Smiley's People (24 page)

“You saw Vladimir and you spoke to him. What happened?” Smiley asked, quite undeflected by this challenge. “You tell me that, and I’ll tell you who is speaking here.”

In the farthest corner of the ceiling there was a yellowed patch of glass about a metre square and the shadows that played over it were the feet of passers-by in the street. For some reason Toby’s eyes had fixed on this strange spot and he seemed to read his decision there, like an instruction flashed on a screen.

“Vladimir put up a distress rocket,” Toby said in exactly the same tone as before, of neither conceding nor confiding. Indeed, by some trick of tone or inflection, he even managed to bring a note of warning to his voice.

“Through the Circus?”

“Through friends of mine,” said Toby.

“When?”

Toby gave a date. Two weeks ago. A crash meeting. Smiley asked where it took place.

“In the Science Museum,” Toby replied with new-found confidence. “The café on the top floor, George. We drank coffee, admired the old aeroplanes hanging from the roof. You going to report all this to Lacon, George? Feel free, okay? Be my guest. I got nothing to hide.”

“And he put the proposition?”

“Sure. He put me a proposition. He wanted me to do a lamplighter job. To be his camel. That was our joke, back in the old Moscow days, remember? To collect, carry across the desert, to deliver. ‘Toby, I got no passport.
Aidez-moi. Mon ami, aidez-moi.’
You know how he talked. Like de Gaulle. We used to call him that—‘the other General.’ Remember?”

“Carry what?”

“He was not precise. It was documentary, it was small, no concealment was needed. This much he tells me.”

“For somebody putting out feelers, he seems to have told you a lot.”

“He was asking a hell of a lot too,” said Toby calmly, and waited for Smiley’s next question.

“And the where?” Smiley asked. “Did Vladimir tell you that too?”

“Germany.”

“Which one?”

“Ours. The north of it.”

“Casual encounter? Dead-letter boxes? Live? What sort of meeting?”

“On the fly. I should take a train ride. From Hamburg north. The hand-over to be made on the train, details on acceptance.”

“And it was to be a private arrangement. No Circus, no Max?”

“For the time being, very private, George.”

Smiley picked his words with tact. “And the compensation for your labours?”

A distinct scepticism marked Toby’s answer: “If we get the document—that’s what he called it, okay? Document. If we get the document, and the document is genuine, which he swore it was, we win immediately a place in Heaven. We take first the document to Max, tell Max the story. Max would know its meaning, Max would know the crucial importance—of the document. Max would reward us. Gifts, promotion, medals, Max will put us in the House of Lords. Sure. Only problem was, Vladimir didn’t know Max was on the shelf and the Circus has joined the Boy Scouts.”

“Did he know that Hector was on the shelf?”

“Fifty-fifty, George.”

“What does that mean?” Then, with a “never mind,” Smiley cancelled his own question again and lapsed into prolonged thought.

“George, you want to drop this line of enquiry,” Toby said earnestly. “That is my strong advice to you, abandon it,” he said, and waited.

Smiley might not have heard. Momentarily shocked, he seemed to be pondering the scale of Toby’s error.

“The point is, you sent him packing,” he muttered, and remained staring into space. “He appealed to you and you slammed the door in his face. How could you do that, Toby? You of all people?”

The reproach brought Toby furiously to his feet, which was perhaps what it was meant to do. His eyes lit up, his cheeks coloured, the sleeping Hungarian in him was wide awake.

“And you want to hear why, maybe? You want to know why I told him, ‘Go to hell, Vladimir. Leave my sight, please, you make me sick’? You want to know who his connect is out there—this magic guy in North Germany with the crock of gold that’s going to make millionaires of us overnight, George—you want to know his full identity? Remember the name Otto Leipzig, by any chance? Holder many times of our Creep of the Year award? Fabricator, intelligence pedlar, confidence man, sex maniac, pimp, also various sorts of criminal? Remember
that
great hero?”

Smiley saw the tartan walls of the hotel again, and the dreadful hunting prints of Jorrocks in full cry; he saw the two black-coated figures, the giant and the midget, and the General’s huge mottled hand resting on the tiny shoulder of his protégé.
“Max, here is my good friend Otto. I have brought him to tell his own story.”
He heard the steady thunder of the planes landing and taking off at Heathrow Airport.

“Vaguely,” Smiley replied equably. “Yes, vaguely I do remember an Otto Leipzig. Tell me about him. I seem to remember he had rather a
lot
of names. But then so do we all, don’t we?”

