Smiley's People (19 page)

“Two. Three. Even four maybe. I am not sure.”

Then Smiley felt Mikhel’s gaze lift fractionally over his shoulder and beyond it and stay there, and an instinct that he had lived by for as long as he could remember made him ask: “Did Vladimir come here alone?”

“Of course, Max. Who would he bring?”

They were interrupted by a clank of crockery as Elvira at the other end of the room went clumsily back to her chores. Daring to glance at Mikhel just then, Smiley saw him staring after her with an expression he recognised but for a split second could not place: hopeless and affectionate at once, torn between dependence and disgust. Till, with sickening empathy, Smiley found himself looking into his own face as he had glimpsed it too often, red-eyed like Mikhel’s, in Ann’s pretty gilt mirrors in their house in Bywater Street.

“So if he wouldn’t let you help him, what did you do?” Smiley asked with the same studied casualness. “Sit up and read—play chess with Elvira?”

Mikhel’s brown eyes held him a moment, slipped away, and came back to him.

“No, Max,” he replied with great courtesy. “I gave him the maps. He desired to be left alone with them. I wished him good night. I was asleep by the time he left.”

But not Elvira, apparently, Smiley thought. Elvira stayed behind for instruction from her proxy brother.
Active as a patriot, as a man, as a leader,
Smiley rehearsed.
Active in all respects.

“So what contact have you had with him since?” Smiley asked, and Mikhel came suddenly to yesterday. Nothing till yesterday, Mikhel said.

“Yesterday afternoon he called me on the telephone. Max, I swear to you I had not heard him so excited for many years. Happy, I would say ecstatic. ‘Mikhel! Mikhel!’ Max, that was a delighted man. He would come to me that night. Last night. Late maybe, but he will have my fifty pounds. ‘General,’ I tell him. ‘What is fifty pounds? Are you well? Are you safe? Tell me.’ ‘Mikhel, I have been fishing and I am happy. Stay awake,’ he says to me. ‘I shall be with you at eleven o’clock, soon after. I shall have the money. Also it is necessary I beat you at chess to calm my nerves.’ I stay awake, make tea, wait for him. And wait. Max, I am a soldier, for myself I am not afraid. But for the General—for that old man, Max—I was afraid. I phone the Circus, an emergency. They hang up on me. Why? Max, why did you do that, please?”

“I was not on duty,” Smiley said, now watching Mikhel as intently as he dared. “Tell me, Mikhel,” he began deliberately.

“Max.”

“What did you think Vladimir was going to be doing after he rang you with the good news—and before he came to repay you fifty pounds?”

Mikhel did not hesitate. “Naturally I assumed he would be going to Max,” he said. “He had landed his big fish. Now he would go to Max, claim his expenses, present him with his great news. Naturally,” he repeated, looking a little too straight into Smiley’s eyes.

Naturally,
thought Smiley; and you knew to the minute when he would leave his apartment, and to the metre the route he would take to reach the Hampstead flat.

“So he failed to appear, you rang the Circus, and we were unhelpful,” Smiley resumed. “I’m sorry. So what did you do next?”

“I phone Villem. First to make sure the boy is all right, also to ask him where is our leader? That English wife of his bawled me out. Finally I went to his flat. I did not like to—it was an intrusion—his private life is his own—but I went. I rang the bell. He did not answer. I came home. This morning at eleven o’clock Jüri rings. I had not read the early edition of the evening papers, I am not fond of English newspapers. Jüri had read them. Vladimir our leader was dead,” he ended.

Elvira was at his elbow. She had two glasses of vodka on a tray.

“Please,” said Mikhel. Smiley took a glass, Mikhel the other.

“To life!” said Mikhel, very loud, and drank as the tears started to his eyes.

“To life,” Smiley repeated while Elvira watched them.

She went with him, Smiley thought. She forced Mikhel to the old man’s flat, she dragged him to the door.

“Have you told anyone else of this, Mikhel?” Smiley asked when she had once more left.

“Jüri I don’t trust,” said Mikhel, blowing his nose.

“Did you tell Jüri about Villem?”

“Please?”

