While Guillam and Smiley looked on, Esterhase dialled the Circus and asked for Phil Porteous. He said his lines perfectly: a little self-pity, a little conspiracy, a little joke. Some girl who was passionate about him up north, Phil, and threatening wild things if he didn’t go and hold her hand.
“Don’t tell me, I know it happens to you every day, Phil. Hey, how’s that gorgeous new secretary of yours? And listen, Phil, if Mara phones from home, tell her Toby’s on a big job, okay? Blowing up the Kremlin, back on Monday. Make it nice and heavy, huh? Cheers, Phil.”
He rang off and dialled a number in north London. “Mrs. M., hullo, this is your favourite boyfriend—recognise the voice? Good. Listen, I’m sending you a visitor tonight—an old, old friend, you’ll be surprised. She hates me,” he explained to them, his hand over the mouthpiece. “He wants to check the wiring,” he went on. “Look it all over, make sure it’s working okay, no bad leaks—all right?”
“If he’s any trouble,” Guillam said to Fawn with real venom as they left, “bind him hand and foot.”
In the stairwell, Smiley lightly touched his arm. “Peter, I want you to watch my back. Will you do that for me? Give me a couple of minutes, then pick me up on the corner of Marloes Road, heading north. Stick to the west pavement.”
Guillam waited, then stepped into the street. A thin drizzle lay on the air, which had an eerie warmness like a thaw. Where lights shone, the moisture shifted in fine clouds, but in shadow he neither saw nor felt it: simply, a mist blurred his vision, making him half close his eyes. He completed one round of the gardens, then entered a pretty mews well south of the pick-up point. Reaching Marloes Road, he crossed to the west pavement, bought an evening paper, and began walking at a leisurely rate past villas set in deep gardens. He was counting off pedestrians, cyclists, cars, while out ahead of him, steadily plodding the far pavement, he picked out George Smiley, the very prototype of the homegoing Londoner. “Is it a team?” Guillam had asked. Smiley could not be specific. “Short of Abingdon Villas, I’ll cross over,” he said. “Look for a solo. But look!”
As Guillam watched Smiley pulled up abruptly, as if he had just remembered something, stepped perilously into the road, and scuttled between the angry traffic to disappear at once through the doors of a liquor store. As he did so, Guillam saw, or thought he saw, a tall crooked figure in a dark coat step out after him, but at that moment a bus drew up, screening both Smiley and his pursuer; and when it pulled away, it must have taken his pursuer with it, for the only survivor on that strip of pavement was an older man in a black plastic raincoat and cloth cap lolling at the bus stop while he read his evening paper; and when Smiley emerged from the store with his brown bag, the man did not so much as lift his head from the sporting pages. For a short while longer, Guillam trailed Smiley through the smarter reaches of Victorian Kensington as he slipped from one quiet square to another, sauntered into a mews and out again by the same route. Only once, when Guillam forgot Smiley and out of instinct turned upon his own tracks, did he have a suspicion of a third figure walking with them: a fanged shadow thrown against the broadloom brickwork of an empty street, but when he started forward, it was gone.
The night had its own madness after that; events ran too quickly for him to fasten on them singly. Not till days afterwards did he realise that the figure, or the shadow of it, had struck a chord of familiarity in his memory. Even then, for some time, he could not place it. Then one early morning, waking abruptly, he had it clear in his mind: a barking, military voice, a gentleness of manner heavily concealed, a squash racket jammed behind the safe of his room in Brixton, which brought tears to the eyes of his unemotional secretary.
35
Probably the only thing which Steve Mackelvore did wrong that same evening, in terms of classic tradecraft, was blame himself for leaving the passenger door of his car unlocked. Climbing in from the driver’s side, he put it down to his own negligence that the other lock was up. Survival, as Jim Prideaux liked to recall, is an infinite capacity for suspicion. By that purist standard, Mackelvore should have suspected that in the middle of a particularly vile rush-hour, on a particularly vile evening, in one of those blaring side streets that feed into the lower end of the Elysées, Ricki Tarr would unlock the passenger door and hold him up at gunpoint. But life in the Paris residency these days did little to keep a man’s wits sharp, and most of Mackelvore’s working day had been taken up with filing his weekly expenses and completing his weekly returns of staff for the housekeepers. Only lunch, a longish affair with an insincere anglophile in the French security labyrinth, had broken the monotony of that Friday.
