John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels by John le Carré
“What went wrong?”
“Nothing. We weren’t right for each other.”
Guillam didn’t believe her.
“Did you get a divorce?”
“I expect so.”
“Don’t be damn silly; you must know whether you’re divorced or not!”
His parents handled it, she said; he was foreign.
“Does he send you money?”
“Why should he? He doesn’t owe me anything.”
Then the flute again, in the spare room, long questioning notes in the half-light while Guillam made coffee. Is she a fake or an angel? He’d half a mind to pass her name across the records. She had a lesson with Sand in an hour.
Armed with a green slip with a 43 reference, he returned the two files to their places and positioned himself at the alcove next to Testify.
Dry run uneventful, he thought.
The girl was still up her ladder. Allitson had vanished but the laundry basket was still there. The radiator had already exhausted Astrid and he was sitting beside it reading the Sun. The green slip read “4343,” and he found the file at once because he had already marked it down. It had a pink jacket like Testify. Like Testify, it was reasonably thumbed. He fitted the green slip into the bracket. He moved back across the aisle, again checked Allitson and the girls, then reached for the Testify file and replaced it very fast with the file he had in his hand.
“I think the vital thing, Peter”—Smiley speaking—“is not to leave a gap. So what I suggest is, you requisition a comparable file—physically comparable, I mean—and pop it into the gap which is left by—”
“I get you,” Guillam said.
Holding the Testify file casually in his right hand, title inward to his body, Guillam returned to the reading-room and again sat at his desk. Sal raised her eyebrows and mouthed something. Guillam nodded that all was well, thinking that was what she was asking, but she beckoned him over. Momentary panic. Take the file with me or leave it? What do I usually do? He left it on the desk.
“Juliet’s going for coffee,” Sal whispered. “Want some?”
Guillam laid a shilling on the counter.
He glanced at the clock, then at his watch. Christ, stop looking at your damn watch! Think of Camilla, think of her starting her lesson, think of those aunts you didn’t spend the weekend with, think of Alwyn not looking in your bag. Think of anything but the time. Eighteen minutes to wait. “Peter, if you have the smallest reservation, you really mustn’t go ahead with it. Nothing is as important as that.” Great, so how do you spot a reservation when thirty teenage butterflies are mating in your stomach and the sweat is like a secret rain inside your shirt? Never, he swore, never had he had it this bad.
Opening the Testify file, he tried to read it.
It wasn’t all that thin, but it wasn’t fat, either. It looked pretty much like a token volume, as Smiley had said: the first serial was taken up with a description of what wasn’t there. “Annexes 1 to 8 held London Station, cross-refer to P.F.s ELLIS Jim, PRIDEAUX Jim, HAJEK Vladimir, COLLINS Sam, HABOLT Max . . .” and a whole football team besides. “For these files, consult H/London Station or C.C.,” standing for Chief of Circus and his appointed mothers. Don’t look at your watch; look at the clock and do the arithmetic, you idiot. Eight minutes. Odd to be pinching files about one’s predecessor. Odd to have Jim as a predecessor, come to think of it, and a secretary who held a wake over him without ever mentioning his name. The only living trace Guillam had ever found of him, apart from his workname on the files, was his squash racket jammed behind the safe in his room, with “J.P.” hand-done in poker-work on the handle. He showed it to Ellen, a tough old biddy who could make Cy Vanhofer quail like a schoolboy, and she broke into floods of tears, wrapped it, and sent it to the housekeepers by the next shuttle, with a personal note to the Dolphin insisting that it be returned to him “if humanly possible.” How’s your game these days, Jim, with a couple of Czech bullets in your shoulder-bone?
Still eight minutes.
“Now, if you could contrive,” said Smiley, “I mean if it wouldn’t be too much bother, to take your car in for a service at your local garage. Using your home phone to make the appointment, of course, in the hope that Toby is listening . . .”
In the hope. Mother of Pearl. And all his cosy chats with Camilla? Still eight minutes.
The rest of the file seemed to be Foreign Office telegrams, Czech press cuttings, monitoring reports on Prague radio, extracts from a policy file on the resettlement and rehabilitation of blown agents, draft submissions to the Treasury, and a postmortem by Alleline that blamed Control for the fiasco. Sooner you than me, George.