“Did you mention Villem to him? Did you suggest to Jüri in any way that Villem might have been involved with Vladimir?”

Mikhel had committed no such sin, apparently.

“In this situation you should trust no one,” Smiley said, in a more formal tone, as he prepared to take his leave. “Not even the police. Those are the orders. The police must not know that Vladimir was doing anything operational when he died. It is important for security. Yours as well as ours. He gave you no message otherwise? No word for Max, for instance?”

Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman,
he thought.

Mikhel smiled his regrets.

“Did Vladimir mention Hector recently, Mikhel?”

“Hector was no good for him.”

“Did Vladimir say that?”

“Please, Max. I have nothing against Hector personally. Hector is Hector, he is not a gentleman, but in our work we must use many varieties of mankind. This was the General speaking. Our leader was an old man. ‘Hector,’ Vladimir says to me. ‘Hector is no good. Our good postman Hector is like the City banks. When it rains, they say, the banks take away your umbrella. Our postman Hector is the same.’ Please. This is Vladimir speaking. Not Mikhel. ‘Hector is no good.’”

“When did he say this?”

“He said it several times.”

“Recently?”

“Yes.”

“How recently?”

“Maybe two months. Maybe less.”

“After he received the Paris letter, or before?”

“After. No question.”

Mikhel escorted him to the door, a gentleman even if Toby Esterhase was not. At her place again beside the samovar, Elvira sat smoking before the same photograph of birch trees. And as he passed her, Smiley heard a sort of hiss, made through the nose or mouth, or both at once, as a last statement of her contempt.

“What will you do now?” he asked of Mikhel in the way one asks such things of the bereaved. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her head lift at his question and her fingers spread across the page.

A last thought struck him. “And you didn’t recognise the handwriting?” Smiley asked.

“What handwriting is this, Max?”

“On the envelope from Paris?”

Suddenly he had no time to wait for an answer; suddenly he was sick of evasion.

“Goodbye, Mikhel.”

“Go well, Max.”

Elvira’s head sank again to the birch trees.

 

I’ll never know, Smiley thought, as he made his way quickly down the wooden staircase. None of us will. Was he Mikhel the traitor who resented the old man sharing his woman, and thirsted for the crown that had been denied him for too long? Or was he Mikhel the selfless officer and gentleman, Mikhel the ever-loyal servant? Or was he perhaps, like many loyal servants, both?

He thought of Mikhel’s cavalry pride, as terribly tender as any other hero’s manhood. His pride in being the General’s keeper, his pride in being his satrap. His sense of injury at being excluded. His pride again—how it split so many ways! But how far did it extend? To a pride in giving nobly to each master, for instance?
Gentlemen, I have served you both well,
says the perfect double agent in the twilight of his life. And says it with pride, too, thought Smiley, who had known a number of them.

He thought of the seven-page letter from Paris. He thought of second proofs. He wondered who the photocopy had gone to—maybe Esterhase? He wondered where the original was. So who went to Paris? he wondered. If Villem went to Hamburg, who was the little magician? He was bone tired. His tiredness hit him like a sudden virus. He felt it in the knees, the hips, his whole subsiding body. But he kept walking, for his mind refused to rest.

T
o walk was just possible for Ostrakova, and to walk was all she asked. To walk and wait for the magician. Nothing was broken. Though her dumpy little body, when they had given her a bath, was shaping up to become as blackened and patchy as a map of the Siberian coalfields, nothing was broken. And her poor rump, which had given her that bit of trouble at the warehouse, looked already as though the assembled secret armies of Soviet Russia had booted her from one end of Paris to the other; still, nothing was broken. They had X-rayed every part of her, they had prodded her like questionable meat for signs of internal bleeding. But in the end, they had gloomily declared her to be the victim of a miracle.

They had wanted to keep her, for all that. They had wanted to treat her for shock, sedate her—at least for one night! The police, who had found six witnesses with seven conflicting accounts of what had happened (The car was grey, or was it blue? The registration number was from Marseilles, or was it foreign?), the police had taken one long statement from her, and threatened to come back and take another.

Ostrakova had nevertheless discharged herself.

