John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  “Looks as though he’s swallowed his last sixpence,” said Jerry. “Who is he?”

  “Karla,” said Guillam. “Recruited Bill Haydon. Russian hood.”

  “Sounds more like a girl’s name. How you keeping?”

  “It’s the code-name of his first network. There’s a school of thought that says it’s also the name of his one love.”

  “Bully for him,” said Jerry carelessly and, still grinning, padded beside him toward the rumpus room. Perhaps deliberately, Smiley had gone ahead, out of earshot of their conversation. “Still with that loony girl, the flute-player, are you?” Jerry asked.

  “She got less loony,” said Guillam. They took a few more paces.

  “Bolted?” Jerry enquired sympathetically.

  “Something like that.”

  “And he’s all right, is he?” Jerry asked dead casually, nodding at the solitary figure ahead of them. “Eating well, good coat, all that stuff?”

  “Never been better. Why?”

  “Just asked,” said Jerry, very pleased.

  From the airport, Jerry rang his daughter Cat, a thing he rarely did, but this time he had to. He knew it was a mistake before he put the money in, but he still persisted, and not even the terribly familiar voice of the early wife could put him off.

  “Gosh, hullo! It’s me, actually. Super. Listen: how’s Phillie?”

  Phillie was her husband, a civil servant nearly eligible for a pension, though younger than Jerry by about thirty muddled lives.

  “Perfectly well, thank you,” she retorted, in the frosty tone with which old wives defend new mates. “Is that why you rang?”

  “Well, I did just think I might chat up old Cat, actually. Going out East for a bit, back in harness,” he said. He felt he should apologise. “It’s just the comic needs a hack out there,” he said, and heard a clatter as the receiver hit the hall chest. Oak, he remembered. Barley-twist legs. Another of old Sambo’s left-overs.

  “Daddy?”

  “Hi!” he yelled, as if the line were bad, as if she had taken him by surprise. “Cat? Hullo, hey, listen, sport, did you get my postcards and stuff?” He knew she had. She had thanked him regularly in her weekly letters.

  Hearing nothing but “Daddy” repeated in a questioning voice, Jerry asked jovially, “You do still collect stamps, don’t you? Only I’m going that way, you see. East.”

  Planes were called, others landed, whole worlds were changing places, but Jerry Westerby, speaking to his daughter, was motionless in the procession.

  “You used to be a demon for stamps,” he reminded her.

  “I’m seventeen.”

  “Sure, sure, what do you collect now? Don’t tell me. Boys!” With the brightest humour, he kept it going while he danced from one buckskin boot to the other, making his own jokes and supplying his own laughter. “Listen, I’m sending you some money—Blatt & Rodney are fixing it, sort of birthday and Christmas put together—better talk to Mummy before spending it. Or maybe Phillie, what? He’s a sound sort of bloke, isn’t he? Turn Phillie loose on it, kind of thing he likes to get his teeth into.” He opened the kiosk door to raise an artificial flurry. “’Fraid they’re calling my flight there, Cat,” he bellowed over the clatter. “Look, mind how you go, d’you hear? Watch yourself. Don’t give yourself too easy. Know what I mean?”

  He queued for the bar awhile, but at the last moment the old Eastern hand in him woke up and he moved across to the cafeteria. It might be some time before he got his next glass of fresh cow’s milk. Standing in the queue, Jerry had a sensation of being watched. No trick to that; at an airport everyone watches everyone, so what the hell? He thought of the orphan and wished he’d had time to get himself a girl before he left, if only to take the bad taste out of his mouth.

  Smiley walked, one round little man in a raincoat. Social journalists with more class than Jerry, shrewdly observing his progress through the purlieus of the Charing Cross Road, would have recognised the type at once: the mackintosh brigade personified, cannon-fodder of the mixed-sauna parlours and the naughty bookshops. These long tramps had become a habit for him; with his new-found energy he could cover half the length of London and not notice it. From Cambridge Circus, now that he knew the byways, he could take any of twenty routes and never cross the same path twice. Having selected a beginning, he would let luck and instinct guide him while his other mind plundered the remoter regions of his soul.

