Smiley's People (16 page)

“I gather you’ve already heard the news about Vladimir,” Smiley said.

“News? What news, please?”

Smiley took his time. Watching him, sensing his stress.

“That he’s disappeared,” Smiley replied quite lightly, at last. “I gather his friends have been ringing you up at unsocial hours.”

“Friends?” Villem shot a dependent glance at Stella. “Old émigrés, drink tea, play chess all day, politics? Talk crazy dreams? Mikhel is not my friend, Max.”

He spoke swiftly, with impatience for this foreign language, which was such a poor substitute for his own. Whereas Smiley spoke as if he had all day.

“But
Vladi
is your friend,” he objected. “Vladi was your father’s friend before you. They were in Paris together. Brothers-in-arms. They came to England together.”

Countering the weight of this suggestion, Villem’s small body became a storm of gestures. His hands parted and made furious arcs, his brown hair lifted and fell flat again.

“Sure! Vladimir, he was my father’s friend. His good friend. Also of Beckie the godfather, okay? But not for politics. Not any more.” He glanced at Stella, seeking her approval. “Me, I am William Craven. I got English home, English wife, English kid, English name. Okay?”

“And an English job,” Stella put in quietly, watching him.

“A good job! Know how much I earn, Max? We buy house. Maybe a car, okay?”

Something in Villem’s manner—his glibness perhaps, or the energy of his protest—had caught the attention of his wife, for now Stella was studying him as intently as Smiley was, and she began to hold the baby distractedly, almost without interest.

“When did you last see him, William?” Smiley asked.

“Who, Max? See who? I don’t understand you, please.”

“Tell him, Bill,” Stella ordered her husband, not moving her eyes from him for a moment.

“When did you last see Vladimir?” Smiley repeated patiently.

“Long time, Max.”

“Weeks?”

“Sure. Weeks.”

“Months?”

“Months. Six months! Seven! At christening. He was godfather, we make a party. But no politics.”

Smiley’s silences had begun to produce an awkward tension.

“And not since?” he asked at last.

“No.”

Smiley turned to Stella, whose gaze had still not flinched.

“What time did William get back yesterday?”

“Early,” she said.

“As early as ten o’clock in the morning?”

“Could have been. I wasn’t here. I was visiting Mother.”

“Vladimir drove down here yesterday by taxi,” he explained, still to Stella. “I think he saw William.”

Nobody helped him, not Smiley, not his wife. Even the child kept still.

“On his way here Vladimir bought a toy. The taxi waited an hour down the lane and took him away again, back to Paddington where he lives,” Smiley said, still being very careful to keep the present tense.

Villem had found his voice at last. “Vladi is of Beckie the godfather!” he protested with another flourish, as his English threatened to desert him entirely. “Stella don’t like him, so he must come here like a thief, okay? He bring my Beckie toy, okay? Is a crime already, Max? Is a law, an old man cannot bring to his godchild toys?”

Once again neither Smiley nor Stella spoke. They were both waiting for the same inevitable collapse.

“Vladi is old man, Max! Who knows when he sees his Beckie again? He is friend of family!”

“Not of this family,” said Stella. “Not any more.”

“He was friend of my father! Comrade! In Paris they fight together Bolshevism. So he brings to Beckie a toy. Why not, please? Why not, Max?”

“You said you bought the bloody thing yourself,” said Stella. Putting a hand to her breast, she closed a button as if to cut him off.

Villem swung to Smiley, appealing to him: “Stella don’t like the old man, okay? Is afraid I make more politics with him, okay? So I don’t tell Stella. She goes to see her mother in Staines hospital and while she is away Vladi makes a small visit to see Beckie, say hullo, why not?” In desperation he actually leapt to his feet, flinging up his arms in too much protest. “Stella!” he cried. “Listen to me! So Vladi don’t get home last night? Please, I am so sorry! But it is not my fault, okay? Max! That Vladi is an old man! Lonely. So maybe he finds a woman once. Okay? So he can’t do much with her, but he still likes her company. For this he was pretty famous, I think! Okay? Why not?”

“And
before
yesterday?” Smiley asked, after an age. Villem seemed not to understand, so Smiley paced out the question again: “You saw Vladimir yesterday. He came by taxi and brought a yellow wooden duck for Beckie. On wheels.”

