Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (8 page)

Guillam had already cut him off. “You just keep your head down, right?” he ordered, and Tarr sulked for a space.

“All I knew was Irina wanted to defect—talk to Percy, as she called it. She had three days left, and the sooner she jumped the better for everybody. If I waited much longer, she was going to talk herself out of it. So I took the plunge and walked in on Thesinger, first thing while he was opening up the shop.”

“Wednesday, the eleventh,” Smiley murmured. “In London the early hours of the morning.”

“I guess Thesinger thought I was a ghost,” Tarr said. “ ‘I’m talking to London, personal for Head of London Station,’ I said. He argued like hell but he let me do it. I sat at his desk and coded up the message myself from a one-time pad while Thesinger watched me like a sick dog. We had to top and tail it like trade code because Thesinger has export cover. That took me an extra half hour. I was nervy, I really was. Then I burnt the whole damn pad and typed out the message on the ticker machine. At that point, there wasn’t a soul on earth but me who knew what the numbers meant on that sheet of paper—not Thesinger, nobody but me. I applied for full defector treatment for Irina on emergency procedure. I held out for all the goodies she’d never even talked about: cash, nationality, a new identity, no limelight, and a place to live. After all, I was her business representative in a manner of speaking, wasn’t I, Mr. Smiley?”

Smiley glanced up as if surprised to be addressed. “Yes,” he said quite kindly. “Yes, I suppose in a manner of speaking that’s what you were.”

“He also had a piece of the action, if I know him,” said Guillam under his breath.

Catching this or guessing the meaning of it, Tarr was furious.

“That’s a damn lie!” he shouted, colouring deeply. “That’s a—” After glaring at Guillam a moment longer, he went back to his story.

“I outlined her career to date and her access, including jobs she’d had at Centre. I asked for inquisitors and an Air Force plane. She thought I was asking for a personal meeting with Percy Alleline on neutral ground, but I reckoned we’d cross that bridge when we were past it. I suggested they should send out a couple of Esterhase’s lamplighters to take charge of her, maybe a tame doctor as well.”

“Why lamplighters?” Smiley asked sharply. “They’re not allowed to handle defectors.”

The lamplighters were Toby Esterhase’s pack, based not in Brixton but in Acton. Their job was to provide the support services for mainline operations: watching, listening, transport, and safe houses.

“Ah, well, Toby’s come up in the world since your day, Mr. Smiley,” Tarr explained. “They tell me even his pavement artists ride around in Cadillacs. Steal the scalp-hunters’ bread out of their mouths, too, if they get the chance—right, Mr. Guillam?”

“They’ve become the general footpads for London Station,” Guillam said shortly. “Part of lateralism.”

“I reckoned it would take half a year for the inquisitors to clean her out, and for some reason she was crazy about Scotland. She had a great wish to spend the rest of her life there, in fact. With Thomas. Raising our babies in the heather. I gave it the London Station address group; I graded it flash and by hand of officer only.”

Guillam put in: “That’s the new formula for maximum limit. It’s supposed to cut out handling in the coding rooms.”

“But not in London Station?” said Smiley.

“That’s their affair.”

“You heard Bill Haydon got that job, I suppose?” said Lacon, jerking round on Smiley. “Head of London Station? He’s effectively their chief of operations, just as Percy used to be when Control was there. They’ve changed all the names, that’s the thing. You know how your old buddies are about names. You ought to fill him in, Guillam, bring him up to date.”

“Oh, I think I have the picture, thank you,” Smiley said politely. Of Tarr, with a deceptive dreaminess, he asked, “She spoke of a great secret, you said?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you give any hint of this in your cable to London?”

He had touched something, there was no doubt of it; he had found a spot where touching hurt, for Tarr winced, and darted a suspicious glance at Lacon, then at Guillam.

Guessing his meaning, Lacon at once sang out a disclaimer: “Smiley knows nothing beyond what you have so far told him in this room,” he said. “Correct, Guillam?” Guillam nodded yes, watching Smiley.

“I told London the same as she’d told me,” Tarr conceded grumpily, like someone who has been robbed of a good story.

“What form of words, precisely?” Smiley asked. “I wonder whether you remember that.”

“ ‘Claims to have further information crucial to the well-being of the Circus, but not yet disclosed.’ Near enough, anyhow.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.”

They waited for Tarr to continue.

