Smiley's People (38 page)

“Karla was under stress,” Smiley said. “Kirov said so and we have it from elsewhere also. He was in a hurry. He had to take risks.”

“Like bumping chaps off?”

“That was more recent,” Smiley said, in a tone of such casual exoneration that Enderby glanced at him quite sharply.

“You’re bloody forgiving these days, aren’t you, George?” said Enderby suspiciously.

“Am I?” Smiley sounded puzzled by the question. “If you say so, Saul.”

“And bloody meek too.” He returned to the transcript. “Page twenty-one and we’re home free.” He read slowly to give the passage extra point. “Page twenty-one,” he repeated. “‘Following the successful recruitment of Ostrakova, and the formal issuing of a French permit to her daughter Alexandra, I was instructed to set aside immediately ten thousand American dollars a month from the Paris imprest for the purpose of servicing this new mole, who was henceforth awarded the workname KOMET. The agent KOMET also received the highest classification of secrecy within the Directorate, requiring all communications regarding her to be sent to the Director personally, using person-to-person ciphers, and without intermediaries. Preferably, however, such communications should go by courier, since Karla is an opponent of the excessive use of radio.’ Any truth in that one, George?” Enderby asked casually.

“It was how we caught him in India,” said Smiley without lifting his head from the script. “We broke his codes and he later swore that he would never use radio again. Like most promises, it was subject to review.”

Enderby bit off a bit of matchstick, and smeared it onto the back of his hand. “Don’t you want to take your coat off, George?” he asked. “Sam, ask him what he wants to drink.”

Sam asked, but Smiley was too absorbed in the script to answer.

Enderby resumed his reading aloud: “‘I was also instructed to make sure that no reference to KOMET appeared on the annual accounts for Western Europe which, as auditor, I was obliged to sign and present to Karla for submission to the Collegium of Moscow Centre at the close of each financial year. . . . No, I never met the agent KOMET, nor do I know what became of her, or in which country she is operating. I know only that she is living under the name of Alexandra Ostrakova, the daughter of naturalised French parents. . . .’” More turning of pages. “‘The monthly payment of ten thousand dollars was not expended by myself, but transferred to a bank in Thun in the Swiss canton of Berne. The transfer is made by standing orders to the credit of a Dr. Adolf Glaser. Glaser is the nominal account holder, but I believe that Dr. Glaser is only the workname for a Karla operative at the Soviet Embassy in Berne, whose real name is Grigoriev. I believe this because once when I sent money to Thun, the sending bank made an error and it did not arrive; when this became known to Karla, he ordered me to send a second sum immediately to Grigoriev personally while bank enquiries were continuing. I did as I was ordered and later recovered the duplicated amount. This is all I know. Otto, my friend, I beg you to preserve these confidences, they could kill me.’ He’s bloody right. They did.” Enderby chucked the transcript onto a table, and it made a loud slap. “Kirov’s last will and testament, as you might say. That’s it. George?”

“Yes, Saul.”

“Really no drink?”

“Thank you, I’m fine.”

“I’m still going to spell it out because I’m thick. Watch my arithmetic. It’s nowhere near as good as yours. Watch my
every move.
” Recalling Lacon, he held up a white hand and spread the fingers as a prelude to counting on them.

“One, Ostrakova writes to Vladimir. Her message rings old bells. Probably Mikhel intercepted and read it, but we’ll never know. We could sweat him, but I doubt if it would help, and it would most certainly put the cat among Karla’s pigeons in a big way if we did.” He grabbed a second finger. “Two, Vladimir sends a copy of Ostrakova’s letter to Otto Leipzig, urging him to rewarm the Kirov relationship double-quick. Three, Leipzig roars off to Paris, sees Ostrakova, gets himself alongside his dear old buddy Kirov, tempts him to Hamburg—where Kirov is free to go, after all, since Leipzig is still down in Karla’s books as Kirov’s agent. Now there’s a thing, George.”

Smiley waited.

“In Hamburg, Leipzig burns Kirov rotten. Right? Proof right here in our sweaty hands. But I mean—how?”

Did Smiley really not follow, or was he merely intent upon making Enderby work a little harder? In either case, he preferred to take Enderby’s question as rhetorical.

