Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (15 page)

“And the third? Viktorov?”

“Sunk without trace.”

“Oh, dear,” said Smiley, and his boredom seemed to deepen.

“Trained and disappeared off the face of the earth. May have died, of course. One does
tend
to forget the natural causes.”

“Oh, indeed,” Smiley agreed; “oh, quite.”

He had that art, from miles and miles of secret life, of listening at the front of his mind; of letting the primary incidents unroll directly before him while another, quite separate faculty wrestled with their historical connection. The connection ran through Tarr to Irina, through Irina to her poor lover who was so proud of being called Lapin, and of serving one Colonel Gregor Viktorov “whose workname at the Embassy is Polyakov.” In his memory, these things were like part of a childhood: he would never forget them.

“Were there photographs, Connie?” he asked glumly. “Did you land physical descriptions at all?”

“Of Bardin at the United Nations, naturally. Of Stokovsky, perhaps. We had an old press picture from his soldiering days, but we could never quite nail the verification.”

“And of Viktorov, who sank without trace?” Still, it might have been any name. “No pretty picture of him, either?” Smiley asked, going down the room to fetch more drink.

“Viktorov, Colonel Gregor,” Connie repeated with a fond distracted smile. “Fought like a terrier at Stalingrad. No, we never had a photograph. Pity. They said he was yards the best.” She perked up: “Though, of course, we don’t
know
about the others. Five huts and a two-year course: well, my dear, that adds up to a sight more than three graduates after all these years!”

With a tiny sigh of disappointment, as if to say there was nothing so far in that whole narrative, let alone in the person of Colonel Gregor Viktorov, to advance him in his laborious quest, Smiley suggested they should pass to the wholly unrelated phenomenon of Polyakov, Aleksey Aleksandrovich, of the Soviet Embassy in London, better known to Connie as dear Aleks Polyakov, and establish just where he fitted into Karla’s scheme of things and why it was that she had been forbidden to investigate him further.

13

S
he was much more animated now. Polyakov was not a fairy-tale hero; he was her lover Aleks, though she had never spoken to him, probably never seen him in the flesh. She had moved to another seat closer to the reading lamp, a rocking-chair that relieved certain pains: she could sit nowhere for long. She had tilted her head back so that Smiley was looking at the white billows of her neck and she dangled one stiff hand coquettishly, recalling indiscretions she did not regret; while to Smiley’s tidy mind her speculations, in terms of the acceptable arithmetic of intelligence, seemed even wilder than before.

“Oh,
he was so good,” she said. “Seven long years Aleks had been here before we even had an inkling. Seven years, my dear, and not so much as a
tickle!
Imagine!”

She quoted his original visa application, those nine years ago: Polyakov, Aleksey Aleksandrovich, graduate of Leningrad State University, cultural attaché with second-secretary rank, married but not accompanied by wife, born March 3, 1922, in the Ukraine, son of a transporter, early education not supplied. She ran straight on, a smile in her voice as she gave the lamplighters’ first routine description: “Height, five foot eleven; heavy build; colour of eyes, green; colour of hair, black; no other visible distinguishing marks. Jolly giant of a bloke,” she declared with a laugh. “Tremendous joker. Black tuft of hair, here, over the right eye. I’m sure he was a bottom pincher, though we never caught him at it. I’d have offered him one or two bottoms of our own if Toby had played ball, which he wouldn’t. Not that Aleksey Aleksandrovich would have fallen for
that,
mind. Aleks was
far
too artful,” she said proudly. “Lovely voice. Mellow like yours. I often used to play the tapes twice, just to listen to him speaking. Is he really still around, George? I don’t even like to ask, you see. I’m afraid they’ll all change and I won’t know them any more.”

He was still there, Smiley assured her. The same cover, the same rank.

“And still occupying that dreadful little suburban house in Highgate that Toby’s watchers hated so? Forty Meadow Close, top floor. Oh, it was a
pest
of a place. I love a man who really lives his cover, and Aleks did. He was the busiest culture vulture that Embassy ever had. If you wanted something done fast—lecturer, musician, you name it—Aleks cut through the red tape faster than any man.”

“How did he manage that, Connie?”

“Not how
you
think, George Smiley,” she sang as the blood shot to her face.
“Oh,
no. Aleksey Aleksandrovich was nothing but what he said he was—so there; you ask Toby Esterhase or Percy Alleline. Pure as the driven snow, he was. Unbesmirched in any shape or form—Toby will put you right on that!”

“Hey,” Smiley murmured, filling her glass. “Hey, steady, Connie. Come down.”

