John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  The interior doors opened with a bang. One of the messengers shouted “Gentlemen!” and those who knew the form stood back to let the women file ahead. There were two. The men followed and Guillam brought up the tail. For a few yards it might have been the Circus: a makeshift bottle-neck at which each face was checked by janitors, then a makeshift corridor leading to what resembled a builders’ cabin parked at the centre of a gutted stair-well—except that it had no windows and was suspended from wires and held tight by guy-ropes. Guillam had lost sight of Smiley entirely, and as he climbed the hardboard steps and entered the safe room he saw only shadows hovering under a blue night-light.

  “Do do something, somebody,” Enderby growled, in the tones of a bored diner complaining about the service. “Lights, for God’s sake. Bloody little men.”

  The door slammed behind Guillam’s back, a key turned in the lock, an electronic hum did the scale and whined out of earshot, and three strip-lights stammered to life, drenching everyone in their sickly pallor.

  “Hoorah,” said Enderby, and sat down. Later Guillam wondered how he had been so sure it was Enderby calling in the darkness, but there are voices you can hear before they speak.

  The conference table was covered in a ripped green baize like a billiards table in a youth club. The Foreign Office sat one end, the Colonial Office at the other. The separation was visceral rather than legal. For six years, the two departments had been formally married under the grandiose awnings of the Diplomatic Service, but no one in his right mind took the union seriously.

  Guillam and Smiley sat at the centre, shoulder to shoulder, each with empty chairs to the other side of him. Examining the cast, Guillam was absurdly aware of costume. The Foreign Office had come sharply dressed in charcoal suits and the secret plumage of privilege: both Enderby and Martindale wore Old Etonian ties. The Colonialists had the home-weave look of country people come to town, and the best they could offer in the way of ties was one Royal Artilleryman: honest Wilbraham, their leader, a fit lean schoolmasterly figure with crimson veins on his weather-beaten cheeks. A tranquil woman in church-organ brown supported him, and to the other side a freshly minted boy with freckles and a shock of ginger hair.

  The rest of the committee sat across from Smiley and Guillam and had the air of seconds in a duel they disapproved of. They had come in twos for protection: dark Pretorius of the Security Service with one nameless woman bag-carrier; two grim warriors from Defence; two Treasury bankers, one of them Welsh Hammer. Oliver Lacon was alone and had set himself apart from everyone, for all the world the person least engaged.

  Before each pair of hands lay Smiley’s submission in a pink-and-red folder marked “Top Secret Withhold,” like a souvenir programme. The “Withhold” meant keep it away from the Cousins. Smiley had drafted it, the mothers had typed it, Guillam himself had watched the eighteen pages come off the duplicators and supervised the hand-stitching of the twenty-four copies. Now their handiwork lay tossed around the torn baize, among the water-glasses and the ashtrays. Lifting a copy six inches above the table, Enderby let it fall with a slap.

  “All read it?” he asked. All had.

  “Then let’s go,” said Enderby, and peered round the table with bloodshot, arrogant eyes. “Who’ll start the bowling? Oliver? You got us here. You shoot first.”

  It crossed Guillam’s mind that Martindale, the great scourge of the Circus and its works, was curiously subdued. His eyes were turned dutifully to Enderby, and his mouth sagged unhappily.

  Lacon meanwhile was setting out his defences: “Let me say first that I’m as much taken by surprise in this as anyone else,” he said. “This is a real body-blow, George. It would have been helpful to have had a little preparation. It’s a little uncomfortable for me, I have to tell you, to be the link to a service which has rather cut its links of late.”

  Wilbraham said, “Hear, hear.” Smiley preserved a mandarin silence. Pretorius of the competition frowned in agreement.

  “It also comes at an awkward time,” Lacon added portentously. “I mean the thesis, your thesis alone, is—well, momentous. A lot to swallow. A lot to face up to, George.”

  Having thus secured his back way out, Lacon made a show of pretending there might not be a bomb under the bed at all.

  “Let me try to summarise the summary. May I do that? In bald terms, George. A prominent Hong Kong Chinese citizen is under suspicion of being a Russian spy. That’s the nub?”

