Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (7 page)

Guillam said, “Since the reorganisation, scalp-hunters have no brief to trawl for double agents. They must be turned over to London Station on sight. The boys have a standing order, over Bill Haydon’s own signature. If there’s even a smell of the opposition, abandon.” He added, for Smiley’s special ear, “Under lateralism our autonomy is cut to the bone.”

“And I’ve been in double-double games before,” Tarr confessed in a tone of injured virtue. “Believe me, Mr. Smiley, they are a can of worms.”

“I’m sure they are,” said Smiley, and gave a prim tug at his spectacles.

Tarr cabled Guillam “no sale,” booked a flight home, and went shopping. However, since his flight didn’t leave till Thursday, he thought that before he left, just to pay his fare, he might as well burgle Boris’s room.

“The Alexandra’s a real ramshackle old place, Mr. Smiley, off Marble Road, with a stack of wooden balconies. As for the locks—why, sir, they give up when they see you coming.”

In a very short time, therefore, Tarr was standing inside Boris’s room with his back against the door, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. He was still standing there when a woman spoke to him in Russian drowsily from the bed.

“It was Boris’s wife,” Tarr explained. “She was crying. Look, I’ll call her Irina, right? Mr. Guillam has the details.”

Smiley was already objecting: wife was impossible, he said. Centre would never let them both out of Russia at the same time; they’d keep one and send the other—

“Common-law marriage,” Guillam said dryly. “Unofficial but permanent.”

“There’s a lot that are the other way round these days,” said Tarr with a sharp grin at no one, least of all Smiley, and Guillam shot him another foul look.

6

F
rom the outset of this meeting, Smiley had assumed for the main a Buddha-like inscrutability from which neither Tarr’s story nor the rare interjections of Lacon and Guillam could rouse him. He sat leaning back with his short legs bent, head forward, and plump hands linked across his generous stomach. His hooded eyes had closed behind the thick lenses. His only fidget was to polish his glasses on the silk lining of his tie, and when he did this his eyes had a soaked, naked look that was embarrassing to those who caught him at it. His interjection, however, and the donnish, inane sound that followed Guillam’s explanation, now acted like a signal upon the rest of the gathering, bringing a shuffling of chairs and a clearing of throats.

Lacon was foremost: “George, what are your drinking habits? Can I get you a Scotch or anything?” He offered drink solicitously, like aspirin for a headache. “I forgot to say it earlier,” he explained. “George, a bracer: come. It’s winter, after all. A nip of something?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Smiley said.

He would have liked a little coffee from the percolator but somehow he didn’t feel able to ask. Also he remembered it was terrible.

“Guillam?” Lacon proceeded. No; Guillam also found it impossible to accept alcohol from Lacon.

He didn’t offer anything to Tarr, who went straight on with his narrative.

Tarr took Irina’s presence calmly, he said. He had worked up his fallback before he entered the building, and now he went straight into his act. He didn’t pull a gun or slap his hand over her mouth or any of that tripe, as he put it, but he said he had come to speak to Boris on a private matter; he was sorry and he was damn well going to sit there till Boris showed up. In good Australian, as became an outraged car salesman from down under, he explained that while he didn’t want to barge into anyone’s business he was damned if he was going to have his girl and his money stolen in a single night by a lousy Russian who couldn’t pay for his pleasures. He worked up a lot of outrage but managed to keep his voice down, and then he waited to see what she did.

And that, said Tarr, was how it all began.

It was eleven-thirty when he made Boris’s room. He left at one-thirty with a promise of a meeting next night. By then the situation was all the other way: “We weren’t doing anything improper, mind. Just pen friends—right, Mr. Smiley?”

For a moment, that bland sneer seemed to lay claim to Smiley’s most precious secrets.

“Right,” he assented vapidly.

