The Secret Pilgrim (6 page)

Taking up a delicate bone-china cup, he peered doubtfully into it, as if searching for something I had missed. “Would
you
have sent Ben to Berlin?”

“Yes, of course I would. Why not?”

“Well, why?”

“He's got perfect German from his mother. He's bright. Resourceful. People do what he wants them to do. His father had this terrific war.”

“So did your mother, as I remember.” He was referring to my mother's work with the Dutch Resistance. “What did
he
do—Ben's father, I mean?” he continued, as if he really didn't know.

“He broke codes,” I said, with Ben's pride. “He was a wrangler. A mathematician. A genius, apparently. He helped organise the double-cross system against the Germans—recruit their agents and play them back. My mother was very small beer by comparison.”

“And Ben was impressed by that?”

“Who wouldn't be?”

“He talked of it, I mean,” Smiley insisted. “Often? It was a big matter for him. You had that impression?”

“He just said it was something he had to live up to. He said it was the up-side of having a German mother.”

“Oh dear,” said Smiley unhappily. “Poor man. And those were his words? You're not embellishing?”

“Of course I'm not! He said that with a background like his, in England you had to run twice as fast as everyone else, just to keep up.”

Smiley seemed genuinely upset. “Oh dear,” he said again. “How unkind. And do you think he has the stamina, would you say?”

He had once more stopped me short. At our age, we really didn't think of stamina as being limited.

“What for?” I asked

“Oh, I don't know. What kind of stamina would one need for running twice as fast as everyone else in Berlin? A double ration of nerves, I suppose—always a strain. A doubly good head for alcohol—
and
where women are concerned—never easy.”

“I'm sure he's got whatever it takes,” I said loyally.

Smiley hung his teacloth on a bent nail which looked like his own addition to the kitchen. “Did you ever talk politics, the two of you?” he asked as we took our whiskies to the drawing room.

“Never.”

“Then I'm sure he's sound,” he said, with a sad little laugh, and I laughed too.

Houses always seem to me, at first acquaintance, to be either masculine or feminine, and Smiley's was undoubtedly feminine, with pretty curtains and carved mirrors and clever woman's touches. I wondered who he was living with, or wasn't. We sat down.

“And is there any reason why you
mightn't
have sent Ben to Berlin?” he resumed, smiling kindly over the top of his glass.

“Well, only that I wanted to go myself. Everybody wants a Berlin break. It's the front line.”

“He simply disappeared,” Smiley explained, settling back and appearing to close his eyes. We're not keeping anything from you. I'll tell you what we know. Last Thursday he crossed into East Berlin to meet his head agent, a gentleman named Hans Seidl— you can see his photograph in
Neues Deutschland.
It was Ben's first solo meeting with him. A big event. Ben's superior in the Berlin Station is Haggarty. Do you know Haggarty?”

“No.”

“Have you heard of him?”

“No.”

Ben never mentioned him to you?”

“No. I told you. I've never heard his name.”

“Forgive me. Sometimes an answer can vary with a context, if you follow me.”

I didn't.

“Haggarty is second man in the Station under the Station Commander. Did you not know that either?”

“No.”

“Has Ben a regular girlfriend?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Irregular?”

“You only had to go to a dance with him, they were all over him.”

“And after the dance?”

“He didn't brag. He doesn't. If he slept with them, he wouldn't say. He's not that kind of man.”

“They tell me you and Ben took your bits of leave together. Where did you go?”

“Twickenham. Lord's. Bit of fishing. Mainly we stayed with one another's people.”

“Ah.”

I couldn't understand why Smiley's words were scaring me. Perhaps I was so scared for Ben that I was scared by everything.
Increasingly I had the feeling Smiley assumed I was guilty of something, even if we had still to find out what. His recitation of events was like a summary of the evidence.

“First comes
Willis,”
he said, as if we were following a difficult trail. “Willis is the Berlin Head of Station, Willis has overall command. Then comes
Haggarty,
and Haggarty is the senior field officer under Willis and Ben's direct boss. Haggarty is responsible for the day-to-day servicing of the Seidl network. The network is twelve agents strong, or was—that is to say, nine men and three women, now all under arrest. An illegal network of that size, communicating partly by radio and partly by secret writing, requires a base team of at least the same number to maintain it, and I'm not talking about evaluating or distributing the product.”

