Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (25 page)

Tarr, he thought. That bastard Ricki Tarr.

22

T
he bedroom was long and low, once a maid’s room, built into the attic. Guillam was standing at the door; Tarr sat on the bed motionless, his head tilted back against the sloped ceiling, hands to either side of him, fingers wide. There was a dormer window above him, and from where Guillam stood he could see long reaches of black Suffolk countryside and a line of black trees traced against the sky. The wallpaper was brown with large red flowers. The one light hung from a black oak truss, lighting their two faces in strange geometric patterns, and when either one of them moved, Tarr on the bed or Smiley on the wooden kitchen chair, they seemed by their movement to take the light with them a distance before it resettled.

Left to himself, Guillam would have been very rough with Tarr, he had no doubt of it. His nerves were all over the place, and on the drive down he had touched ninety before Smiley sharply told him to go steady. Left to himself, he would have been tempted to beat the daylights out of Tarr, and if necessary he would have brought Fawn in to lend a hand; driving, he had a very clear picture of opening the front door of wherever Tarr lived and hitting him in the face several times, with love from Camilla and her ex-husband, the distinguished doctor of the flute. And perhaps in the shared tension of the journey Smiley had received the same picture telepathically, for the little he said was clearly directed to talking Guillam down. “Tarr has not lied to us, Peter. Not in any material way. He has simply done what agents do the world over: he has failed to tell us the whole story. On the other hand, he has been rather clever.” Far from sharing Guillam’s bewilderment, he seemed curiously confident—even complacent—to the extent of allowing himself a sententious aphorism from Steed-Asprey on the arts of double-cross; something about not looking for perfection, but for advantage, which again had Guillam thinking about Camilla. “Karla has admitted us to the inner circle,” Smiley announced, and Guillam made a bad joke about changing at Charing Cross. After that Smiley contented himself with giving directions and watching the wing mirror.

They had met at Crystal Palace, a van pick-up with Mendel driving. They drove to Barnsbury, straight into a car-body repair shop at the end of a cobbled alley full of children. There they were received with discreet rapture by an old German and his son, who had stripped the plates off the van almost before they got out of it and led them to a souped-up Vauxhall ready to drive out of the far end of the workshop. Mendel stayed behind with the Testify file, which Guillam had brought from Brixton in his night-bag; Smiley said, “Find the A12.” There was very little traffic but short of Colchester they hit a cluster of lorries and Guillam suddenly lost patience. Smiley had to order him to pull in. Once they met an old man driving at twenty in the fast lane. As they overtook him on the inside, he veered wildly towards them, drunk or ill, or just terrified. And once, with no warning, they hit a fog wall; it seemed to fall on them from above. Guillam drove clean through it, afraid to brake because of black ice. Past Colchester they took small lanes. On the signposts were names like Little Horkesley, Wormingford, and Bures Green; then the signposts stopped and Guillam had a feeling of being nowhere at all.

“Left here and left again at the dower house. Go as far as you can but park short of the gates.”

They reached what seemed to be a hamlet but there were no lights, no people, and no moon. As they got out, the cold hit them and Guillam smelt a cricket field and wood-smoke and Christmas all at once; he thought he had never been anywhere so quiet or so cold or so remote. A church tower rose ahead of them, a white fence ran to one side, and up on the slope stood what he took to be the rectory, a low rambling house, part thatched; he could make out the fringe of gable against the sky. Fawn was waiting for them; he came to the car as they parked, and climbed silently into the back.

“Ricki’s been that much better today, sir,” he reported. He had evidently done a lot of reporting to Smiley in the last few days. He was a steady, soft-spoken boy with a great will to please, but the rest of the Brixton pack seemed to be afraid of him, Guillam didn’t know why. “Not so nervy—more relaxed, I’d say. Did his pools this morning—loves the pools, Ricki does—this afternoon we dug up fir trees for Miss Ailsa, so’s she could drive them into market. This evening we had a nice game of cards and early bed.”

“Has he been out alone?” asked Smiley.

“No, sir.”

“Has he used the telephone?”

“Gracious, no, sir, not while I’m around, and I’m sure not while Miss Ailsa was, either.”

Their breath had misted the windows of the car, but Smiley would not have the engine on, so there was no heater and no de-mister.

