Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (22 page)

There was also a row about a new camera, which at great expense was broken into tubular components by nuts and bolts section and fitted into a standard lamp of Soviet manufacture. The lamp, after screams of pain—this time from the Foreign Office—was spirited to Moscow by diplomatic bag. The problem was then the drop. The residency could not be informed of Merlin’s identity, nor did it know the contents of the lamp. The lamp was unwieldy, and would not fit the boot of the resident’s car. After several shots, an untidy handover was achieved, but the camera never worked and there was bad blood between the Circus and its Moscow residency as a result. A less ambitious model was taken by Esterhase to Helsinki, where it was handed—thus Alleline’s memo to the Minister—to “a trusted intermediary whose frontier crossings would go unchallenged.”

Suddenly, Smiley sat up with a jolt.

“We spoke,” wrote Alleline to the Minister, in a minute dated February 27th this year. “You agreed to submit a supplementary estimate to the Treasury for a London house to be carried on the Witchcraft budget.”

He read it once, then again more slowly. The Treasury had sanctioned sixty thousand pounds for the freehold and another ten for furniture and fittings. To cut costs, it wanted its own lawyers to handle the conveyance. Alleline refused to reveal the address. For the same reason there was an argument about who should keep the deeds. This time the Treasury put its foot down and its lawyers drew up instruments to get the house back from Alleline should he die or go bankrupt. But he still kept the address to himself, as also the justification for this remarkable, and costly, adjunct to an operation that was supposedly taking place abroad.

Smiley searched eagerly for an explanation. The financial files, he quickly confirmed, were scrupulous to offer none. They contained only one veiled reference to the London house, and that was when the rates were doubled: Minister to Alleline: “I assume the London end is still necessary?” Alleline to Minister: “Eminently. I would say more than ever. I would add that the circle of knowledge has not widened since our conversation.” What knowledge?

It was not till he went back to the files which appraised the Witchcraft product that he came on the solution. The house was paid for in late March. Occupancy followed immediately. From the same date exactly, Merlin began to acquire a personality, and it was shaped here in the customers’ comments. Till now, to Smiley’s suspicious eye, Merlin had been a machine: faultless in tradecraft, eerie in access, free of the strains that make most agents such hard going. Now, suddenly, he was having a tantrum.

“We put to Merlin your follow-up question about the prevailing Kremlin view on the sale of Russian oil surpluses to the United States. We suggested to him, at your request, that this was at odds with his report last month that the Kremlin is presently flirting with the Tanaka government for a contract to sell Siberian oil on the Japanese market. Merlin saw no contradiction in the two reports and declined to forecast which market might ultimately be favoured.”

Whitehall regretted its temerity.

“Merlin will not, repeat not, add to his report on the repression of Georgian nationalism and the rioting in Tbilisi. Not being himself a Georgian, he takes the traditional Russian view that all Georgians are thieves and vagabonds, and better behind bars . . .”

Whitehall agreed not to press.

Merlin had suddenly drawn nearer. Was it only the acquisition of a London house that gave Smiley this new sense of Merlin’s physical proximity? From the remote stillness of a Moscow winter, Merlin seemed suddenly to be sitting here before him in the tattered room; in the street outside his window, waiting in the rain, where now and then, he knew, Mendel kept his solitary guard. Here out of the blue was a Merlin who talked and answered back and gratuitously offered his opinions, a Merlin who had time to be met. Met here in London? Fed, entertained, debriefed in a sixty-thousand-pound house while he threw his weight about and made jokes about Georgians? What was this circle of knowledge that had now formed itself even within the wider circle of those initiated into the secrets of the Witchcraft operation?

At this point, an improbable figure flitted across the stage: one J.P.R., a new recruit to Whitehall’s growing band of Witchcraft evaluators. Consulting the indoctrination list, Smiley established that his full name was Ribble, and that he was a member of Foreign Office Research Department. J. P. Ribble was puzzled.

J.P.R. to the Adriatic Working Party (A.W.P.): “May I respectfully draw your attention to an apparent discrepancy concerning dates? Witchcraft No. 104 (Soviet-French discussions on joint aircraft production) is dated April 21st. According to your covering minute, Merlin had this information directly from General Markov on the day after the negotiating parties agreed to a secret exchange of notes. But on that day, April 21st, according to our Paris Embassy, Markov was still in Paris, and Merlin, as witness your Report No. 109, was himself visiting a missile research establishment outside Leningrad . . .”

