Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (12 page)

He began with works of reference from his personal safe. Smiley had given him priorities. First the staff directory, on issue to senior officers only, which supplied the home addresses, telephone numbers, names, and worknames of all home-based Circus personnel. Second, the handbook on staff duties, including the fold-in diagram of the Circus’s reorganisation under Alleline. At its centre lay Bill Haydon’s London Station, like a giant spider in its own web. “After the Prideaux fiasco,” Bill had reputedly fumed, “we’ll have no more damned private armies, no more left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.” Alleline, he noticed, was billed twice: once as Chief, once as Director Special Sources. According to rumour, it was those sources that kept the Circus in business. Nothing else, in Guillam’s view, could account for the Circus’s inertia at working level and the esteem it enjoyed in Whitehall. To these documents, at Smiley’s insistence, he added the scalp-hunters’ revised charter, in the form of an Alleline letter beginning “Dear Guillam,” and setting out in detail the diminution of his powers. In several cases, the winner was Toby Esterhase, head of Acton lamplighters, the one outstation that had actually grown fatter under lateralism.

Next he moved to his desk and photographed, also on Smiley’s instruction, a handful of routine circulars that might be useful as background reading. These included a belly-ache from Admin., on the state of safe houses in the London area
(“Kindly
treat them as if they were your
own”),
and another about the misuse of unlisted Circus telephones for private calls. Lastly a very rude personal letter from documents warning him “for the last time of asking” that his workname driving licence was out of date, and that unless he took the trouble to renew it “his name would be forwarded to the housekeepers for appropriate disciplinary action.”

He put away the camera and returned to his safe. On the bottom shelf lay a stack of lamplighter reports issued over Toby Esterhase’s signature and stamped with the code word “Hatchet.” These supplied the names and cover jobs of the two or three hundred identified Soviet intelligence officers operating in London under legal or semi-legal cover: trade, Tass, Aeroflot, Radio Moscow, consular, and diplomatic. Where appropriate, they also gave the dates of lamplighter investigations and names of branch lines, which is jargon for contacts thrown up in the course of surveillance and not necessarily run to earth. The reports came in a main annual volume and monthly supplements. He consulted the main volume first, then the supplements. At eleven-twenty he locked his safe, rang London Station on the direct line, and asked for Lauder Strickland, of Banking Section.

“Lauder, this is Peter from Brixton; how’s trade?”

“Yes, Peter, what can we do for you?”

Brisk and blank. We of London Station have more important friends, said the tone.

It was a question of washing some dirty money, Guillam explained, to finance a ploy against a French diplomatic courier who seemed to be for sale. In his meekest voice, he wondered whether Lauder could possibly find the time for them to meet and discuss it. Was the project cleared with London Station, Lauder demanded. No, but Guillam had already sent the papers to Bill by shuttle. Lauder Strickland came down a peg. Guillam pressed his cause: “There are one or two tricky aspects, Lauder; I think we need your sort of brain.”

Lauder said he could spare him half an hour.

On his way to the West End, he dropped his films at the meagre premises of a chemist called Lark, in the Charing Cross Road. Lark, if it was he, was a very fat man with tremendous fists. The shop was empty.

“Mr. Lampton’s films, to be developed,” said Guillam. Lark took the package to the back room, and when he returned he said “All done” in a gravel voice, then blew out a lot of air at once, as if he were smoking, which he wasn’t. He saw Guillam to the door and closed it behind him with a clatter. Where on God’s earth does George find them, Guillam wondered. He had bought some throat pastilles. Every move must be accountable, Smiley had warned him: assume that the Circus has the dogs on you twenty-four hours a day. So what’s new about that, Guillam thought; Toby Esterhase would put the dogs on his own mother if it bought him a pat on the back from Alleline.

From Charing Cross he walked up to Chez Victor for lunch with his head man, Cy Vanhofer, and a thug calling himself Lorimer, who claimed to be sharing his mistress with the East German ambassador in Stockholm. Lorimer said the girl was ready to play ball but she needed British citizenship and a lot of money on delivery of the first take. She would do anything, he said: spike the ambassador’s mail, bug his rooms, or “put broken glass in his bath,” which was supposed to be a joke. Guillam reckoned Lorimer was lying, and he was inclined to wonder whether Vanhofer was too, but he was wise enough to realise that he was in no state to say which way anyone was leaning just then. He liked Chez Victor but had no recollection of what he ate, and now as he entered the lobby of the Circus he knew the reason was excitement.