  “He is known to receive very large Russian subventions,” Smiley corrected him, but talking to his hands.

  “From a secret fund devoted to financing penetration agents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Solely for financing them? Or does this fund have other uses?”

  “To the best of our knowledge, it has no other use at all,” said Smiley in the same lapidary tone as before.

  “Such as—propaganda—the informal promotion of trade—kickbacks, that kind of thing? No?”

  “To the best of our knowledge: no,” Smiley repeated.

  “Ah, but how good’s their knowledge?” Wilbraham called from below the salt. “Hasn’t been too good in the past, has it?”

  “You see what I’m getting at?” Lacon asked.

  “We would want far more corroboration,” the Colonial lady in church brown said, with a heartening smile.

  “So would we,” Smiley agreed mildly. One or two heads lifted in surprise. “It is in order to obtain corroboration that we are asking for rights and permissions.”

  Lacon resumed the initiative. “Accept your thesis for a moment. A secret intelligence fund, all much as you say.”

  Smiley gave a remote nod.

  “Is there any suggestion that he subverts the Colony?”

  “No.”

  Lacon glanced at his notes. It occurred to Guillam that he had done a lot of homework.

  “He is not, for example, preaching the withdrawal of their sterling reserves from London? Which would put us a further nine hundred million pounds in the red?”

  “To my knowledge, no.”

  “He is not telling us to get off the Island. He is not whipping up riots or urging amalgamation with the mainland, or waving the wretched treaty in our faces?”

  “Not that we know.”

  “He’s not a leveller. He’s not demanding effective trade unions, or a free vote, or a minimum wage, or compulsory education, or racial equality, or a separate parliament for the Chinese instead of their tame assemblies, whatever they’re called?”

  “Legco and Exco,” Wilbraham snapped. “And they’re not tame.”

  “No, he isn’t,” said Smiley.

  “Then what is he doing?” Wilbraham interrupted excitedly. “Nothing. That’s the answer. They’ve got it all wrong. It’s a goose-chase.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Lacon proceeded, as if he hadn’t heard, “he probably does as much to enrich the Colony as any other wealthy and respected Chinese businessman. Or as little. He dines with the Governor, but he is not known to rifle the contents of his safe, I assume. In fact, to all outward purposes, he is something of a Hong Kong prototype: Steward of the Jockey Club, supports the charities, pillar of the integrated society, successful, benevolent, has the wealth of Croesus and the commercial morality of the whore-house.”

  “I say, that’s a bit hard!” Wilbraham objected. “Steady on, Oliver. Remember the new housing estates.”

  Again Lacon ignored him: “Short of the Victoria Cross, a war-disability pension, and a baronetcy, therefore, it is hard to see how he could be a less suitable subject for harassment by a British service, or recruitment by a Russian one.”

  “In my world, we call that good cover,” said Smiley.

  “Touché, Oliver,” said Enderby with satisfaction.

  “Oh, everything’s cover these days,” said Wilbraham mournfully, but it didn’t get Lacon off the hook.

  Round 1 to Smiley, thought Guillam in delight, recalling the dreadful Ascot dinner. “Hitty-pitty within the wall, a
nd bumps goes Pottifer,” he chanted inwardly, with due acknowledgment to his hostess.

  “Hammer?” said Enderby, and the Treasury had a brief fling in which Smiley was hauled over the coals for his financial accounts, but no one except the Treasury seemed to find Smiley’s transgressions relevant.

  “This is not the purpose for which you were granted a secret float,” Hammer kept insisting, in Welsh outrage. “That was postmortem funds only—”

  “Fine, fine, so Georgie’s been a naughty boy,” Enderby interrupted in the end, closing him down. “Has he thrown his money down the drain or has he made a cheap killing? That’s the question. Chris, time the Empire had its shout.”

  Thus bidden, Colonial Wilbraham formally took the floor, backed by his lady in church brown and his red-haired assistant, whose young face was already set bravely in protection of his headmaster.