“Sure.”

“Very well. But before yesterday—not counting yesterday—when did you last see him?”

Some questions are hazard, some are instinct, some—like this one—are based on a premature understanding that is more than instinct, but less than knowledge.

Villem wiped his lips on the back of his hand. “Monday,” he said miserably. “I see him Monday. He ring me, we meet. Sure.”

Then Stella whispered, “Oh, William,” and held the child upright against her, a little soldier, while she peered downward at the haircord carpet waiting for her feelings to right themselves.

The phone began ringing. Like an infuriated infant, Villem sprang at it, lifted the receiver, slammed it back on the cradle, then threw the whole telephone onto the floor and kicked the receiver clear. He sat down.

Stella turned to Smiley. “I want you to go,” she said. “I want you to walk out of here and never come back. Please, Max. Now.”

For a time Smiley seemed to consider this request quite seriously. He looked at Villem with avuncular affection; he looked at Stella. Then he delved in his inside pocket and pulled out a folded copy of the day’s first edition of the
Evening Standard
and handed it to Stella rather than to Villem, partly because of the language barrier and partly because he guessed that Villem would break down.

“I’m afraid Vladi’s disappeared for good, William,” he said in a tone of simple regret. “It’s in the papers. He’s been shot dead. The police will want to ask you questions. I have to hear what happened and tell you how to answer them.”

Then Villem said something hopeless in Russian, and Stella, moved by his tone if not his words, put down one child and went to comfort the other, and Smiley might not have been in the room at all. So he sat for a while quite alone, thinking of Vladimir’s piece of negative film—indecipherable until he turned it to positive—nestling in its box in the Savoy Hotel with the anonymous letter from Paris that he could do nothing about. And of the second proof, wondering what it was, and how the old man had carried it, and supposing it was in his wallet; but believing also that he would never know.

 

Villem sat bravely as if he were already attending Vladimir’s funeral. Stella sat at his side with her hand on his, Beckie the child lay on the floor and slept. Occasionally as Villem talked, tears rolled unashamedly down his pale cheeks.

“For the others I give nothing,” said Villem. “For Vladi everything. I love this man.” He began again: “After the death of my father, Vladi become father to me. Sometimes I even say him: ‘my father.’ Not uncle. Father.”

“Perhaps we could start with Monday,” Smiley suggested. “With the first meeting.”

Vladi had telephoned, said Villem. It was the first time Villem had heard from him or from anybody in the Group for months. Vladi telephoned Villem at the depot, out of the blue, while Villem was consolidating his load and checking his transshipment papers with the office before leaving for Dover. That was the arrangement, Villem said, that was how it had been left with the Group. He was out of it, as they all were, more or less, but if he was ever urgently needed he could be reached at the depot on a Monday morning, not at home because of Stella. Vladi was Beckie’s godfather and as godfather could ring the house any time. But not on business. Never.

“I ask him: ‘Vladi! What you want? Listen, how are you?’”

Vladimir was in a call-box down the road. He wanted a personal conversation immediately. Against all the employers’ regulations, Villem picked him up at the roundabout and Vladimir rode half the way to Dover with him: “black,” said Villem—meaning “illegally.” The old boy was carrying a rush basket full of oranges, but Villem had not been of a mood to ask him why he should saddle himself with pounds of oranges. At first Vladimir had talked about Paris and Villem’s father, and the great struggles they had shared; then he talked about a small favour Villem could do for him. For the sake of old times a small favour. For the sake of Villem’s dead father, whom Vladimir had loved. For the sake of the Group, of which Villem’s father had once been such a hero.

“I tell him: ‘Vladi, this small favour is impossible for me. I promise Stella: is impossible!’”

Stella’s hand left her husband’s side and she sat alone, torn between wishing to console him for the old man’s death and her hurt at his broken promise.

Just a small favour, Vladimir had insisted. Small, no trouble, no risk, but very helpful to our cause: also Villem’s duty. Then Vladi produced snaps he had taken of Beckie at the christening. They were in a yellow Kodak envelope, the prints on one side and the negatives in protective cellophane on the other and the chemist’s blue docket still stapled to the outside, all as innocent as the day.

