John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  “London scrubbed the case.”

  From the dead silence, Sam must have realised in a second that he had touched a considerable nerve. His sign language indicated as much, for he did not peer round at their faces, or register any curiosity at all. Instead, out of a sort of theatrical modesty, he studied his shiny evening shoes and his elegant dress socks, and drew thoughtfully on his brown cigarette.

  “When did they do that then, Sam?” asked Smiley.

  Sam gave the date.

  “Go back a little. Still forgetting the record, right? How much did London know of your enquiries as you went along? Tell us that. Did you send progress reports from day to day? Did Mac?”

  If the mothers next door had set a bomb off, said Guillam afterwards, nobody would have taken his eyes off Sam.

  Well, said Sam easily, as if humouring Smiley’s whim, he was an old dog. His principle in the field had always been to do it first and apologise afterwards. Mac’s, too. Operate the other way round and soon you have London refusing to let you cross the street without changing your nappies first, said Sam.

  “So?” said Smiley patiently.

  So the first word they sent London on the case was, you might say, their last. Mac acknowledged the enquiry, reported the sum of Sam’s findings, and asked for instructions.

  “And London? What did London do, Sam?”

  “Sent Mac a top-priority shriek pulling us both off the case and ordering him to cable back immediately confirming I had understood and obeyed the order. For good measure, they threw in a rocket telling us not to fly solo again.”

  Guillam was doodling on the sheet of paper before him: a flower, then petals, then rain falling on the flower. Connie was beaming at Sam as if it were his wedding day, and her baby eyes were brimming tears of excitement. Di Salis, as usual, was jiggling and fiddling like an old engine, but his gaze also, as much as he could fix it anywhere, was upon Sam.

  “You must have been rather cross,” said Smiley.

  “Not really.”

  “Didn’t you have any wish to see the case through? You’d made a considerable strike.”

  “I was irked, sure.”

  “But you went along with London’s instruction?”

  “I’m a soldier, George. We all are in the field.”

  “Very laudable,” said Smiley, considering Sam once more, how he lounged smooth and charming in his dinner-jacket.

  “Orders is orders,” said Sam, with a smile.

  “Indeed. And when you eventually got back to London, I wonder,” Smiley went on, in a controlled, speculative way, “and you had your ‘welcome-home-well-done’ session with Bill, did you happen to mention the matter casually at all, to Bill?”

  “Asked him what the hell he thought he was up to,” Sam agreed, just as leisurely.

  “And what did Bill have to answer there, Sam?”

  “Blamed the Cousins. Said they had got in on the act ahead of us. Said it was their case and their parish.”

  “Had you any reason to believe that?”

  “Sure. Ricardo.”

  “You guessed he was the Cousins’ man?”

  “He’d flown for them. He was on their books already. He was a natural. All they had to do was keep him in play.”

  “I thought we were agreed that a man like Ricardo would have no access to the real operations of the company?”

  “Wouldn’t stop them using him. Not the Cousins. Still be their case, even if Ricardo was a bummer. The hands-off pact would apply either way.”

  “Let’s go back to the moment when London pulled you off the case. You received the order ‘Drop everything.’ You obeyed. But it was some while yet before you returned to London, wasn’t it? Was there an aftermath of any kind?”

  “Don’t quite follow you, old boy.”

  Once again, at the back of his mind, Smiley made a scrupulous record of Sam’s evasion.

  “For example your friendly contact at the Banque de l’Indochine. Johnny. You kept up with him, of course?”

  “Sure,” said Sam.

  “And did Johnny happen to mention to you, as a matter of history, what happened to the gold seam after you’d received your hands-off telegram? Did it continue to come in month by month, just as it had before?”

  “Stopped dead. Paris turned the tap off. No Indocharter, no nothing.”

  “And Commercial Boris, of no previous convictions? Does he live happily ever after?”

  “Went home.”

  “Was he due to?”

  “Done three years.”

  “They usually do more.”

  “Specially the hoods,” Sam agreed, smiling.

  “And Ricardo, the madcap Mexican flyer whom you suspect of being the Cousins’ agent—what became of him?”