  Wilbraham was one of those men who are unconscious of how much time they take to think. “Yes,” he began after an age. “Yes. Yes—well, I’d like to stay with the money, if I may, much as Lacon did, to begin with.” It was already clear that he regarded the submission as an assault upon his territory. “Since the money is all we’ve got to go on,” he remarked pointedly, turning back a page in his folder. “Yes.” And there followed another interminable hiatus. “You say here the money first of all came from Paris through Vientiane.” Pause. “Then the Russians switched systems, so to speak, and it was paid through a different channel altogether. A Hamburg-Vienna-Hong Kong tie-up. Endless complexities, subterfuges, all that—we’ll take your word for it—right. Same amount, different hat, so to speak. Right. Now, why d’you think they did that, so to speak?”

  “So to speak,” Guillam recorded, who was very susceptible to verbal ticks.

  “It is sensible practice to vary the routine from time to time,” Smiley replied, repeating the explanation he had already offered in the submission.

  “Tradecraft, Chris,” Enderby put in, who liked his bit of jargon, and Martindale, still piano, shot him a glance of admiration.

  Again Wilbraham slowly wound himself up.

  “We’ve got to be guided by what Ko does,” he declared with puzzled fervour, and rattled his knuckles on the baize table. “Not by what he gets. That’s my argument. After all, I mean—dash it—it’s not Ko’s own money, is it? Legally it’s nothing to do with him.” The point caused a moment’s puzzled silence. “Page two, top. Money’s all in trust.” A general shuffle as everyone but Smiley and Guillam reached for their folders. “I mean, not only is none of it being spent, which in itself is jolly odd—I’ll come to that in a bit—it’s not Ko’s money. It’s in trust, and when the claimant comes along, whoever he or she is, it will be the claimant’s money. Till then, it’s the trust’s money. So to speak. So, I mean, what’s Ko done wrong? Opened a trust? No law against that. Done every day. Specially in Hong Kong. The beneficiary of the trust—oh, well, he could be anywhere! In Moscow or Timbuctoo or—” He didn’t seem to be able to think of a third place, so he dried up, to the discomfort of his ginger-headed assistant, who scowled straight at Guillam as if to challenge him. “Point is: what’s against Ko?”

  Enderby was holding a matchstick to his mouth, and rolling it between his front teeth. Conscious perhaps that his adversary had made a good point badly—whereas his own speciality tended to be the reverse—he took the matchstick out and contemplated the wet end.

  “Hell’s all this balls about thumb-prints, George?” he asked, perhaps in an effort to deflate Wilbraham’s success. “Like something out of Phillips Oppenheim.”

  Belgravia cockney, thought Guillam: the last stage of linguistic collapse.

  Smiley’s answers contained about as much emotion as a speaking clock: “The use of thumb-prints is old banking practice along the China coast. It dates from the days of widespread illiteracy. Many overseas Chinese prefer to use British banks rather than their own, and the structure of this account is by no means extraordinary. The beneficiary is not named, but identifies himself by a visual means, such as the torn half of a banknote—or in this case his left thumb-prints, on the assumption that it is less worn by labour than the right. The bank is unlikely to raise an eyebrow provided that whoever founded the trust has indemnified the bank against charges of accidental or wrongful payment.”

  “Thank you,” said Enderby, and did more delving with the matchstick. “Could be Ko’s own thumb-print, I suppose,” he suggested. “Nothing to stop him doing that, is there? Then it would be his money all right. If he’s trustee and beneficiary all at once, of course it’s his own damn money.”

  To Guillam, the issue had already taken a quite ludicrous wrong turning.

  “That’s pure supposition,” Wilbraham said after the usual two-minute silence. “Suppose Ko’s doing a favour for a chum. Just suppose that for a moment. And this chum’s on a fiddle, so to speak, or doing business with the Russians at several removes. Your Chinese loves a conspiracy. Get up to all the tricks, even the nicest of ’em. Ko’s no different, I’ll be bound.”

  Speaking for the first time, the red-haired boy ventured direct support.

  “The submission rests on a fallacy,” he declared bluntly, speaking at this stage more to Guillam than to Smiley. Sixth-form puritan, thought Guillam; thinks sex weakens you and spying is immoral. “You say Ko is on the Russian payroll. We say that’s not demonstrated. We say the trust may contain Russian money, but that Ko and the trust are separate entities.” In his indignation he went on too long: “You’re talking about guilt. Whereas we say Ko’s done nothing wrong under Hong Kong law and should enjoy the due rights of a Colonial subject.”