His car, parked under a lime tree that was dying of exhaust fumes, had an extraterritorial registration and “C.C.” plastered on the back, for the residency cover was consular, though no one took it seriously. Mackelvore was a Circus elder, a squat, white-haired Yorkshireman with a long record of consular appointments which in the eyes of the world had brought him no advancement. Paris was the last of them. He did not care particularly for Paris, and he knew from an operational lifetime in the Far East that the French were not for him. But as a prelude to retirement it could not be bettered. The allowances were good, the billet was comfortable, and the most that had been asked of him in the ten months he had been here was to welfare the occasional agent in transit, put up a chalk-mark here and there, play postman to some ploy by London Station, and show a time to the visiting firemen.
Until now, that was, as he sat in his own car with Tarr’s gun jammed against his rib-cage, and Tarr’s hand resting affectionately on his right shoulder, ready to wrench his head off if he tried any monkey business. A couple of feet away, girls hurried past on their way to the Metro, and six feet beyond that the traffic had come to a standstill; it could stay that way for an hour. None was faintly stirred by the sight of two men having a cosy chat in a parked car.
Tarr had been talking ever since Mackelvore sat down. He needed to send a message to Alleline, he said. It would be personal and decypher yourself, and Tarr would like Steve to work the machine for him while Tarr stood off with the gun.
“What the hell have you been up to, Ricki?” Mackelvore complained, as they walked arm in arm back to the residency. “The whole service is looking for you—you know that, don’t you? They’ll skin you alive if they find you. We’re supposed to do blood-curdling things to you on sight.”
He thought of turning into the hold and smacking Tarr’s neck, but he knew he hadn’t the speed and Tarr would kill him.
The message would run to about two hundred groups, said Tarr, as Mackelvore unlocked the front door and put on the lights. When Steve had transmitted them, they would sit on the machine and wait for Percy’s answer. By tomorrow, if Tarr’s instinct was correct, Percy would be coming over to Paris hotfoot to have a conference with Ricki. This conference would also take place in the residency, because Tarr reckoned it was marginally less likely that the Russians would try to kill him on British consular premises.
“You’re berserk, Ricki. It’s not the Russians who want to kill you. It’s us.”
The front room was called Reception; it was what remained of the cover. It had an old wooden counter and out-of-date “Notices to British Subjects” hanging on the grimy wall. Here, with his left hand, Tarr searched Mackelvore for a weapon but found none. It was a courtyard house and most of the sensitive stuff was across the yard: the cypher-room, the strong-room, and the machines.
“You’re out of your mind, Ricki,” Mackelvore warned monotonously, as he led the way through a couple of empty offices and pressed the bell to the cypher-room. “You always thought you were Napoleon Bonaparte and now it’s got you completely. You’d too much religion from your dad.”
The steel message hatch slid back and a mystified, slightly silly face appeared in the opening. “You can go home, Ben, boy. Go home to your missus but stay close to your phone in case I need you, there’s a lad. Leave the books where they are and put the keys in the machines. I’ll
be talking to London presently, under my own steam.”
The face withdrew and they waited while the boy unlocked the door from inside: one key, two keys, a spring lock.
“This gentleman’s from out East, Ben,” Mackelvore explained as the door opened. “He’s one of my most distinguished connections.”
“Hullo, sir,” said Ben. He was a tall, mathematical-looking boy with spectacles and an unblinking gaze.
“Get along with you, Ben. I’ll not dock it against your duty pay. You’ve the weekend free on full rates, and you’ll not owe me time, either. Off you go, then.”
“Ben stays here,” said Tarr.