“Fooey,”
she shouted, quite unmollified. “Sheer unadulterated
fooey.
Aleksey Aleksandrovich Polyakov was a six-cylinder Karla-trained hood if ever I saw one, and they wouldn’t even listen to me! ‘You’re seeing spies under the bed,’ says Toby. ‘Lamplighters are fully extended,’ says Percy”—her Scottish brogue—“‘We’ve no place for luxuries here.’ Luxuries my foot!” She was crying again. “Poor George,” she kept saying. “Poor George. You tried to help but what could you do? You were on the down staircase yourself. Oh, George, don’t go hunting with the Lacons. Please don’t.”

Gently he guided her back to Polyakov, and why she was so sure he was Karla’s hood, a graduate of Karla’s special school.

“It was Remembrance Day,” she sobbed. “We photographed his medals—’course we did.”

Year one again, year one of her seven-year love affair with Aleks Polyakov. The curious thing was, she said, that she had her eye on him from the moment he arrived:

“Hullo, I thought. I’m going to have a bit of fun with you.”

Quite why she thought that she didn’t know. Perhaps it was his self-sufficiency, perhaps it was his poker walk, straight off the parade-ground: “Tough as a button. Army written all over him.” Or perhaps it was the way he lived: “He chose the one house in London those lamplighters couldn’t get within fifty yards of.” Or perhaps it was his work: “There were three cultural attachés already: two of them were hoods and the only thing the third did was cart the flowers up to Highgate Cemetery for poor Karl Marx.”

She was a little dazed, so he walked her again, taking the whole weight of her when she stumbled. Well, she said, at first Toby Esterhase agreed to put Aleks on the A list and have his Acton lamplighters cover him for random days, twelve out of every thirty, and each time they followed him he was as pure as the driven snow.

“My dear, you’d have thought I’d rung him up and told him, ‘Aleks Aleksandrovich, mind your “p”s and “q”s because I’m putting Tiny Toby’s dogs on you. So just you live your cover and no monkey business.’ ”

He went to functions, lectures, strolled in the park, played a little tennis, and short of giving sweets to the kids he couldn’t have been more respectable. Connie fought for continued coverage but it was a losing battle. The machinery ground on and Polyakov was transferred to the B list: to be topped up every six months or as resources allowed. The six-monthly top-ups produced nothing at all, and after three years he was graded Persil: investigated in depth and found to be of no intelligence interest. There was nothing Connie could do, and really she had almost begun to live with the assessment when one gorgeous November day lovely Teddy Hankie telephoned her rather breathlessly from the Laundry at Acton to say Aleks Polyakov had blown his cover and run up his true colours at last. They were splashed all over the masthead.

“Teddy was an old
old
chum. Old Circus and a perfect pet; I don’t care if he’s ninety. He’d finished for the day and was on his way home when the Soviet Ambassador’s Volga drove past going to the wreath-laying ceremony, carrying the three service attachés. Three others were following in a second car. One was Polyakov and he was wearing more medals than a Christmas tree. Teddy shot down to Whitehall with his camera and photographed them across the street. My dear,
everything
was on our side: the weather was perfect, a bit of rain and then some lovely afternoon sunshine; he could have got the smile on a fly’s backside at three hundred yards. We blew up the photographs and there they were: two gallantry and four campaign. Aleks Polyakov was a war veteran and he’d never told a soul in seven years. Oh, I was excited! I didn’t even need to plot the campaigns. ‘Toby,’ I said—I rang him straight away—‘You just listen to me for a moment, you Hungarian poison dwarf. This is one of the occasions when ego has finally got the better of cover. I want you to turn Aleks Aleksandrovich
inside out
for me, no “if”s or “but”s. Connie’s little hunch has come home trumps.’ ”

“And what did Toby say?”

The grey spaniel let out a dismal sigh, and dropped off to sleep again.