  But this evening his journey had a pull to it, drawing him south and westward, and Smiley yielded. The air was damp and cold, hung with a harsh fog that had never seen the sun. Walking, he took his own island with him, and it was crammed with images, not people. Like an extra mantle, the white walls encased him in his thoughts. In a doorway, two murderers in leather coats were whispering; under a streetlamp, a dark-haired boy angrily clutched a violin case. Outside a theatre, a waiting crowd burned in the blaze of lights from the awning overhead, and the fog curled round them like fire smoke.

  Never had Smiley gone into battle knowing so little and expecting so much. He felt lured, and he felt pursued. Yet when he tired, and drew back for a moment, and considered the logic of what he was about, it almost eluded him. He glanced back and saw the jaws of failure waiting for him. He peered forward and through his moist spectacles saw the phantoms of great hopes dancing in the mist. He blinked around him and knew there was nothing for him where he stood. Yet he advanced without the ultimate conviction.

  It was no answer to rehearse the steps that had brought him to this point—the Russian gold seam, the imprint of Karla’s private army, the thoroughness of Haydon’s efforts to extinguish knowledge of them. Beyond the limits of these external reasons, Smiley perceived in himself the existence of a darker motive, infinitely more obscure, one which his rational mind continued to reject. He called it Karla, and it was true that somewhere in him, like a leftover legend, there burned the embers of hatred toward the man who had set out to destroy the temples of his private faith, whatever remained of them: the service that he loved, his friends, his country, his concept of a reasonable balance in human affairs. It was true also that a lifetime or two ago, in a sweltering Indian jail, the two men had actually faced each other, Smiley and Karla, across an iron table, though Smiley had no reason at the time to know he was in the presence of his destiny. Karla’s head was on the block in Moscow; Smiley had tried to woo him to the West, and Karla had kept silent, preferring death or worse to an easy defection. And it was true that now and then the memory of that encounter, of Karla’s unshaven face and watchful, inward eyes, came at him like a spectre out of the murk of his little room while he slept fitfully on his bunk.

  But hatred was really not an emotion he could sustain for any length of time, unless it was the obverse side of love.

  He was approaching the King’s Road in Chelsea. The fog was heavier because of the closeness of the river. Above him, the globes of streetlamps hung like Chinese lanterns in the bare branches of the trees. The traffic was sparse and cautious. Crossing the road, he followed the pavement till he came to Bywater Street and turned in to it: a cul-de-sac of neat flat-fronted terrace cottages. He trod discreetly now, keeping to the west side, and the shadow of the parked cars. It was the cocktail hour, and in other windows he saw talking heads and shrieking, silent mouths. Some he recognised, some she even had names for: “Felix the cat,” “Lady Macbeth,” “the Puffer.”

  He drew level with his own house. For their reunion, she had had the shutters painted blue and they were blue still. The curtains were open because she hated to be enclosed. She sat alone at her escritoire, and she might have composed the scene for him deliberately: the beautiful and conscientious wife, ending her day, attends to matters of administration. She was listening to music, and he caught the echo of it carried on the fog: Sibelius. Smiley wasn’t good at music, but he knew all her records and he had several times praised the Sibelius out of politeness. He couldn’t see the gramophone but he knew it lay on the floor, where it had lain fo
r Bill Haydon when she was trailing her affair with him. He wondered whether the German dictionary lay beside it, and her anthology of German poetry. Several times, over the last decade or two, usually during reconciliations, she had made a show of learning German so that Smiley would be able to read aloud to her.

  As he watched, she got up, crossed the room, paused in front of the pretty gilt mirror to adjust her hair. The notes she wrote to herself were jammed into the frame. What was it this time, he wondered. “Blast garage.” “Cancel lunch Madeleine.” “Destroy butcher.” Sometimes, when things were tense, she had sent him messages that way: “Force George to smile, apologise insincerely for lapse.” In very bad times, she wrote whole letters to him, and posted them there for his collection.