In Cambridge Circus the lighting was quite yellow and from where Mendel stood, on the third floor of the clothes shop, the wet tarmac glistened like cheap gold. It was nearly midnight and he had been standing three hours. He stood between a net curtain and a clothes-horse. He stood the way coppers stand the world over: weight on both feet equally, legs straight, leaning slightly backward over the line of balance. He had pulled his hat low and turned up his collar to keep the white of his face from the street, but his eyes as they watched the front entrance below him glittered like a cat’s eyes in a coal-hole. He would wait another three hours or another six: Mendel was back on the beat; the scent of the hunt was in his nostrils. Better still, he was a night bird; the darkness of that fitting room woke him wonderfully. Such light as reached him from the street lay upside down in pale pieces on the ceiling. All the rest—the cutting-benches, the bolts of cloth, the draped machines, the steam iron, the signed photographs of princes of the blood—these were there because he had seen them on his reconnaissance that afternoon; the light did not reach them and even now he could barely make them out.
From his window he covered most of the approaches: eight or nine unequal roads and alleys that for no good reason had chosen Cambridge Circus as their meeting point. Between them, the buildings were gimcrack, cheaply fitted out with bits of Empire: a Roman bank, a theatre like a vast desecrated mosque. Behind them, high-rise blocks advanced like an army of robots. Above, a pink sky was slowly filling with fog.
Why was it so quiet? he wondered. The theatre had long emptied but why didn’t the pleasure trade of Soho, only a stone’s throw from his window, fill the place with taxis, groups of loiterers? Not a single fruit lorry had rumbled down Shaftesbury Avenue on its way to Covent Garden.
Through his binoculars Mendel once more studied the building straight across the road from him. It seemed to sleep even more soundly than its neighbours. The twin doors of the portico were closed and no light was visible in the ground-floor windows. Only on the fourth floor, out of the second window from the left, a pale glow issued, and Mendel knew it was the duty officer’s room; Smiley had told him. Briefly he raised the glasses to the roof, where a plantation of aerials made wild patterns against the sky, then down a floor to the four blackened windows of the radio section.
“At night everyone uses the front door,” Guillam had said. “It’s an economy measure to cut down on janitors.”
In those three hours, only three events had rewarded Mendel’s vigil; one an hour is not much. At half past nine a blue Ford Transit delivered two men carrying what looked like an ammunition box. They unlocked the door for themselves and closed it as soon as they were inside, while Mendel murmured his commentary into the telephone. At ten o’clock the shuttle arrived; Guillam had warned him of this, too. The shuttle collected hot documents from the outstations and stored them for safekeeping at the Circus over the weekend. It called at Brixton, Acton, and Sarratt, in that order, said Guillam, lastly at the Admiralty, and it made the Circus by about ten. In the event, it arrived on the dot of ten, and this time two men from inside the building came out to help unload; Mendel reported that, too, and Smiley acknowledged with a patient “Thank you.”
Was Smiley sitting down? Was he in the darkness like Mendel? Mendel had a notion he was. Of all the odd coves he had known, Smiley was the oddest. You thought, to look at him, that he couldn’t cross the road alone, but you might as well have offered protection to a hedgehog. Funnies, Mendel mused. A lifetime of chasing villains and how do I end up? Breaking and entering, standing in the dark and spying on the Funnies. He’d never held with Funnies till he met Smiley. Thought they were an interfering lot of amateurs and college boys; thought they were unconstitutional; thought the best thing the Special Branch could do, for its own sake and the public’s, was say “Yes, sir,” “No, sir” and lose the correspondence. Come to think of it, with the notable exception of Smiley and Guillam, that’s exactly what he thought tonight.
Shortly before eleven, just an hour ago, a cab arrived. A plain licensed London hackney cab, and it drew up at the theatre. Even that was something Smiley had warned him about: it was the habit within the service not to take taxis to the door. Some stopped at Foyle’s, some in Old Compton Street or at one of the shops; most people had a favourite cover destination and Alleline’s was the theatre. Mendel had never seen Alleline, but he had their description of him and as he watched him through the glasses he recognised him without a doubt, a big lumbering fellow in a dark coat; he even noticed how the cabby pulled a bad face at his tip and called something after him as Alleline delved for his keys.
The front door is not secured, Guillam had explained; it is only locked. The security begins inside, once you have turned left at the end of the corridor. Alleline lives on the fifth floor. You won’t see his windows light up but there’s a skylight and the glow should catch the chimney-stack. Sure enough, as he watched, a patch of yellow appeared on the grimy bricks of the chimney: Alleline had entered his room.
