John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels by John le Carré
For these test transmissions between Moscow and California, Smiley explained, a book code was used: “Then, one day, Moscow signalled a straight order—”
“Still on the book code?”
“Precisely. That is the point. Owing to a temporary inattention on the part of Rudnev’s cryptographers, we were ahead of the game. The wranglers broke the code and that’s how we got our information. Gerstmann was to leave San Francisco at once and head for Delhi for a rendezvous with the Tass correspondent, a talent-spotter who had stumbled on a hot Chinese lead and needed immediate direction. Why they dragged him all the way from San Francisco to Delhi, why it had to be Karla and no one else—well, that’s a story for another day. The only material point is that when Gerstmann kept the rendezvous in Delhi, the Tass man handed him an aeroplane ticket and told him to go straight home to Moscow. No questions. The order came from Rudnev personally. It was signed with Rudnev’s workname and it was brusque even by Russian standards.”
Whereupon the Tass man fled, leaving Gerstmann standing on the pavement with a lot of questions and twenty-eight hours until take-off.
“He hadn’t been standing there long when the Indian authorities arrested him at our request and carted him off to Delhi jail. As far as I remember, we had promised the Indians a piece of the product. I think that was the deal,” he remarked and, like someone suddenly shocked by the faultiness of his own memory, fell silent and looked distractedly down the steamy room. “Or perhaps we said they could have him when we’d done with him. Dear, oh dear.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” Guillam said.
“For once in Karla’s life, as I say, the Circus was ahead of him,” Smiley resumed, having taken a sip of wine and made a face. “He couldn’t know it but the San Francisco network which he had just serviced had been rolled up hide and hair the day he left for Delhi. As soon as Control had the story from the wranglers, he traded it to the Americans on the understanding that they missed Gerstmann but hit the rest of the Rudnev network in California. Gerstmann flew on to Delhi unaware, and he was still unaware when I arrived at Delhi jail to sell him a piece of insurance, as Control called it. His choice was very simple. There could not be the slightest doubt, on present form, that Gerstmann’s head was on the block in Moscow, where to save his own neck Rudnev was busy denouncing him for blowing the San Francisco network. The affair had made a great splash in the States, and Moscow was very angry at the publicity. I had with me the American press photographs of the arrest, even of the radio set Karla had imported and the signal plans he had cached before he left. You know how prickly we all become when things get into the papers.”
Guillam did; and with a jolt remembered the Testify file, which he had left with Mendel earlier that evening.
“To sum it up, Karla was the proverbial cold-war orphan. He had left home to do a job abroad. The job had blown up in his face, but he couldn’t go back: home was more hostile than abroad. We had no powers of permanent arrest, so it was up to Karla to ask us for protection. I don’t think I had ever come across a clearer case for defection. I had only to convince him of the arrest of the San Francisco network—wave the press photographs and cuttings from my briefcase at him—talk to him a little about the unfriendly conspiracies of Brother Rudnev in Moscow, and cable the somewhat overworked inquisitors in Sarratt, and with any luck I’d make London by the weekend. I rather think I had tickets for Sadler’s Wells. It was Ann’s great year for ballet.”
Yes, Guillam had heard about that, too: a twenty-year-old Welsh Apollo, the season’s wonder boy. They had been burning up London for months.
The heat in the jail was appalling, Smiley continued. The cell had an iron table at the centre and iron cattle rings let into the wall. “They brought him manacled, which seemed silly because he was so slight. I asked them to free his hands and when they did, he put them on the table in front of him and watched the blood come back. It must have been painful but he didn’t comment on it. He’d been there a week and he was wearing a calico tunic. Red. I forget what red meant. Some piece of prison ethic.” Taking a sip of wine, he again pulled a face, then slowly corrected the gesture as the memories once more bore in upon him.
“Well, at first sight, he made little impression on me. I would have been hard put to it to recognise in the little fellow before me the master of cunning we have heard about in Irina’s diary, poor woman. I suppose it’s also true that my nerve-ends had been a good deal blunted by so many similar encounters in the last few months, by travel, and well by—well, by things at home.”
In all the time Guillam had known him, it was the nearest Smiley had ever come to acknowledging Ann’s infidelities.
“For some reason, it hurt an awful lot.” His eyes were still open but his gaze had fixed upon an inner world. The skin of his brow and cheeks was drawn smooth as if by the exertion of his memory; but nothing could conceal from Guillam the loneliness evoked by this one admission. “I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,” Smiley went on, more lightly. “Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things. What do you think of it?”