“Hullo, Bryant.”

“Nice to see you, sir. Take a seat, sir, please, just for a moment, sir, thank you,” said Bryant, all in one breath, and Guillam perched on the wooden settle thinking of dentists and Camilla. She was a recent and somewhat mercurial acquisition; it was a while since things had moved quite so fast for him. They met at a party and she talked about truth, alone in a corner over a carrot juice. Guillam, taking a long chance, said he wasn’t too good at ethics, so why didn’t they just go to bed together? She considered for a while, gravely; then fetched her coat. She’d been hanging around ever since, cooking nut rissoles and playing the flute.

The lobby looked dingier than ever. Three old lifts, a wooden barrier, a poster for Mazawattee tea, Bryant’s glass-fronted sentry box with a “Scenes of England” calendar, and a line of mossy telephones.

“Mr. Strickland
is
expecting you, sir,” said Bryant as he emerged, and in slow motion stamped a pink chit with the time of day: “14:55, P. Bryant, Janitor.” The grille of the centre lift rattled like a bunch of dry sticks.

“Time you oiled this thing, isn’t it?” Guillam called as he waited for the mechanism to mesh.

“We keep asking,” said Bryant, embarking on a favourite lament. “They never do a thing about it. You can ask till you’re blue in the face. How’s the family, sir?”

“Fine,” said Guillam, who had none.

“That’s right,” said Bryant. Looking down, Guillam saw the creamy head vanish between his feet. Mary called him strawberry and vanilla, he remembered: red face, white hair, and mushy.

In the lift he examined his pass. “Permit to enter L.S.,” ran the headline. “Purpose of visit: Banking Section. This document to be handed back on leaving.” And a space, marked “host’s signature,” blank.

“Well met, Peter. Greetings. You’re a trifle late, I think, but never mind.”

Lauder was waiting at the barrier—all five foot nothing of him, white collared and secretly on tiptoe—to be visited. In Control’s day this floor had been a thoroughfare of busy people. Today a barrier closed the entrance and a rat-faced janitor scrutinised his pass.

“Good God, how long have you had that monster?” Guillam asked, slowing down before a shiny new coffee machine. A couple of girls, filling beakers, glanced round and said “Hullo, Lauder,” looking at Guillam. The tall one reminded him of Camilla: the same slow-burning eyes, censuring male insufficiency.

“Ah, but you’ve no notion how many man-hours it saves!” Lauder cried at once. “Fantastic. Quite fantastic,” and all but knocked over Bill Haydon in his enthusiasm.

He was emerging from his room, an hexagonal pepper pot overlooking New Compton Street and the Charing Cross Road. He was moving in the same direction as they were but at about half a mile an hour, which for Bill indoors was full throttle. Outdoors was a different matter; Guillam had seen that, too—on training games at Sarratt, and once on a night drop in Greece. Outdoors he was swift and eager; his keen face, in this clammy corridor shadowed and withdrawn, seemed in the free air to be fashioned by the outlandish places where he had served. There was no end to them: no operational theatre, in Guillam’s admiring eyes, that did not bear the Haydon imprint somewhere. Over and again in his own career, he had made the same eerie encounter with Bill’s exotic progress. A year or two back, still working on Marine intelligence and having as one of his targets the assembly of a team of coast-watchers for the Chinese ports of Wenchow and Amoy, Guillam discovered to his amazement that there were actually Chinese stay-behind agents living in those very towns, recruited by Bill Haydon in the course of some forgotten wartime exploit, rigged out with cached radios and equipment, with whom contact might be made. Another time, raking through war records of Circus strong-arm men, more out of nostalgia for the period than present professional optimism, Guillam stumbled twice on Haydon’s workname in as many minutes: in 1941 he was running French fishing smacks out of the Helford Estuary; in the same year, with Jim Prideaux as his stringer, he was laying down courier lines across southern Europe from the Balkans to Madrid. To Guillam, Haydon was of that unrepeatable, fading Circus generation, to which his parents and George Smiley also belonged—exclusive and, in Haydon’s case, blue-blooded—which had lived a dozen leisured lives to his own hasty one, and still, thirty years later, gave the Circus its dying flavour of adventure.

