Smiley's People (36 page)

“The magician is dead, madame,” he said, fogging the fish-eye with his breath. “I have come from London to help you in his place.”

 

For years afterwards, and probably for all his life, Peter Guillam would relate, with varying degrees of frankness, the story of his home-coming that same evening. He would emphasize that the circumstances were particular. He was in a bad temper—one—he had been so all day. Two—his Ambassador had publicly rebuked him at the weekly meeting for a remark of unseemly levity about the British balance of payments. He was newly married—three—and his very young wife was pregnant. Her phone call—four—came moments after he had decoded a long and extremely boring signal from the Circus reminding him for the fifteenth time that no, repeat
no
operations could be undertaken on French soil without advance permission in writing from Head Office. And—five
—le tout Paris
was having one of its periodical scares about kidnapping. Last, the post of Circus head resident in Paris was widely known to be a laying-out place for officers shortly to be buried, offering little more than the opportunity to lunch interminably with a variety of very corrupt, very boring chiefs of rival French Intelligence services who spent more time spying on each other than on their supposed enemies. All of these factors, Guillam would afterwards insist, should be taken into account before anyone accused him of impetuosity. Guillam, it may be added, was an athlete, half French, but more English on account of it; he was slender, and near enough handsome—but though he fought it every inch of the way, he was also close on fifty, which is the watershed that few careers of ageing fieldmen survive. He also owned a brand-new German Porsche car, which he had acquired, somewhat shamefacedly, at diplomatic rates, and parked, to the Ambassador’s strident disapproval, in the Embassy car-park.

Marie-Claire Guillam, then, rang her husband at six exactly, just as Guillam was locking away his code-books. Guillam had two telephone lines to his desk, one of them in theory operational and direct. The second went through the Embassy switchboard. Marie-Claire rang on the direct line, a thing they had always agreed she would only ever do in emergency. She spoke French, which, true, was her native language, but they had recently been communicating in English in order to improve her fluency.

“Peter,” she began.

He heard at once the tension in her voice.

“Marie-Claire? What is it?”

“Peter, there’s someone here. He wants you to come at once.”

“Who?”

“I can’t say. It’s important. Please come home at once,” she repeated and rang off.

Guillam’s chief clerk, a Mr. Anstruther, had been standing at the strong-room door when the call came, waiting for him to spin the combination lock before they each put in their keys. Through the open doorway to Guillam’s office he saw him slam down the phone, and the next thing he knew, Guillam had tossed to Anstruther—a long throw, probably fifteen feet—the Head Resident’s sacred
personal key,
near enough the symbol of his office, and Anstruther by a miracle had caught it: put up his left hand and caught it in his palm, like an American baseball player; he couldn’t have done it again if he’d tried it a hundred times, he told Guillam later.

“Don’t budge from here till I ring you!” Guillam shouted. “You sit at my desk and you man those phones. Hear me?”

Anstruther did, but by then Guillam was half-way down the absurdly elegant spiral staircase of the Embassy, barging between typists and Chancery guards and bright young men setting out on the evening cocktail round. Seconds later, he was at the wheel of his Porsche, revving the engine like a racing driver, which in another life he might well have been. Guillam’s home was in Neuilly, and in the ordinary way these sporting dashes through the rush-hour rather amused him, reminding him twice a day—as he put it—that however mindbendingly boring the Embassy routine, life around him was hairy, quarrelsome, and fun. He was even given to timing himself over the distance. If he took the Avenue Charles de Gaulle and got a fair wind at the traffic-lights, twenty-five minutes through the evening traffic was not unreasonable. Late at night or early in the morning, with empty roads and CD plates, he could cut it to fifteen, but in the rush-hour thirty-five minutes was fast going and forty the norm. That evening, hounded by visions of Marie-Claire held at pistol point by a bunch of crazed nihilists, he made the distance in eighteen minutes cold. Police reports later submitted to the Ambassador had him jumping three sets of lights and touching around a hundred and forty kilometres as he entered the home stretch; but these were of necessity something of a reconstruction, since no one felt inclined to try to keep up with him. Guillam himself remembers little of the drive, beyond a near squeak with a furniture van, and a lunatic cyclist who took it into his head to turn left when Guillam was a mere hundred and fifty metres behind him.