“What did Karla look like?” Guillam asked, treating the question as rhetorical.
“Avuncular. Modest, and avuncular. He would have looked very well as a priest: the shabby, gnomic variety one sees in small Italian towns. Little wiry chap, with silvery hair and bright brown eyes and plenty of wrinkles. Or a schoolmaster, he could have been a schoolmaster: tough—whatever that means—and sagacious within the limits of his experience; but the small canvas, all the same. He made no other initial impression, except that his gaze was straight and it fixed on me from early in our talk. If you can call it a talk, seeing that he never uttered a word. Not one, the whole time we were together; not a syllable. Also it was stinking hot and I was travelled to death.”
Out of a sense of manners rather than appetite, Smiley set to work on his food, eating several mouthfuls joylessly before resuming his narrative. “There,” he muttered, “that shouldn’t offend the cook. The truth is, I was slightly predisposed against Mr. Gerstmann. We all have our prejudices and radio men are mine. They’re a thoroughly tiresome lot, in my experience, bad fieldmen and overstrung, and disgracefully unreliable when it comes down to doing the job. Gerstmann, it seemed to me, was just another of the clan. Perhaps I’m looking for excuses for going to work on him with less”—he hesitated—“less care, less caution, than in retrospect would seem appropriate.” He grew suddenly stronger. “Though I’m not at all sure I need make any excuses,” he said.
Here Guillam sensed a wave of unusual anger, imparted by a ghostly smile that crossed Smiley’s pale lips. “To hell with it,” Smiley muttered.
Guillam waited, mystified.
“I also remember thinking that prison seemed to have taken him over very fast in seven days. He had that white dust in the skin and he wasn’t sweating. I was, profusely. I trotted out my piece, as I had a dozen times that year already, except that there was obviously no question of his being played back into Russia as our agent. ‘You have the alternative. It’s no one else’s business but your own. Come to the West and we can give you, within reason, a decent life. After questioning, at which you are expected to cooperate, we can help you to a new start, a new name, seclusion, a certain amount of money. On the other hand, you can go home and I suppose they’ll shoot you or send you to a camp. Last month they sent Bykov, Shur, and Muranov. Now why don’t you tell me your real name?’ Something like that. Then I sat back and wiped away the sweat and waited for him to say, ‘Yes, thank you.’ He did nothing. He didn’t speak. He simply sat there stiff and tiny under the big fan that didn’t work, looking at me with his brown, rather jolly eyes. Hands out in front of him. They were very calloused. I remember thinking I must ask him where he had been doing so much manual labour. He held them—like this—resting on the table, palms upward and fingers a little bent, as if he were still manacled.”
The boy, thinking that by this gesture Smiley was indicating some want, came lumbering over, and Smiley again assured him that all was doubly well, and the wine in particular was exquisite—he really wondered where they had it from; till the boy left grinning with secret amusement and flapped his cloth at an adjoining table.
“It was then, I think, that an extraordinary feeling of unease began to creep over me. The heat was really getting to me. The stench was terrible and I remember listening to the pat-pat of my own sweat falling onto the iron table. It wasn’t just his silence; his physical stillness began to get under my skin. Oh, I had known defectors who took time to speak. It can be a great wrench for somebody trained to secrecy even towards his closest friends suddenly to open his mouth and spill secrets to his enemies. It also crossed my mind that the prison authorities might have thought it a courtesy to soften him up before they brought him to me. They assured me they hadn’t, but of course one can never tell. So at first, I put his silence down to shock. But this stillness—this intense, watchful stillness—was a different matter. Specially when everything inside me was so much in motion: Ann, my own heartbeats, the effects of heat and travel . . .”
“I can understand,” said Guillam quietly.
“Can you? Sitting is an eloquent business; any actor will tell you that. We sit according to our natures. We sprawl and straddle, we rest like boxers between rounds, we fidget, perch, cross and uncross our legs, lose patience, lose endurance. Gerstmann did none of those things. His posture was finite and irreducible, his little jagged body was like a promontory of rock; he could have sat that way all day, without stirring a muscle. Whereas I—” Breaking out in an awkward, embarrassed laugh, Smiley tasted the wine again, but it was no better than before. “Whereas I longed to have something before me—papers, a book, a report. I think I am a restless person, fussy, variable. I thought so then, anyway. I felt I lacked philosophic repose. Lacked philosophy, if you like. My work had been oppressing me much more than I realised; till now. But in that foul cell I really felt aggrieved. I felt that the entire responsibility for fighting the cold war had landed on my shoulders. Which was tripe, of course; I was just exhausted and a little bit ill.” He drank again.