“Toby?” Connie was suddenly very lonely. “Oh, Tiny Toby gave me his dead-fish voice and said Percy Alleline was now head of operations, didn’t he? It was Percy’s job, not his, to allocate resources. I knew straight away something was wrong but I thought it was Toby.” She fell silent. “Damn fire,” she muttered morosely. “You only have to turn your back and it goes out.” She had lost interest. “You know the rest. Report went to Percy. ‘So what?’ Percy says. ‘Polyakov used to be in the Russian Army. It was a biggish army and not everybody who fought in it was Karla’s agent.’ Very funny. Accused me of unscientific deduction. ‘Whose expression is that?’ I said to him. ‘It’s not deduction at all,’ he says, ‘it’s induction.’ ‘My dear Percy, wherever have you been learning words like that; you sound just like a beastly doctor or someone.’ My
dear,
he was cross! As a sop, Toby puts the dogs on Aleks and nothing happens. ‘Spike his house,’ I said. ‘His car, everything! Rig a mugging, turn him inside out, put the listeners on him! Fake a mistaken identity, search him. Anything, but for God’s
sake
do something, because it’s a pound to a rouble Aleks Polyakov is running an English mole!’ So Percy sends for me, all lofty,”—the brogue again: “ ‘You’re to leave Polyakov alone. You’re to put him out of your silly woman’s mind, do you understand? You and your blasted Polly what’s-’is-name are becoming a damned nuisance, so lay off him.’ Follows it up with a rude letter. ‘We spoke and you agreed,’ copy to head cow. I wrote, ‘yes repeat no’ on the bottom and sent it back to him.” She switched to her sergeant-major voice: “ ‘You’re losing your sense of proportion, Connie. Time you got out into the real world.’ ”

Connie was having a hangover. She was sitting again, slumped over her glass. Her eyes had closed and her head kept falling to one side.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, waking up again. “Oh, my Lordy be.”

“Did Polyakov have a legman?” Smiley asked.

“Why should he? He’s a culture vulture. Culture vultures don’t need legmen.”

“Komarov had one in Tokyo. You said so.”

“Komarov was military,” she said sullenly.

“So was Polyakov. You saw his medals.”

He held her hand, waiting. Lapin the rabbit, she said, clerk driver at the Embassy, twerp. At first she couldn’t work him out. She suspected him of being one Ivlov, but she couldn’t prove it and no one would help her anyway. Lapin the rabbit spent most of his day padding round London looking at girls and not daring to talk to them. But gradually she began to pick up the connection. Polyakov gave a reception, Lapin helped pour the drinks. Polyakov was called in late at night, and half an hour later Lapin turned up presumably to unbutton a telegram. And when Polyakov flew to Moscow, Lapin the rabbit actually moved into the Embassy and slept there till he came back. “He was doubling up,” said Connie firmly. “Stuck out a mile.”

“So you reported that, too?”

“ ’Course I did.”

“And what happened?”

“Connie was sacked and Lapin went home,” Connie said with a giggle. “Couple of weeks later, Jimmy Prideaux got shot in the bot, George Smiley was pensioned off, and Control . . .” She yawned. “Hey, ho,” she said. “Halcyon days. Landslide. Did I start it, George?”

The fire was quite dead. From somewhere above them came a thud; perhaps it was Janet and her lover. Gradually, Connie began humming, then swaying to her own music.

He stayed, trying to cheer her up. He gave her more drink and finally it brightened her.

“Come on,” she said, “I’ll show you
my
bloody medals.”

Dormitory feasts again. She had them in a scuffed attaché case, which Smiley had to pull out from under the bed. First a real medal in a box and a typed citation calling her by her workname Constance Salinger and putting her on the Prime Minister’s list.

“’Cause Connie was a good girl,” she explained, her cheek against his. “And loved all her gorgeous boys.”

Then photographs of past members of the Circus: Connie in Wren’s uniform in the war, standing between Jebedee and old Bill Magnus, the wrangler, taken somewhere in England; Connie with Bill Haydon one side and Jim Prideaux the other, the men in cricket gear and all three looking very-nicely-thank-you, as Connie put it, on a summer course at Sarratt, the grounds stretching out behind them, mown and sunlit, and the sight screens glistening. Next an enormous magnifying glass with signatures engraved on the lens: from Roy, from Percy, from Toby and lots of others, “To Connie with love and never say goodbye!”

Lastly, Bill’s own special contribution: a caricature of Connie lying across the whole expanse of Kensington Palace Gardens while she peered at the Soviet Embassy through a telescope: “With love and fond memories, dear, dear Connie.”

“They still remember him here, you know,” she said. “The golden boy. Christ Church common-room has a couple of his paintings. They take them out quite often. Giles Langley stopped me in the High only the other day: did I ever hear from Haydon? Don’t know what I said: Yes. No. Does Giles’s sister still do safe houses, do you know?” Smiley did not. “ ‘We miss his flair,’ says Giles, ‘they don’t breed them like him any more.’ Giles must be a hundred and eight in the shade. Says he taught Bill modern history, in the days before ‘Empire’ became a dirty word. Asked after Jim, too. ‘His alter ego, we might say, hem hem, hem hem.’ You never liked Bill, did you?” Connie ran on vaguely, as she packed it all away again in plastic bags and bits of cloth. “I never knew whether you were jealous of him or he was jealous of you. Too glamorous, I suppose. You always distrusted looks. Only in men, mind.”