Smiley’s answer, though effective, lacked the fire Guillam longed for. “Oh, I suppose one can always invent a hypothesis,” he objected mildly. “I think the best one can say is that Martello and I would at that stage pool our thoughts and act for the best.”

  “George and I have a fine working relationship, Saul,” Martello declared handsomely. “Just fine.”

  “Much tidier, you see, George,” Enderby resumed, through a fresh matchstick. “Much safer if it’s an all-Yank do. Marty’s people make a hash and all they do is apologise to the Governor, post a couple of blokes to Walla Walla, and promise not to do it again. That’s it. What everyone expects of ’em anyway. Advantage of a disgraceful reputation—right, Marty? Nobody’s surprised if you screw the housemaid.”

  “Why, Saul,” said Martello, and laughed richly at the great British sense of humour.

  “Much more tricky if we’re the naughty boys, George,” Enderby went on. “Or you are, rather. Governor could blow you down with one puff, the way it’s set up at the moment. Wilbraham’s crying all over his desk already.”

  Against Smiley’s distracted obduracy, there was however no progress to be made, so for the while Enderby bowed out and they resumed their discussion of the “meat and potatoes,” which was Martello’s amusing phrase for modalities. But before they finished, Enderby had one last shot at dislodging Smiley from his primacy, choosing again the issue of the efficient handling and after-care of the catch.

  “George, who’s going to manage all the grilling and stuff? You using that funny little Jesuit of yours, the one with the smart name?”

  “Di Salis will be responsible for the Chinese aspects of the debriefing and our Soviet research section the Russian.”

  “That the crippled don woman, is it, George? The one Bill shoved out to grass for drinking?”

  “It is they, between them, who have brought the case this far,” said Smiley.

  Inevitably Martello sprang into the breach: “Ah, now, George, I won’t have that! Sir, I will not! Saul, Oliver, I wish you to know that I regard the Dolphin case, in all its aspects, Saul, as a personal triumph for George here and for George alone!”

  With a big hand all round for dear old George, they made their way back to Cambridge Circus.

  “Gunpowder, treason, and plot!” Guillam expostulated. “Why’s Enderby selling you down the river? What’s all that tripe about losing the letter?”

  “Yes,” said Smiley at last, but from far away. “Yes, that’s very careless of them. I thought I’d send them a copy, actually. Blind, by hand, for information only. Enderby seemed so woolly, didn’t he? Will you attend to that, Peter, ask the mothers?”

  The mention of the letter of agreement—heads of agreement, as Lacon called it—revived Guillam’s worst misgivings. He remembered how he had foolishly allowed Sam Collins to be the bearer of it, and how, according to Fawn, he had spent more than an hour cloistered with Martello under the pretext of delivering it. He remembered Sam Collins also as he had glimpsed him in Lacon’s ante-room, the mysterious confidant of Lacon and Enderby, lazing around Whitehall like a blasted Cheshire cat. He remembered Enderby’s taste for backgammon, which he played for very high stakes, and it even passed through his head, as he tried to sniff out the conspiracy, that Enderby might be a client of Sam Collins’s club. From that notion he soon pulled back, discounting it as too absurd. But ironically it later turned out to be true. And he remembered his fleeting conviction—based on little but the physiognomy of the three Americans, and therefore soon also to be dismissed—that they knew already what Smiley had come to tell them.

  But Guillam did not pull back from the notion of Sam Collins as the ghost at that morning’s feast, and as he boarded the plane at London Airport, exhausted by his long and energetic farewell from Molly, the same ghost grinned at him through the smoke of his infernal brown cigarette.

  The flight was uneventful except in one respect. They were three strong, and in the seating arrangements Guillam had won a small battle in his running war with Fawn. Over House-keeping Section’s dead body, Guillam and Smiley flew first class, while Fawn, the baby-sitter, took an aisle seat at the front of the tourist compartment, cheek by jowl with the airline security guards, who slept innocently for most of the journey while Fawn sulked. There had never been any suggestion, fortunately, that Martello and his quiet men would fly with them, for Smiley was determined that that should not happen on any account. As it was, Martello flew west, staging in Langley for instructions and continuing through Honolulu and Tokyo in order to be on hand in Hong Kong for their arrival.

  As an unconsciously ironic footnote to their departure, Smiley left a long handwritten note to Jerry, to be presented to him on his arrival at the Circus, congratulating him on his first-rate performance. The carbon copy is still in Jerry’s dossier. Nobody has thought to remove it. Smiley speaks of Jerry’s “unswerving loyalty” and of “setting the crown on more than twenty years of service.” He includes an apocryphal message from Ann, “who joins me in wishing you an equally distinguished career in letters.” And he winds up rather awkwardly with the sentiment that “one of the privileges of our work is that it provides us with such wonderful colleagues. I must tell you that we all think of you in those terms.”