There was nothing exotic about Irina’s presence in Hong Kong and no reason why Thesinger should have known of it, Tarr explained. Irina was a member of the delegation in her own right. She was a trained textile buyer: “Come to think of it, she was a sight better qualified than her old man, if I can call him that. She was a plain kid, a bit blue-stocking for my taste, but she was young and she had one hell of a pretty smile when she stopped crying.” Tarr coloured quaintly. “She was good company,” he insisted, as if arguing against a trend. “When Mr. Thomas from Adelaide came into her life, she was at the end of the line from worrying what to do about the demon Boris. She thought I was the Angel Gabriel. Who could she talk to about her husband who wouldn’t turn the dogs on him? She’d no chums on the delegation; she’d no one she trusted even back in Moscow, she said. Nobody who hadn’t been through it would ever know what it was like trying to keep a ruined relationship going while all the time you’re on the move.” Smiley was once more in a deep trance. “Hotel after hotel, city after city, not even allowed to speak to the natives in a natural way or get a smile from a stranger—that’s how she described her life. She reckoned it was a pretty miserable state of affairs, Mr. Smiley, and there was a lot of God-thumping and an empty vodka bottle beside the bed to show for it. Why couldn’t she be like normal people? she kept saying. Why couldn’t she enjoy the Lord’s sunshine like the rest of us? She loved sightseeing, she loved foreign kids; why couldn’t she have a kid of her own? A kid born free, not in captivity. She kept saying that: born in captivity, born free. ‘I’m a jolly person, Thomas. I’m a normal, sociable girl. I like people: why should I deceive them when I like them?’ And then she said, the trouble was that long ago she had been chosen for work that made her frozen like an old woman and cut her off from God. So that’s why she’d had a drink and why she was having a cry. She’d kind of forgotten her husband by then; she was apologising for having a fling, more.” Again he faltered. “I could scent it, Mr. Smiley. There was gold in her. I could scent it from the start. Knowledge is power, they say, sir, and Irina had the power, same as she had the quality. She was hellbent maybe, but she could still give her all. I can sense generosity in a woman where I meet it, Mr. Smiley. I have a talent for it. And this lady was generous. Jesus, how do you describe a hunch? Some people can smell water under the ground . . .”

He seemed to expect some show of sympathy, so Smiley said, “I understand,” and plucked at the lobe of his ear.

Watching him with a strange dependence in his expression, Tarr kept silent a stretch longer. “First thing next morning, I cancelled my flight and changed my hotel,” he said finally.

Abruptly Smiley opened his eyes wide. “What did you tell London?”

“Nothing.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s a devious fool,” said Guillam.

“Maybe I thought Mr. Guillam would say, ‘Come home, Tarr,’” he replied, with a knowing glance at Guillam that was not returned. “You see, long ago when I was a little boy I made a mistake and walked into a honey trap.”

“He made an ass of himself with a Polish girl,” said Guillam.

“He sensed her generosity, too.”

“I knew Irina was no honey trap, but how could I expect Mr. Guillam to believe me? No way.”

“Did you tell Thesinger?”

“Hell, no.”

“What reason did you give London for postponing your flight?”

“I was due to fly Thursday. I reckoned no one back home would miss me till Tuesday. Specially with Boris being a dead duck.”

“He didn’t give a reason and the housekeepers posted him absent without leave on the Monday,” said Guillam. “He broke every rule in the book. And some that aren’t. By the middle of that week, even Bill Haydon was beating his war drums. And I was having to listen,” he added tartly.

However that was, Tarr and Irina met next evening. They met again the evening after that. The first meeting was in a café and it limped. They took a lot of care not to be seen, because Irina was frightened stiff not just of her husband but of the security guards attached to the delegation—the gorillas, as Tarr called them. She refused a drink and she was shaking. The second evening Tarr was still waiting on her generosity. They took the tram up to Victoria Peak, jammed between American matrons in white socks and eyeshades. The third he hired a car and drove her round the New Territories till she suddenly got the heebies about being so close to the Chinese border, so they had to run for harbour. Nevertheless she loved that trip, and often spoke of the tidy beauty of it, the fish ponds and the paddy fields. Tarr also liked the trip because it proved to both of them that they weren’t being watched. But Irina had still not unpacked, as he put it.

“Now I’ll tell you a damn odd thing about this stage of the game. At the start, I worked Thomas the Aussie to death. I fed her a lot of smoke about a sheep station outside Adelaide and a big property in the high street with a glass front and ‘Thomas’ in lights. She didn’t believe me. She nodded and fooled around and waited till I’d said my piece; then she said, ‘Yes, Thomas,’ ‘No, Thomas,’ and changed the subject.”

On the fourth evening, he drove her into the hills overlooking North Shore, and Irina told Tarr that she had fallen in love with him and that she was employed by Moscow Centre, she and her husband both, and that she knew Tarr was in the trade, too; she could tell by his alertness and the way he listened with his eyes.