  Several voices pounced at once. Lacon’s won. “No one is talking about guilt,” he retorted. “Guilt doesn’t enter into it in the least degree. We’re talking about security. Solely. Security, and the desirability or otherwise of investigating an apparent threat.”

  Welsh Hammer’s Treasury colleague was a bleak Scot, as it turned out, with a style as bald as the sixth-former’s.

  “Nobody’s sizing up to infringe Ko’s Colonial rights, either,” he snapped. “He hasn’t any. There’s nothing in Hong Kong law whatever which says the Governor cannot steam open Mr. Ko’s mail, tap Mr. Ko’s telephone, suborn his maid, or bug his house to kingdom come. Nothing whatever. There are a few other things the Governor can do too, if he feels like it.”

  “Also speculative,” said Enderby, with a glance to Smiley. “Circus has no local facilities for those high jinks, and anyway in the circumstances they’d be insecure.”

  “They would be scandalous,” said the red-haired boy unwisely, and Enderby’s gourmet eye, yellowed by a lifetime’s luncheons, lifted to him, and marked him down for future treatment.

  So that was the second, inconclusive skirmish. They hacked about in this way till coffee break, no victor and no corpses. Round 2 a draw, Guillam decided. He wondered despondently how many rounds there would be.

  “What’s it all about?” he asked Smiley under the buzz. “They won’t make it go away by talking. It’s a monstrous notion. What’s wrong with them?”

  “They have to reduce it to their own size,” Smiley explained uncritically. Beyond that, he seemed bent on Oriental self-effacement, and no prodding from Guillam was going to shake him out of it. Enderby demanded fresh ashtrays.

  The parliamentary Under-Secretary said they should try to make progress. “Think what it’s costing the taxpayer, just having us sit here,” he urged proudly. Lunch was still two hours away.

  Opening round 3, Enderby moved the ticklish issue of whether to advise the Hong Kong government of the intelligence regarding Ko. This was impish of him, in Guillam’s view, since the position of the shadow Colonial Office (as Enderby referred to his homespun confrères) was still that there was no crisis, and consequently nothing for anyone to be advised of.

  But honest Wilbraham, failing to see the trap, walked into it and said, “Of course we should advise Hong Kong! They’re self-administering. We’
ve no alternative.”

  “Oliver?” said Enderby with the calm of a man who holds good cards. Lacon glanced up, clearly irritated at being drawn into the open. “Oliver?” Enderby repeated.

  “I’m tempted to reply that it’s Smiley’s case and Wilbraham’s Colony and we should let them fight it out,” he said, remaining firmly on the fence.

  Which left Smiley: “Oh, well, if it were the Governor and nobody else I could hardly object,” he said. “That is, if you feel it’s not too much for him,” he added dubiously, and Guillam saw the redhead stoke himself up again.

  “Why the dickens should it be too much for the Governor ?” Colonial Wilbraham demanded, genuinely perplexed. “Experienced administrator, shrewd negotiator. Find his way through anything. Why’s it too much?”

  This time, it was Smiley who made the pause. “He would have to encode and decode his own telegrams, of course,” he mused, as if he were even now working his way obliviously through all the implications. “We couldn’t have him cutting his staff in on the secret, naturally. That’s asking too much of anyone. Personal code-books—well, we can fix him up with those, no doubt. Brush up his coding, if he needs it. There is also the problem, I suppose, of the Governor being forced into the position of agent provocateur if he continues to receive Ko socially—which he obviously must. We can’t frighten the game at this stage. Would he mind that? Perhaps not. Some people take to it quite naturally.” He glanced at Enderby.

  Wilbraham was already expostulating: “But good heavens, man—if Ko’s a Russian spy, which we say he isn’t anyway—if the Governor has him to dinner, and perfectly naturally, in confidence, commits some minor indiscretion—Well, it’s damned unfair. It could ruin the man’s career. Let alone what it could do to the Colony! He must be told!”