John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels by John le Carré
Marie-Claire Guillam, then, rang her husband at six exactly, just as Guillam was locking away his code-books. Guillam had two telephone lines to his desk, one of them in theory operational and direct. The second went through the Embassy switchboard. Marie-Claire rang on the direct line, a thing they had always agreed she would only ever do in emergency. She spoke French, which, true, was her native language, but they had recently been communicating in English in order to improve her fluency.
“Peter,” she began.
He heard at once the tension in her voice.
“Marie-Claire? What is it?”
“Peter, there’s someone here. He wants you to come at once.”
“Who?”
“I can’t say. It’s important. Please come home at once,” she repeated and rang off.
Guillam’s chief clerk, a Mr. Anstruther, had been standing at the strong-room door when the call came, waiting for him to spin the combination lock before they each put in their keys. Through the open doorway to Guillam’s office he saw him slam down the phone, and the next thing he knew, Guillam had tossed to Anstruther—a long throw, probably fifteen feet—the Head Resident’s sacred personal key, near enough the symbol of his office, and Anstruther by a miracle had caught it: put up his left hand and caught it in his palm, like an American baseball player; he couldn’t have done it again if he’d tried it a hundred times, he told Guillam later.
“Don’t budge from here till I ring you!” Guillam shouted. “You sit at my desk and you man those phones. Hear me?”
Anstruther did, but by then Guillam was half-way down the absurdly elegant spiral staircase of the Embassy, barging between typists and Chancery guards and bright young men setting out on the evening cocktail round. Seconds later, he was at the wheel of his Porsche, revving the engine like a racing driver, which in another life he might well have been. Guillam’s home was in Neuilly, and in the ordinary way these sporting dashes through the rush-hour rather amused him, reminding him twice a day—as he put it—that however mindbendingly boring the Embassy routine, life around him was hairy, quarrelsome, and fun. He was even given to timing himself over the distance. If he took the Avenue Charles de Gaulle and got a fair wind at the traffic-lights, twenty-five minutes through the evening traffic was not unreasonable. Late at night or early in the morning, with empty roads and CD plates, he could cut it to fifteen, but in the rush-hour thirty-five minutes was fast going and forty the norm. That evening, hounded by visions of Marie-Claire held at pistol point by a bunch of crazed nihilists, he made the distance in eighteen minutes cold. Police reports later submitted to the Ambassador had him jumping three sets of lights and touching around a hundred and forty kilometres as he entered the home stretch; but these were of necessity something of a reconstruction, since no one felt inclined to try to keep up with him. Guillam himself remembers little of the drive, beyond a near squeak with a furniture van, and a lunatic cyclist who took it into his head to turn left when Guillam was a mere hundred and fifty metres behind him.
His apartment was in a villa, on the third floor. Braking hard before he reached the entrance, he cut the engine and coasted to a halt in the street outside, then pelted to the front door as quietly as haste allowed. He had expected a car parked somewhere close, probably with a get-away driver waiting at the wheel, but to his momentary relief there was none in sight. A light was burning in their bedroom, however, so that he now imagined Marie-Claire gagged and tied to the bed, and her captors sitting over her, waiting for Guillam to arrive. If it was Guillam they wanted, he did not propose to disappoint them. He had come unarmed; he had no choice. The Circus Housekeepers had a holy terror of weapons, and his illicit revolver was in the bedside locker, where no doubt they had by now found it. He climbed the three flights silently and at the front door threw off his jacket and dropped it on the floor beside him. He had his door key in his hand, and now, as softly as he knew how, he fed it into the lock, then pressed the bell and called “Facteur”—postman—through the letter-box and then “Exprès.” His hand on the key, he waited till he heard approaching footsteps, which he knew at once were not those of Marie-Claire. They were slow, even ponderous, and, to Guillam’s ear, too self-assured by half. And they came from the direction of the bedroom. What he did next, he did all at once. To open the door from inside, he knew, required two distinct movements: first the chain must be shot, then the spring catch must be freed. In a half-crouch, Guillam waited till he heard the chain slip, then used his one weapon of surprise: he turned his own key and threw all his weight against the door and, as he did so, had the intense satisfaction of seeing a plump male figure spin wildly back against the hall mirror, knocking it clean off its moorings, while Guillam seized his arm and swung it into a vicious breaking lock—only to see the startled face of his lifelong friend and mentor, George Smiley, staring helplessly at him.
