Smiley's People (33 page)

The old man sat sixty yards off, resting on his oars. He had rowed out of the backwater to watch. Smiley cupped his hands and yelled: “How do I get to him?”

“If you want him, call him,” the old man replied, not seeming to lift his voice at all.

Turning to the launch, Smiley called “Otto.” He called softly, then more loudly, but inside the
Isadora
nothing stirred. He watched the curtains. He watched the oily water tossing against the rotting hull. He listened and thought he heard music like the music in Herr Kretzschmar’s club, but it might have been echo from another boat. From the dinghy, Walther’s brown face still watched him.

“Call again,” he growled. “Keep calling, if you want him.”

But Smiley had an instinct against being commanded by the old man. He could feel his authority and his contempt and he resented both.

“Is he in here or not?” Smiley called. “I said, ‘Is he in here?’”

The old man did not budge.

“Did you see him come aboard?” Smiley insisted.

He saw the brown head turn, and knew the old man was spitting into the water.

“The wild pig comes and goes,” Smiley heard him say. “What the hell do I care?”

“So when did he come last?”

At the sound of their voices a couple of heads had lifted out of other boats. They stared at Smiley without expression: the little fat stranger standing at the end of the broken jetty. On the shore a ragtag group had formed: a girl in shorts, an old woman, two blond teen-aged boys dressed alike. There was something that linked them in their disparity: a prison look; submission to the same bad laws.

“I’m looking for Otto Leipzig,” Smiley called to all of them. “Can anyone tell me, please, whether he’s around?” On a houseboat not too far away, a bearded man was lowering a bucket into the water. Smiley’s eye selected him. “Is there anyone aboard the
Isadora?
” he asked.

The bucket gurgled and filled. The bearded man pulled it out, but didn’t speak.

“You should see his car,” a woman shouted shrilly from the shore, or perhaps it was a child. “They took it to the wood.”

The wood lay a hundred yards back from the water, mostly saplings and birch trees.

“Who did?” Smiley asked. “Who took it there?”

Whoever had spoken chose not to speak again. The old man was rowing himself towards the jetty. Smiley watched him approach, watched him back the stern towards the jetty steps. Without hesitating, Smiley clambered aboard. The old man pulled him the few strokes to the
Isadora’
s side. A cigarette was jammed between his cracked old lips and, like his eyes, it shone unnaturally against the evil gloom of his weathered face.

“Come far?” the old man asked.

“I’m a friend of his,” Smiley said.

There was rust and weed on the
Isadora’
s ladder, and as Smiley reached the deck it was slippery with dew. He looked for signs of life and saw none. He looked for footprints in the dew, in vain. A couple of fixed fishing-lines hung into the water, made fast to the rusted balustrade, but they could have been there for weeks. He listened, and heard again, very faintly, the strains of slow band music. From the shore? Or from farther out? From neither. The sound came from under his feet, and it was as if someone were playing a seventy-eight record on thirty-three.

He looked down and saw the old man in his dinghy, leaning back, and the peak of his cap pulled over his eyes, while he slowly conducted to the beat. He tried the cabin door and it was locked, but the door did not seem strong—nothing did—so he walked around the deck till he found a rusted screwdriver to use as a jemmy. He shoved it into the gap, worked it backwards and forwards, and suddenly to his surprise the whole door went, frame, hinges, lock, and everything else, with a bang like an explosion, followed by a shower of red dust from the rotten timber. A big slow moth thudded against his cheek and left it stinging strangely for a good while afterwards, till he began to wonder whether it was a bee. Inside, the cabin was pitch dark, but the music was a little louder. He was on the top rung of the ladder, and even with the daylight behind him the darkness below remained absolute. He pressed a light switch. It didn’t work, so he stepped back and spoke down to the old man in his dinghy: “Matches.”

For a moment Smiley nearly lost his temper. The peaked cap didn’t stir, nor did the conducting cease. He shouted, and this time a box of matches landed at his feet. He took them into the cabin and lit one, and saw the exhausted transistor radio that was still putting out music with the last of its energy, and it was about the only thing intact, the only thing still functioning, in all the devastation round it.