The minute cited no fewer than four similar “discrepancies,” which, put together, suggested a degree of mobility in Merlin that would have done credit to his miraculous namesake.

J. P. Ribble was told in as many words to mind his own business. But in a separate minute to the Minister, Alleline made an extraordinary admission that shed an entirely new light on the nature of the Witchcraft operation.

“Extremely secret and personal. We spoke. Merlin, as you have known for some time, is not one source but several. While we have done our best for security reasons to disguise this fact from your readers, the sheer volume of material makes it increasingly difficult to continue with this fiction. Might it not be time to come clean, at least on a limited basis? By the same token it would do the Treasury no harm to learn that Merlin’s ten thousand Swiss francs a month in salary, and a similar figure for expenses and running costs, are scarcely excessive when the cloth has to be cut so many ways.”

But the minute ended on a harsher note: “Nevertheless, even if we agree to open the door this far, I regard it as paramount that knowledge of the existence of the London house, and the purpose for which it is used, remain absolutely at a minimum. Indeed, once Merlin’s plurality is published among our readers, the delicacy of the London operation is increased.”

Totally mystified, Smiley read this correspondence several times. Then, as if struck by a sudden thought, he looked up, his face a picture of confusion. So far away were his thoughts, indeed, so intense and complex, that the telephone rang several times inside the room before he responded to the summons. Lifting the receiver, he glanced at his watch; it was six in the evening; he had been reading barely an hour.

“Mr. Barraclough? This is Lofthouse from finance, sir.”

Peter Guillam, using the emergency procedure, was asking by means of the agreed phrases for a crash meeting, and he sounded shaken.

20

T
he Circus Archives were not accessible from the main entrance. They rambled through a warren of dingy rooms and half-landings at the back of the building, more like one of the second-hand bookshops that proliferate round there than the organised memory of a large department. They were reached by a dull doorway in the Charing Cross Road, jammed between a picture-framer and an all-day café that was out of bounds to staff. A plate on the door read, “Town and Country Language School, Staff Only,” and another, “C & L Distribution, Ltd.” To enter, you pressed one or other bell and waited for Alwyn, an effeminate Marine who spoke only of weekends. Till Wednesday or so, he spoke of the weekend past; after that he spoke of the weekend to come. This morning, a Tuesday, he was in a mood of indignant unrest.

“Here, what about that storm, then?” he demanded as he pushed the book across the counter for Guillam to sign. “Might as well live in a lighthouse. All Saturday, all Sunday. I said to my friend: ‘Here we are in the middle of London and listen to it.’ Want me to look after that for you?”

“You should have been where I was,” said Guillam, consigning the brown canvas grip into Alwyn’s waiting hands. “Talk about listen to it, you could hardly stand upright.”

Don’t be over-friendly, he thought, talking to himself.

“Still, I do like the country,” Alwyn confided, stowing the grip in one of the open lockers behind the counter. “Want a number, then? I’m supposed to give you one—the Dolphin would kill me if she knew.”

“I’ll trust you,” said Guillam. Climbing the four steps, he pushed open the swing doors to the reading-room. The place was like a makeshift lecture hall: a dozen desks all facing the same way, a raised area where the archivist sat. Guillam took a desk near the back. It was still early—ten-ten by his watch—and the only other reader was Ben Thruxton, of research, who spent most of his time here. Long ago, masquerading as a Latvian dissident, Ben had run with revolutionaries through the streets of Moscow calling death to the oppressors. Now he crouched over his papers like an old priest, white-haired and perfectly still.

Seeing Guillam standing at her desk, the archivist smiled. Quite often, when Brixton was dead, Guillam would spend a day here searching through old cases for one that could stand refiring. She was Sal, a plump, sporting girl who ran a youth club in Chiswick and was a judo black-belt.

“Break any good necks this weekend?” he asked, helping himself to a bunch of green requisition slips.

Sal handed him the notes she kept for him in her steel cupboard.

“Couple. How about you?”

“Visiting aunts in Shropshire, thank you.”

“Some aunts,” said Sal.