In his mind, Guillam began measuring the distance from his desk to the rear door, where Alwyn dozed at the reception counter. He reckoned it was five paces and he decided to make a tactical staging post. Two paces from the door stood a chart chest like a big yellow piano. It was filled with oddments of reference: large-scale maps, back copies of Who’s Who, old Baedekers. Putting a pencil between his teeth, he picked up the Testify file, wandered to the chest, selected a telephone directory of Warsaw, and began writing names on a sheet of paper. My hand! a voice screamed inside him: my hand is shaking all over the page; look at those figures—I might be drunk! Why has no one noticed? . . . The girl Juliet came in with a tray and put a cup on his desk. He blew her a distracted kiss. He selected another directory—he thought for Poznan—and laid it beside the first. When Alwyn came through the door, he didn’t even look up.
“Telephone, sir,” he murmured.
“Oh, to hell,” said Guillam, deep in the directory. “Who is it?”
“Outside line, sir. Someone rough. The garage, I think, regarding your car. Said he’d got some bad news for you,” said Alwyn, very pleased.
Guillam was holding the Testify file in both hands, apparently cross-referring with the directory. He had his back to Sal and he could feel his knees shaking against his trouser legs. The pencil was still jammed in his mouth. Alwyn went ahead and held the swing door for him, and he passed through it reading the file. Like a damned choirboy, he thought. He waited for lightning to strike him, Sal to call murder, old Ben the superspy to leap suddenly to life, but it didn’t happen. He felt much better: Alwyn is my ally, I trust him, we are united against the Dolphin, I can move. The swing doors closed; he went down the four steps and there was Alwyn again, holding open the door to the telephone cubicle. The lower part was panelled, the upper part glass. Lifting the receiver, he laid the file at his feet and heard Mendel tell him he needed a new gear-box; the job could cost anything up to a hundred quid. They’d worked this up for the benefit of the housekeepers or whoever read the transcripts, and Guillam kept it going nicely to and fro till Alwyn was safely behind his counter, listening like an eagle. It’s working, he thought; I’m flying, it’s working after all. He heard himself say, “Well, at least get on to the main agents first and find out how long they’ll take to supply the damn thing. Have you got their number?” And irritably: “Hang on.”
He half-opened the door and he kept the mouthpiece jammed against his backside because he was very concerned that this part should not go on tape. “Alwyn, chuck me that bag a minute, will you?”
Alwyn brought it over keenly, like the first-aid man at a football match. “All right, Mr. Guillam, sir? Open it for you, sir?”
“Just dump it there, thanks.”
The bag was on the floor outside the cubicle. Now he stooped, dragged it inside, and unzipped it. At the middle, among his shirts and a lot of newspaper, were three dummy files, one buff, one green, one pink. He took out the pink dummy and his address book and replaced them with the Testify file. He closed the zip, and stood up and read Mendel a telephone number—actually the right one. He rang off, handed Alwyn the bag, and returned to the reading-room with the dummy file. He dawdled at the chart chest, fiddled with a couple more directories, then sauntered to the archive carrying the dummy file. Allitson was going through a comedy ro
“Peter, give us a hand, will you—I’m stuck.”
“Half a sec.”
Recovering the 43 file from the Testify pigeon-hole, he replaced it with the dummy, restored it to its rightful place in the 43 alcove, and removed the green slip from the bracket. God is in His heaven and the first night was a wow. He could have sung out loud: God is in His heaven and I can still fly.
He took the slip to Sal, who signed it and put it on a spike as she always did. Later today she would check. If the file was in its place, she would destroy both the green slip and the flimsy from the box, and not even clever Sal would remember that he had been alongside the 44 alcove. He was about to return to the archive to give old Allitson a hand when he found himself looking straight into the brown, unfriendly eyes of Toby Esterhase.
“Peter,” said Toby, in his not quite perfect English. “I am so sorry to disturb you but we have a tiny crisis and Percy Alleline would like quite an urgent word with you. Can you come now? That would be very kind.” And at the door, as Alwyn let them out: “Your opinion he wants, actually,” he remarked with the officiousness of a small but rising man. “He wishes to consult you for an opinion.”
In a desperately inspired moment, Guillam turned to Alwyn and said, “There’s a midday shuttle to Brixton. You might just give transport a buzz and ask them to take that thing over for me, will you?”
“Will do, sir,” said Alwyn. “Will do. Mind the step, sir.”