  “Died,” said Sam, eyes on Smiley all the while. “Crashed up on the Thai border. The boys put it down to an overload of heroin.”

  Pressed, Sam had that date too.

  “Was there moaning at the bar about that, so to speak?”

  “Not much. General feeling seemed to be that Vientiane would be a safer place without Ricardo emptying his pistol through the ceiling of the White Rose or Madame Lulu’s.”

  “Where was that feeling expressed, Sam?”

  “Oh, at Maurice’s place.”

  “Maurice?”

  “Constellation Hotel. Maurice is the proprietor.”

  “I see. Thank you.”

  Here there was a definite gap, but Smiley seemed disinclined to fill it. Watched by Sam and his three assistants and Fawn the factotum, Smiley plucked at his spectacles, tilted them, straightened them, and returned his hands to the glass-top desk. Then he took Sam all the way through the story again, rechecked dates and names and places, very laboriously in the way of trained interrogators the world over, listening by long habit for the tiny flaws and the chance discrepancies and the omissions and the changes of emphasis, and apparently not finding any. And Sam, in his sense of false security, let it all happen, watching with the same blank smile with which he watched cards slip across the baize, or the roulette wheel tease the white ball from one bay to another.

  “Sam, I wonder whether you could possibly manage to stay the night with us?” Smiley said when they were once more just the two of them. “Fawn will do you a bed and so on. Do you think you could swing that with your club?”

  “My dear fellow,” said Sam generously.

  Then Smiley did a rather unnerving thing. Having handed Sam a bunch of magazines, he phoned for Sam’s personal dossier, all volumes, and with Sam sitting there before him he read them in silence from cover to cover.

  “I see you’re a ladies’ man,” he remarked at last, as the dusk gathered at the window.

  “Here and there,” Sam agreed, still smiling. “Here and there.” But the nervousness was quite apparent in his voice.

  When night came, Smiley sent the mothers home and issued orders through Housekeeping Section to have the archives cleared of all burrowers by eight at the latest. He gave no reason. He let them think what they wanted. Sam should lie up in the rumpus room to be on call, and Fawn should keep him company and not let him stray. Fawn took this instruction literally. Even when the hours dragged out and Sam appeared to doze, Fawn stayed folded like a cat across the threshold, but with his eyes always open.

  Then the four of them cloistered themselves in Registry—Connie, di Salis, Smiley, and Guillam—and began the long, cautious paper-chase. They looked first for the operational case papers which properly should have been housed in the South East Asian cut, under the dates Sam had given them. There was no card in the index and there were no case papers either, but this was not yet significant. Haydon’s London Station had been in the habit of waylaying operational files and confining them to its own restricted archive. So they plodded across the basement, feet clapping on the brown linoleum tiles, till they came to a barred alcove like an antechapel where the remains of what was formerly London Station’s archive were laid to rest. Once again, th
ey found no card and no papers.

  “Look for the telegrams,” Smiley ordered, so they checked the signals ledgers, both incoming and outgoing, and for a moment Guillam at least was ready to suspect Sam of lying, till Connie pointed out that the relevant traffic sheets had been typed with a different typewriter: a machine, as it later turned out, that had not been acquired by housekeepers till six months after the date on the paper.

  “Look for floats,” Smiley ordered.

  Circus floats were duplicated copies of main serials, which Registry ran off when case papers threatened to be in constant action. They were banked in loose-leaf folders like back numbers of magazines and indexed every six weeks. After much delving, Connie Sachs unearthed the South East Asian folder covering the six-week period immediately following Collins’s trace request. It contained no reference to a suspected Soviet gold seam and none to Indocharter Vientiane S.A.

  “Try the P.F.s,” said Smiley, with a rare use of initials, which he otherwise detested. So they trailed to another corner of Registry and sorted through drawers of cards, looking first for personal files on Commercial Boris, then for Ricardo, then under aliases for Tiny, believed dead, whom Sam had apparently mentioned in his original ill-fated report to London Station. Now and then, Guillam was sent upstairs to ask Sam some small point, and found him reading Field and sipping a large Scotch, watched unflinchingly by Fawn, who occasionally varied his routine—Guillam learned later—with press-ups, first on two knuckles of each hand, then on his fingertips. In the case of Ricardo, they mapped out phonetic variations and ran them across the index also.