Seeing them both, Haydon stood rock-still. It was a month since Guillam had spoken to him; he had probably been away on unexplained business. Now, against the light of his own open doorway, he looked strangely black and tall. He was carrying something—Guillam could not make out what it was—a magazine, a file, or a report; his room, split by his own shadow, was an undergraduate mayhem, monkish and chaotic. Reports, flimsies, and dossiers lay heaped everywhere; on the wall a baize noticeboard jammed with postcards and press cuttings; beside it, askew and unframed, one of Bill’s old paintings, a rounded abstract in the hard flat colours of the desert.

“Hullo, Bill,” said Guillam.

Leaving his door open—a breach of housekeeper regulations—Haydon fell in ahead of them, still without a word. He was dressed with his customary dottiness. The leather patches of his jacket were stitched on like diamonds, not squares, which from behind gave him a harlequin look. His spectacles were jammed up into his hair like goggles. For a moment they followed him uncertainly, till, without warning, he suddenly turned himself round, all of him at once like a statue being slowly swivelled on its plinth, and fixed his gaze on Guillam. Then he grinned, so that his crescent eyebrows went straight up like a clown’s, and his face became handsome and absurdly young.

“What the hell are you doing here, you pariah?” he enquired pleasantly.

Taking the question seriously, Lauder started to explain about the Frenchman and the dirty money.

“Well, mind you lock up the spoons,” said Bill, talking straight through him. “Those bloody scalp-hunters will steal the gold out of your teeth. Lock up the girls, too,” he added as an afterthought, his eyes still on Guillam, “if they’ll let you. Since when did scalp-hunters wash their own money? That’s our job.”

“Lauder’s doing the washing. We’re just spending the stuff.”

“Papers to me,” Haydon said to Strickland, with sudden curtness. “I’m not crossing any more bloody wires.”

“They’re already routed to you,” said Guillam. “They’re probably in your in-tray now.”

A last nod sent them on ahead, so that Guillam felt Haydon’s pale blue gaze boring into his back all the way to the next dark turning.

“Fantastic fellow,” Lauder declared, as if Guillam had never met him. “London Station could not be in better hands. Incredible ability. Incredible record. Brilliant.”

Whereas you, thought Guillam savagely, are brilliant by association. With Bill, with the coffee machine, with banks. His meditations were interrupted by Roy Bland’s caustic cockney voice, issuing from a doorway ahead of them.

“Hey, Lauder, hold on a minute: have you seen Bloody Bill anywhere? He’s wanted urgently.”

Followed at once by Toby Esterhase’s faithful mid-European echo from the same direction: “Immediately, Lauder; actually, we have put out an alert for him.”

They had entered the last cramped corridor. Lauder was perhaps three paces on and was already composing his answer to this question as Guillam arrived at the open doorway and looked in. Bland was sprawled massively at his desk. He had thrown off his jacket and was clutching a paper. Arcs of sweat ringed his armpits. Tiny Toby Esterhase was stooped over him like a headwaiter, a stiff-backed miniature ambassador with silvery hair and a crisp unfriendly jaw, and he had stretched out one hand towards the paper as if to recommend a speciality. They had evidently been reading the same document when Bland caught sight of Lauder Strickland passing.

“Indeed I have seen Bill Haydon,” said Lauder, who had a trick of rephrasing questions to make them sound more seemly. “I suspect Bill is on his way to you this moment. He’s a way back there down the corridor; we were having a brief word about a couple of things.”

Bland’s gaze moved slowly to Guillam and settled there; its chilly appraisal was uncomfortably reminiscent of Haydon’s. “Hullo, Pete,” he said. At this, Tiny Toby straightened up and turned his eyes also directly towards Guillam; brown and quiet like a pointer’s.

“Hi,” said Guillam, “what’s the joke?”

Their greeting was not merely frosty; it was downright hostile. Guillam had lived cheek by jowl with Toby Esterhase for three months on a very dodgy operation in Switzerland and Toby had never smiled once, so his stare came as no surprise. But Roy Bland was one of Smiley’s discoveries, a warmhearted and impulsive fellow for that world, red-haired and burly, an intellectual primitive whose idea of a good evening was talking Wittgenstein in the pubs round Kentish Town. He’d spent ten years as a Party hack, plodding the academic circuit in Eastern Europe, and now, like Guillam, he was grounded, which was even something of a bond. His usual style was a big grin, a slap on the shoulder, and a blast of last night’s beer; but not today.