  To his surprise, she had put out the light. He heard the bolts slide on the front door. Drop the chain, he thought automatically. Double-lock the Banhams. How many times do I have to tell you bolts are as weak as the screws that hold them in place? Odd, all the same; he had somehow supposed she would leave the bolts open in case he might return. Then the bedroom light went on, and he saw her body framed in silhouette in the window as, angel-like, she stretched her arms to the curtains. She drew them almost to her, stopped, and momentarily he feared she had seen him, till he remembered her shortsightedness and her refusal to wear glasses. She’s going out, he thought; she’s going to doll herself up. He saw her head half turn as if she had been addressed. He saw her lips move, and break into a puckish smile as her arms lifted again, this time to the back of her neck, and she began to unfasten the top button of her housecoat. In the same moment, the gap between the curtains was abruptly closed by other, impatient hands.

  Oh, no, thought Smiley hopelessly. Please! Wait till I’ve gone!

  For a minute, perhaps longer, standing on the pavement, he stared in disbelief at the blacked-out window, till anger, shame, and finally self-disgust broke in him together like a physical anguish and he turned and hurried blindly back toward the King’s Road. Who was it this time? Another beardless ballet dancer, performing some narcissistic ritual? Her vile cousin Miles, the career politician? Or a one-night Adonis spirited from the nearby pub?

  When the outside telephone rang, Peter Guillam was sitting alone in the rumpus room a little drunk, languishing equally for Molly Meakin’s body and George Smiley’s return. He lifted the receiver at once and heard Fawn, out of breath and furious.

  “I’ve lost him!” he shouted. “He’s bilked me!”

  “Then you’re a bloody idiot,” Guillam retorted with satisfaction.

  “Idiot nothing! He heads for home, right? Our usual ritual. I’m waiting for him, I stand off, he’s coming back to the main road, looks at me. Like I’m dirt. Just dirt. Next thing I know, I’m on my own. How does he do it? Where does he go? I’m his friend, aren’t I? Who the hell does he think he is? Fat little runt, I’ll kill him!”

  Guillam was still laughing as he rang off.

  6

  The Burning of Frost

  In Hong Kong it was Saturday again, but the typhoons were forgotten and the day burned hot and clear and breathless. In the Hong Kong Club a serenely Christian clock struck eleven and the chimes tinkled in the panelled quiet like spoons dropped on a distant kitchen floor. The better chairs were already taken by readers of last Thursday’s Telegraph, which gave a quite dismal picture of the moral and economic miseries of their homeland.

  “Pound’s in the soup again,” a crusted voice growled through a pipe. “Electricians out. Railways out. Pilots out.”

  “Who’s in? More the question,” said another, just as crusted.

  “If I was the Kremlin, I’d say we were doing a first-class job,” said the first speaker, barking out the final word to give it a military indignation, and with a sigh ordered up a couple of dry martinis. Neither man was above twenty-five years old, but being an exiled patriot in search of a quick fortune can age you pretty fast.

  The Foreign Correspondents’ Club, by contrast, was having one of its churchy days when burghers far outnumbered newsmen. Without old Craw to hold them together, the Shanghai Bowlers had dispersed and several had left the Colony altogether. The photographers had been lured to Phnom Penh by the promise of some great new fighting now the wet season was ended. The cowboy was in Bangkok for an expected revival of student riots, Luke was at the bureau, and his boss the dwarf was slouched grumpily at the bar surrounded by sonorous British suburbanites in dark trousers and white shirts discussing the 1100 gearbox.

  “But cold this time. Hear that? Muchee coldee and bring it chop chop!”

  Even the Rocker was muted. He was attended this morning by his wife, a former Bible School teacher from Borneo, a dried-out shrew in bobbed hair and ankle socks who could spot a sin before it was committed.

  And a couple of miles eastward on Cloudview Road, a thirty-cent ride on the one-price city bus—in what is said to be the most populated corner of our planet, on North Point, just where the city swells toward the Peak—on the sixteenth floor of a high-rise block called 7A, Jerry Westerby was lying on a mattress after a short but dreamless sleep, singing his own words to the tune of “Miami Sunrise” and watching a beautiful girl undress.

