John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels by John le Carré
Control never said what he was doing. If Smiley asked the mothers, or if Bill Haydon sauntered in, favourite boy, and made the same enquiry, they only shook their heads or silently raised their eyebrows towards paradise: “A terminal case,” said these gentle glances. “We are humouring a great man at the end of his career.” But Smiley—as he now patiently leafed through file after file, and in a corner of his complex mind rehearsed Irina’s diary to Ricki Tarr—Smiley knew, and in a quite real way took comfort from the knowledge, that he was not after all the first to make this journey of exploration; that Control’s ghost was his companion into all but the furthest reaches; and might even have stayed the whole distance if Operation Testify, at the eleventh hour, had not stopped him dead.
Breakfast again, and a much-subdued Welshman not drawn by undercooked sausage and overcooked tomato.
“Do you want these back,” Lacon demanded, “or have you done with them? They can’t be very enlightening, since they don’t even contain the reports.”
“Tonight, please, if you don’t mind.”
“I suppose you realise you look a wreck.”
He didn’t realise, but at Bywater Street, when he returned there, Ann’s pretty gilt mirror showed his eyes red-rimmed and his plump cheeks clawed with fatigue. He slept a little, then went his mysterious ways. When evening came, Lacon was actually waiting for him. Smiley went straight on with his reading.
For six weeks, according to the files, the naval dispatch had no successor. Other sections of the Ministry of Defence echoed the Admiralty’s enthusiasm for the original dispatch; the Foreign Office remarked that “this document sheds an extraordinary sidelight on Soviet aggressive thinking,” whatever that meant; Alleline persisted in his demands for special handling of the material, but he was like a general with no army. Lacon referred frostily to “the somewhat delayed follow-up,” and suggested to his Minister that he should “defuse the situation with the Admiralty.” From Control, according to the file, nothing. Perhaps he was lying low and praying it would blow over. In the lull, a Treasury Moscow-gazer sourly pointed out that Whitehall had seen plenty of this in recent years: an encouraging first report, then silence or, worse, a scandal.
He was wrong. In the seventh week, Alleline announced publication of three new Witchcraft reports all on the same day. All took the form of secret Soviet interdepartmental correspondence, though the topics differed widely.
Witchcraft No. 2, according to Lacon’s summary, described tensions inside Comecon and spoke of the degenerative effect of Western trade deals on its weaker members. In Circus terms, this was a classic report from Roy Bland territory, covering the very target that the Hungarian-based Aggravate network had been attacking in vain for years. “Excellent tour d’horizon,” wrote a Foreign Office customer, “and backed by good collateral.”
Witchcraft No. 3 discussed revisionism in Hungary and Kadar’s renewed purges in political and academic life: the best way to end loose talk in Hungary, said the author of the paper, borrowing a phrase coined by Khrushchev long before, would be to shoot some more intellectuals. Once again this was Roy Bland territory. “A salutary warning,” wrote the same Foreign Office commentator, “to all those who like to think the Soviet Union is going soft on satellites.”
These two reports were both in essence background, but Witchcraft No. 4 was sixty pages long and held by the customers to be unique. It was an immensely technical Soviet Foreign Service appreciation of the advantages and disadvantages of negotiating with a weakened American President. The conclusion, on balance, was that by throwing the President a bone for his own electorate, the Soviet Union could buy useful concessions in forthcoming discussions on multiple nuclear warheads. But it seriously questioned the desirability of allowing the United States to feel too much the loser, since this could tempt the Pentagon into a retributive or preemptive strike. The report was from the very heart of Bill Haydon territory. But, as Haydon himself wrote in a touching minute to Alleline (promptly copied, without Haydon’s knowledge, to the Minister and entered on the Cabinet Office file), in twenty-five years of attacking the Soviet nuclear target he had not laid his hands on anything of this quality.
“Nor,” he concluded, “unless I am extremely mistaken, have our American brothers-in-arms. I know that these are early days, but it does occur to me that anyone taking this material to Washington could drive a very hard bargain in return. Indeed, if Merlin maintains the standard, I would venture to predict that we could buy anything there is to have in the American agency’s shop.”
Percy Alleline had his reading-room; and George Smiley made himself a coffee on the derelict burner beside the washstand. Midway the meter ran out, and in a temper he called for Norman and ordered five pounds’ worth of shillings.
17
With mounting interest, Smiley continued his journey through Lacon’s meagre records from that first meeting of protagonists until the present day. At the time, such a mood of suspicion had gripped the Circus that even between Smiley and Control the subject of Source Merlin became taboo. Alleline brought up the Witchcraft reports and waited in the anteroom while the mothers took them to Control, who signed them at once in order to demonstrate that he had not read them. Alleline took back the file, poked his head round Smiley’s door, grunted a greeting, and clumped down the staircase. Bland kept his distance, and even Bill Haydon’s breezy visits—traditionally a part of the life up there, of the “talking shop” that Control in the old days had liked to foster among his senior lieutenants—became fewer and shorter, then ceased entirely.