“
How
does Leipzig burn him precisely?” Enderby insisted. “What’s the pressure? Dirty pix—well, okay. Karla’s a puritan, so’s Kirov. But I mean, Christ, this isn’t the fifties, is it? Everyone’s allowed a bit of leg-sliding these days, what?”

Smiley offered no comment on Russian mores; but on the subject of pressure he was as precise as Karla might have been: “It’s a different ethic to ours. It suffers no fools. We think of ourselves as more susceptible to pressure than the Russians. It’s not true. It’s simply not true.” He seemed very sure of this. He seemed to have given the matter a lot of recent thought:

“Kirov had been incompetent and indiscreet. For his indiscretion alone, Karla would have destroyed him. Leipzig had the proof of that. You may remember that when we were running the original operation against Kirov, Kirov got drunk and talked out of turn about Karla. He told Leipzig that it was Karla personally who had ordered him to compose the legend for a female agent. You discounted the story at the time, but it was true.”

Enderby was not a man to blush, but he did have the grace to pull a wry grin before fishing in his pocket for another matchstick.

“
And he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him,
” he remarked contentedly, though whether he was referring to his own dereliction or to Kirov’s was unclear. “Tell us the rest, buddy, or I’ll tell Karla what you’ve told me already, says little Otto to the fly. Jesus, you’re right, he really
did
have Kirov by the balls!”

Sam Collins ventured a soothing interjection. “I think George’s point meshes pretty neatly with the reference on page two, Chief,” he said. “There’s a passage where Leipzig actually refers to ‘our discussions in Paris.’ Otto’s twisting the Karla knife there, no question. Right, George?”

But Sam Collins might have been speaking in another room for all the attention either of them paid him.

“Leipzig also had Ostrakova’s letter,” Smiley added. “Its contents did not speak well for Kirov.”

“Another thing,” said Enderby.

“Yes, Saul?”

“Four years, right? It’s fully four years since Kirov made his original pass at Leipzig. Suddenly he’s all over Ostrakova, wanting the same thing. Four years later. You suggesting he’s been swanning around with the same brief from Karla all this time, and got no forrarder?”

Smiley’s answer was curiously bureaucratic. “One can only suppose that Karla’s requirement ceased and was then revived,” he replied primly, and Enderby had the sense not to press him.

“Point is, Leipzig burns Kirov rotten and gets word to Vladimir that he’s done so,” Enderby resumed as the spread fingers came up again for counting. “Vladimir dispatches Villem to play courier. Meanwhile back at the Moscow ranch, Karla is either smelling a rat or Mikhel has peached, probably the latter. In either case, Karla calls Kirov home under the pretext of promotion and swings him by his ears. Kirov sings, as I would, fast. Karla tries to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Kills Vladimir while he’s on the way to our rendezvous armed with Ostrakova’s letter. Kills Leipzig. Takes a pot at the old lady, and fluffs it. What’s his mood now?”

“He’s sitting in Moscow waiting for Holmes or Captain Ahab to catch up with him,” Sam Collins suggested, in his velvet voice, and lit yet another of his brown cigarettes.

Enderby was unamused. “So why doesn’t Karla dig up his treasure, George? Put it somewhere else? If Kirov has confessed to Karla what he’s confessed to Leipzig, Karla’s first move should be to brush over the traces!”

“Perhaps the treasure is not movable,” Smiley replied. “Perhaps Karla’s options have run out.”

“But it would be daylight madness to leave that bank account intact!”

“It was daylight madness to use a fool like Kirov,” Smiley said, with unusual harshness. “It was madness to let him recruit Leipzig and madness to approach Ostrakova, and madness to believe that by killing three people he could stop the leak. Presumptions of sanity are therefore not given. Why should they be?” He paused. “And Karla
does
believe it, apparently, or Grigoriev would not still be in Berne. Which you say he is, I gather?” The smallest glance at Collins.

“As of today he’s sitting pretty,” Collins said through his all-weather grin.

“Then moving the bank account would hardly be a logical step,” Smiley remarked. And he added: “Even for a madman.”

And it was strange—as Collins and Enderby afterwards privily agreed—how everything that Smiley said seemed to pass through the room like a chill; how in some way that they failed to understand, they had removed themselves to a higher order of human conduct for which they were unfit.

