John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  But Sol had no use for humour, or objections either, least of all from some pretty-faced Brit. “And do we go for his jugular?” he demanded, keeping straight on course. “Do we, hell. We pussyfoot. We stand on the sidelines. ‘Play it delicate. It’s a British ball game. Their territory, their joe, their party.’ So we weave, we dance around. We float like a butterfly and sting like one. Jesus, if we’d been handling this thing, we’d have had that bastard trussed over a barrel months ago.”

  Slapping the table with his palm, he used the rhetorical trick of repeating his point in different language. “For the first time ever, we have gotten ourselves a sabre-toothed Soviet Communist corrupter in our sights, pushing dope and screwing up the area and taking Russian money and we can prove it!” It was all addressed to Martello; Smiley and Guillam might not have been there at all.

  “And you just remember another thing,” he advised Martello in conclusion. “We got big people wanting mileage out of this. Impatient people. Influential. People very angry with the dubious part your Company has indirectly played in the supply and merchandising of narcotics to our boys in Vietnam, which is why you cut us in on this in the first place. So maybe you better tell some of those limousine liberals back in Langley, Virginia, it’s time for them to shit or get off the pot. Pot in both senses,” he ended, in a humourless—and to Guillam, pointless—pun.

  Smiley had turned so pale that Guillam was genuinely afraid for him; he wondered whether he had had a heart attack, or was going to faint. From where Guillam sat, his cheeks and complexion were suddenly an old man’s, and his eyes, as he too addressed Martello only, had an old man’s fire.

  “However, there is an agreement,” Smiley said. “And so long as it stands, I trust that you will stick to it. We have your general declaration that you will abstain from operations in British areas unless our permission has been granted. We have your particular promise that you will leave to us the entire development of this case, outside surveillance and communication, regardless of where the development leads. That was the contract: a complete hands-off in exchange for a complete sight of the product. I take that to mean this: no action by Langley and no action by any other American agency. I take that to be your absolute word. And I take your word to be still good, and I regard that understanding as irreducible.”

  “Tell him,” said Sol, and walked out, followed by Cy, his sallow Mormon sidekick. At the door Sol turned and jabbed a finger in Smiley’s direction.

  “You ride our wagon, we tell you where to get off and where to stay topsides,” he said.

  The Mormon nodded. “Sure do,” he said, and smiled at Guillam as if in invitation. On Martello’s nod, Murphy and his fellow quiet man followed them out of the room.

  Martello was pouring drinks. In his office, the walls were also rosewood—a fake laminate, Guillam noticed, not the real thing—and when Martello pulled a handle he revealed an ice machine that vomited a steady flow of pellets in the shape of rugby balls. He poured three whiskies without asking the others what they wanted. Smiley looked all in. His plump hands were still cupped over the ends of his airport chair, but he was leaning back like a spent boxer between rounds, staring at the ceiling, which was perforated by twinkling lights. Martello set the glasses on the table.

  “Thank you, sir,” Guillam said. Martello liked a “sir.”

  “You bet,” said Martello.

  “Whom else have your headquarters told?” Smiley said, to the stars. “The Revenue Service? The Customs Service? The Mayor of Chicago? Their twelve best friends? Do you realise that not even my masters know we are in collaboration with you? God in heaven.”

  “Ah, come on now, George. We have politics, same as you. We have promises to keep. Mouths to buy. Enforcement’s out for our blood. That dope story’s gotten a lot of air time on the Hill. Senators, the House sub-committees, the whole garbage. Kid comes back from the war a screaming junkie, first thing his pa does is write to his congressman. Company doesn’t care for all those bad rumours. It likes to have its friends on its own side. That’s showbiz, George.”

  “Could I please just know what the deal is?” Smiley asked. “Could I have it in plain words, at least?”

  “Oh, now, there’s no deal, George. Langley can’t deal with what she doesn’t own, and this is your case, your property, your . . . We fish for him—you do, with a little help from us, maybe—we do our best and then if, ah, we don’t come up with anything—why, Enforcement will get in on the act a little and, on a very friendly and controllable basis, try their hand.”

  “At which point it’s open season,” Smiley said. “My goodness, what a way to run a case.”

  When it came to pacification, Martello was a very old hand indeed.