  “Where are the organisations filed?” Smiley asked.

  But of the société anonyme known as Indocharter Vientiane, the organisations index contained no card either.

  “Look up the liaison material.”

  Dealings with the Cousins in Haydon’s day were handled entirely through the London Station Liaison Secretariat, of which he himself for obvious reasons had personal command and which held its own file copies of all inter-service correspondence. Returning to the antechapel, they once more drew a blank. To Peter Guillam the night was taking on surreal dimensions. Smiley had become all but wordless. His plump face turned to rock. Connie in her excitement had forgotten her arthritic aches and pains and was hopping around the shelves like a teenager at the ball. Not by any means a born paper man, Guillam scrambled after her pretending to keep up with the pack, and secretly grateful for his trips up to Sam.

  “We’ve got him, George, darling,” Connie kept saying under her breath. “Sure as boots we’ve got the beastly toad.”

  Doc di Salis had danced away in search of Indocharter’s Chinese directors—Sam, astonishingly, had the names of two still in his head—and was wrestling with their names first in Chinese, then in Roman script, and finally in Chinese commercial code. Smiley sat in a chair reading the files on his knee like a man in a train, doughtily ignoring the passengers. Sometimes he lifted his head, but the sounds he heard were not from inside the room.

  Connie, on her own initiative, had launched a search for cross-references to files with which the case papers should theoretically have been linked. There were subject files on mercenaries, and on free-lance aviators. There were method files on Centre’s techniques for laundering agent payments, and even a treatise, which she herself had written long ago, on the subject of below-the-line paymasters responsible for Karla’s illegal networks run unbeknown to the mainstream residencies. Commercial Boris’s unpronounceable last names had not been added to the appendix. There were background files on the Banque de l’Indochine and its links with the Moscow Narodny Bank, and statistical files on the growing scale of Centre’s activities in South East Asia, and study files on the Vientiane residency itself. But the negatives only multiplied, and as they multiplied they proved the affirmative: nowhere in their whole pursuit of Haydon had they come upon such a systematic and wholesale brushing-over of the traces. It was the back-bearing of all time.

  And it led inexorably East.

  Only one clue that night pointed to the culprit. They came on it somewhere between dawn and morning while Guillam was dozing on his feet. Connie sniffed it out, Smiley laid it silently on the table, and three of them peered at it together under the reading-light as if it were the clue to buried treasure: a clip of destruction certificates, a dozen in all, with the authorising cryptonym scribbled in black felt-tip along the middle line, giving a pleasing effect of charcoal. The condemned files related to “top-secret correspondence with H/Annexe”; that is to say, with the Cousins’ Head of Station—then, as now, Smiley’s Brother-in-Christ Martello. The reason for destruction was the same as that which Haydon had given to Sam Collins for abandoning the field enquiries in Vientiane: “Risk of compromising delicate American operation.” The signature consigning the files to the incinerator was in Haydon’s work name.

  Returning upstairs, Smiley invited Sam once more to his room. Sam had removed his bow-tie, and the stubble of his jaw against his open-necked white shirt made him a lot less smooth.

  First, Smiley sent Fawn out for coffee. He let it arrive and he waited till Fawn had flitted away again before pouring two cups, black for both of them, sugar for Sam, a saccharin for Smiley on account of his weight problem. Then he settled in a soft chair at Sam’s side rather than have a desk between them, in order to affiliate himself to Sam.

  “Sam, I think I ought to hear a little about the girl,” he said very softly, as if he were breaking sad news. “Was it chivalry that made you miss her out?”

  Sam seemed rather amused. “Lost the files, have you, old boy?” he enquired, with the same men’s-room intimacy.

  Sometimes, in order to obtain a confidence, it is necessary to impart one.

  “Bill lost them,” Smiley replied gently.

  Elaborately, Sam lapsed into deep thought. Curling one card-player’s hand, he surveyed his fingertips, lamenting their grimy state.