Then had she at least children to look after her? they had asked. Oh, but she had a mass of them! she said. Daughters who would pander to her smallest whim, sons to assist her up and down the stairs! Any number—as many as they wished! To please the sisters, she even made up lives for them, though her head was beating like a war-drum. She had sent out for clothes. Her own were in shreds and God Himself must have blushed to see the state she was in when they found her. She gave a false address to go with her false name; she wanted no follow-up, no visitors. And somehow, by sheer will-power, at the stroke of six that evening, Ostrakova became just another ex-patient, stepping cautiously and extremely painfully down the ramp of the great black hospital, to rejoin the very world which that same day had done its best to be rid of her for good. Wearing her boots, which like herself were battered but mysteriously unbroken; and she was quaintly proud of the way they had supported her.

She wore them still. Restored to the twilight of her own apartment, seated in Ostrakov’s tattered armchair while she patiently wrestled with his old army revolver, trying to fathom how the devil it loaded, cocked, and fired itself, she wore them like a uniform. “I am an army of one.” To stay alive: that was her one aim, and the longer she did it, the greater would be her victory. To stay alive until the General came, or sent her the magician.

To escape from them, like Ostrakov? Well, she had done that. To mock them, like Glikman, to force them into corners where they had no option but to contemplate their own obscenity? In her time, she liked to think, she had done a little of that as well. But to survive, as neither of her men had done; to cling to life, against all the efforts of that soulless, numberless universe of brutalised functionaries; to be a thorn to them every hour of the day, merely by staying alive, by breathing, eating, moving, and having her wits about her—that, Ostrakova had decided, was an occupation worthy of her mettle, and her faith, and of her two loves. She had set about it immediately, with appropriate devotion. Already she had sent the fool concierge to shop for her: disability had its uses.

“I have had a small
attack,
Madame la Pierre”—whether of the heart, the stomach, or the Russian secret police she did not divulge to the old goat. “I am advised to leave off work for several weeks and rest completely. I am exhausted, madame—there are times when one wishes only to be alone. And here, take this, madame—not like the others, so grasping and over-vigilant.” Madame la Pierre took the note in her fist, and looked at just one corner of it before tucking it away at her waist somewhere. “And listen, madame, if anyone asks for me, do me a favour and say I am away. I shall burn no lights on the street side. We women of sensitivity are entitled to a little peace, you agree? But, madame, please, remember who they are, these visitors, and tell me—the gasman, people from the charities—tell me everything. I like to hear that life is going on around me.”

The concierge concluded she was mad, no doubt, but there was no madness to her money, and money was what the concierge liked best, and besides, she was mad herself. In a few hours, Ostrakova had become more cunning even than in Moscow. The concierge’s husband came up—a brigand himself, worse than the old goat—and, encouraged by further payments, fixed chains to her front door. Tomorrow he would fit a peep-hole, also for money. The concierge promised to receive her mail for her, and deliver it only at certain agreed times—exactly eleven in the morning, six in the evening, two short rings—for money. By forcing open the tiny ventilator in the back lavatory and standing on a chair, Ostrakova could look down into the courtyard whenever she wanted, at whoever came and went. She had sent a note to the warehouse saying she was indisposed. She could not move her double bed, but with pillows and her feather coverlet she made up the divan and positioned it so that it pointed like a torpedo through the open door of the drawing-room at the front door beyond it, and all she had to do was lie on it with her boots aimed at the intruder and shoot down the line of them, and if she didn’t blow her own foot off, she would catch him in the first moment of surprise as he attempted to burst in on her: she had worked it out. Her head throbbed and caterwauled, her eyes had a way of darkening over when she moved her head too fast, she had a raging temperature and sometimes she half fainted. But she had worked it out, she had made her dispositions, and till the General or the magician came, it was Moscow all over again. “You’re on your own, you old fool,” she told herself aloud. “You’ve nobody to rely on but yourself, so get on with it.”

With one photograph of Glikman and one of Ostrakov on the floor beside her, and an icon of the Virgin under the coverlet, Ostrakova embarked upon her first night’s vigil, praying steadily to a host of saints, not least of them St. Joseph, that they would send her her redeemer, the magician.