  “George. George. Suppose they nail Ko. Suppose they fall on him out of the trees next time he leaves the Colony. If Ko’s going to languish in Sing Sing on a ten-to-thirty rap—why, we can pick him clean at will. Is that so very terrible, suddenly?”

  Yes it bloody well is, thought Guillam, till it suddenly dawned on him, with a quite malignant glee, that Martello himself was not “witting” on the subject of brother Nelson, and that George had kept his best card to his chest.

  Smiley was still sitting forward. The ice in his whisky had put a damp frost round the outside of the glass, and for a time he stared at it, watching the tears slide onto the rosewood table.

  “So how long have we got on our own?” Smiley asked. “What’s our head start before the narcotics people come barging in?”

  “It’s not rigid, George. It’s not like that! It’s parameters, like Cy said.”

  “Three months?”

  “That’s generous, a little generous.”

  “Less than three months?”

  “Three months, inside of three months, ten to twelve weeks—in that area, George. It’s fluid. It’s between friends. Three months outside, I would say.”

  Smiley breathed out in a long slow sigh: “Yesterday we had all the time in the world.”

  Martello dropped the veil an inch or two. “Sol is not that conscious, George,” he said, careful to use Circus jargon rather than his own. “Ah, Sol has blank areas,” he said, half by way of admission. “We don’t just throw him the whole carcass, know what I mean?”

  Martello paused, then said, “Sol goes to first echelon. No further. Believe me.”

  “And what does first echelon mean?”

  “He knows Ko is in funds from Moscow. Knows he pushes opium. That’s all.”

  “Does he know of the girl?”

  “Now, she’s a case in point, George. The girl. That girl went with him on the trip to Bangkok. Remember Murphy describing the Bangkok trip? She stayed in the hotel suite with him. She flew on with him to Manila. I saw you read me there. I caught your eye. But we had Murphy delete that section of the report. Just for Sol’s benefit.”

  Very slightly, Smiley seemed to revive. “Deal stands, George,” Martello assured him munificently. “Nothing’s added, nothing’s subtracted. You play the fish, we’ll help you eat it. Any help along the way, you just have to pick up that green line and holler.”

  He went so far as to lay a consoling hand on Smiley’s shoulder, but sensing that Smiley disliked the gesture, abandoned it rather quickly. “However, if you ever do want to pass us the oars—why, we would merely reverse that arrangement and—”

  “Steal our thunder and get yourselves thrown off the Colony into the bargain,” said Smiley, completing the sentence for him. “I want one more thing made clear. I want it written down. I want it to be the subject of an exchange of letters between us.”

  “Your party, you choose the games,” said Martello expansively.

  “My service will play the fish,” Smiley insisted, in the same direct tone. “We will also land it, if that is the angling expression. I’m not a sportsman, I’m afraid.”

  “Land it, beach it, hook it, sure.”

  Martello’s good will, to Guillam’s suspicious eye, was tiring a little at t
he edges.

  “I insist on it being our operation. Our man. I insist on first rights. To have and to hold, until we see fit to pass him on.”

  “No problem, George, no problem at all. You take him aboard, he’s yours. Soon as you want to share him, call us. It’s simple as that.”

  “I’ll send round a written confirmation in the morning.”

  “Oh, don’t bother to do that, George. We have people. We’ll have them collect it for you.”

  “I’ll send it round,” said Smiley.

  Martello stood up. “George, you just got yourself a deal.”

  “I had a deal already,” Smiley said. “Langley broke it.”

  They shook hands.

  The case history has no other moment like this. In the trade it goes under various smart phrases. “The day George reversed the controls,” is one—though it took him a good week, and brought Martello’s deadline that much nearer. But to Guillam the process had something far more stately about it, far more beautiful than a mere technical retooling. As his understanding of Smiley’s intention slowly grew, as he looked on fascinated while Smiley laid down each meticulous line, summoned this or that collaborator, put out a hook here, and took in a cleat there, Guillam had the sensation of watching the turn-round of some large ocean-going vessel as it is coaxed and nosed and gentled into facing back along its own course.