“Control’s going potty,” Haydon told Smiley with contempt. “And if I’m not mistaken he’s also dying. It’s just a question of which gets him first.”
The customary Tuesday meetings were discontinued, and Smiley found himself constantly harassed by Control either to go abroad on some blurred errand or to visit the domestic outstations—Sarratt, Brixton, Acton, and the rest—as his personal envoy. He had a growing feeling that Control wanted him out of the way. When they talked, he felt the heavy strain of suspicion between them, so that even Smiley seriously wondered whether Bill was right and Control was unfit for his job.
The Cabinet Office files made it clear that those next three months saw a steady flowering of the Witchcraft operation, without any help from Control. Reports came in at the rate of two or even three a month, and the standard, according to the customers, continued excellent, but Control’s name was seldom mentioned and he was never invited to comment. Occasionally the evaluators produced quibbles. More often they complained that corroboration was not possible, since Merlin took them into uncharted areas: could we not ask the Americans to check? We could not, said the Minister. Not yet, said Alleline; who in a confidential minute seen by no one, added, “When the time is ripe we shall do more than barter our material for theirs. We are not interested in a one-time deal. Our task is to establish Merlin’s track record beyond all doubt. When that is done, Haydon can go to market . . .”
There was no longer any question of it. Among the chosen few who were admitted to the chambers of the Adriatic Working Party, Merlin was already a winner. His material was accurate; often other sources confirmed it retrospectively. A Witchcraft committee formed, with the Minister in the chair. Alleline was vice-chairman. Merlin had become an industry, and Control was not even employed. Which was why in desperation he had sent out Smiley with his beggar’s bowl: “There are three of them and Alleline,” he said. “Sweat them, George. Tempt them, bully them, give them whatever they eat.”
Of those meetings also, the files were blessedly ignorant, for they belonged in the worst rooms of Smiley’s memory. He had known already that there was nothing left in Control’s larder that would satisfy their hunger.
It was April. Smiley had come back from Portugal, where he had been burying a scandal, to find Control living under siege. Files lay strewn over the floor; new locks had been fitted to the windows. He had put the tea-cosy over his one telephone and from the c
“Tell them they’re buying their way in with counterfeit money,” he ordered, barely looking up from his files. “Tell them any damn thing. I need time.”
“There are three of them and Alleline,” Smiley now repeated to himself, seated at the Major’s card table and studying Lacon’s list of those who had been Witchcraft-cleared. Today there were sixty-eight licensed visitors to the Adriatic Working Party’s reading-room. Each, like a member of the Communist Party, was numbered according to the date of his admission. The list had been retyped since Control’s death; Smiley was not included. But the same four founding fathers still headed the list: Alleline, Bland, Esterhase, and Bill Haydon. Three of them and Alleline, Control had said.
Suddenly Smiley’s mind, open as he read to every inference, every oblique connection, was assailed by a quite extraneous vision: of himself and Ann walking the Cornish cliffs. It was the time immediately after Control’s death, the worst time Smiley could remember in their long, puzzled marriage. They were high on the coast, somewhere between Lamorna and Porthcurno; they had gone there out of season ostensibly for Ann to take the sea air for her cough. They had been following the coast path, each lost in his thoughts: she to Haydon, he supposed; he to Control, to Jim Prideaux and Testify, and the whole mess he had left behind him on retirement. They shared no harmony. They had lost all calmness in one another’s company; they were a mystery to each other, and the most banal conversation could take strange, uncontrollable directions. In London, Ann had been living quite wildly, taking anyone who would have her. He knew she was trying to bury something that hurt or worried her very much; but he knew no way to reach her.
“If I had died,” she demanded suddenly, “rather than Control, say, how would you feel towards Bill?”
Smiley was still pondering his answer when she threw in: “I sometimes think I safeguard your opinion of him. Is that possible? That I somehow keep the two of you together. Is that possible?”
“It’s possible.” He added, “Yes, I suppose I’m dependent on him, too, in a way.”
“Is Bill still important in the Circus?”
“More than he was, probably.”
“And he still goes to Washington, wheels and deals with them, turns them upside down?”
“I expect so. I hear so.”
“Is he as important as you were?”
“I suppose.”
“I suppose,” she repeated. “I expect. I hear. Is he better, then? A better performer than you, better at the arithmetic? Tell me. Please tell me. You must.”
She was strangely excited. Her eyes, tearful from the wind, shone desperately upon him; she had both hands on his arm and, like a child, was dragging on him for an answer.
“You’ve always told me that men aren’t to be compared,” he replied awkwardly. “You’ve always said you didn’t think in that category of comparison.”
“Tell me!”
“All right: no, he’s not better.”
“As good?”
“ No.”
“And if I wasn’t there, what would you think of him then? If Bill were not my cousin, not my anything? Tell me, would you think more of him, or less?”
“Less, I suppose.”
