John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  Alexandra watched Grigoriev arrive, she waited for the moment when he leaned his head forward over the handle-bars and raised his ample bottom in the air and swung one short leg over the crossbars as if he were climbing off a woman. She saw how the short ride had reddened his face, she watched him unfasten the brief-case from the rack over the back wheel. She ran to the door and tried to kiss him, first on the cheek, then on the lips, for she had an idea of putting her tongue into his mouth as an act of welcome, but he scurried past her with his head down as if he were already going back to his wife.

  “Greetings, Alexandra Borisovna,” she heard him whisper, all of a flurry, uttering her patronymic as if it were a state secret.

  “Greetings, Uncle Anton,” she replied; then Sister Beatitude caught her by the arm, and whispered to her to behave herself or else.

  Mother Felicity’s study was at once both sparse and sumptuous. It was small and bare and very hygienic, and the Marthas scrubbed it and polished it every day so that it smelt like a swimming-pool. Yet her little pieces of Russia glistened like caskets. She had icons, and she had richly framed sepia photographs of princesses she had loved, and bishops she had served, and on her saint’s day—or was it her birthday or the bishop’s?—she had taken them all down and made a theatre of them with candles and a Virgin and a Christ-child. Alexandra knew this because Felicity had called her in to sit with her, and had read old Russian prayers to her aloud, and chanted bits of liturgy in a marching rhythm to her, and given her sweet cake and a glass of sweet wine, all to have Russian company on her saint’s day—or was it Easter or Christmas? Russians were the best in the world, she said. Gradually, though she had had a lot of pills, Alexandra had realised that Felicity-Felicity was stone drunk, so she lifted up her old feet and put a pillow for her, and kissed her hair and let her fall asleep on the tweed sofa where parents sat when they came to enrol fresh patients. It was the same sofa where Alexandra sat now, staring at Uncle Anton while he pulled the little notebook from his pocket. He was having one of his brown days, she noticed: brown suit, brown tie, brown shirt.

  “You should buy yourself brown cycle clips,” she told him in Russian.

  Uncle Anton did not laugh. He kept a piece of black elastic like a garter round his notebook and he was unwinding it with a shrewd, reluctant air while he moistened his official lips. Sometimes Alexandra thought he was a policeman, sometimes a priest disguised, sometimes a lawyer or schoolmaster, sometimes even a special kind of doctor. But whatever he was, he clearly wished her to know, by means of the elastic and the notebook, and by the expressions of nervous benevolence, that there was a Higher Law for which neither he nor she was personally responsible, that he did not mean to be her jailer, that he wished her forgiveness—if not her actual love—for locking her away. She knew also that he wished her to know that he was sad and even lonely, and assuredly that he was fond of her, and that in a better world he would have been the uncle who brought her birthday presents, Christmas presents faithfully, and each year chucked her under the chin, “My-my, Sasha, aren’t you growing up,” followed by a restrained pat on some rounded part of her, meaning “My-my, Sasha, you’ll soon be ready for the pot.”

  “How is your reading progressing, Alexandra?” he asked her while he flattened the notebook in front of him and turned the pages looking for his list. This was small talk. This was not the Higher Law. This was like talk about the weather, or what a pretty dress she was wearing, or how happy she appeared today—not at all like last week.

  “My name is Tatiana and I come from the moon,” she replied.

  Uncle Anton acted as though this statement had not been made, so perhaps she only said it to herself, silently in her mind, where she said a lot of things.

  “You have finished the novel by Turgenev I brought you?” he asked. “You were reading Torrents of Spring, I think.”

  “Mother Felicity was reading it to me but she has a sore throat,” said Alexandra.

  “So.”

  This was a lie. Felicity-Felicity had stopped reading to her as a punishment for throwing her food on the floor.

  Uncle Anton had found the page of his notebook with the list on it, and he had found his pencil too, a silver one with a top you pressed; he appeared inordinately proud of it.

  “So,” he said. “So then, Alexandra!”