His apartment was in a villa, on the third floor. Braking hard before he reached the entrance, he cut the engine and coasted to a halt in the street outside, then pelted to the front door as quietly as haste allowed. He had expected a car parked somewhere close, probably with a get-away driver waiting at the wheel, but to his momentary relief there was none in sight. A light was burning in their bedroom, however, so that he now imagined Marie-Claire gagged and tied to the bed, and her captors sitting over her, waiting for Guillam to arrive. If it was Guillam they wanted, he did not propose to disappoint them. He had come unarmed; he had no choice. The Circus Housekeepers had a holy terror of weapons, and his illicit revolver was in the bedside locker, where no doubt they had by now found it. He climbed the three flights silently and at the front door threw off his jacket and dropped it on the floor beside him. He had his door key in his hand, and now, as softly as he knew how, he fed it into the lock, then pressed the bell and called “
Facteur”
—postman—through the letter-box and then “
Exprès.
” His hand on the key, he waited till he heard approaching footsteps, which he knew at once were not those of Marie-Claire. They were slow, even ponderous, and, to Guillam’s ear, too self-assured by half. And they came from the direction of the bedroom. What he did next, he did all at once. To open the door from inside, he knew, required two distinct movements: first the chain must be shot, then the spring catch must be freed. In a half-crouch, Guillam waited till he heard the chain slip, then used his one weapon of surprise: he turned his own key and threw all his weight against the door and, as he did so, had the intense satisfaction of seeing a plump male figure spin wildly back against the hall mirror, knocking it clean off its moorings, while Guillam seized his arm and swung it into a vicious breaking lock—only to see the startled face of his lifelong friend and mentor, George Smiley, staring helplessly at him.

 

The aftermath of that encounter is described by Guillam somewhat hazily; he had, of course, no forewarning of Smiley’s coming, and Smiley—perhaps out of fear of microphones—said little inside the flat to enlighten him. Marie-Claire was in the bedroom, but neither bound nor gagged; it was Ostrakova who, at Marie-Claire’s insistence, was lying on the bed, still in her old black dress, and Marie-Claire was ministering to her in any way she could think of—jellied breast of chicken, mint tea, all the invalid foods she had diligently laid in for the wonderful day, alas not yet at hand, when Guillam would fall ill on her. Ostrakova, Guillam noticed (though he had yet to learn her name), seemed to have been beaten up. She had broad grey bruises round the eyes and lips, and her fingers were cut to bits where she had apparently tried to defend herself. Having briefly admitted Guillam to this scene—the battered lady tended by the anxious child bride—Smiley conducted Guillam to his own drawing-room and, with all the authority of Guillam’s old chief, which he indeed had been, rapidly set out his requirements. Only now, it developed, was Guillam’s earlier haste warranted. Ostrakova—Smiley referred to her only as “our guest”—should leave Paris tonight, he said. The station’s safe house outside Orléans—he called it “our country mansion”—was not safe enough; she needed somewhere that provided care and protection. Guillam remembered a French couple in Arras, a retired agent and his wife, who in the past had provided shelter for the Circus’s occasional birds of passage. It was agreed he would telephone them, but not from the apartment: Smiley sent him off to find a public call-box. By the time Guillam had made the necessary arrangements and returned, Smiley had written out a brief signal on a sheet of Marie-Claire’s awful notepaper with its grazing bunnies, which he wished Guillam to have transmitted immediately to the Circus, “Personal for Saul Enderby, decipher yourself.” The text, which Smiley insisted that Guillam should read (but not aloud), politely asked Enderby—“in view of a second death no doubt by now reported to you”—for a meeting at Ben’s Place forty-eight hours hence. Guillam had no idea where Ben’s Place was.

“And, Peter.”

“Yes, George,” said Guillam, still dazed.

“I imagine there exists an official directory of locally accredited diplomats. Do you happen to have such a thing in the house by any chance?”