“Has he mentioned his daughter Danny?”

“Over the weekend he did a lot. Now he’s sort of cooled off about them. I think he’s shut them out of his mind, in view of the emotional side.”

“He hasn’t talked about seeing them again?”

“No, sir.”

“Nothing about arrangements for meeting when all this is over?”

“No, sir.”

“Or bringing them to England?”

“No, sir.”

“Nor about providing them with documents?”

“No, sir.”

Guillam chimed in irritably: “So what has he talked about, for heaven’s sake?”

“The Russian lady, sir. Irina. He likes to read her diary. He says when the mole’s caught, he’s going to make Centre swap him for Irina. Then we’ll get her a nice place, sir—like Miss Ailsa’s but up in Scotland where it’s nicer. He says he’ll see me right, too. Give me a big job in the Circus. He’s been encouraging me to learn another language to increase my scope.”

There was no telling, from the flat voice behind them in the dark, what Fawn made of this advice.

“Where is he now?”

“In bed, sir.”

“Close the doors quietly.”

Ailsa Brimley was waiting in the front porch for them: a grey-haired lady of sixty with a firm, intelligent face. She was old Circus, Smiley said, one of Lord Landsbury’s coding ladies from the war, now in retirement but still formidable. She wore a trim brown suit. She shook Guillam by the hand and said “How do you do,” bolted the door, and when he looked again she had gone. Smiley led the way upstairs. Fawn should wait on the lower landing in case he was needed.

“It’s Smiley,” he said knocking on Tarr’s door. “I want a chat with you.”

Tarr opened the door fast. He must have heard them coming, and been waiting just the other side. He opened it with his left hand, holding the gun in his right, and he was looking past Smiley down the corridor.

“It’s only Guillam,” said Smiley.

“That’s what I mean,” said Tarr. “Babies can bite.”

They stepped inside. He wore slacks and some sort of cheap Malay wrap. Spelling cards lay spread over the floor and in the air hung a smell of curry that he had cooked for himself on a ring.

“I’m sorry to be pestering you,” said Smiley with an air of sincere commiseration. “But I must ask you again what you did with those two Swiss escape passports you took with you to Hong Kong.”

“Why?” said Tarr at last.

The jauntiness was all gone. He had a prison pallor; he had lost weight and as he sat on the bed with the gun on the pillow beside him, his eyes sought them out nervously, each in turn, trusting nothing.

Smiley said, “Listen. I want to believe your story. Nothing is altered. Once we know, we’ll respect your privacy. But we have to know. It’s terribly important. Your whole future stands by it.”

And a lot more besides, thought Guillam, watching; a whole chunk of devious arithmetic was hanging by a thread, if Guillam knew Smiley at all.

“I told you I burned them. I didn’t fancy the numbers. I reckoned they were blown. Might as well put a label round your neck ‘Tarr, Ricki Tarr, Wanted’ soon as use those passports.”

Smiley’s questions were terribly slow in coming. Even to Guillam it was painful waiting for them in the deep silence of the night.

“What did you burn them with?”

“What the hell does that matter?”

But Smiley apparently did not feel like giving reasons for his enquiries; he preferred to let the silence do its work, and he seemed confident that it would. Guillam had seen whole interrogations conducted that way: a laboured catechism swathed in deep coverings of routine; wearying pauses as each answer was written down in longhand and the suspect’s brain besieged itself with a thousand questions to the interrogator’s one; and his hold on his story weakened from day to day.

“When you bought your British passport in the name of Poole,” Smiley asked, after another age, “did you buy any other passports from the same source?”

“Why should I?”

But Smiley did not feel like giving reasons.

“Why should I?” Tarr repeated. “I’m not a damn collector, for Christ’s sake; all I wanted was to get out from under.”

“And protect your child,” Smiley suggested, with an understanding smile. “And protect her mother, too, if you could. I’m sure you gave a lot of thought to that,” he said in a flattering tone. “After all, you could hardly leave them behind to the mercy of that inquisitive Frenchman, could you?”

Waiting, Smiley appeared to examine the lexicon cards, reading off the words longways and sideways. There was nothing to them: they were random words. One was misspelt; Guillam noticed “epistle” with the last two letters back to front. What’s he been doing up there, Guillam wondered, in that stinking flea-pit of a hotel? What furtive little tracks has his mind been following, locked away with the sauce bottles and the commercial travellers?