  Suddenly Alexandra did not want to wait for his questions. Suddenly she could not. She thought of pulling down his trousers and making love to him. She thought of messing in a corner like the French girl. She showed him the blood on her hands where she had chewed them. She needed to explain to him, through her own divine blood, that she did not want to hear his first question. She stood up, holding out one hand for him while she dug her teeth into the other. She wanted to demonstrate to Uncle Anton, for once and for ever, that the question he had in mind was obscene to her, and insulting, and unacceptable, and mad, and to do this she had chosen Christ’s example as the nearest and best: did He not hang on Felicity-Felicity’s wall, straight ahead of her, with blood running down His wrists? I have shed this for you, Uncle Anton, she explained, thinking of Easter now, of Felicity-Felicity going round the castle breaking eggs. Please. This is my blood, Uncle Anton. I have shed it for you. But with her other hand jammed in her mouth, all she could manage in her speaking voice was a sob. So finally she sat down, frowning, with her hands linked on her lap, not actually bleeding, she noticed, but at least wet with her saliva.

  Uncle Anton held the notebook open with his right hand and was holding the pop-top pencil in his left. He was the first left-handed man she had known and sometimes, watching him write, she wondered whether he was a mirror image, with the real version of him sitting in the car behind Andreas Gertsch’s barn. She thought what a wonderful way that would be of handling what Dr. Rüedi called the “divided nature”—to send one half away on a bicycle while the other half stayed put in the car with the redheaded woman who drove him. Felicity-Felicity, if you lend me your pop-pop bicycle, I will send the bad part of me away on it.

  Suddenly she heard herself talking. It was a wonderful sound. It made her like all the strong healthy voices around her: politicians on the radio, doctors when they looked down on her in bed.

  “Uncle Anton, where do you come from, please?” she heard herself enquire, with measured curiosity. “Uncle Anton, pay attention to me, please, while I make a statement. Until you have told me who you are and whether you are my real uncle, and what is the registration number of your big black car, I shall refuse to answer any of your questions. I regret this, but it is necessary. Also, is the redheaded woman your wife or is she Felicity-Felicity with her hair dyed, as Sister Beatitude advises me?”

  But too often Alexandra’s mind spoke words which her mouth did not transmit, with the result that the words stayed flying around inside her and she became their unwilling jailer, just as Uncle Anton pretended to be hers.

  “Who gives you the money to pay Felicity-Felicity for my detention here? Who pays Dr. Rüedi? Who dictates what questions go into your notebook every week? To whom do you pass my answers which you so meticulously write down?”

  But once again, the words flew around inside her skull like the birds in Kranko’s greenhouse in the fruit season, and there was nothing that Alexandra could do to persuade them to come out.

  “So, then?” said Uncle Anton a third time, with the watery smile that Dr. Rüedi wore when he was about to give her an injection. “Now first you must please tell me your full name, Alexandra.”

  Alexandra held up three fingers and counted on them like a good child. “Alexandra Borisovna Ostrakova,” she said in an infantile voice.

  “Good. And how have you been feeling this week, Sasha?”

  Alexandra smiled politely in response: “Thank you, Uncle Anton. I have been feeling much better this week. Dr. Rüedi tells me that my crisis is already far behind me.”

  “Have you received by any means—post, telephone, or word of mouth—any communication from outside
persons?”

  Alexandra had decided she was a saint. She folded her hands on her lap, and tilted her head to one side, and imagined she was one of Felicity-Felicity’s Russian Orthodox saints on the wall behind the desk. Vera, who was faith; Liubov, who was love; Sofia, Olga, Irina, or Xenia—all the names that Mother Felicity had taught her during that evening when she had confided that her own real name was Hope—whereas Alexandra’s was Alexandra or Sasha, but never, never Tatiana, and just remember it. Alexandra smiled at Uncle Anton and she knew her smile was sublime, and tolerant, and wise; and that she was hearing God’s voice, not Uncle Anton’s; and Uncle Anton knew it too, for he gave a long sigh and put away his notebook, then reached for the bell button to summon Mother Felicity for the ceremony of the money.