And you pray for me, thought Guillam.
21
“Our Shadow Foreign Secretary,” Haydon called him. The janitors called him “Snow White” because of his hair. Toby Esterhase dressed like a male model, but the moment he dropped his shoulders or closed his tiny fists he was unmistakably a fighter. Following him down the fourth-floor corridor—noting the coffee machine again, and Lauder Strickland’s voice explaining that he was unobtainable—Guillam thought, Christ, we’re back in Berne and on the run.
He’d half a mind to call this out to Toby, but decided the comparison was unwise.
Whenever he thought of Toby, that was what he thought of: Switzerland eight years ago, when Toby was just a humdrum watcher with a growing reputation for informal listening on the side. Guillam was kicking his heels after North Africa, so the Circus packed them both off to Berne on a one-time operation to spike a pair of Belgian arms dealers who were using the Swiss to spread their wares in unpopular directions. They rented a villa next door to the target house, and the following night Toby opened up a junction box and rearranged things so that they overheard the Belgians’ conversations on their own phone. Guillam was boss and legman, and twice a day he dropped the tapes on the Berne residency, using a parked car as a letter-box. With the same ease, Toby bribed the local postman to give him a first sight of the Belgians’ mail before he delivered it, and the cleaning lady to plant a radio mike in the drawing room where they held most of their discussions. For diversion, they went to the Chikito and Toby danced with the youngest girls. Now and then he brought one home, but by morning she was always gone and Toby had the windows open to get rid of the smell.
They lived this way for three months and Guillam knew him no better at the end than he had on the first day. He didn’t even know his country of origin. Toby was a snob, and knew the places to eat and be seen. He washed his own clothes and at night he wore a net over his snow white hair, and on the day the police hit the villa and Guillam had to hop over the back wall, he found Toby at the Bellevue Hotel munching pâtisseries and watching the thé dansant. He listened to what Guillam had to say, paid his bill, tipped first the bandleader, then Franz, the head porter, and then led the way along a succession of corridors and staircases to the underground garage where he had cached the escape car and passports. There also, punctiliously, he asked for his bill. Guillam thought, If you ever want to get out of Switzerland in a hurry, you pay your bills first. The corridors were endless, with mirror walls and Versailles chandeliers, so that Guillam was following not just one Esterhase but a whole delegation of them.
It was this vision that came back to him now, though the narrow wooden staircase to Alleline’s rooms was painted mud-green and only a battered parchment lampshade recalled the chandeliers.
“To see the Chief,” Toby announced portentously to the young janitor who beckoned them through with an insolent nod. In the anteroom at four grey typewriters sat the four grey mothers, in pearls and twin-sets. They nodded to Guillam and ignored Toby. A sign over Alleline’s door said “Engaged.” Beside it, a six-foot wardrobe safe, new. Guillam wondered how on earth the floor took the strain. On its top, bottles of South African sherry; glasses, plates. Tuesday, he remembered: London Station’s informal lunch meeting.
“I’ll have no phone calls, tell them,” Alleline shouted as Toby opened the door.
“The Chief will take no calls, please, ladies,” said Toby elaborately, holding back the door for Guillam. “We are having a conference.”
One of the mothers said, “We heard.”
It was a war party.
Alleline sat at the head of the table in the megalomaniac’s throne, reading a two-page document, and he didn’t stir when Guillam came in. He just growled, “Down there with you. By Paul. Below the salt,” and went on reading with heavy concentration.
The chair to Alleline’s right was empty, and Guillam knew it was Haydon’s by the posture-curve cushion tied to it with string. To Alleline’s left sat Roy Bland, also reading, but he looked up as Guillam passed, and said “Wotcher, Peter,” then followed him all the way down the table with his bulging eyes. Next to Bill’s empty chair sat Mo Delaware, London Station’s token woman, in bobbed hair and a brown tweed suit. Across from her, Phil Porteous, the head housekeeper, a rich servile man with a big house in suburbia. When he saw Guillam, he stopped his reading altogether, ostentatiously closed the folder, laid his sleek hands over it, and smirked.
“ ‘Below the salt’ means next to Paul Skordeno,” said Phil, still smirking.
“Thanks. I can see it.”