“I know.”

“I'm sure you do, but let me tell you all the same,” he continued at the same ponderous pace. “Then you can help me fill in the gaps. Haggarty is a powerful personality. An Ulsterman. Off duty, he drinks, he's noisy and unpleasant. But when he's working he's none of those things. He's a conscientious officer with a prodigious memory. You're sure Ben never mentioned him to you?”

“I told you. No.”

I had not intended this to sound so adamant. There's always a mystery about how often you can deny a thing without beginning to sound like a liar, even to yourself; and of course this was the very mystery Smiley was playing upon in order to bring hidden things to the surface in me.

“Yes, well you
did
tell me no,” he agreed with his habitual courtesy, “And I did
hear
you say no. I merely wondered whether I had jogged your memory?”

“No.”

“Haggarty and Seidl were
friends,
” he continued, speaking, if it were possible, even more slowly. “So far as their business allowed, they were
close
friends. Seidl had been a prisoner of war in England, Haggarty in Germany. While Seidl was working as a farm labourer
near Cirencester in 1944, under the relaxed conditions for German prisoners of war that prevailed by then, he succeeded in courting an English landgirl. His guards at the camp took to leaving a bicycle for him outside the main gates with an army greatcoat tossed over the handlebar to cover Seidl's prisoner-of-war tunic. As long as he was back in his own bed by reveille, the guards turned a blind eye. Seidl never forgot his gratitude to the English. When the baby came along, Seidl's guards and fellow prisoners came to the christening. Charming, isn't it? The English at their best. But the story doesn't ring a bell?”

“How could it? You're talking about a joe!”

“A blown joe. One of Ben's. Haggarty's experiences of German prison camp were not so uplifting. Never mind. In 1948 while Haggarty was nominally working with the Control Commission, he picked up Seidl in a bar in Hannover, recruited him and ran him back into East Germany, to his home town of Leipzig. He has been running him ever since. The Haggarty-Seidl friendship has been the linchpin of the Berlin Station for the last fifteen years. At the time of his arrest last week, Seidl was fourth man in the East German Foreign Ministry. He had served as their Ambassador in Havana. But you've never heard of him. Nobody ever mentioned him to you. Not Ben. Not anyone.”

“No,” I said, as wearily as I could manage.

“Once a month Haggarty was accustomed to going into East Berlin and debriefing Seidl—in a car, in a safe flat, on a park bench, wherever—the usual thing. After the Wall there was a suspension of service for a while, before the meetings were cautiously resumed. The game was to cross in a Four Power vehicle—say, an army jeep— introduce a substitute, hop out at the right moment and rejoin the vehicle at an agreed point. It sounds perilous and it was, but with practice it worked. If Haggarty was on leave or sick, there was no meeting. A couple of months ago Head Office ruled that Haggarty should introduce Seidl to be a successor. Haggarty is past retiring age, Willis has had Berlin so long he's blown sky high, and besides
he knows far too many secrets to go wandering around behind the Curtain. Hence Ben's posting to Berlin. Ben was untarnished. Clean. Haggarty in person briefed him—I gather exhaustively. I'm sure he was not merciful. Haggarty is not a merciful man, and a twelve-strong network can be a complicated matter: who works to whom and why; who knows whose identity; the cut-outs, codes, couriers, covernames, symbols, radios, dead-letter boxes, inks, cars, salaries, children, birthdays, wives, mistresses. A lot to get into one's head all at once.”

“I know.”

“Ben told you, did he?”

I did not rise to him this time. I was determined not to. “We learned it on the course.
Ad infinitum,
” I said.

“Yes. Well, I suppose you did. The trouble is, the theory's never quite the same as the real thing, is it? Who's his best friend, apart from you?”

“I don't know.” I was startled by his sudden change of tack. “Jeremy, I suppose.”