  Mother Felicity came hastily and Alexandra guessed she had not been far from the other side of the door. She had the account ready in her hand. Uncle Anton considered it and frowned, as he always did, then counted notes onto the desk, blue ones and orange ones singly, so that each was for a moment transparent under the beam of the reading lamp. Then Uncle Anton patted Alexandra on the shoulder as if she were fifteen instead of twenty-five, or twenty, or however old she was when she had clipped away the forbidden bits of her life. She watched him waddle out of the door again and onto his bike. She watched his rump strive and gather rhythm as he rode away from her, through the lodge, past Kranko, and away down the hill towards the village. And as she watched she saw a strange thing, a thing that had never happened before: not to Uncle Anton, at least. From nowhere, two purposeful figures materialised—a man and a woman, wheeling a motor bike. They must have been sitting on the summer bench the other side of the lodge, keeping out of sight, perhaps in order to make love. They moved into the lane, and stared after him, but they didn’t mount the motor bike, not yet. Instead, they waited till Uncle Anton was almost out of sight before setting off after him down the hill. Then Alexandra decided to scream, and this time she found her talking voice and the scream split the whole house from roof to floor before Sister Beatitude bore down on her to quell her with a heavy smack across the mouth.

  “They’re the same people,” Alexandra shrieked.

  “Who are?” Sister Beatitude demanded, drawing back her hand in case she needed to use it again. “Who are the same people, you bad girl?”

  “They’re the people who followed my mother before they dragged her away to kill her.”

  Sister Beatitude gave a snort of disbelief. “On black horses, I suppose!” she sneered. “Dragged her on a sledge, too, didn’t he, all across Siberia!”

  Alexandra had spun these tales before. How her father was a secret prince more powerful than the Czar. How he ruled at night, as the owls rule while the hawks are at rest. How his secret eyes followed her wherever she went, how his secret ears heard every word she spoke. And how, one night, hearing her mother praying in her sleep, he sent his men for her and they took her into the snow and she was never seen again: not even by God, He was looking for her still.

  24

  The burning of Tricky Tony, as it afterwards became known in the Circus mythology—such being Grigoriev’s whimsical code-name among the watchers—was one of those rare operations where luck, timing, and preparation come together in a perfect marriage. They had all known from early on that the problem would be to find Grigoriev alone at a moment that allowed for his speedy reintroduction into normal life a few hours later. Yet by the week-end following the coverage of the Thun bank, intensive researches into Grigoriev’s behaviour pattern had produced no obvious pointers as to when this moment might be. In desperation Skordeno and de Silsky, Toby’s hard men, dreamed up a wildcat scheme to snatch him on his way to work, along the few hundred metres of pavement between his house and the Embassy. Toby killed it at once. One of the girls offered herself as a decoy: perhaps she could hitch a lift from him somehow? Her altruism was applauded, but it did not answer the practicalities.

  The main problem was that Grigoriev was under double guard. Not only did the Embassy security staff keep check on him as a matter of routine; so did his wife. The watchers had no doubt that she suspected him of a tenderness for little Natasha. Their fears were confirmed when Toby’s listeners contrived to tamper with the junction box at the corner of the road. In one day’s watch, Grigorieva telephoned her husband no less than three times, to no apparent purpose other than to establish that he was indeed at the Embassy.

  “George, I mean that woman is a total monster,” Toby stormed when he heard this. “Love—I mean, all right. But possession, for its own sake, this I absolutely condemn. It’s a matter of principle for me.”

  The one chink was Grigoriev’s Thursday-afternoon drives to the garage, when he took the Mercedes to have it checked. If a practised car coper such as Canada Bill could introduce an engine fault during the Wednesday night—one that kept the car mobile, but only just—then might not Grigoriev be snatched from the garage while he was waiting for the mechanic to trace it? The plan bristled with imponderables. Even if everything worked, how long would they have Grigoriev to themselves? Then again, on Thursdays Grigoriev must be back home in time to receive his weekly visit from the courier Krassky. Nevertheless, it remained the only plan they had—their worst except for the others, said Toby—and accordingly they settled to an apprehensive wait of five days while Toby and his team leaders plotted fall-backs for the many unpleasant contingencies should the plot abort: everyone to be signed out of his hotel and packed; escape papers and money to be carried at all times; radio equipment to be boxed and cached under American identity in the vaults of one of the major banks, so that any clues left behind would point to the Cousins rather than themselves; no forms of assembly other than walk-and-talk encounters on the pavement; wavelengths to be changed every four hours. Toby knew his Swiss police, he said. He had hunted here before. If the balloon went up, he said, then the fewer of his boys and girls around to answer questions, the better. “I mean thank God the Swiss are only neutral, know what I mean?”