The match had gone out. He pulled the curtains, but not on the landward side, before he lit another. He didn’t want the old man looking in. In the grey sideways light, Leipzig was ridiculously like his tiny portrait in the photograph taken by Herr Kretzschmar. He was naked, he was lying where they had trussed him, even if there was no girl and no Kirov either. The hewn Toulouse-Lautrec face, blackened with bruising and gagged with several strands of rope, was as jagged and articulate in death as Smiley had remembered it in life. They must have used the music to drown the noise while they tortured him, Smiley thought. But he doubted whether the music would have been enough. He went on staring at the radio as a point of reference, a thing to go back to when the body became too much to look at before the match went out. Japanese, he noticed. Odd, he thought. Fix on the oddness of it. How odd of the technical Germans to buy Japanese radios. He wondered whether the Japanese returned the compliment. Keep wondering, he urged himself ferociously; keep your whole mind on this interesting economic phenomenon of the exchange of goods between highly industrialised nations.

Still staring at the radio, Smiley righted a folding stool and sat on it. Slowly, he returned his gaze to Leipzig’s face. Some dead faces, he reflected, have the dull, even stupid look of a patient under anaesthetic. Others preserve a single mood of the once varied nature—the dead man as lover, as father, as car driver, bridge player, tyrant. And some, like Vladimir’s, have ceased to preserve anything. But Leipzig’s face, even with the ropes across it, had a mood, and it was anger: anger intensified by pain, turned to fury by it; anger that had increased and become the whole man as the body lost its strength.

Hate, Connie had said.

Methodically, Smiley peered about him, thinking as slowly as he could manage, trying, by his examination of the debris, to reconstruct their progress. First the fight before they overpowered him, which he deduced from the smashed table-legs and chairs and lamps and shelves, and anything else that could be ripped from its housing and either wielded or thrown. Then the search, which took place after they had trussed him and in the intervals while they questioned him. Their frustration was written everywhere. They had ripped out wall-boards and floor-boards, and cupboard drawers and clothes and mattresses and by the end anything that came apart, anything that was not a minimal component, as Otto Leipzig still refused to talk. He noticed also that there was blood in surprising places—in the wash-basin, over the stove. He liked to think it was not all Otto Leipzig’s. And finally, in desperation, they had killed him, because those were Karla’s orders, that was Karla’s way. “The killing comes first, the questioning second,” Vladimir used to say.

I too believe in Otto,
Smiley thought stupidly, recalling Herr Kretzschmar’s words.
Not in every detail but in the big things.
So do I, he thought. He believed in him, at that moment, as surely as he believed in death, and in the Sandman. As for Vladimir, so for Otto Leipzig: death had ruled that he was telling the truth.

From the direction of the shore, he heard a woman yelling: “What’s he found? Has he found something? Who is he?”

He returned aloft. The old man had shipped his oars and let the dinghy drift. He sat with his back to the ladder, head hunched into his big shoulders. He had finished his cigarette and lit a cigar as if it were Sunday. And at the same moment as Smiley saw the old man, he also saw the chalk mark. It was in the same line of vision, but very close to him, swimming in the misted lenses of his spectacles. He had to lower his head and look over the top of them to fix on it. A chalk mark, sharp and yellow. One line, carefully drawn over the rust of the balustrade, and a foot away from it a reel of fishing-line, made fast with a sailor’s knot. The old man was watching him; so, for all he knew, was the growing group of watchers on the shore, but he had no option. He pulled at the line and it was heavy. He pulled steadily, hand over hand, till the line changed to gut, and he found himself pulling that instead. The gut grew suddenly tight. Cautiously he kept pulling. The people on the shore had grown expectant; he could feel their interest even across the water. The old man had put back his head and was watching through the black shadow of his cap. Suddenly, with a plop, the catch jumped clear of the water and a peal of ribald laughter rose from the spectators: one old gym-shoe, green, with the lace still in it, and the hook that held it to the line was big enough to beach a shark. The laughter slowly died. Smiley unhooked the shoe. Then, as if he had other business there, he lumbered back into the cabin till he was out of sight, leaving the door ajar for light.

But happening to take the gym-shoe with him.