The aftermath of that encounter is described by Guillam somewhat hazily; he had, of course, no forewarning of Smiley’s coming, and Smiley—perhaps out of fear of microphones—said little inside the flat to enlighten him. Marie-Claire was in the bedroom, but neither bound nor gagged; it was Ostrakova who, at Marie-Claire’s insistence, was lying on the bed, still in her old black dress, and Marie-Claire was ministering to her in any way she could think of—jellied breast of chicken, mint tea, all the invalid foods she had diligently laid in for the wonderful day, alas not yet at hand, when Guillam would fall ill on her. Ostrakova, Guillam noticed (though he had yet to learn her name), seemed to have been beaten up. She had broad grey bruises round the eyes and lips, and her fingers were cut to bits where she had apparently tried to defend herself. Having briefly admitted Guillam to this scene—the battered lady tended by the anxious child bride—Smiley conducted Guillam to his own drawing-room and, with all the authority of Guillam’s old chief, which he indeed had been, rapidly set out his requirements. Only now, it developed, was Guillam’s earlier haste warranted. Ostrakova—Smiley referred to her only as “our guest”—should leave Paris tonight, he said. The station’s safe house outside Orléans—he called it “our country mansion”—was not safe enough; she needed somewhere that provided care and protection. Guillam remembered a French couple in Arras, a retired agent and his wife, who in the past had provided shelter for the Circus’s occasional birds of passage. It was agreed he would telephone them, but not from the apartment: Smiley sent him off to find a public call-box. By the time Guillam had made the necessary arrangements and returned, Smiley had written out a brief signal on a sheet of Marie-Claire’s awful notepaper with its grazing bunnies, which he wished Guillam to have transmitted immediately to the Circus, “Personal for Saul Enderby, decipher yourself.” The text, which Smiley insisted that Guillam should read (but not aloud), politely asked Enderby—“in view of a second death no doubt by now reported to you”—for a meeting at Ben’s Place forty-eight hours hence. Guillam had no idea where Ben’s Place was.
“And, Peter.”
“Yes, George,” said Guillam, still dazed.
“I imagine there exists an official directory of locally accredited diplomats. Do you happen to have such a thing in the house by any chance?”
Guillam did. Indeed, Marie-Claire lived by it. She had no memory for names at all, so it lay beside the bedroom telephone for every time a member of a foreign embassy telephoned her with yet another invitation to drinks, to dinner, or, most ghastly of all, to a National Day festivity. Guillam fetched it, and a moment later was peering over Smiley’s shoulder. “Kirov,” he read—but not, once more, aloud—as he followed the line of Smiley’s thumb-nail—“Kirov, Oleg, Second Secretary (Commercial), Unmarried.” Followed by an address in the Soviet Embassy ghetto in the 7th district.
“Ever bumped into him?” Smiley asked.
Guillam shook his head. “We took a look at him a few years back. He’s marked ‘hands off,’” he replied.
“When was this list compiled?” Smiley asked. The answer was printed on the cover: December of the previous yea
Smiley said, “Well, when you get to the office—”
“I’ll take a look at the file,” Guillam promised.
“There is also this,” said Smiley sharply, and handed Guillam a plain carrier-bag containing, when he looked later, several micro-cassettes and a fat brown envelope.
“By first bag tomorrow, please,” Smiley said. “The same grading and the same addressee as the telegram.”