  Certain people do still ask why no anxious word about Jerry’s whereabouts had reached the Circus before take-off. He was, after all, several days overdue. Once more they look for ways of blaming Smiley, but there is no evidence of a lapse on the Circus’s side. For the transmission of Jerry’s report from the air base in North East Thailand—his last—the Cousins had cleared a line through Bangkok direct to the Annexe in London. But the arrangement was valid for one signal and one answer-back only, and a follow-up was not envisaged.

  Accordingly, the grizzle, when it came, was routed first to Bangkok on the military network, thence to the Cousins in Hong Kong on their network—since Hong Kong was held to have a total lien on all Dolphin-starred material—and only then, marked “Routine,” repeated by Hong Kong to London, where it kicked around in several rosewood in-trays before anybody noted its significance. And it must be admitted that the languid Major Masters had attached very little significance to the no-show, as he later called it, of some travelling English fairy. “ASSUME EXPLANATION YOUR END,” his message ends. Major Masters now lives in Norman, Oklahoma, where he runs a small automobile repair business.

  Nor did Housekeeping Section have any reason to panic—or so they still plead. Jerry’s instructions on reaching Bangkok were to find himself a plane, any plane, using his air-travel card, and get himself to London. No date was mentioned and no airline. The whole purpose was to leave things fluid. Most likely he had stopped over somewhere for a bit of relaxation. Many homing fieldmen do, and Jerry was on record as sexually oriented. So they kept their usual watch on flight lists and made a provisional booking at Sarratt for the two weeks’ drying-out and recycling ceremony, then returned their attention to the far more urgent business of setting up the Dolphin safe house.

  This was a charming mill-house, quite remote, though situated in the commuter town of Maresfield, Sussex, and on most days they found a reason for going down there. As well as di Salis and a sizeable part of his Chinese archive, a small army of interpreters and transcribers had to be accommodated, not to mention technicians, baby-sitters, and a Chinese-speaking doctor. In no time at all the residents were complaining noisily to the police about the influx of Japanese. The local paper carried a story that they were a visiting dance troupe. Housekeeping Section had inspired the leak.

  Jerry had nothing to collect at the hotel—and, as it happened, no hotel—but he reckoned he had an hour to get
clear, perhaps two. He had no doubt the Americans had the whole town wired, and he knew there would be nothing easier, if London asked for it, than for Major Masters to have Jerry’s name and description broadcast as an American deserter travelling on a false-flag passport. Once his taxi was clear of the gates, therefore, he took it to the southern edge of town, waited, then took a second taxi and pointed it due north.

  A wet haze lay over the paddies and the straight road ran into it endlessly. The radio pumped out female Thai voices like a slow-motion nursery rhyme. They passed an American electronics base, a circular grid a quarter of a mile wide floating in the haze and known locally as the Elephant Cage. Giant bodkins marked the perimeter, and at the middle, surrounded by webs of strung wire, burned a single infernal light like the promise of a future war. He had heard there were twelve hundred language students inside the place, but not one soul was to be seen.

  He needed time, and in the event he helped himself to more than a week. Even now, he needed that long to bring himself to the point, because Jerry at heart was a soldier and voted with his feet. In the beginning was the deed, Smiley liked to say to him, in his failed-priest mood, quoting from Goethe. For Jerry that simple statement had become a pillar of his uncomplicated philosophy. What a man thinks is his own business. What matters is what he does.

  Reaching the Mekong by early evening, he selected a village and for a couple of days strolled idly up and down the river-bank, trailing his shoulder-bag and kicking at an empty Coca-Cola tin with the toe of his buckskin boot. Across the river, behind the brown anthill mountains, lay the Ho Chi Minh trail. He had once watched a B-52 strike from this very point, three miles away in central Laos. He remembered how the ground shook under his feet and the sky emptied and burned, and he had known—he had really for a moment known—what it was like to be in the middle of it.

  In this same spot, to use Frost’s jolly phrase, Jerry Westerby blew the walls out, much along the lines the housekeepers expected of him, if not in quite the circumstances. In a riverside bar where they played old tunes on a nickelodeon, he drank black-market P.X. Scotch and night after night drove himself into oblivion, leading one laughing girl after another up the unlit staircase to a tattered bedroom, till finally he stayed there sleeping and didn’t come down.