Smiley's People (34 page)

Smiley looked at the boy’s face and saw no human instinct that he understood.

“You have repaired nothing. You have done damage. Ask your friend to get off the car.”

The boys conferred, seeming to disagree. They did this under the full gaze of the crowd, in a reasoned manner, slowly pushing each other’s shoulders and making rhetorical gestures that did not coincide with their words. They talked about nature and about politics, and their Platonic dialogue might have gone on indefinitely if the boy who was on the car had not stood up in order to make the best of a debating point. As he did so, he broke off a windscreen wiper as if it were a flower and handed it to the old man. Driving away, Smiley looked in his mirror and saw a ring of faces staring after him with the old man at their centre. Nobody waved goodbye.

 

He drove without haste, weighing the chances, while the car clanged like an old fire-engine. He supposed they had done something else to it as well, something he had failed to notice. He had left Germany before, he had come and gone illicitly, he had hunted while on the run, and though he was old now and in a different Germany, he felt as if he had been returned to the wild. He had no way of knowing whether anybody from the water camp had telephoned the police, but he took it for an accomplished fact. The boat was open and its secret out. Those who had looked away would now be the first to come forward as good citizens. He had seen that before as well.

He entered a sea town, the boot—if it
was
the boot—still clanking behind him. Or perhaps it’s the exhaust, he thought; the pot-hole I crashed into on the way to the camp. A hot, unseasonable sun had replaced the morning mists. There were no trees. An amazing brilliance was opening around him. It was still early, and empty horse carriages stood waiting for the first tourists. The sand was a pattern of craters dug in the summer by sun-worshippers to escape the wind. He could hear the tinny echo of his own progress bouncing between the painted shop-fronts, and the sunlight seemed to make it even louder. Where he passed people, he saw their heads lift to stare after him because of the row the car made.

They’ll know the car, he thought. Even if nobody at the water camp remembered the number, the smashed boot would give him away. He turned off the main street. The sun was really very bright indeed. “A man came, Herr Wachtmeister,” they would be saying to the police patrol. “This morning, Herr Wachtmeister. He said he was a friend. He looked in the boat and then drove away. He asked us nothing, Captain. He was unmoved. He fished a shoe, Herr Wachtmeister. Imagine—a shoe!”

He was heading for the railway station, following the signs, looking for a place where you could park a car all day. The station was red brick and massive, he supposed from before the war. He passed it and found a big car-park to his left. A line of shedding trees ran through it, and there were leaves on some of the cars. A machine took his money and issued him a ticket to stick on his windscreen. He backed into the middle of a line, the boot as far out of sight as possible against a mud bank. He stepped out and the extraordinary sun hit him like a slap. There was not a breath of wind. He locked the car and put the keys in the exhaust-pipe, he didn’t quite know why, except that he felt apologetic towards the hire company. He kicked up the leaves and sand till the front number-plate was almost hidden. In an hour, in this St. Luke’s summer, there would be a hundred and more cars in the park.

He had noticed a men’s clothes shop in the main street. He bought a linen jacket there but nothing more, because people who buy whole outfits are remembered. He did not wear it, but carried it in a plastic bag. In a side-street full of boutiques he bought a gaudy straw hat and, from a stationer’s, a holiday map of the area, and a railway timetable of the region Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, and Lower Saxony. He didn’t wear the hat either, but kept it in its bag like the jacket. He was sweating from the unexpected heat. The heat was upsetting him; it was as absurd as snow in summer. He went to a telephone-box and again consulted local directories. Hamburg had no Claus Kretzschmar, but one of the Schleswig-Holstein directories had a Kretzschmar who lived in a place Smiley had never heard of. He studied his map and found a small town by that name on the main railway line to Hamburg. This pleased him very much.

Calmly, all other thoughts bound down with iron bands, Smiley once more did his sums. Within moments of finding the car, the police would be talking to the hire firm in Hamburg. As soon as they had spoken to the hire firm and obtained his name and description, they would put a watch on the airport and other crossing places. Kretzschmar was a night-bird and would sleep late. The town where he lived was an hour away by stopping train.

