Honourable Schoolboy (38 page)

‘It’s the Cousins,’ Guillam said gently. ‘About Brother Ricardo, your favourite pilot. They want to meet with you at the Annexe as soon as possible. I’m to ring back by yesterday.’

‘They want what?’

‘To meet you. But they use the preposition.’

‘Do they? Do they really? Good Lord. I suppose it’s the German influence. Or it is old English? Meet with. Well I must say.’ And he lumbered off to his bathroom to shave.

Returning to his own room, Guillam found Sam Collins sitting in the soft chair, smoking one of his beastly brown cigarettes and smiling his washable smile.

‘Something up?’ Sam asked, very leisurely.

‘Get the hell out of here,’ Guillam snapped.

Sam was in general nosing around a lot too much for Guillam’s liking, but that day he had a firm reason for distrusting him. Calling on Lacon at the Cabinet Office to deliver the Circus’s monthly imprest account for his inspection, he had been astonished to see Sam emerging from his private office, joking easily with Lacon and Saul Enderby of the Foreign Office.

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Before the fall, studiously informal meetings of intelligence partners to the special relationship were held as often as monthly and followed by what Smiley’s predecessor Alleline had liked to call ‘a jar’. If it was the American turn to play host, then Alleline and his cohorts, among them the popular Bill Haydon, would be shepherded to a vast rooftop bar, known within the Circus as the planetarium, to be regaled with dry martinis and a view of West London they could not otherwise have afforded. If it was the British turn, then a trestle table was set up in the rumpus room, and a darned damask tablecloth spread over it, and the American delegates were invited to pay homage to the last bastion of clubland spying, and incidentally the birthplace of their own service, while they sipped South African sherry disguised by cut-glass decanters on the grounds that they wouldn’t know the difference. For the discussions, there was no agenda and by tradition no notes were taken. Old friends had no need of such devices, particularly since hidden microphones stayed sober and did the job better.

Since the fall, these niceties had for a while stopped dead. Under orders from Martello’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia, the ‘British liaison’, as they knew the Circus, was placed on the arm’s-length list, equating it with Jugoslavia and the Lebanon, and for a while the two services in effect passed each other on opposite pavements, scarcely lifting their eyes. They were like an estranged couple in the middle of divorce proceedings. But by the time that grey winter’s morning had come along when Smiley and Guillam, in some haste, presented themselves at the front doors of the Legal Advisor’s Annexe in Grosvenor Square, a marked thaw was already discernible everywhere, even in the rigid faces of the two Marines who frisked them.

The doors, incidentally, were double, with black grilles over black iron, and gilded feathers on the grilles. The cost of them alone would have kept the entire Circus ticking over for a couple more days at least. Once inside them, they had the sensation of coming from a hamlet to a metropolis.

Martello’s room was very large. There were no windows and it could have been midnight. Above an empty desk an American flag, unfurled as if by a breeze, occupied half the end wall. At the centre of the floor a ring of airline chairs was clustered round a rosewood table, and in one of these sat Martello himself, a burly, cheerful-looking Yale man in a country suit which seemed always out of season. Two quiet men flanked him each as sallow and sincere as the other.

‘George, this is good of you,’ said Martello heartily, in his warm, confiding voice, as he came quickly forward to receive them. ‘I don’t need to tell you. I know how busy you are. I know. Sol.’ He turned to two strangers sitting across the room, so far unnoticed, the one young like Martello’s quiet men, if less smooth; the other, squat and tough and much older, with a slashed complexion and a crew cut; a veteran of something. ‘Sol,’ Martello repeated. ‘I want you to meet one of the true legends of our profession, Sol: Mr George Smiley. George, this is Sol Eckland, who’s high in our fine Drug Enforcement Administration, formerly the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, now rechristened, right Sol? Sol, say hullo to Pete Guillam.’

The elder of the two men put out a hand and Smiley and Guillam each shook it, and it felt like dried bark.

‘Sure,’ said Martello, looking on with the satisfaction of a matchmaker. ‘George, ah, remember Ed Ristow, also in narcotics, George? Paid a courtesy call on you over there a few months back? Well, Sol has taken over from Ristow. He has the South East Asian sphere. Cy here is with him.’

Nobody remembers names like the Americans, thought Guillam.

Cy was the young one of the two. He had sideburns and a gold watch and he looked like a Mormon missionary: devout, but defensive. He smiled as if smiling had been part of his course, and Guillam smiled in return.