“I tell you,” he insisted, once more quite angry with himself. “No one has any business to apologise for what I did.”
“What did you do?” Guillam asked, with a laugh.
“So anyway there came this gap,” Smiley resumed, disregarding the question. “Hardly of Gerstmann’s making, since he was all gap; so of mine, then. I had said my piece; I had flourished the photographs, which he ignored—I may say, he appeared quite ready to take my word for it that the San Francisco network was blown. I restated this part, that part, talked a few variations, and finally I dried up. Or, rather, sat there sweating like a pig. Well, any fool knows that if ever that happens, you get up and walk out. ‘Take it or leave it,’ you say. ‘See you in the morning’; anything. ‘Go away and think for an hour.’
“As it was, the next thing I knew, I was talking about Ann.” He left no time for Guillam’s muffled exclamation. “Oh, not about my Ann, not in as many words. About his Ann. I assumed he had one. I had asked myself—lazily, no doubt—what would a man think of in such a situation, what would I? And my mind came up with a subjective answer: his woman. Is it called ‘projection’ or ‘substitution’? I detest those terms but I’m sure one of them applies. I exchanged my predicament for his, that is the point, and as I now realise I began to conduct an interrogation with myself—he didn’t speak, can you imagine? There were certain externals, it is true, to which I pinned the approach. He looked connubial; he looked like half a union; he looked too complete to be alone in all his life. Then there was his passport, describing Gerstmann as married; and it is a habit in all of us to make our cover stories, our assumed personae, at least parallel with the reality.” He lapsed again into a moment of reflection. “I often thought that. I even put it to Control: we should take the opposition’s cover stories more seriously, I said. The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal. The fifty-year-old who knocks five years off his age. The married man who calls himself a bachelor; the fatherless man who gives himself two children . . . Or the interrogator who projects himself into the life of a man who does not speak. Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they are making a fantasy about themselves.”
He was lost again, and Guillam waited patiently for him to come back. For while Smiley might have fixed his concentration upon Karla, Guillam had fixed his on Smiley; and just then would have gone anywhere with him, turned any corner, in order to remain beside him and hear the story out.
“I also knew from the American observation reports that Gerstmann was a chain-smoker: Camels. I sent out for several packs of them—‘packs’ is the American word?—and I remember feeling very strange as I handed money to a guard. I had the impression, you see, that Gerstmann saw something symbolic in the transaction of money between myself and the Indian. I wore a money belt in those days. I had to grope and peel off a note from a bundle. Gerstmann’s gaze made me feel like a fifth-rate imperialist oppressor.” He smiled. “And that I assuredly am not. Bill, if you like. Percy. But not I.” He called to the boy, in order to send him away: “May we have some water, please? A jug and two glasses? Thank you.” Again he picked up the story: “So I asked him about Mrs. Gerstmann. I asked him: where was she? It was a question I would dearly have wished answered about Ann. No reply but the eyes unwavering. To either side of him, the two guards, and their eyes seemed so light by comparison. She must make a new life, I said; there was no other way. Had he no friend he could count on to look after her? Perhaps we could find methods of getting in touch with her secretly? I put it to him that his going back to Moscow would do nothing for her at all. I was listening to myself, I ran on, I couldn’t stop. Perhaps I didn’t want to. I was really thinking of leaving Ann, you see; I thought the time had come. To go back would be a quixotic act, I told him, of no material value to his wife or anyone—quite the reverse. She would be ostracised; at best, she would be allowed to see him briefly before he was shot. On the other hand, if he threw in his lot with us, we might be able to trade her; we had a lot of stock in those days, remember, and some of it was going back to Russia as barter; though why in God’s name we should have used it up for that purpose is beyond me. Surely, I said, she would prefer to know him safe and well in the West, with a fair chance that she herself would join him, than shot or starving to death in Siberia? I really harped upon her: his expression encouraged me. I could have sworn I was getting through to him, that I had found the chink in his armour; when of course all I was doing—all I was doing was showing him the chink in mine. And when I mentioned Siberia, I touched something. I could feel it, like a lump in my own throat; I could feel in Gerstmann a shiver of revulsion. Well, naturally I did,” Smiley commented sourly; “since it was only recently that he had been made an inmate. Finally, back came the guard with the cigarettes, armfuls of them, and dumped them with a clatter on the iron table. I counted the change, tipped him, and in doing so again caught the expression in Gerstmann’s eyes; I fancied I read amusement there, but really I was no longer in a state to tell. I noticed that the boy refused my tip; I suppose he disliked the English. I tore open a packet and offered Gerstmann a cigarette. ‘Come,’ I said, ‘you’re a chain-smoker, everyone knows that. And this is your favourite brand.’ My voice sounded strained and silly, and there was nothing I could do about it. Gerstmann stood up and politely indicated to the warders that he would like to return to his cell.”