“Jeremy who?”

“Galt. He was on the course.”

“And women?”

“I told you. No one special.”

“Haggarty wanted to take Ben into East Berlin with him, make the introduction himself,” Smiley resumed. “The Fifth Floor wouldn't wear that. They were trying to wean Haggarty away from his agent, and they don't hold with sending two men into badland where one will do. So Haggarty took Ben through the rendezvous procedures on a street map, and Ben went into East Berlin alone. On the Wednesday, he did a dry run and reconnoitred the location. On the Thursday he went in again, this time for real. He went in legally, driven in a Control Commission Humber car. He crossed at Checkpoint Charlie at three in the afternoon and slipped out of the car at the agreed spot. His substitute rode in it for three hours, all as planned. Ben rejoined the car successfully at six-ten,
and recrossed into West Berlin at six-fifty in the evening. His return was logged by the checkpoint. He had himself dropped at his flat. A faultless run. Willis and Haggarty were waiting for him at Station Headquarters, but he telephoned from his flat instead. He said the rendezvous had gone to plan, but he'd brought nothing back except a high temperature and a ferocious stomach bug. Could they postpone their debriefing till morning? Lamentably they could. They haven't seen him or heard from him since. He sounded cheerful despite his ailment, which they put down to nerves. Has Ben ever been ill on you?”

“No.”

“He said their mutual friend had been in great form, real character and so forth. Obviously he could say no more on the open telephone. His bed wasn't slept in, he took no extra clothes with him. There's no proof that he was in his flat when he rang, there's no proof he's been kidnapped, there's no proof he hasn't been. If he was going to defect, why didn't he stay in East Berlin? They can't have turned him round and played him back at us or they wouldn't have arrested his network. And if they wanted to kidnap him, why not do it while he was their side of the Wall? There's no hard evidence that he left West Berlin by any of the approved corridors— train, autobahn, air. The controls are not efficient, and as you say, he was trained. For all we know, he hasn't left Berlin at all. On the other hand, we thought he might have come to you. Don't look so appalled. You're his friend, aren't you? His best friend? Closer to him than anyone? Young Galt doesn't compare. He told us so himself. ‘Ben's great buddy was Ned,' he said. ‘If Ben was going to turn to any of us, it would have to be Ned.' The evidence rather bears that out, I'm afraid.”

“What evidence?”

No pregnant pause, no dramatic change of tone, no warning of any kind: just dear old George Smiley being his apologetic self. “There's a letter in his flat, addressed to you,” he said. “It's not dated, just thrown in a drawer. A scrawl rather than a letter. He
was probably drunk. It's a love letter, I'm afraid.” And, having handed me a photocopy to read, he fetched us both another whisky.

Perhaps I do it to help me look away from the discomfort of the moment. But always when I set that scene in my memory I find myself switching to Smiley's point of view. I imagine how it must have felt to be in his position.

What he had before him is easy enough to picture. See a striving trainee trying to look older than his years, a pipe-smoker, a sailor, a wise nodder, a boy who could not wait for middle age, and you have the young Ned of the early sixties.

But what he had behind him was not half so easy, and it was capable of altering his reading of me drastically. The Circus, though I couldn't know it at the time, was in low water, dogged by unaccountable failure. The arrest of Ben's agents, tragic in itself, was only the latest in a chain of catastrophes reaching across the globe. In northern Japan, an entire Circus listening station and its three-man staff had vanished into thin air. In the Caucasus, our escape lines had been rolled up overnight. We had lost networks in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, all in a space of months. And in Washington our American Cousins were voicing ever-louder dissatisfaction with our reliability, and threatening to cut the special cord for good.

In such a climate, monstrous theories became daily fare. A bunker mentality develops. Nothing is allowed to be accidental, nothing random. If the Circus triumphed, it was because we were allowed to do so by our opponents. Guilt by association was rife. In the American perception, the Circus was nurturing not one mole but burrows of them, each cunningly advancing the career of every other. And what joined them was not so much their pernicious faith in Marx—though that was bad enough—it was their dreadful English homosexuality.