He returned to the railway station. The main concourse was a Wagnerian fantasy of a Gothic court, with an arched roof and a huge stained-glass window that poured out coloured sunbeams onto the ceramic floor. From a telephone-box, he rang Hamburg Airport, giving his name as “Standfast, initial J,” which was the name on the passport he had collected from his London club. The first available flight to London was this evening at six but only first-class was open. He booked a first-class seat and said he would upgrade his economy ticket on arrival at the airport. The girl said, “Then please come half an hour before check-in.” Smiley promised he would—he wanted to make an impression—but no, alas, Mr. Standfast had no phone number where he could be reached meanwhile. There was nothing in her tone to suggest she had a security officer standing behind her with a Telex in his hand, whispering instructions in her ear, but he guessed that within a couple of hours Mr. Standfast’s seat reservation was going to ring a lot of bells, because it was Mr. Standfast who had hired the Opel car. He stepped back into the concourse, and the shafts of coloured light. There were two ticket counters and two short queues. At the first, an intelligent girl attended him and he bought a second-class single ticket to Hamburg. But it was a deliberately laboured purchase, full of indecision and nervousness, and when he had made it he insisted on writing down times of departure and arrival: also on borrowing her ball-point and a pad of paper.

In the men’s room, having first transferred the contents of his pockets, beginning with the treasured piece of postcard from Leipzig’s boat, he changed into the linen jacket and straw hat, then went to the second ticket counter where, with a minimum of fuss, he bought a ticket on the stopping train to Kretzschmar’s town. To do this, he avoided looking at the attendant at all, concentrating instead on the ticket and his change, from under the brim of his loud straw hat. Before leaving he took one last precaution. He made a wrong-number phone call to Herr Kretzschmar and established from an indignant wife that it was a scandal to telephone anybody so early. As a last measure, he folded the plastic carrier-bags into his pocket.

 

The town was leafy and secluded, the lawns large, the houses carefully zoned. Whatever there had been of country life had long fallen before the armies of suburbia, but the brilliant sunlight made everything beautiful. Number 8 was on the right-hand side, a substantial two-story residence with steep Scandinavian roofs, a double garage, and a wide selection of young trees planted much too close together. There was a swing chair in the garden with a flowered plastic seat and a new fish-pond in the romantic idiom. But the main attraction, and Herr Kretzschmar’s pride, was an outdoor swimming-pool in its own patio of shrieking red tile, and it was there that Smiley found him, in the bosom of his family, on this unlikely autumn day, entertaining a few neighbours at an impromptu party. Herr Kretzschmar himself, in shorts, was preparing the barbecue and as Smiley dropped the latch on the gate he paused from his labours and looked round to see who had come. But the new straw hat and the linen jacket confused him and he called instead to his wife.

Frau Kretzschmar strode down the path, bearing a champagne glass. She was clad in a pink bathing-dress and a diaphanous pink cape, which she allowed to flow behind her daringly.

“Who
is
that then? Who
is
the nice surprise?” she kept asking in a playful voice. She could have been talking to her puppy.

She stopped in front of him. She was tanned and tall and, like her husband, built to last. He could see little of her face, for she wore dark glasses with a white plastic beak to protect her nose from burning.

“Here is family Kretzschmar, going about its pleasures,” she said not very confidently when he had still not introduced himself. “What can we do for you, sir? In what way can we
serve?
”

“I have to speak to your husband,” Smiley said. It was the first time he had spoken since he bought his ticket, and his voice was thick and unnatural.

“But Cläuschen does no business in the daytime,” she said firmly, still smiling. “In the daytime by family decree the profit motive has its sleep. Shall I put handcuffs on him to prove to you he is our prisoner till sunset?”

Her bathing-dress was in two parts and her smooth, full belly was oily with lotion. She wore a gold chain round her waist, presumably as a further sign of naturalness. And gold sandals with very high heels.

“Kindly tell your husband that this is not business,” Smiley said. “This is friendship.”

Frau Kretzschmar took a sip of her champagne, then removed her dark glasses and beak, as if she were declaring herself at the
bal masqué.
She had a snub nose. Her face, though kindly, was a good deal older than her body.

“But how can it be friendship when I don’t know your name?” she demanded, no longer certain whether to be winsome or discouraging.

But by then Herr Kretzschmar himself had walked down the path after her, and stopped before them, staring from his wife to Smiley, then at Smiley again. And perhaps the sight of Smiley’s set face and manner, and the fixity of his gaze, warned Herr Kretzschmar of the reason for his coming.

“Go and take care of the cooking,” he said curtly.

Guiding Smiley by the arm, Herr Kretzschmar led him to a drawing-room with brass chandeliers and a picture window full of jungle cacti.

“Otto Leipzig is dead,” Smiley said without preliminary as soon as the door was closed. “Two men killed him at the water camp.”