An oilskin packet was hand-stitched into the toe of the shoe. He pulled it out. It was a tobacco pouch, stitched along the top and folded several times.
Moscow Rules,
he thought woodenly.
Moscow Rules all the way.
How many more dead men’s legacies must I inherit? he wondered.
Though we value none/But the horizontal one.
He had unpicked the stitching. Inside the pouch was another wrapping, this time a latex-rubber sheath knotted at the throat. And secreted inside the sheath, one hard wad of cardboard smaller than a book of matches. Smiley spread it open. It was half a picture postcard. Black-and-white, not even coloured. Half a dull picture of Schleswig-Holstein landscape with half a herd of Friesian cattle grazing in grey sunlight. Ripped with a deliberate jaggedness. No writing on the back, no address, no stamp. Just half a boring, unposted postcard; but they had tortured him, then killed him for it, and still not found it, or any of the treasures it unlocked. Putting it, together with its wrapping, into the inside pocket of his jacket, he returned to the deck. The old man in his dinghy had drawn alongside. Without a word, Smiley climbed slowly down the ladder. The crowd of camp people on the shore had grown still larger.

“Drunk?” the old man asked. “Sleeping it off?”

Smiley stepped into the dinghy and, as the old man pulled away, looked back at the
Isadora
once more. He saw the broken porthole, he thought of the wreckage in the cabin, the paper-thin sides that allowed him to hear the very shuffle of feet on the shore. He imagined the fight and Leipzig’s screams filling the whole camp with their din. He imagined the silent group standing where they were standing now, without a voice or a helping hand between them.

“It was a party,” the old man said carelessly while he made the dinghy fast against the jetty. “Lots of music, singing. They warned us it would be loud.” He tugged at a knot. “Maybe they quarrelled. So what? Many people quarrel. They made some noise, played some jazz. So what? We are musical people here.”

“They were police,” a woman called from the group on the shore. “When police go about their business, it is the duty of the citizen to keep his trap shut.”

“Show me his car,” Smiley said.

They moved in a rabble, no one leading. The old man strode at Smiley’s side, half custodian, half bodyguard, making a way for him with facetious ceremony. The children ran everywhere but they kept well clear of the old man. The Volkswagen stood in a coppice and it was ripped apart like the cabin of the
Isadora.
The roof lining hung in shreds, the seats had been pulled out and split open. The wheels were missing but Smiley guessed that had happened since. The camp people stood round it reverently, as if it were their show-piece. Someone had tried to burn it but the fire had not caught.

“He was scum,” the old man explained. “They all are. Look at them. Polacks, criminals, subhumans.”

Smiley’s Opel stood where he had parked it, at the edge of the track, close to the dustbins, and the two blond boys who were dressed alike were standing over the boot beating the lid with hammers. As he walked towards them, he could see their forelocks bouncing with each blow. They wore jeans and black boots studded with love-daisies.

“Tell them to stop hitting my car,” Smiley said to the old man.

The camp people were following at a distance. He could hear again the furtive shuffle of their feet, like a refugee army. He reached his car and had the keys in his hand, and the two boys were still bent over the back hitting with all their might. But when he walked round to take a look, all they had done was beat the lid of the boot right off its hinges, then fold it and beat it flat again till it lay like a crude parcel on the floor. He looked at the wheels but nothing seemed amiss. He didn’t know what else to look for. Then he saw that they had tied a dustbin to the rear bumper with string. Keeping clear, he tugged at the string to break it, but it refused to yield. He tried it with his teeth, without success. The old man lent him a penknife and he cut it, keeping clear of the boys with their hammers. The camp people had made a half ring and they were holding up their children for the farewell. Smiley got into the car and the old man slammed the door after him with a tremendous heave. Smiley had the key in the ignition, but by the time he turned it, one of the boys had draped himself over the bonnet as languidly as a model at a motor show and the other was tapping politely at the window.

Smiley lowered the window. “What do you want?” he asked.

The boy held out his palm. “Repairs,” he explained. “Your boot didn’t shut properly. Time and materials. Overheads. Parking.” He indicated his thumb-nail. “My colleague here hurt his hand. It could have been serious.”