For a while they admired them till Vladimir said suddenly: “It is for Beckie, Villem. What we do, we do for Beckie’s future.”

Hearing Villem repeat this, Stella clenched her fists, and when she looked up again she was resolute and somehow much older, with islands of tiny wrinkles at the corner of each eye.

Villem went on with his story: “Then Vladimir tell to me, ‘Villem. Every Monday you are driving to Hanover and Hamburg, returning Friday. How long you stay in Hamburg, please?’”

To which Villem had replied as short a time as possible, depending on how long it took him to unload, depending on whether he delivered to the agent or to the addressee, depending on what time of day he arrived and how many hours he already had on his sheet. Depending on his return load, if he had one. There were more questions of this sort, which Villem now related, many trivial—where Villem slept on the journey, where he ate—and Smiley knew that the old man in a rather monstrous way was doing what he would have done himself; he was talking Villem into a corner, making him answer as a prelude to making him obey. And only after this did Vladimir explain to Villem, using all his military and family authority, just what he wished Villem to do.

“He say to me: ‘Villem, take these oranges to Hamburg for me. Take this basket.’ ‘What for?’ I ask him. ‘General, why do I take this basket?’ Then he give me fifty pounds. ‘For emergencies,’ he tell to me. ‘In emergency, here is fifty pounds.’ ‘But why do I take this basket?’ I ask him. ‘What emergency is considered here, General?’”

Then Vladimir recited to Villem his instructions, and they included fall-backs and contingencies—even, if necessary, staying an extra night on the strength of the fifty pounds—and Smiley noticed how the old man had insisted upon Moscow Rules, exactly as he had with Mostyn, and how there was
too much,
as there always had been—the older he got, the more the old boy had tied himself up in the skeins of his own conspiracies. Villem should lay the yellow Kodak envelope containing Beckie’s photographs on the top of the oranges, he should take his stroll down to the front of the cabin—all as Villem in the event had done, he said—and the envelope was the letter-box, and the sign that it had been filled would be a chalk mark, “also yellow like the envelope, which is the tradition of our Group,” said Villem.

“And the safety signal?” Smiley asked. “The signal that says ‘I am not being followed’?”

“Was Hamburg newspaper from yesterday,” Villem replied swiftly—but on this subject, he confessed, he had had a small difference with Vladimir, despite all the respect he owed to him as a leader, as a General, and as his father’s friend.

“He tell to me, ‘Villem, you carry that newspaper in your pocket.’ But I tell to him: ‘Vladi, please, look at me, I have only track suit, no pockets.’ So he say, ‘Villem, then carry the newspaper under your arm.’”

“Bill,” Stella breathed, with a sort of awe. “Oh, Bill, you stupid bloody fool.” She turned to Smiley. “I mean, why didn’t they just put it in the bloody post, whatever it is, and be done with it?”

Because it was a negative, and only negatives are acceptable under Moscow Rules. Because the General had a terror of betrayal, Smiley thought. The old boy saw it everywhere, in everyone around him. And if death is the ultimate judge, he was right.

“And it worked?” Smiley said finally to Villem with great gentleness. “The hand-over worked?”

“Sure! It work fine,” Villem agreed heartily, and darted Stella a defiant glance.

“And did you have any idea, for instance, who might have been your contact at this meeting?”

Then with much hesitation, and after much prompting, some of it from Stella, Villem told that also: about the hollowed face that had looked so desperate and had reminded him of his father; about the warning stare, which was either real or he had imagined it because he was so excited. How sometimes, when he watched football on the television, which he liked to do very much, the camera caught someone’s face or expression, and it stuck in your memory for the rest of the match, even if you never saw it again—and how the face on the steamer was of this sort exactly. He described the flicked horns of hair, and with his fingertips he lightly drew deep grooves in his own unmarked cheeks. He described the man’s smallness, and even his sexiness—Villem said he could tell. He described his own feelings of being
warned
by the man, warned to take care of a precious thing. Villem would look the same way himself—he told Stella with a sudden flourish of imagined tragedy—if there was another war, and fighting, and he had to give away Beckie to a stranger to look after! And this was the cue for more tears, and more reconciliation, and more lamentations about the old man’s death, to which Smiley’s next question inevitably contributed.