‘What happened to Ristow?’ Smiley asked, as they sat down.

‘Coronary,’ growled Sol the veteran, in a voice as dry as his hand. His hair was like wire wool crimped into small trenches. When he scratched it, which he did a lot, it rasped.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Smiley.

‘Could be permanent,’ said Sol, not looking at him, and drew on his cigarette.

Here, for the first time, it passed through Guillam’s mind that something fairly momentous was in the air. He caught a hint of real tension between the two American camps. Unheralded replacements, in Guillam’s experience of the American scene, were seldom caused by anything as banal as illness. He went so far as to wonder in what way Sol’s predecessor might have blotted his copybook.

‘Enforcement, ah, naturally has a strong interest in our little joint venture, ah, George,’ Martello said, and with this unpromising fanfare, the Ricardo connection was indirectly announced, though Guillam detected there was still a mysterious urge, on the American side, to pretend their meeting was about something different - as witness Martello’s vacuous opening comments:

‘George, our people in Langley like to work very closely indeed with their good friends in narcotics,’ he declared, with all the warmth of a diplomatic note verbale.

‘Cuts both ways,’ Sol the veteran growled in confirmation and expelled more cigarette smoke while he scratched his iron-grey hair. He seemed to Guillam at root a shy man, not comfortable here at all. Cy his young sidekick was a lot more at ease:

‘It’s parameters, Mr Smiley, sir. On a deal like this, you get some areas, they overlap entirely.’ Cy’s voice was a little too high for his size.

‘Cy and Sol have hunted with us before, George,’ Martello said, offering yet further reassurance. ‘Cy and Sol are family, take my word for it. Langley cuts Enforcement in, Enforcement cuts Langley in. That’s the way it goes. Right, Sol?’

‘Right,’ said Sol.

If they don’t go to bed together soon, thought Guillam, they just may claw each other’s eyes out instead. He glanced at Smiley and saw that he too was conscious of the strained atmosphere. He sat like his own effigy, a hand on each knee, eyes almost closed as usual, and he seemed to be willing himself into invisibility while the explanation was acted out for him.

‘Maybe we should all just get ourselves up to date on the latest details, first,’ Martello now suggested, as if he were inviting everyone to wash.

First before what? Guillam wondered.

One of the quiet men used the workname Murphy. Murphy was so fair he was nearly albino. Taking a folder from the rosewood table Murphy began reading from it aloud with great respect in his voice. He held each page singly between his clean fingers.

‘Sir, Monday subject flew to Bangkok with Cathay Pacific Airlines, flight details given, and was picked up at the airport by Tan Lee, our reference given, in his personal limousine. They proceeded directly to the Airsea permanent suite at the Hotel Erawan.’ He glanced at Sol. ‘Tan is managing director of Asian Rice and General, sir, that’s Airsea’s Bangkok subsidiary, file references appended. They spent three hours in the suite and -’

‘Ah, Murphy,’ said Martello, interrupting.

‘Sir?’

‘All that reference given , reference appended . Leave that out, will you? We all know we have files on these guys. Right?’

‘Right, sir.’

‘Ko alone?’ Sol demanded.

‘Sir, Ko took his manager Tiu along with him. Tiu goes with him most everywhere.’

Here chancing to look at Smiley again, Guillam intercepted an enquiring glance from him directed at Martello. Guillam had a notion he was thinking of the girl - had she gone too? - but Martello’s indulgent smile didn’t waver, and after a moment Smiley seemed to accept this, and resumed his attentive pose.

Sol meanwhile had turned to his assistant and the two of them had a brief private exchange:

‘Why the hell doesn’t somebody bug the damn hotel suite, Cy? What’s holding everyone up?’

‘We already suggested that to Bangkok, Sol, but they’ve got problems with the party walls, they got no proper cavities or something.’

‘Those Bangkok clowns are drowsy with too much ass. That the same Tan we tried to nail last year for heroin?’

‘Now, that was Tan Ha, Sol. This one’s Tan Lee. They have a great 1ot of Tans out there. Tan Lee’s just a front man. He plays link to Fatty Hong in Chiang Mai. It’s Hong who has the connections to the growers and the big brokers.’

‘Somebody ought to go out and shoot that bastard,’ Sol said. Which bastard wasn’t quite clear.