“About two hundred, but Leipzig he ended up with. Know why? Leipzig in East Germany; he liked the jail there. He was that kind of crazy joker. Remember the stuff he peddled, by any chance?” Believing he had the initiative, Toby stepped boldly forward and stood over the passive Smiley while he talked down at him: “George, do you not even remember the incredible and total bilge which year for year that creep would push out under fifteen different source names to our West European stations, mainly German? Our expert on the new Estonian order? Our top source on Soviet arms shipments out of Leningrad? Our inside ear at Moscow Centre, our principal Karla-watcher, even?” Smiley did not stir. “How he took our Berlin resident alone for two thousand Deutschmarks for a rewrite from
Stern
magazine? How he foxed that old General, worked on him like a sucking-leech, time and again—‘us fellow Balts’—that line? ‘General, I just got the Crown jewels for you—only trouble, I don’t have the air fare’? Jesus!”

“It wasn’t
all
fabrication, though, was it, Toby?” Smiley objected mildly. “Some of it, I seem to remember—in certain areas, at least—turned out to be rather good stuff.”

“Count it on one finger.”

“His Moscow Centre material, for instance. I don’t remember that we faulted him on that, ever?”

“Okay! So Centre gave him some decent chicken-feed occasionally, so he could pass us the other crap! How else does anyone play a double, for God’s sake?”

Smiley seemed about to argue this point, then changed his mind.

“I see,” he said finally, as if overruled. “Yes, I see what you mean. A plant.”

“Not a plant, a creep. A little of this, a little of that. A dealer. No principles. No standards. Work for anyone who sweetens his pie.”

“I take the point,” said Smiley gravely, in the same diminished tone. “And of course he settled in North Germany, too, didn’t he? Up towards Travemünde somewhere.”

“Otto Leipzig never settled anywhere in his life,” said Toby with contempt. “George, that guy’s a drifter, a total bum. Dresses like he was a Rothschild, owns a cat and a bicycle. Know what his last job was, this great spy? Night-watchman in some lousy Hamburg cargo house somewhere! Forget him.”

“And he had a partner,” Smiley said, in the same tone of innocent reminiscence. “Yes, that comes back to me too. An immigrant, an East German.”

“Worse than East German: Saxon. Name of Kretzschmar, first name was Claus. Claus with a ‘C,’ don’t ask me why. I mean these guys have got no logic at all. Claus was also a creep. They stole together, pimped together, faked reports together.”

“But that was long ago, Toby,” Smiley put in gently.

“Who cares? It was a perfect marriage.”

“Then I expect it didn’t last,” said Smiley, in an aside to himself.

But perhaps Smiley had for once overdone his meekness; or perhaps Toby simply knew him too well. For a warning light had come up in his swift, Hungarian eye, and a tuck of suspicion formed on his bland brow. He stood back and, contemplating Smiley, passed one hand thoughtfully over his immaculate white hair.

“George,” he said. “Listen, who are you fooling, okay?”

Smiley did not speak, but lifted the Degas, and turned it round, then put it down.

“George, listen to me once. Please! Okay, George? Maybe I give you once a lecture.”

Smiley glanced at him, then looked away.

“George, I owe you. You got to hear me. So you pulled me from out the gutter once in Vienna when I was a stinking kid. I was a Leipzig. A bum. So you got me my job with the Circus. So we had a lot of times together, stole some horses. You remember the first rule of retirement, George? ‘No moonlighting. No fooling with loose ends. No private enterprise ever’? You remember who preached this rule? At Sarratt? In the corridors? George Smiley did. ‘When it’s over, it’s over. Pull down the shutters, go home!’ So now what do you want to do, suddenly? Play kiss-kiss with an old crazy General who’s dead but won’t lie down and a five-sided comedian like Otto Leipzig! What is this? The last cavalry charge on the Kremlin suddenly? We’re over, George. We got no licence. They don’t want us any more. Forget it.” He hesitated, suddenly embarrassed. “So okay, Ann gave you a bad time with Bill Haydon. So there’s Karla, and Karla was Bill’s big daddy in Moscow. George, I mean this gets very crude, know what I mean?”

His hands fell to his sides. He stared at the still figure before him. Smiley’s eyelids were nearly closed. His head had dropped forward. With the shifting of his cheeks deep crevices had appeared round his mouth and eyes.