  They returned to the Circus without a word spoken. Smiley took the last flight of stairs slowly enough to revive Guillam’s fears for his health, so that as soon as he was able he rang the Circus doctor and gave him a run-down of the symptoms as he saw them—only to be told that Smiley had been round to see him a couple of days ago on an unrelated matter and showed every sign of being indestructible.

  The throne-room door closed and Fawn, the baby-sitter, once more had his beloved Chief to himself. Smiley’s needs, where they filtered through, had the smack of alchemy. Beechcraft aeroplanes: he wished for plans and catalogues, and also—provided they could be obtained unattributably—any details of owners, sales, and purchases in the South East Asian region. Toby Esterhase duly disappeared into the murky thickets of the aircraft sales industry, and soon afterwards Fawn handed to Molly Meakin a daunting heap of back numbers of a journal called Transport World with handwritten instructions from Smiley in the traditional green ink of his office to mark down any advertisements for Beechcraft planes which might have caught the eye of a potential buyer during the six-month period before the pilot Ricardo’s abortive opium mission into Red China.

  Again on Smiley’s written orders, Guillam discreetly visited several of di Salis’s burrowers and, without the knowledge of their temperamental superior, established that they were still far from putting the finger on Nelson Ko. One old fellow went so far as to suggest that Drake Ko had spoken no less than the truth in his last meeting with old Hibbert, and that brother Nelson was dead indeed. But when Guillam took this news to Smiley he shook his head impatiently and handed him a signal for transmission to Craw, telling him to obtain from his local police source, preferably on a pretext, all recorded details of the travel movements of Ko’s manager, Tiu, in and out of mainland China.

  Craw’s long answer was on Smiley’s desk forty-eight hours later, and it appeared to give him a rare moment of pleasure, for he ordered out the duty driver and had himself taken to Hampstead, where he walked alone over the Heath for an hour, through sunlit frost and, according to Fawn, stood gawping at the ruddy squirrels before returning to the throne-room.

  “But don’t you see?” Smiley protested to Guillam, in an equally rare fit of excitement that evening. “Don’t you understand, Peter?” He shoved Craw’s dates under Guillam’s nose, actually stubbing his finger on one entry. “Tiu went to Shanghai six weeks before Ricardo’s mission. How long did he stay there? Forty-eight hours. Oh, you are a dunce!”

  “I’m nothing of the kind,” Guillam retorted. “I just don’t happen to have a direct line to God, that’s all.”

  In the cellars, cloistered with Millie McCraig, the head listener, Smiley replayed old Hibbert’s monologues, scowling occasionally—said Millie—at di Salis’s clumsy bullying. Otherwise he read and prowled, and talked to Sam Collins in short, intensive bursts. These encounters, Guillam noticed, cost Smiley a lot of spirit, and his bouts of ill temper—which Lord knows were few enough for a man with Smiley’s burdens—always occurred after Sam’s departure. And even when they had blown over, he looked more strained and lonely than ever, till he had taken one of his long night walks.

  Then on about the fourth day, which in Guillam’s life was a crisis day for some reason—probably the argument with Treasury, who resented paying Craw a bonus—Toby Esterhase somehow slipped through the net of both Fawn and Guillam, and gained the throne-room undetected, where he presented Smiley with a bunch of Xeroxed contracts of sale for one brand-new four-seater Beechcraft to the Bangkok firm of Aerosuis & Co., registered in Zurich, details pending. Smiley was particularly jubilant about the fact that there were four seats. The two at the rear were removable, but the pilot’s and co-pilot’s were fixed. As to the actual sale of the plane, it had been completed on the twentieth of July: a scant month, therefore, before the crazy Ricardo set off to infringe Red China’s airspace and then changed his mind.

  “Even Peter can make that connection,” Smiley declared, with heavy skittishness. “Sequence, Peter, sequence, come on!”

  “The plane was sold two weeks after Tiu returned from Shanghai,” Guillam replied reluctantly.

  “And so?” Smiley demanded. “And so? What do we look at next?”

  “We ask ourselves who owns the firm of Aerosuis,” Guillam snapped, really quite irritated.

  “Precisely. Thank you,” said Smiley in mock relief. “You restore my faith in you, Peter. Now, then: whom do we discover at the helm of Aerosuis, do you think? The Bangkok representative, no less?”