  “That club of mine practically runs itself these days,” he reflected. “I’m getting bored with it, to be frank. Money, money. Time I had a change, made something of myself.”

  Smiley understood, but he had to be firm: “I’ve no resources, Sam. I can hardly feed the mouths I’ve hired already.”

  Sam sipped his black coffee ruminatively, smiling through the steam.

  “Who is she, Sam? What’s it all about? No one minds how bad it is. It’s water under the bridge, I promise you.”

  Standing, Sam sank his hands in his pockets, shook his head, and, rather as Jerry Westerby might have done, began meandering round the room, peering at the odd gloomy things that hung on the wall: group war photographs of dons in uniform ; a framed and handwritten letter from a dead Prime Minister; Karla’s portrait again, which this time he studied from very close, on and on.

  “‘Never throw your chips away,’” he remarked, so close to Karla that his breath dulled the glass. “That’s what my old mother used to tell me. ‘Never make a present of your assets. We get very few in life. Got to dole them out sparingly.’ Not as if there isn’t a game going, is it?” he enquired. With his sleeve he wiped the glass clean. “Very hungry mood prevails in this house of yours. Felt it the moment I walked in. The big table, I said to myself. Baby will eat tonight.”

  Arriving at Smiley’s desk, he sat himself in the chair as if testing it for comfort. The chair swivelled as well as rocked. Sam tried both movements. “I need a search request,” he said.

  “Top right,” said Smiley, and watched while Sam opened the drawer, pulled out a yellow flimsy, and laid it on the glass to write.

  For a couple of minutes Sam composed in silence, pausing occasionally for artistic consideration, then writing again.

  “Call me if she shows up,” he said and, with a facetious wave to Karla, took his leave.

  When he had gone, Smiley took the form from the desk, sent for Guillam, and handed it to him without a word.

  On the staircase Guillam paused to read the text: “Worthington E
lizabeth, alias Lizzie, alias Ricardo Lizzie.” That was the top line. Then the details: “Age about twenty-seven. Nationality British. Status: married, details of husband unknown, maiden name also unknown. 197 common-law wife of Ricardo Tiny, 2/3 now dead. Last known place of residence: Vientiane, Laos. Last known occupation: typist-receptionist with Indocharter Vientiane S.A. Previous occupations: night-club hostess, whisky saleswoman, high-class tart.”

  Performing its usual dismal rôle these days, Registry took about three minutes to regret “no trace repeat no trace of subject.” Beyond this, the Queen Bee took issue with the term “high class.” She insisted that “superior” was the proper way to describe that kind of tart.

  Curiously enough, Smiley was not deterred by Sam’s reticence. He seemed happy to accept it as part and parcel of the trade. Instead, he requested copies of all source reports which Sam had originated from Vientiane or elsewhere over the last ten years odd, and which had escaped Haydon’s clever knife. And thereafter, in leisure hours, such as they were, he browsed through these and allowed his questing imagination to form pictures of Sam’s murky world.

  At this hanging moment in the affair Smiley showed a quite lovely sense of tact, as all later agreed. A lesser man might have stormed round to the Cousins and asked, as a matter of the highest urgency, that Martello look out the American end of the destroyed correspondence and grant him a sight of it, but Smiley wanted nothing stirred, nothing signalled. So instead he chose his humblest emissary.

  Molly Meakin was a prim, pretty graduate, a little bluestocking, perhaps, a little inward, but already with a modest name as a capable desk officer, and Old Circus by virtue of both her brother and her father. At the time of the fall, she was still a probationer, cutting her milk-teeth in Registry. After it, she was kept on as skeleton staff and promoted, if that is the word, to Vetting Section, whence no man, let alone woman, says the folklore, returns alive. But Molly possessed, perhaps by heredity, what the trade calls a natural eye. While those around her were still exchanging anecdotes about exactly where they were and what they were wearing when the news of Haydon’s arrest was broken to them, Molly was setting up an unsung channel to her opposite number at the Annexe in Grosvenor Square, one which bypassed the laborious procedures laid down by the Cousins since the fall.