  The mattress was seven feet long, intended to be used the other way on by an entire Chinese family, and for about the first time in his life his feet didn’t hang over the end. It was longer than Pet’s cot by a mile, longer even than the bed in Tuscany, though in Tuscany it hadn’t mattered, because he had a real girl to curl round and with a girl you don’t lie so straight. Whereas the girl he was watching was framed in a window opposite his own, ten yards or miles out of reach, and on every one of the nine mornings he had woken here, she had stripped and washed herself this way, to his considerable enthusiasm, even applause. When he was lucky, he followed the whole ceremony, from the moment when she tipped her head sideways to let her black hair fall to her waist, until she chastely wound a sheet about her and rejoined her ten-strong family in the next room where they all lived. He knew the family intimately. Their washing habits. Their tastes in music, cooking, and lovemaking, their celebrations, their flaring, dangerous rows. The only thing he wasn’t sure of was whether she was two girls or one.

  She vanished, but he went on singing. He felt eager, which was how it took him every time, whether he was about to gumshoe down a back alley in Prague to swap little packages with a terror-stricken joe in a doorway or—his finest hour, and for an Occasional unprecedented—row three miles in a blackened dinghy to scrape a radio operator off a Caspian beach. As the clamps tightened, Jerry discovered the same surprising mastery of himself, the same jollity, and the same alertness. And the same barking funk, not necessarily a contradiction. It’s today, he thought. The kissing’s over.

  There were three tiny rooms and they were parquet-floored all through. That was the first thing he noted every morning, because there was no furniture anywhere, except the mattress and the kitchen chair and the table where his typewriter sat, the one dinner plate, which did duty as an ashtray, and the girlie calendar, vintage 1960, of a redhead whose charms had long since lost their bloom. He knew the type exactly: green eyes, a temper, and a skin so sensitive it looked like a battlefield every time you laid a finger on it. Add one telephone, one ancient record-player for 78s only, and two very real opium pipes suspended from business-like nails on the wall, and he had a complete inventory of the wealth and interests of Deathwish the Hun, now in Cambodia, from whom Jerry had rented the apartment. And one book-sack, his own, beside the mattress.

  The gramophone had run down. He climbed happily to his feet, tightening the makeshift sarong around his stomach. As he did so, the telephone began ringing, so he sat again and, grabbing the wire, dragged the instrument toward him across the floor. It was Luke, as usual wanting to play.

  “Sorry, sport. Doing a story. Try solo whist.”

  Dialling the speaking clock, Jerry heard a Chinese squawk, then an English squawk, and set his watch by the second. Then he went to
the gramophone and put on “Miami Sunrise” again, loud as it would go. It was the only record, but it drowned the gurgle of the useless air-conditioner. Still humming, he pulled open the one wardrobe, and from an old leather grip on the floor picked out his father’s yellowed tennis racquet, vintage 1930-odd, with “S.W.” in marking ink on the pommel. Unscrewing the handle, he fished from the recess four lozenges of subminiature film, a worm of grey wadding, and a battered subminiature camera with measuring chain, which the conservative in him preferred to the flashier models that the Sarratt smudgers had tried to press on him. He loaded a cassette into the camera, set the film speed, and took three sample light-readings of the redhead’s bosom before slopping to the kitchen in his sandals, where he lowered himself devoutly to his knees before the fridge and loosened the Free Foresters tie that held the door in place. With a wild tearing noise he passed his right thumb-nail down the rotted rubber strips, took out three eggs, and re-tied the tie. Waiting for them to boil, he lounged at the window, elbows on the sill, peering fondly through the burglar wire at his beloved roof-tops, which descended like giant stepping-stones to the sea’s edge.

  The roof-tops were a civilisation for themselves, a breathtaking theatre of survival against the raging of the city. Within their barbed-wire compounds, sweat-shops turned out anoraks, religious services were held, mah-jong was played, and fortune-tellers burned joss and consulted huge brown volumes. Ahead of him lay a formal garden made of smuggled earth. Below, three old women fattened chow puppies for the pot. There were schools for dancing, reading, ballet, recreation, and combat; there were schools in culture and the wonders of Mao, and this morning, while Jerry’s eggs boiled, an old man completed his long rigmarole of calisthenics before opening the tiny folding chair where he performed his daily reading of the great man’s Thoughts.