“We never faulted Leipzig’s reports on Moscow Centre,” Smiley said, as if he hadn’t heard the last part. “I remember distinctly that we never faulted them. Nor on Karla. Vladimir trusted him implicitly. On the Moscow stuff, so did we.”

“George, who ever faulted a report on Moscow Centre? Please? So okay, once in a while we got a defector, he tells you: ‘This thing is crap and that thing is maybe true.’ So where’s the collateral? Where’s the hard base, you used to say? Some guy feeds you a story: ‘Karla just built a new spy nursery in Siberia.’ So who’s to say he didn’t? Keep it vague enough, you can’t lose.”

“That was why we put up with him,” Smiley went on, as if he hadn’t heard. “Where the Soviet service was involved, he played a straight game.”

“George,” said Toby softly, shaking his head. “You got to wake up. The crowds have all gone home.”

“Will you tell me the rest of it now, Toby? Will you tell me exactly what Vladimir said to you? Please?”

So in the end, as a reluctant gift of friendship, Toby told it as Smiley asked, straight out, with a frankness that was like defeat.

 

The maquette that might have been by Degas portrayed a ballerina with her arms above her head. Her body was curved backward and her lips were parted in what might have been ecstasy and there was no question but that, fake or genuine, she bore an uncomfortable if superficial resemblance to Ann. Smiley had taken her in his hands again and was slowly turning her, gazing at her this way and that with no clear appreciation. Toby was back on his satin stool. In the ceiling window, the shadowed feet walked jauntily.

Toby and Vladimir had met in the café of the Science Museum on the aeronautical floor, Toby repeated. Vladimir was in a state of high excitement and kept clutching Toby’s arm, which Toby didn’t like; it made him conspicuous. Otto Leipzig had managed the impossible, Vladimir kept saying. It was the big one, the chance in a million, Toby; Otto Leipzig had landed the one Max had always dreamed of, “the full settlement of all our claims,” as Vladimir had put it. When Toby asked him somewhat acidly what claims he had in mind, Vladimir either wouldn’t or couldn’t say: “Ask Max,” he insisted. “If you do not believe me, ask Max, tell Max it is the big one.”

“So what’s the deal?” Toby had asked—knowing, he said, that where Otto Leipzig was concerned the bill came first and the goods a long, long way behind. “How much does he want, the great hero?”

Toby confessed to Smiley that he had found it hard to conceal his scepticism—“which put a bad mood on the meeting from the start.” Vladimir outlined the terms. Leipzig had the story, said Vladimir, but he also had certain material proofs that the story was true. There was first a document, and the document was what Leipzig called a
Vorspeise,
or appetizer. There was also a second proof, a letter, held by Vladimir. There was then the story itself, which would be given by other materials, which Leipzig had entrusted to safe keeping. The document showed how the story was obtained, the materials themselves were incontrovertible.

“And the subject?” Smiley asked.

“Not revealed,” Toby replied shortly. “To Hector, not revealed. Get Max, and okay—then Vladimir reveals the subject. But Hector for the time being got to shut up and run the errands.”

For a moment Toby appeared about to launch upon a second speech of discouragement. “George, I mean look here, the old boy was just totally cuckoo,” he began. “Otto Leipzig was taking him a complete ride.” Then he saw Smiley’s expression, so inward and inaccessible, and contented himself instead with a repetition of Otto Leipzig’s totally outrageous demands.

“The document to be taken personally to Max by Vladimir, Moscow Rules at all points, no middle men, no correspondence. The preparations they made already on the telephone—”

“Telephone between London and Hamburg?” Smiley interrupted, suggesting by his tone that this was new and unwelcome information.

“They used word code, he tells me. Old pals, they know how to fox around. But not with the proof, says Vladi; with the proof there’s no foxing at all. No phones, no mails, no trucks, they got to have a camel, period. Vladi’s security-crazy, okay, this we know already. From now on, only Moscow Rules apply.”

Smiley remembered his own phone call to Hamburg of Saturday night, and wondered again what kind of establishment Otto Leipzig had been using as his telephone exchange.

“Once the Circus had declared its interest,” Toby continued, “they pay a down payment to Otto Leipzig of five thousand Swiss for an audition fee. George! Five thousand Swiss! For openers! Just to be in the game! Next—George, you got to hear this—next, Otto Leipzig to be flown to a safe house in England for the audition. George, I mean I never heard such craziness. You want the rest? If, following the audition, the Circus wants to buy the material itself—you want to hear how much?”