Martello nodded at pale Murphy to go on.

‘Sir, the three men then drove down to Bangkok port - that’s Ko and Tan Lee and Tiu, sir - and they looked at twenty or thirty small coasters tied up along the bank. Then they drove back to Bangkok airport and subject flew to Manila, Philippines, for a cement conference at the Hotel Eden and Bali.’

‘Tiu didn’t go to Manila?’ Martello asked, buying time.

‘No, sir. Flew home,’ Murphy replied, and once more Smiley glanced at Martello.

‘Cement my ass,’ Sol exclaimed. ‘Those the boats that do the run up to Hong Kong, Murphy?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We know those boats,’ expostulated Sol. ‘We been going for these boats for years. Right, Cy?’

‘Right.’

Sol had rounded on Martello, as if he were personally to blame. ‘They leave harbour clean. They don’t take the stuff aboard till they’re at sea. Nobody knows which boat will carry, not even the captain of the selected vessel, until the launch pulls alongside, gives them the dope. When they hit Hong Kong waters, they drop the dope overboard with markers and the junks scoop it in.’ He spoke slowly, as if speaking hurt him, forcing each word out hoarsely. ‘We been screaming at the Brits for years to shake those junks out, but the bastards are all on the take.’

‘That’s all we have, sir,’ said Murphy, and put down his report.

They were back to the awkward pauses. A pretty girl, armed with a tray of coffee and biscuits, provided a temporary reprieve, but when she left the silence was worse.

‘Why don’t you just tell him?’ Sol snapped finally. ‘Otherwise maybe I will.’

Which was when, as Martello would have said, they finally got down to the nitty-gritty.

Martello’s manner became both grave and confiding: a family solicitor reading a will to the heirs. ‘George, ah, at our request Enforcement here took a kind of a second look at the background and the record of the missing pilot Ricardo, and as we half surmised, they’ve dug up a fair quantity of material which till now has not come to light as it should have done, owing to various factors. There’s no profit, in my view, to pointing the finger at anyone and besides Ed Ristow is a sick man. Let’s just agree that, however it happened, the Ricardo thing fell into a small gap between Enforcement and ourselves. That gap has since closed and we’d like to rectify the information for you.’

‘Thank you, Marty,’ said Smiley patiently.

‘Seems Ricardo’s alive after all,’ Sol declared. ‘Seems like it’s a prime snafu.’

‘A what?’ Smiley asked sharply, perhaps before the full significance of Sol’s statement had sunk in.

Martello was quick to translate. ‘Error, George. Human error. Happens to all of us. Snafu. Even you, okay?’

Guillam was studying Cy’s shoes, which had a rubbery gloss and thick welts. Smiley’s eyes had lifted to the side wall, where the benevolent features of President Nixon gazed down encouragingly on the triangular union. Nixon had resigned a good six months ago, but Martello seemed rather touchingly determined to tend his lamp. Murphy and his mute companion sat still as confirmands in the presence of the bishop. Only Sol was for ever on the move, alternately scratching at his crimped scalp or sucking on his cigarette like an athletic version of di Salis. He never smiles, thought Guillam extraneously: he’s forgotten how.

Martello continued. ‘Ricardo’s death is formally recorded in our files as on or round August twenty-one, George, correct?’

‘Correct,’ said Smiley.

Martello drew a breath and tilted his head the other way as he read his notes. ‘However, on September, ah, two couple of weeks after his death, right? - it, ah, seems Ricardo made personal contact with one of the narcotics bureaux in the Asian theatre, then known as BNDD but primarily the same house, okay? Sol would, ah, prefer not to mention which bureau, and I respect that.’ The mannerism ah, Guillam decided, was Martello’s way of keeping talking while he thought. ‘Ricardo offered the bureau his services on a sell-and-tell basis regarding an, ah, opium mission he claimed to have received to fly right over the border into, ah, Red China.’

A cold hand seemed to seize hold of Guillam’s stomach at this moment and stay there. His sense of occasion was all the greater following the slow lead-in through so much unrelated detail. He told Molly afterwards that it was as if ‘all the threads of the case had suddenly wound themselves together in a single skein’ for him. But that was hindsight and he was boasting a little. Nevertheless the shock - after all the tiptoeing and the speculation and the paperchases - the plain shock of being almost physically projected into the Chinese Mainland: that certainly was real, and required no exaggeration.