“All right,” said Tarr sullenly, “so I got passports for Danny and her mother. Mrs. Poole, Miss Danny Poole. What do we do now, cry out in ecstasy?”

Again it was the silence that accused.

“Now why didn’t you tell us that before?” Smiley asked in the tone of a disappointed father. “We’re not monsters. We don’t wish them harm. Why didn’t you tell us? Perhaps we could even have helped you,” and went back to his examination of the cards. Tarr must have used two or three packs; they lay in rivers over the coconut carpet. “Why didn’t you tell us?” he repeated. “There’s no crime in looking after the people one loves.”

If they’ll let you, thought Guillam, with Camilla in mind. To help Tarr answer, Smiley was making helpful suggestions: “Was it because you dipped into your operational expenses to buy these British passports? Was that the reason you didn’t tell us? Good heavens, no one here is worried about money. You’ve brought us a vital piece of information. Why should we quarrel about a couple of thousand dollars?” And the time ticked away again without anyone using it.

“Or was it,” Smiley suggested, “that you were ashamed?”

Guillam stiffened, his own problems forgotten.

“Rightly ashamed in a way, I suppose. It wasn’t a very gallant act, after all, to leave Danny and her mother with blown passports, at the mercy of that so-called Frenchman who was looking so hard for Mr. Poole? While you yourself escaped to all this V.I.P. treatment? It is horrible to think of,” Smiley agreed, as if Tarr, not he, had made the point. “It is horrible to contemplate the lengths Karla would go to in order to obtain your silence. Or your services.”

The sweat on Tarr’s face was suddenly unbearable. There was too much of it; it was like tears all over. The cards no longer interested Smiley; his eye had settled on a different game. It was a toy, made of two steel rods like the shafts of a pair of tongs. The trick was to roll a steel ball along them. The further you rolled it, the more points you won when it fell into one of the holes underneath.

“The other reason you might not have told us, I suppose, is that you burnt them. You burnt the
British
passports, I mean, not the Swiss ones.”

Go easy, George, thought Guillam, and softly moved a pace nearer to cover the gap between them. Just go easy.

“You knew that Poole was blown, so you burnt the Poole passports you had bought for Danny and her mother, but you kept your own because there was no alternative. Then you made travel bookings for the two of them in the name of Poole in order to convince everybody that you still believed in the Poole passports. By everybody, I think I mean Karla’s footpads, don’t I? You doctored the Swiss escapes, one for Danny, one for her mother, took a chance that the numbers wouldn’t be noticed, and you made a different set of arrangements which you didn’t advertise. Arrangements which matured earlier than those you made for the Pooles. How would that be? Such as staying out East, but somewhere else, like Djakarta: somewhere you have friends.”

Even from where he stood, Guillam was too slow. Tarr’s hands were at Smiley’s throat; the chair toppled and Tarr fell with him. From the heap, Guillam selected Tarr’s right arm and flung it into a lock against his back, bringing it very near to breaking as he did so. From nowhere Fawn appeared, took the gun from the pillow, and walked back to Tarr as if to give him a hand. Then Smiley was straightening his suit and Tarr was back on the bed, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief.

Smiley said, “I don’t know where they are. As far as I know, no harm has come to them. You believe that, do you?”

Tarr was staring at him, waiting. His eyes were furious, but over Smiley a kind of calm had settled, and Guillam guessed it was the reassurance he had been hoping for.

“Maybe you should keep a better eye on your own damn woman and leave mine alone,” Tarr whispered, his hand across his mouth. With an exclamation, Guillam sprang forward but Smiley restrained him.

“As long as you don’t try to communicate with them,” Smiley continued, “it’s probably better that I shouldn’t know. Unless you want me to do something about them. Money or protection or comfort of some sort?”

Tarr shook his head. There was blood in his mouth, a lot of it, and Guillam realised Fawn must have hit him but he couldn’t work out when.

“It won’t be long now,” Smiley said. “Perhaps a week. Less, if I can manage it. Try not to think too much.”

By the time they left, Tarr was grinning again, so Guillam guessed that the visit, or the insult to Smiley or the smash in the face, had done him good.