“I also requested Head of London Station to inform Mr. Guillam here that I’d landed on my feet and wasn’t playing hookey for the hell of it.”

“Did that happen?” Smiley asked.

“Nobody said anything to me,” said Guillam dryly.

“I hung around all day for an answer, but by evening it still hadn’t come. Irina was doing a normal day’s work. I insisted on that, you see. She wanted to stage a light dose of fever to keep her in bed but I wouldn’t hear of it. The delegation had factories to visit on Kowloon and I told her to tag along and look intelligent. I made her swear to keep off the bottle. I didn’t want her involved in amateur dramatics at the last moment. I wanted it normal right up to when she jumped. I waited till evening, then cabled a flash follow-up.”

Smiley’s shrouded gaze fixed upon the pale face before him. “You had an acknowledgement, of course?” he asked.

“ ‘We read you.’ That’s all. I sweated out the whole damn night. By dawn I still didn’t have an answer. I thought, Maybe that R.A.F. plane is already on its way. London’s playing it long, I thought, tying all the knots before they bring me in. I mean when you’re that far away from them you
have
to believe they’re good. Whatever you think of them, you
have
to believe that. And I mean now and then they are—right, Mr. Guillam?”

No one helped him.

“I was worried about Irina, see? I was damn certain that if she had to wait another day she would crack. Finally the answer did come. It wasn’t an answer at all. It was a stall: ‘Tell us what sections she worked in, names of former contacts and acquaintances inside Moscow Centre, name of her present boss, date of intake into Centre.’ Jesus, I don’t know what else. I drafted a reply fast because I had a three o’clock date with her down by the church—”

“What church?” Smiley again.

“English Baptist.” To everyone’s astonishment, Tarr was once again blushing. “She liked to visit there. Not for services, just to sniff around. I hung around the entrance looking natural but she didn’t show. It was the first time she’d broken a date. Our fallback was for three hours later on the hilltop, then a one-minute-fifty descending scale back at the church till we met up. If she was in trouble, she was going to leave her bathing suit on her window-sill. She was a swimming nut, swam every day. I shot round to the Alexandra: no bathing suit. I had two and a half hours to kill. There was nothing I could do any more except wait.”

Smiley said, “What was the priority of London Station’s telegram to you?”

“Immediate.”

“But yours was flash?”

“Both of mine were flash.”

“Was London’s telegram signed?”

Guillam put in: “They’re not any more. Outsiders deal with London Station as a unit.”

“Was it decypher yourself?”

“No,” said Guillam.

They waited for Tarr to go on.

“I kicked around Thesinger’s office but I wasn’t too popular there; he doesn’t approve of scalp-hunters and he has a big thing going on the Chinese mainland that he seemed to think I was going to blow for him. So I sat in a café and I had this idea I just might go down to the airport. It was an idea: like you might say, “Maybe I’ll go to a movie.” I took the Star Ferry, hired a cab, and told the driver to go like hell. It got like a panic. I barged the Information queue and asked for all departures to Russia, or connections in. I nearly went mad going through the flight lists, yelling at the Chinese clerks, but there wasn’t a plane since yesterday and none till six tonight. But now I had this hunch. I had to know. What about charters, what about the unscheduled flights, freight, casual transit? Had nothing, but
really
nothing, been routed for Moscow since yesterday morning? Then this little girl comes through with the answer, one of the Chinese hostesses. She fancies me, see. She’s doing me a favour. An unscheduled Soviet plane had taken off two hours ago. Only four passengers boarded. The centre of attraction was a woman invalid. A lady. In a coma. They had to cart her to the plane on a stretcher, and her face was wrapped in bandages. Two male nurses went with her and one doctor—that was the party. I called the Alexandra as a last hope. Neither Irina nor her so-called husband had checked out of their room, but there was no reply. The lousy hotel didn’t even know they’d left.”

Perhaps the music had been going on a long time and Smiley only noticed it now. He heard it in imperfect fragments from different parts of the house: a scale on a flute, a child’s tune on a recorder, a violin piece more confidently played. The many Lacon daughters were waking up.

8

“P
erhaps she
was
ill,” said Smiley stolidly, speaking more to Guillam than anyone else. “Perhaps she
was
in a coma. Perhaps they were real nurses who took her away. By the sound of her, she was a pretty good mess, at best.” He added, with half a glance at Tarr: “After all, only twenty-four hours had elapsed between your first telegram and Irina’s departure. You can hardly lay it at London’s door on that timing.”