Leaving Smiley still poring over the list, and the two women cloistered in the bedroom, Guillam hastened back to the Embassy and, having released the bemused Anstruther from his vigil at the telephones, consigned the carrier-bag to him, together with Smiley’s instructions. The tension in Smiley had affected Guillam considerably, and he was sweating. In all the years he had known George, he said later, he had never known him so inward, so intent, so elliptical, so desperate. Re-opening the strong-room, he personally encoded and dispatched the telegram, waiting only as long as it took him to receive the Head Office acknowledgment before drawing the file on Soviet Embassy movements and browsing through back numbers of old watch lists. He had not far to look. The third serial, copied to London, told him all that he needed to know. Kirov Oleg, Second Secretary Commercial, described this time as “married but wife not en poste,” had returned to Moscow two weeks ago. In the panel reserved for miscellaneous comments, the French liaison service had added that, according to informed Soviet sources, Kirov had been “recalled to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs at short notice in order to take up a senior appointment which had become vacant unexpectedly.” The customary farewell parties had therefore not been feasible.
Back in Neuilly, Smiley received Guillam’s intelligence in utter silence. He did not seem surprised, but he seemed in some way appalled, and when he finally spoke—which did not occur until they were all three in the car and speeding towards Arras—his voice had an almost hopeless ring. “Yes,” he said—as if Guillam knew the whole history inside out. “Yes, that is of course exactly what he would do, isn’t it? He would call Kirov back under the pretext of a promotion, in order to make sure he really came.”
George had not sounded that way, said Guillam—no doubt with the wisdom of hindsight—since the night he unmasked Bill Haydon as Karla’s mole as well as Ann’s lover.
Ostrakova also, in retrospect, had little coherent recollection of that night, neither of the car journey, on which she contrived to sleep, nor of the patient but persistent questioning to which the little plump man subjected her when she woke late the next morning. Perhaps she had temporarily lost her capacity to be impressed—and, accordingly, to remember. She answered his questions, she was grateful to him, she gave him—without the zest or “decoration”—the same information that she had given to the magician, though he seemed to possess most of it already.
“The magician,” she said once. “Dead. My God.”
She asked after the General, but scarcely heeded Smiley’s noncommittal reply. She was thinking of Ostrakov, then Glikman, now the magician—and she never knew his name. Her host and hostess were kind to her also, but as yet made no impression on her. It was raining and she could not see the distant fields.
Little by little, all the same, as the weeks passed, Ostrakova permitted herself an idyllic hibernation. The deep winter came early and she let its snows embrace her; she walked a little, and then a great deal, retired early, spoke seldom, and as her body repaired itself so did her spirit. At first a pardonable confusion reigned in her mind, and she found herself thinking of her daughter in the terms by which the gingery stranger had described her: as the tearaway dissenter and untameable rebel. Then slowly the logic of the matter presented itself to her. Somewhere, she argued, there was the real Alexandra who lived and had her being, as before. Or who, as before, did not. In either case, the gingery man’s lies concerned a different creature altogether, one whom they had invented for their own needs. She even managed to find consolation in the likelihood that her daughter, if she lived at all, lived in complete ignorance of their machinations.
Perhaps the hurts which had been visited on her—of the mind as well as of the body—did what years of prayer and anxiety had failed to do, and purged her of her self-recriminations regarding Alexandra. She mourned Glikman at her leisure, she was conscious of being quite alone in the world, but in the winter landscape her solitude was not disagreeable to her. A retired brigadier proposed marriage to her but she declined. It turned out later that he proposed to everybody. Peter Guillam visited her at least every week and sometimes they walked together for an hour or two. In faultless French he talked to her mainly of landscape gardening, a subject on which he possessed an inexhaustible knowledge. That was Ostrakova’s life, where it touched upon this story. And it was lived out in total ignorance of the events that her own first letter to the General had set in train.