“Then think less now. I divorce him from the family, from our lives, from everything. Here and now. I throw him into the sea. There. Do you understand?”
He understood only: go back to the Circus, finish your business. It was one of a dozen ways she had of saying the same thing.
Still disturbed by this intrusion on his memory, Smiley stood up in rather a flurry and went to the window, his habitual lookout when he was distracted. A line of sea-gulls, a half dozen of them, had settled on the parapet. He must have heard them calling, and remembered that walk to Lamorna.
“I cough when there are things I can’t say,” Ann had told him once. What couldn’t she say then, he asked glumly of the chimney-pots across the street. Connie could say it, Martindale could say it; so why couldn’t Ann?
“Three of them and Alleline,” Smiley muttered aloud. The sea-gulls had gone, all at once, as if they had spotted a better place. “Tell them they’re buying their way in with counterfeit money.” And if the banks accept the money? If the experts pronounce it genuine, and Bill Haydon praises it to the skies? And the Cabinet Office files are full of plaudits for the brave new men of Cambridge Circus, who have finally broken the jinx?
He had chosen Esterhase first because Toby owed Smiley his career. Smiley had recruited him in Vienna, a starving student living in the ruins of a museum of which his dead uncle had been curator. He drove down to Acton and bearded him at the Laundry across his walnut desk with its row of ivory telephones. On the wall, kneeling Magi, questionable Italian seventeenth century. Through the window, a closed courtyard crammed with cars and vans and motorbikes, and rest-huts where the teams of lamplighters killed time between shifts. First Smiley asked Toby about his family: there was a son who went to Westminster and a daughter at medical school, first year. Then he put it to Toby that the lamplighters were two months behind on their worksheets, and when Toby hedged he asked him outright whether his boys had been doing any special jobs recently, either at home or abroad, which for good reasons of security Toby didn’t feel able to mention in his returns.
“Who would I do that for, George?” Toby had asked, dead-eyed. “You know in my book that’s completely illegal.” And idiom, in Toby’s book, had a way of being ludicrous.
“Well, I can see you doing it for Percy Alleline, for one,” Smiley suggested, feeding him the excuse: “After all, if Percy ordered you to do something and not to record it, you’d be in a very difficult position.”
“What sort of something, though, George, I wonder?”
“Clear a foreign letter-box, prime a safe house, watch someone’s back, spike an embassy. Percy’s Director of Operations, after all. You might think he was acting on instructions from the fifth floor. I can see that happening quite reasonably.”
Toby looked carefully at Smiley. He was holding a cigarette, but apart from lighting it he hadn’t smoked it at all. It was a hand-rolled affair, taken from a silver box, but once lit, it never went into his mouth. It swung around, along the line or away to the side; sometimes it was poised to take the plunge, but it never did. Meanwhile Toby made his speech: one of Toby’s personal statements, supposedly definitive about where he stood at this point in his life.
Toby liked the service, he said. He would prefer to remain in it. He felt sentimental about it. He had other interests and at any time they could claim him altogether, but he liked the service best. His trouble was, he said, promotion. Not that he wanted it for any greedy reason. He would say his reasons were social.
“You know, George, I have so many years’ seniority I feel actually quite embarrassed when these young fellows ask me to take orders from them. You know what I mean? Acton, even—just the name of Acton for them is ridiculous.”
“Oh,” said Smiley mildly. “Which young fellows are these?”
But Esterhase had lost interest. His statement completed, his face settled again into its familiar blank expression, his doll’s eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance.
“Do you mean Roy Bland?” Smiley asked. “Or Percy? Is Percy young? Who, Toby?”
It was no good, Toby regretted: “George, when you are overdue for promotion and working your fingers to the bones, anyone looks young who’s above you on the ladder.”
“Perhaps Control could move you up a few rungs,” Smiley suggested, not much caring for himself in this role.
Esterhase’s reply struck a chill. “Well, actually, you know, George, I am not too sure he is able these days. Look here”—opening a drawer—“I give Ann something. When I heard you were coming, I phone a couple of friends of mine; something beautiful, I say, somethin
So Smiley carried off the consolation prize—a costly scent, smuggled, he assumed, by one of Toby’s homing lamplighters—and took his beggar bowl to Bland, knowing as he did so that he was coming one step nearer to Haydon.
Returning to the Major’s table, Smiley searched through Lacon’s files till he came to a slim volume marked “Operation Witchcraft, direct subsidies,” which recorded the earliest expenses incurred through the running of Source Merlin. “For reasons of security it is proposed,” wrote Alleline in yet another personal memo to the Minister, this one dated almost two years ago, “to keep the Witchcraft financing absolutely separate from all other Circus imprests. Until some proper cover can be found, I am asking you for direct subventions from Treasury funds rather than mere supplementaries to the Secret Vote, which in due course are certain to find their way into the mainstream of Circus accounting. I shall then account to you personally.”
“Approved,” wrote the Minister a week later, “provided always . . .”