  Guillam glanced at the notes on Smiley’s desk, but Smiley was too quick and clapped his hands over them.

  “Tiu,” Guillam said, actually blushing.

  “Hoorah. Yes. Tiu. Well done.”

  But by the time Smiley sent again for Sam Collins that evening, the shadows had returned to his pendulous face.

  Still the lines were thrown out. After his success in the aircraft industry, Toby Esterhase, the pavement artist, was reassigned to the liquor trade and flew to the Western Isles of Scotland, under the guise of a value-added-tax inspector, where he spent three days making a spot check of the books of a house of whisky distillers who specialised in the forward selling of unmatured kegs. He returned—to quote Connie—leering like a successful bigamist.

  The multiple climax of all this activity was an extremely long signal to Craw, drafted after a full-dress meeting of the operational directorate—the Golden Oldies, to quote Connie yet again—with Sam Collins added. The meeting followed an extended ways-and-means session with the Cousins, at which Smiley refrained from all mention of the elusive Nelson Ko, but requested certain additional facilities of surveillance and communication in the field.

  To his collaborators Smiley explained his plans this way: Till now the operation had been limited to obtaining intelligence about Ko and the ramifications of the Soviet gold seam. Much care had been taken to prevent Ko from becoming aware of the Circus’s interest in him.

  He then summarised the intelligence they had so far collected : Nelson, Ricardo, Tiu, the Beechcraft, the dates, the inferences, the Swiss-registered aviation company—which, as it now turned out, possessed no premises and no other aircraft. He would prefer, he said, to wait for the positive identification of Nelson, but every operation was a compromise and time, partly thanks to the Cousins, was running out.

  He made no mention at all of the girl, and he never once looked at Sam Collins while he delivered his address.

  Then he came to what he modestly called “the next phase.”

  “Our problem is to break the stalemate. There are operations which run better for not being resolv
ed. There are others which are worthless until they are resolved, and the Dolphin case is one of these.”

  He gave a studious frown, and blinked, then whipped off his spectacles and, to the secret delight of everyone, unconsciously subscribed to his own legend by polishing them on the fat end of his tie. “I propose to do this by turning our tactic inside out. In other words, by declaring to Ko our interest in his affairs.”

  It was Connie, as ever, who put an end to the suitably stunned silence. Her smile was also the fastest—and the most knowing. “He’s smoking him out,” she whispered to them all in ecstasy. “Same as he did with Bill, the clever hound! Lighting a fire on his doorstep, aren’t you, darling, and seeing which way he runs. Oh, George, you lovely, lovely man—the best of all my boys, I do declare!”

  Smiley’s signal to Craw used a different metaphor to describe the plan: one which fieldmen favour. He referred to “shaking Ko’s tree,” and it was clear from the remainder of the text that, despite the considerable dangers, he proposed to use the broad back of Jerry Westerby to do it.

  As a footnote to all this: a couple of days later, Sam Collins vanished. Everyone was very pleased. He ceased to come in and Smiley did not refer to him. His room, when Guillam sneaked in covertly to look it over, contained nothing personal to Sam at all except a couple of unbroken packs of playing-cards and some garish book matches advertising a West End night-club. When he sounded out the housekeepers, they were for once unusually forthcoming: his price was a kiss-off gratuity, they said, and a promise to have his pension rights reconsidered. He had not really had much to sell at all. A flash in the pan, they said, never to reappear. Good riddance.

  All the same, Guillam could not rid himself of a certain unease about Sam, which he often conveyed to Molly Meakin over the next few weeks. It was not just about bumping into him at Lacon’s office. He was bothered about the business of Smiley’s exchange of letters with Martello confirming their oral understanding. Rather than have the Cousins collect it, with the consequent parade of a limousine and even a motorcycle outrider in Cambridge Circus, Smiley had ordered Guillam to run it round to Grosvenor Square himself, with Fawn baby-sitting. But Guillam was snowed under with work, as it happened, and Sam as usual was spare. So when Sam volunteered to take it for him, Guillam let him, and wished to God he never had. He wished it still, devoutly. Because instead of handing George’s letter to Murphy or his faceless running mate, said Fawn, Sam had insisted on going in to Martello personally, and spent more than an hour with him alone.