And young Guillam needs a holiday, thought Mendel. He’d seen that happen before, too: the tough ones who crack at forty. They lock it away, pretend it isn’t there, lean on grown-ups who turn out not to be so grown up after all; then one day it’s all over them, and their heroes come tumbling down and they’re sitting at their desks with the tears pouring onto the blotter.
He had laid the receiver on the floor. Picking it up, he said, “Looks like Tinker’s clocked in.”
He gave the number of the cab, then went back to waiting.
“How did he look?” Smiley murmured.
“Busy,” said Mendel.
“So he should be.”
That one won’t crack, though, Mendel decided with approval; one of your flabby oak trees, Smiley was. Think you could blow him over with one puff, but when it comes to the storm he’s the only one left standing at the end of it. At this point in his reflections a second cab drew up, squarely at the front entrance, and a tall slow figure cautiously climbed the steps one at a time, like a man who takes care of his heart.
“Here’s your Tailor,” Mendel murmured into the telephone. “Hold on, here’s Soldier-boy, too. Proper gathering of the clans, by the look of it. I say, take it easy.”
An old Mercedes 190 shot out of Earlham Street, swung directly beneath his window, and held the curve with difficulty as far as the northern outlet of the Charing Cross Road, where it parked. A young heavy fellow with ginger hair clambered out, slammed the door, and clumped across the street to the entrance without even taking the key out of the dash. A moment later another light went up on the fourth floor as Roy Bland joined the party.
All we need to know now is who comes out, thought Mendel.
36
Lock Gardens, which presumably drew its name from the Camden and Hampstead Road Locks nearby, was a terrace of four flat-fronted nineteenth-century houses built at the centre of a crescent, each with three floors and a basement and a strip of walled back garden running down to the Regent’s Canal. The numbers ran 2 to 5: number 1 had either fallen down or never been built. Number 5 made up the north end, and as a safe house it could not have been improved, for there were three approaches in thirty yards and the canal towpath offered two more. To the north lay Camden High Street for joining traffic; south and west lay the parks and Primrose Hill. Better still, the neighbourhood po
ssessed no social identity and demanded none. Some of the houses had been turned into one-room flats, and had ten doorbells laid out like a typewriter. Some were got up grandly and had only one. Number 5 had two: one for Millie McCraig and one for her lodger, Mr. Jefferson.
Mrs. McCraig was churchy and collected for everything, which was incidentally an excellent way of keeping an eye on the locals, though that was scarcely how they viewed her zeal. Jefferson, her lodger, was known vaguely to be foreign and in oil and away a lot. Lock Gardens was his pied-à-terre. The neighbours, when they bothered to notice him, found him shy and respectable. They would have formed the same impression of George Smiley if they had happened to spot him in the dim light of the porch at nine that evening, as Millie McCraig admitted him to her front room and drew the pious curtains. She was a wiry Scottish widow with brown stockings and bobbed hair and the polished, wrinkled skin of an old man. In the interest of God and the Circus, she had run Bible schools in Mozambique and a seaman’s mission in Hamburg, and though she had been a professional eavesdropper for twenty years since then, she was still inclined to treat all menfolk as transgressors. Smiley had no way of telling what she thought. Her manner, from the moment he arrived, had a deep and lonely stillness; she showed him round the house like a chatelaine whose guests had long since died.
First the semi-basement, where she lived herself, full of plants and that medley of old postcards, brass table-tops, and carved black furniture which seems to attach itself to travelled British ladies of a certain age and class. Yes, if the Circus wanted her at night they rang her on the basement phone. Yes, there was a separate line upstairs, but it was only for outgoing calls. The basement phone had an extension in the upstairs dining-room. Then up to the ground floor, a veritable shrine to the costly bad taste of the housekeepers: loud Regency stripes, gilded reproduction chairs, plush sofas with roped corners. The kitchen was untouched and squalid. Beyond it lay a glass outhouse, half conservatory, half scullery, which looked down to the rough garden and the canal. Strewn over the tiled floor: an old mangle, a copper tub, and crates of tonic water.
John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels Page 33