  As a somewhat forlorn consolation, and as a boost to the delicate morale of the watchers, Smiley and Toby decreed that the surveillance of Grigoriev should be kept at full pitch throughout the expected days of waiting. The observation post in the Brunnadernrain would be manned round the clock; car and cycle patrols would be increased; everyone should be on his toes for the remote chance that God, in an uncharacteristic moment, would favour the just.

  What God did, in fact, was send idyllic Sunday weather, and it proved decisive. By ten o’clock that Sunday it was as if the Alpine sun had come down from the Oberland to brighten the lives of the fog-ridden lowlanders. In the Bellevue Palace, which on Sundays has a quite overwhelming calm, a waiter had just spread a napkin on Smiley’s lap for him. He was drinking a leisurely coffee, trying to concentrate on the week-end edition of the Herald Tribune, when, looking up, he saw the gentle figure of Franz the head porter standing before him.

  “Mr. Barraclough, sir, the telephone, I am sorry. A Mr. Anselm.”

  The cabins were in the main hall, the voice was Toby’s, and the name Anselm signified urgency: “The Geneva bureau has just advised us that the managing director is on his way to Berne at this very moment.”

  The Geneva bureau was word code for the Brunnadernrain observation post.

  “Is he bringing his wife?” said Smiley.

  “Unfortunately, Madame is obliged to make an excursion with the children,” Toby replied. “Perhaps if you could come down to the office, Mr. Barraclough?”

  Toby’s office was a sun pavilion situated in an ornamental garden next to the Bundeshaus. Smiley was there in five minutes. Below them lay the ravine of the green river. In the distance, under a blue sky, the peaks of the Bernese Oberland lifted splendidly in the sunlight.

  “Grigoriev left the Embassy on his own five minutes ago, wearing a hat and coat,” Toby said as soon as Smiley arrived. “He’s heading for the town on foot. It’s like the first Sunday we watched him. He walks to th
e Embassy, ten minutes later he sets off for the town. He’s going to watch the chess game, George, no question. What do you say?”

  “Who’s with him?”

  “Skordeno and de Silsky on foot, a back-up car behind, two more ahead. One team’s heading for the Cathedral Close right now. Do we go, George, or don’t we?”

  For a moment, Toby was aware of that disconnection which seemed to afflict Smiley whenever the operation gathered speed: less indecision, then a mysterious reluctance to advance.

  He pressed him: “The green light, George? Or not? George, please! We are speaking of seconds here!”

  “Is the house still covered for when Grigorieva and the children get back?”

  “Completely.”

  For a moment longer Smiley hesitated. For a moment, he weighed the method against the prize, and the grey and distant figure of Karla seemed actually to admonish him.

  “The green light, then,” said Smiley. “Yes. Go.”

  He had barely finished speaking before Toby was standing in the telephone kiosk not twenty metres from the pavilion. “With my heart going like a complete steam engine,” as he later claimed. But also with the light of battle in his eyes.

  There is even a scale model of the scene at Sarratt, and occasionally the directing staff will dig it out and tell the tale.

  The old city of Berne is best described as a mountain, a fortress, and a peninsula all at once, as the model shows. Between the Kirchenfeld and Kornhaus bridges, the Aare runs in a horseshoe cut into a giddy cleft, and the old city roosts prudently inside it, in rising foothills of medieval streets, till it reaches the superb late-Gothic spire of the Cathedral, which is both the mountain’s peak and its glory. Next to the Cathedral, at the same height, stands the Platform, from whose southern perimeter the unwary visitor may find himself staring down a hundred feet of sheer stone face, straight into the swirling river. It is a place to draw suicides and no doubt there have been some. It is a place where, according to popular history, a pious man was thrown from his horse and, though he fell the whole awesome distance, survived by God’s deliverance to serve the church for another thirty years, dying peacefully at a great age. The rest of the Platform makes a tranquil spot, with benches and ornamental trees and a children’s playground—and, in recent years, a place for public chess. The pieces are two feet or more in height, light enough to move, but heavy enough to withstand the occasional thrust of a south wind that whips off the surrounding hills. The scale model even runs to replicas of them.