Herr Kretzschmar’s eyes opened very wide; then unashamedly he swung his back to Smiley and covered his face with his hands.

“You made a tape-recording,” Smiley said, ignoring this display entirely. “There was the photograph which I showed you, and somewhere there is also a tape-recording which you are keeping for him.” Herr Kretzschmar’s back showed no sign that he had heard. “You talked about it to me yourself last night,” Smiley went on, in the same sentinel tone. “You said they discussed God and the world. You said Otto was laughing like an executioner, speaking three languages at once, singing, telling jokes. You took the photographs for Otto, but you also recorded their conversation for him. I suspect you also have the letter which you received on his behalf from London.”

Herr Kretzschmar had swung round and he was staring at Smiley in outrage.

“Who killed him?” he asked. “Herr Max, I ask you as a soldier!”

Smiley had taken the torn piece of picture postcard from his pocket.

“Who killed him?” Herr Kretzschmar repeated. “I insist!”

“This is what you expected me to bring last night,” said Smiley, ignoring the question. “Whoever brings it to you may have the tapes and whatever else you were keeping for him. That was the way he worked it out with you.”

Kretzschmar took the card.

“He called it his Moscow Rules,” Kretzschmar said. “Both Otto and the General insisted on it, though it struck me personally as ridiculous.”

“You have the other half of the card?” Smiley asked.

“Yes,” said Kretzschmar.

“Then make the match and give me the material. I shall use it exactly as Otto would have wished.”

He had to say this twice in different ways before Kretzschmar answered. “You promise this?” Kretzschmar demanded.

“Yes.”

“And the killers? What will you do with them?”

“Most likely they are already safe across the water,” Smiley said. “They have only a few kilometres to drive.”

“Then what good is the material?”

“The material is an embarrassment to the man who sent the killers,” Smiley said, and perhaps at this moment the iron quietness of Smiley’s demeanour advised Herr Kretzschmar that his visitor was as distressed as he was—perhaps, in his own very private fashion, more so.

“Will it kill him also?” Herr Kretzschmar asked.

Smiley took quite a time to answer this question. “It will do worse than kill him,” he said.

For a moment Herr Kretzschmar seemed disposed to ask what was worse than being killed; but he didn’t. Holding the half postcard lifelessly in his hand, he left the room. Smiley waited patiently. A perpetual brass clock laboured on its captive course, red fish gazed at him from an aquarium. Kretzschmar returned. He held a white cardboard box. Inside it, padded in hygienic tissue, lay a folded wad of photocopy paper covered with a now familiar handwriting, and six miniature cassettes, blue plastic, of a type favoured by men of modern habits.

“He entrusted them to me,” Herr Kretzschmar said.

“He was wise,” said Smiley.

Herr Kretzschmar laid a hand on Smiley’s shoulder. “If you need anything, let me know,” he said. “I have my people. These are violent times.”

 

From a call-box Smiley once more rang Hamburg Airport, this time to re-confirm Standfast’s flight to London Heathrow. This done, he bought stamps and a strong envelope and wrote on it a fictional address in Adelaide, Australia. He put Mr. Standfast’s passport inside it and dropped it in a letter-box. Then, travelling as plain Mr. George Smiley, profession clerk, he returned to the railway station, passing without incident across the border into Denmark. During the journey, he took himself to the lavatory and there read Ostrakova’s letter, all seven pages of it, the copy made by the General himself on Mikhel’s antiquated liquid copier in the little library next door to the British Museum. What he read, added to what he had that day already seen, filled him with a growing and almost uncontainable alarm. By train, ferry, and finally taxi, he hastened to Copenhagen’s Castrup Airport. From Castrup he caught a mid-afternoon plane to Paris and, though the flight lasted only an hour, in Smiley’s world it took a lifetime, conveying him across the entire range of his memories, emotions, and anticipations. His anger and revulsion at Leipzig’s murder, till now suppressed, welled over, only to be set aside by his fears for Ostrakova: if they had done so much to Leipzig and the General, what would they not do to her? The dash through Schleswig-Holstein had given him the swiftness of revived youth, but now, in the anti-climax of escape, he was assailed by the incurable indifference of age. With death so close, he thought, so ever-present, what is the point of struggling any longer? He thought of Karla again, and of his absolutism, which at least gave point to the perpetual chaos that was life’s condition; point to violence, and to death; of Karla for whom killing had never been more than the necessary adjunct of a grand design.