“She’d decided I was an English colonel of intelligence,” said Tarr with no smile at all. “She was crying one minute and laughing the next, and in my opinion she was three-quarters of the way to being a basket case. Half, she talked like a pocket-book loony heroine, half like a nice up-and-down suburban kid. The English were her favourite people. Gentlemen, she kept saying. I’d brought her a bottle of vodka and she drank half of it in about fifteen seconds flat. Hooray for English gentlemen. Boris was the lead and Irina was the backup girl. It was a his-and-hers act, and one day she’d talk to Percy Alleline and tell him a great secret all for himself. Boris was on a trawl for Hong Kong businessmen and had a post-box job on the side for the local Soviet residency. Irina ran courier, boiled down the microdots, and played radio for him on a high-speed squirt to beat the listeners. That was how it read on paper, see? The two nightclubs were rendezvous and fallback for his local connect, in that order. But all Boris really wanted to do was drink and chase the dancing girls and have depressions. Or else go for five-hour walks because he couldn’t stand being in the same room with his wife. All Irina did was wait around crying and getting plastered, and fancy herself sitting alone at Percy’s fireside, telling him all she knew. I kept her there talking, up on the hill, sitting in the car. I didn’t move because I didn’t want to break the spell. We watched the dusk fall on the harbour and the lovely moon come up there, and the peasants slipping by with their long poles and kerosene lamps. All we needed was Humphrey Bogart in a tuxedo. I kept my foot on the vodka bottle and let her talk. I didn’t move a muscle. Fact, Mr. Smiley. Fact,” he declared, with the defence-lessness of a man longing to be believed, but Smiley’s eyes were closed and he was deaf to all appeal.

“She just completely let go,” Tarr explained, as if it were suddenly an accident, a thing he had had no part in. “She told me her whole life story, from birth to Colonel Thomas; that’s me. Mummy, Daddy, early loves, recruitment, training, her lousy half-marriage, the lot. How her and Boris were teamed at training and had been together ever since: one of the great unbreakable relationships. She told me her real name, her work-name, and the cover names she’d travelled and transmitted by; then she hauled out her handbag and started showing me her conjuring set: recessed fountain pen, signal plan folded up inside; concealed camera—the works. ‘Wait till Percy sees that,’ I tell her—playing her along, like. It was production-line stuff, mind, nothing coach-built, but grade-one material all the same. To round it off, she starts barking the dirt about the Soviet Hong Kong set-up: legmen, safe houses, letter-boxes, the lot. I was going crazy trying to remember it all.”

“But you did,” said Guillam shortly.

Yes, Tarr agreed; near on, he did. He knew she hadn’t told him the whole truth, but he knew truth came hard to a girl who’d been a hood since puberty, and he reckoned that for a beginner she was doing pretty nice.

“I kind of felt for her,” he said with another flash of that false confessiveness. “I felt we were on the same wave-length, no messing.”

“Quite so,” said Lacon in a rare interjection. He was very pale, but whether that was anger or the effect of the grey light of early morning creeping through the shutters, there was no way to tell.

7

“N
ow I was in a queer situation. I saw her next day and the day after, and I reckoned that if she wasn’t already schizoid she was going to be that way damn soon. One minute talking about Percy giving her a top job in the Circus working for Colonel Thomas, and arguing the hell with me about whether she should be a lieutenant or a major. Next minute saying she wouldn’t spy for anybody ever again and she was going to grow flowers and rut in the hay with Thomas. Then she had a convent kick: Baptist nuns were going to wash her soul. I nearly died. Who the hell ever heard of Baptist nuns, I ask her. Never mind, she says, Baptists are the greatest; her mother was a peasant and knew. That was the second biggest secret she would ever tell me. ‘What’s the biggest, then?’ I ask. No dice. All she’s saying is, we’re in mortal danger, bigger than I could possibly know: there’s no hope for either of us unless she has that special chat with Brother Percy. ‘What danger, for Christ’s sake? What do you know that I don’t?’ She was vain as a cat but when I pressed her she clammed up, and I was frightened to death she’d belt home and sing the lot to Boris. I was running out of time, too. Then it was Wednesday already and the delegation was due to fly home to Moscow Friday. Her tradecraft wasn’t all lousy but how could I trust a nut like her? You know how women are when they fall in love, Mr. Smiley. They can’t hardly—”