“You can
just,”
said Guillam, looking at the floor. “It’s extremely fast, but it does just work, if somebody in London—” They were all waiting. “If somebody in London had very good footwork. And in Moscow, too, of course.”

“Now, that’s exactly what I told myself, sir,” said Tarr proudly, taking up Smiley’s point and ignoring Guillam’s. “My very words, Mr. Smiley. ‘Relax, Ricki,’ I said; ‘you’ll be shooting at shadows if you’re not damn careful.’ ”

“Or the Russians tumbled to her,” Smiley said. “The security guards found out about your affair and removed her. It would be a wonder if they
hadn’t
found out, the way you two carried on.”

“Or she told her husband,” Tarr suggested. “I understand psychology as well as the next man, sir. I know what can happen between a husband and wife when they have fallen out. She wishes to annoy him. To goad him, to obtain a reaction, I thought. ‘Want to hear what I’ve been doing while you’ve been out boozing and cutting the rug?’—like that. Boris peels off and tells the gorillas; they sandbag her and take her home. I went through all those possibilities, Mr. Smiley, believe me. I really worked on them, truth. Same as any man does whose woman walks out on him.”

“Let’s just have the story, shall we?” Guillam whispered, furious.

Well, now, said Tarr, he would agree that for twenty-four hours he went a bit berserk: “Now, I don’t often get that way—right, Mr. Guillam?”

“Often enough.”

“I was feeling pretty physical. Frustrated, you could almost say.”

His conviction that a considerable prize had been brutally snatched away from him drove him to a distracted fury that found expression in a rampage through old haunts. He went to the Cat’s Cradle, then to Angelika’s, and by dawn he had taken in half a dozen other places besides, not to mention a few girls along the way. At some point he crossed town and raised a spot of dust around the Alexandra. He was hoping to have a couple of words with those security gorillas. When he sobered down, he got thinking about Irina and their time together, and he decided before he flew back to London to go round their dead letter-boxes to check whether by any chance she had written to him before she left.

Partly it was something to do. “Partly, I guess, I couldn’t bear to think of a letter of hers kicking around in a hole in a wall while she sweated it out in the hot seat,” he added, the ever-redeemable boy.

They had two places where they dropped mail for one another. The first was not far from the hotel on a building site.

“Ever seen that bamboo scaffolding they use? Fantastic. I’ve seen it twenty storeys high and the coolies swarming over it with slabs of precast concrete.” A bit of discarded piping, he said, handy at shoulder height. It seemed most likely, if Irina was in a hurry, that the piping was the letter-box she would use, but when Tarr went there it was empty. The second was back by the church, “in under where they stow the pamphlets,” as he put it. “This stand was part of an old wardrobe, see. If you kneel in the back pew and grope around, there’s a loose board. Behind the board there’s a recess full of rubbish and rat’s mess. I tell you, it made a real lovely drop, the best ever.”

There was a short pause, illuminated by the vision of Ricki Tarr and his Moscow Centre mistress kneeling side by side in the rear pew of a Baptist church in Hong Kong.

In this dead letter-box, Tarr said, he found not a letter but a whole damn diary. The writing was fine and done on both sides of the paper, so that quite often the black ink came through. It was fast urgent writing with no erasures. He knew at a glance that she had maintained it in her lucid periods.

“This isn’t it, mind. This is only my copy.”

Slipping a long hand inside his shirt, he had drawn out a leather purse attached to a broad thong of hide. From it he took a grimy wad of paper.

“I guess she dropped the diary just before they hit her,” he said. “Maybe she was having a last pray at the same time. I made the translation myself.”

“I didn’t know you spoke Russian,” said Smiley—a comment lost to everyone but Tarr, who at once grinned.

“Ah, now, a man needs a qualification in this profession, Mr. Smiley,” he explained as he separated the pages. “I may not have been too great at law but a further language can be decisive. You know what the poets say, I expect?” He looked up from his labours and his grin widened. “ ‘To possess another language is to possess another soul.’ A great king wrote that, sir, Charles the Fifth. My father never forgot a quotation, I’ll say that for him, though the funny thing is he couldn’t speak a damn thing but English. I’ll read the diary aloud to you, if you don’t mind.”