“So who’s his dark lady?” Enderby demanded outright. “Who’s worth ten grand a month and his whole damn career? Forcing him to use boobies instead of his own regular cut-throats? Must be quite a gal.”

 

Again there is mystery about Smiley’s decision not to reply to this question. Perhaps only his wilful inaccessibility can explain it; or perhaps we are staring at the stubborn refusal of the born case man to reveal anything to his controller that is not essential to their collaboration. Certainly there was philosophy in his decision. In his mind already, Smiley was accountable to nobody but himself: why should he act as if things were otherwise? “The threads lead all of them into my own life,” he may have reasoned. “Why pass the ends to my adversary merely so that he can manipulate me?” Again, he may well have assumed—and probably with justice—that Enderby was as familiar as Smiley was with the complexities of Karla’s background; and that even if he was not, he had had his Soviet Research Section burrowing all night until they found the answers he required.

In any case, the fact is that Smiley kept his counsel.

 

“George?” said Enderby, finally.

An aeroplane flew over quite low.

“It’s simply a question of whether you want the product,” Smiley said at last. “I can’t see that anything else is ultimately of very much importance.”

“Can’t you, by God!” said Enderby, and pulled his hand from his mouth and the matchstick with it. “Oh, I
want
him all right,” he went on, as if that were only half the point. “I
want
the Mona Lisa, and the Chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic, and next year’s winner of the Irish Sweep. I
want
Karla sitting in the hot seat at Sarratt, coughing out his life story to the inquisitors. I
want
the American Cousins to eat out of my hand for years to come. I
want
the whole ball game, of course I do. Still doesn’t get me off the hook.”

But Smiley seemed curiously unconcerned by Enderby’s dilemma.

“Brother Lacon told you the facts of life, I suppose? The stalemate and all?” Enderby asked. “Young, idealistic Cabinet, mustard for détente, preaching open government, all that balls? Ending the conditioned reflexes of the cold war? Sniffing Tory conspiracies under every Whitehall bed, ours specially? Did he? Did he tell you they’re proposing to launch a damn great Anglo-Bolshie peace initiative, yet another, which will duly fall on its arse around Christmas next?”

“No. No, he didn’t tell me that part.”

“Well, they are. And we’re not to jeopardise it, tra-la. Mind you, the very chaps who go hammering the peace-drums are the ones who scream like hell when we don’t deliver the goods. I suppose that stands to reason. They’re already asking what the Soviet posture will be, even now. Was it always like that?”

Smiley took so long to answer that he might have been passing the Judgment of Ages. “Yes. I suppose it was. I suppose that in one form or another it always
was
like that,” he said at last, as if the answer mattered to him deeply.

“Wish you’d warned me.”

Enderby sauntered back towards the centre of the room and poured himself some plain soda from the sideboard; he stared at Smiley with what seemed to be honest indecision. He stared at him, he shifted his head and stared again, showing all the signs of being faced with an insoluble problem.

“It’s a tough one, Chief, it really is,” said Sam Collins, unremarked by either man.

“And it’s not all a wicked Bolshie plot, George, to lure us to our ultimate destruction—you’re sure of
that?
”

“I’m afraid we’re no longer worth the candle, Saul,” Smiley said, with an apologetic smile.

Enderby did not care to be reminded of the limitations of British grandeur, and for a moment his mouth set into a sour grimace.

“All right, Maud,” he said finally. “Let’s go into the garden.”

 

They walked side by side. Collins, on Enderby’s nod, had stayed indoors. Slow rain puckered the surface of the pool and made the marble angel glisten in the dusk. Sometimes a breeze passed and a chain of water slopped from the hanging branches onto the lawn, soaking one or the other of them. But Enderby was an English gentleman, and while God’s rain might be falling on the rest of mankind, he was damned if it was going to fall on him. The light came at them in bits. From Ben’s French windows, yellow rectangles fell across the pond. From over the brick wall, they had the sickly green glow of a modern street lamp. They completed a round in silence before Enderby spoke.

“Led us a proper dance, you did, George, I’ll tell you that for nothing, Villem, Mikhel, Toby, Connie. Poor old Ferguson hardly had time to fill in his expense claims before you were off again. ‘Doesn’t he ever sleep?’ he asked me. ‘Doesn’t he ever drink?’”