Guillam did. Indeed, Marie-Claire lived by it. She had no memory for names at all, so it lay beside the bedroom telephone for every time a member of a foreign embassy telephoned her with yet another invitation to drinks, to dinner, or, most ghastly of all, to a National Day festivity. Guillam fetched it, and a moment later was peering over Smiley’s shoulder. “Kirov,” he read—but not, once more, aloud—as he followed the line of Smiley’s thumb-nail—“Kirov, Oleg, Second Secretary (Commercial), Unmarried.” Followed by an address in the Soviet Embassy ghetto in the 7th district.

“Ever bumped into him?” Smiley asked.

Guillam shook his head. “We took a look at him a few years back. He’s marked ‘hands off,’” he replied.

“When was this list compiled?” Smiley asked. The answer was printed on the cover: December of the previous year.

Smiley said, “Well, when you get to the office—”

“I’ll take a look at the file,” Guillam promised.

“There is also
this,
” said Smiley sharply, and handed Guillam a plain carrier-bag containing, when he looked later, several micro-cassettes and a fat brown envelope.

“By first bag tomorrow, please,” Smiley said. “The same grading and the same addressee as the telegram.”

Leaving Smiley still poring over the list, and the two women cloistered in the bedroom, Guillam hastened back to the Embassy and, having released the bemused Anstruther from his vigil at the telephones, consigned the carrier-bag to him, together with Smiley’s instructions. The tension in Smiley had affected Guillam considerably, and he was sweating. In all the years he had known George, he said later, he had never known him so inward, so intent, so elliptical, so desperate. Re-opening the strong-room, he personally encoded and dispatched the telegram, waiting only as long as it took him to receive the Head Office acknowledgment before drawing the file on Soviet Embassy movements and browsing through back numbers of old watch lists. He had not far to look. The third serial, copied to London, told him all that he needed to know. Kirov Oleg, Second Secretary Commercial, described this time as “married but wife not en poste,” had returned to Moscow two weeks ago. In the panel reserved for miscellaneous comments, the French liaison service had added that, according to informed Soviet sources, Kirov had been “recalled to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs at short notice in order to take up a senior appointment which had become vacant unexpectedly.” The customary farewell parties had therefore not been feasible.

Back in Neuilly, Smiley received Guillam’s intelligence in utter silence. He did not seem surprised, but he seemed in some way appalled, and when he finally spoke—which did not occur until they were all three in the car and speeding towards Arras—his voice had an almost hopeless ring. “Yes,” he said—as if Guillam knew the whole history inside out. “Yes, that is of course exactly what he
would
do, isn’t it? He would call Kirov back under the pretext of a promotion, in order to make sure he really came.”

George had not sounded that way, said Guillam—no doubt with the wisdom of hindsight—since the night he unmasked Bill Haydon as Karla’s mole as well as Ann’s lover.

 

Ostrakova also, in retrospect, had little coherent recollection of that night, neither of the car journey, on which she contrived to sleep, nor of the patient but persistent questioning to which the little plump man subjected her when she woke late the next morning. Perhaps she had temporarily lost her capacity to be impressed—and, accordingly, to remember. She answered his questions, she was grateful to him, she gave him—without the zest or “decoration”—the same information that she had given to the magician, though he seemed to possess most of it already.

“The magician,” she said once. “Dead. My God.”

She asked after the General, but scarcely heeded Smiley’s noncommittal reply. She was thinking of Ostrakov, then Glikman, now the magician—and she never knew his name. Her host and hostess were kind to her also, but as yet made no impression on her. It was raining and she could not see the distant fields.

Little by little, all the same, as the weeks passed, Ostrakova permitted herself an idyllic hibernation. The deep winter came early and she let its snows embrace her; she walked a little, and then a great deal, retired early, spoke seldom, and as her body repaired itself so did her spirit. At first a pardonable confusion reigned in her mind, and she found herself thinking of her daughter in the terms by which the gingery stranger had described her: as the tearaway dissenter and untameable rebel. Then slowly the logic of the matter presented itself to her. Somewhere, she argued, there was the real Alexandra who lived and had her being, as before. Or who, as before, did not. In either case, the gingery man’s lies concerned a different creature altogether, one whom they had invented for their own needs. She even managed to find consolation in the likelihood that her daughter, if she lived at all, lived in complete ignorance of their machinations.