Still at her desk, he filled in slips for the next two references on his list. He watched her stamp them, tear off the flimsies, and post them through a slot on her desk.

“D corridor,” she murmured, handing back the top copies. “The two-eights are halfway on your right, the three-ones are next alcove down.”

Pushing open the far door, he entered the main hall. At the centre an old lift like a miner’s cage carried files into the body of the Circus. Two bleary juniors were feeding it; a third stood by to operate the winch. Guillam moved slowly along the shelves reading the fluorescent number cards.

“Lacon swears he holds no file on Testify at all,” Smiley had explained in his usual worried way. “He has a few resettlement papers on Prideaux and nothing else.” And, in the same lugubrious tone: “So I’m afraid we’ll have to find a way of getting hold of whatever there is in Circus Registry.”

For “getting hold,” in Smiley’s dictionary, read “steal.”

One girl stood on a ladder. Oscar Allitson, the collator, was filling a laundry basket with wrangler files; Astrid, the maintenance man, was mending a radiator. The shelves were wooden, deep as bunks, and divided into pigeon-holes by panels of ply. He knew already that the Testify reference was 4482E which meant alcove 44, where he now stood. “E” stood for “extinct” and was used for dead operations only. Guillam counted to the eighth pigeon-hole from the left. Testify should be second from the left, but there was no way of making certain because the spines were unmarked. His reconnaissance complete, he drew the two files he had requested, leaving the green slips in the steel brackets provided for them.

“There won’t be much, I’m sure,” Smiley had said, as if thinner files were easier. “But there ought to be something, if only for appearances.” That was another thing about him that Guillam didn’t like just then: he spoke as if you followed his reasoning, as if you were inside his mind all the time.

Sitting down, he pretended to read but passed the time thinking of Camilla. What was he supposed to make of her? Early this morning as she lay in his arms, she told him she had once been married. Sometimes she spoke like that, as if she’d lived about twenty lives. It was a mistake, so they packed it in.

“What went wrong?”

“Nothing. We weren’t right for each other.”

Guillam didn’t believe her.

“Did you get a divorce?”

“I expect so.”

“Don’t be damn silly; you must know whether you’re divorced or not!”

His parents handled it, she said; he was foreign.

“Does he send you money?”

“Why should he? He doesn’t owe me anything.”

Then the flute again, in the spare room, long questioning notes in the half-light while Guillam made coffee. Is she a fake or an angel? He’d half a mind to pass her name across the records. She had a lesson with Sand in an hour.

Armed with a green slip with a 43 reference, he returned the two files to their places and positioned himself at the alcove next to Testify.

Dry run uneventful, he thought.

The girl was still up her ladder. Allitson had vanished but the laundry basket was still there. The radiator had already exhausted Astrid and he was sitting beside it reading the
Sun.
The green slip read “4343,” and he found the file at once because he had already marked it down. It had a pink jacket like Testify. Like Testify, it was reasonably thumbed. He fitted the green slip into the bracket. He moved back across the aisle, again checked Allitson and the girls, then reached for the Testify file and replaced it very fast with the file he had in his hand.

“I think the vital thing, Peter”—Smiley speaking—“is not to leave a gap. So what I suggest is, you requisition a comparable file—
physically
comparable, I mean—and pop it into the gap which is left by—”

“I get you,” Guillam said.

Holding the Testify file casually in his right hand, title inward to his body, Guillam returned to the reading-room and again sat at his desk. Sal raised her eyebrows and mouthed something. Guillam nodded that all was well, thinking that was what she was asking, but she beckoned him over. Momentary panic. Take the file with me or leave it? What do I usually do? He left it on the desk.

“Juliet’s going for coffee,” Sal whispered. “Want some?”

Guillam laid a shilling on the counter.

He glanced at the clock, then at his watch. Christ, stop looking at your damn watch! Think of Camilla, think of her starting her lesson, think of those aunts you didn’t spend the weekend with, think of Alwyn not looking in your bag. Think of anything but the time. Eighteen minutes to wait. “Peter, if you have the smallest reservation, you really mustn’t go ahead with it. Nothing is as important as that.” Great, so how do you spot a reservation when thirty teenage butterflies are mating in your stomach and the sweat is like a secret rain inside your shirt? Never, he swore, never had he had it this bad.