19
“Do you know his name really is Ferguson?” Saul Enderby drawled in that lounging Belgravia cockney which is the final vulgarity of the English upper class.
“I never doubted it,” Smiley said.
“He’s about all we’ve got left of that whole lamplighter stable. Wise Men don’t hold with domestic surveillance these days. Anti-Party or some damn thing.” Enderby continued his study of the bulky document in his hand. “So what’s your name, George? Sherlock Holmes dogging his poor old Moriarty? Captain Ahab chasing his big white whale? Who are you?”
Smiley did not reply.
“Wish I had an enemy, I must say,” Enderby remarked, turning a few pages. “Been looking for one for donkey’s years. Haven’t I, Sam?”
“Night and day, Chief,” Sam Collins agreed heartily, and sent his master a confiding grin.
Ben’s Place was the back room of a dark hotel in Knightsbridge and the three men had met there an hour ago. A notice on the door said “MANAGEMENT STRICTLY PRIVATE” and inside was an ante-room for coats and hats and privacy, and beyond it lay this oak-panelled sanctum full of books and musk, which in turn gave on to its own rectangle of walled garden stolen from the park, with a fish-pond and a marble angel and a path for contemplative walks. Ben’s identity, if he ever had one, was lost in the unwritten archives of Circus mythology. But this place of his remained, as an unrecorded perquisite of Enderby’s appointment, and of George Smiley’s before him—and as a trysting ground for meetings that afterwards have not occurred.
“I’ll read it again, if you don’t mind,” Enderby said. “I’m a bit slow on the uptake this time of day.”
“I think that would be jolly helpful, actually, Chief,” said Collins.
Enderby shifted his half-lens spectacles, but only by way of peering over the top of them, and it was Smiley’s secret theory that they were plain glass anyway.
“Kirov is doing the talking. This is after Leipzig has put the bite on him, right, George?” Smiley gave a distant nod. “They’re still sitting in the cat house with their pants down, but it’s five in the morning and the girls have been sent home. First we get Kirov’s tearful how-could-you-do-this-to-me? ‘I thought you were my friend, Otto!’ he says. Christ, he picked a wrong ’un there! Then comes his statement, put into bad English by the translators. They’ve made a concordance—that the word, George? Um’s and ah’s omitted.”
Whether it was the word or not, Smiley offered no answer. Perhaps he was not expected to. He sat very still in a leather armchair leaning forward over his clasped hands, and he had not taken off his brown tweed overcoat. A set of the Kirov typescripts lay at his elbow. He looked drawn, and Enderby remarked later that he seemed to have been on a diet. Sam Collins, head of Operations, sat literally in Enderby’s shadow, a dapper man with a dark moustache and a flashy, ever-ready smile. There had been a time when Collins was the Circus hard-man, whose years in the field had taught him to despise the cant of the fifth floor. Now he was the poacher turned gamekeeper, nurturing his own pension and security in the way he had once nurtured his networks. A wilful blankness had overcome him; he was smoking brown ci
“Here we go. I’m Kirov. ‘As a finance officer working in Moscow Centre from 1970 to 1974, it was my duty to unearth irregularities in the accounts of overseas residencies and bring the culprits to book.’” He broke off and peered over his glasses again. “This is all before Kirov was posted to Paris, right?”
“Dead right,” said Collins keenly and glanced at Smiley for support, but got none.
“Just working it out, you see, George,” Enderby explained. “Just getting my ducks in a row. Haven’t got your little grey cells.”
Sam Collins smiled brightly at his chief’s show of modesty.
Enderby continued: “‘As a result of conducting these extremely delicate and confidential enquiries, which in some cases led to the punishment of senior officers of Moscow Centre, I made the acquaintance of the head of the independent Thirteenth Intelligence Directorate, subordinated to the Party’s Central Committee, who is known throughout Centre only by his workname Karla. This is a woman’s name and is said to belong to the first network he controlled.’ That right, George?”