Taking his time, Smiley pushed aside his half-eaten food, over which white flakes of fat had formed like seasonable frost.
“As he left the cell, he changed his mind and helped himself to a packet of cigarettes and the lighter from the table—my lighter, a gift from Ann. ‘To George from Ann with all my love.’ I would never have dreamed of letting him take it in the ordinary way; but this w
“You were ill,” Guillam insisted.
“Let us say tired. Ill or tired; all night, between aspirin and quinine and treacly visions of the Gerstmann marriage resurrected, I had a recurring image. It was of Gerstmann, poised on the sill, staring down into the street with those fixed brown eyes, and myself talking to him, on and on, ‘Stay, don’t jump, stay.’ Not realising, of course, that I was dreaming of my own insecurity, not his. In the early morning a doctor gave me injections to bring down the fever. I should have dropped the case, cabled for a replacement. I should have waited before going to the prison, but I had nothing but Gerstmann in mind; I needed to hear his decision. By eight o’clock I was already having myself escorted to the accommodation cells. He was sitting stiff as a ramrod on a trestle bench; for the first time, I guessed the soldier in him, and I knew that, like me, he hadn’t slept all night. He hadn’t shaved and there was a silver down on his jaw which gave him an old man’s face. On other benches Indians were sleeping, and with his red tunic and this silvery colouring he looked very white among them. He was holding Ann’s lighter in his hands; the packet of cigarettes lay beside him on the bench, untouched. I concluded that he had been using the night, and the forsworn cigarettes, to decide whether he could face prison and interrogation, and death. One look at his expression told me that he had decided he could. I didn’t beseech him,” Smiley said, going straight on. “He would never have been swayed by histrionics. His plane left in the mid-morning; I still had two hours. I am the worst advocate in the world, but in those two hours I tried to summon all the reasons I knew for his not flying to Moscow. I believed, you see, that I had seen something in his face that was superior to mere dogma, not realising that it was my own reflection. I had convinced myself that Gerstmann ultimately was accessible to ordinary human arguments coming from a man of his own age and profession and—well, durability. I didn’t promise him wealth and women and Cadillacs and cheap butter; I accepted that he had no use for those things. I had the wit by then, at least, to steer clear of the topic of his wife. I didn’t make speeches to him about freedom—whatever that means—or the essential goodwill of the West; besides, they were not favourable days for selling that story, and I was in no clear ideological state myself. I took the line of kinship. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we’re getting to be old men, and we’ve spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another’s systems. I can see through Eastern values just as you can see through our Western ones. Both of us, I am sure, have experienced ad nauseam the technical satisfactions of this wretched war. But now your own side is going to shoot you. Don’t you think it’s time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine? Look,’ I said, ‘in our trade we have only negative vision. In that sense, neither of us has anywhere to go. Both of us when we were young subscribed to great visions—’ Again I felt an impulse in him—Siberia—I had touched a nerve. ‘But not any more. Surely?’ I urged him just to answer me this: did it not occur to him that he and I by different routes might well have reached the same conclusions about life? Even if my conclusions were what he would call unliberated, surely our workings were identical? Did he not believe, for example, that the political generality was meaningless? That only the particular in life had value for him now? That in the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery? And that therefore his life, the saving of it from yet another meaningless firing squad, was more important—morally, ethically more important—than the sense of duty, or obligation, or commitment, or whatever it was that kept him on this present path of self-destruction? Did it not occur to him to question—after all the travels of his life—to question the integrity of a system that proposed cold-bloodedly to shoot him down for misdemeanours he had never committed? I begged him—yes, I did beseech him, I’m afraid; we were on the way to the airport and he still had not addressed a word to me—I begged him to consider whether he really believed; whether faith in the system he had served was honestly possible to him at this moment.”