Across from Porteous came Bill’s Russians, last seen in the fourth-floor men’s room, Nick de Silsky and his boyfriend Kaspar. They couldn’t smile, and for all Guillam knew they couldn’t read, either, because they had no papers in front of them; they were the only ones who hadn’t. They sat with their four thick hands on the table as if somebody were holding a gun behind them, and they just watched him with their four brown eyes.
Downhill from Porteous sat Paul Skordeno, now reputedly Roy Bland’s fieldman on the satellite networks, though others said he ran between wickets for Bill. Paul was thin and mean and forty, with a pitted brown face and long arms. Guillam had once paired with him on a tough-guy course at the Nursery and they all but killed each other.
Guillam moved the chair away from him and sat down, so Toby sat next along like the other half of a bodyguard. Guillam thought, What the hell do they expect me to do—make a mad dash for freedom? Everyone was watching Alleline fill his pipe when Bill Haydon upstaged him. The door opened and at first no one came in. Then a slow shuffle and Bill appeared, clutching a cup of coffee in both hands, the saucer on top. He had a striped folder jammed under his arm and his glasses were over his nose, for a change, so he must have done his reading elsewhere. They’ve all been reading it except me, thought Guillam, and I don’t know what it is. He wondered whether it was the same document that Esterhase and Roy were reading yesterday, and decided on no evidence at all that it was; that yesterday it had just come in, that Toby had brought it to Roy, and that he had disturbed them in their first excitement—if excitement was the word.
Alleline had still not looked up. Down the table Guillam had only his rich black hair to look at, and a pair of broad tweedy shoulders. Mo Delaware was pulling at her fringe while she read. Percy had two wives, Guillam remembered, as Camilla once more flitted through his teeming mind, and both were alcoholics, which must mean something. He had met only the Lo
“I’m Joy,” she said, in a theatrical voice, like “I’m Virtue” or “I’m Continence.” It wasn’t his coat she wanted but a kiss. Yielding to it, Guillam inhaled the joint pleasures of Je Reviens and a high concentration of inexpensive sherry.
“Well, now, young Peter Guillam”—Alleline speaking—“are you ready for me finally or have you other calls to make about my house?” He half looked up and Guillam noticed two tiny triangles of fur on each weathered cheek. “What are you getting up to out there in the sticks these days”—turning a page—“apart from chasing the local virgins, if there are any in Brixton, which I severely doubt—if you’ll pardon my freedom, Mo—and wasting public money on expensive lunches?”
This banter was Alleline’s one instrument of communication; it could be friendly or hostile, reproachful or congratulatory, but in the end it was like a constant tapping on the same spot.
“Couple of Arab ploys look quite promising. Cy Vanhofer’s got a lead to a German diplomat. That’s about it.”
“Arabs,” Alleline repeated, pushing aside the folder and dragging a rough pipe from his pocket. “Any bloody fool can burn an Arab—can’t he, Bill? Buy a whole damn Arab Cabinet for half a crown, if you’ve a mind to.” From another pocket Alleline took a tobacco pouch, which he tossed easily onto the table. “I hear you’ve been hobnobbing with our late-lamented Brother Tarr. How is he these days?”
A lot of things went through Guillam’s mind as he heard himself answer. That the surveillance on his flat did not begin till last night—he was sure of it. That over the weekend he was in the clear unless Fawn, the captive baby-sitter, had doubled, which would have been hard for him. That Roy Bland bore a close resemblance to the late Dylan Thomas: Roy had always reminded him of someone and till this moment he’d never been able to pin down the connection; and that Mo Delaware had only passed muster as a woman because of her brownie mannishness. He wondered whether Dylan Thomas had had Roy’s extraordinary blue eyes. That Toby Esterhase was helping himself to a cigarette from his gold case, and that Alleline didn’t as a rule allow cigarettes but only pipes, so Toby must stand pretty well with Alleline just now. That Bill Haydon was looking strangely young and that Circus rumours about his love-life were not after all so laughable: they said he went both ways. That Paul Skordeno had one brown palm flat on the table and the thumb slightly lifted in a way that hardened the hitting surface on the outside of the hand. He thought also of his canvas case: had Alwyn put it on the shuttle? Or had he gone off for his lunch leaving it in Registry, waiting to be inspected by one of the new young janitors busting for promotion? And Guillam wondered—not for the first time—just how long Toby had been hanging around Registry before Guillam noticed him.