Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (26 page)

“Those football-pool coupons,” Smiley said quietly to Fawn as they climbed into the car: “You don’t post them anywhere, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, let’s hope to God he doesn’t have a win,” Smiley remarked in a most unusual fit of jocularity, and there was laughter all round.

The memory plays strange tricks on an exhausted, overladen brain. As Guillam drove, one part of his conscious mind upon the road and another still wretchedly grappling with even more gothic suspicions of Camilla, odd images of this and other long days drifted freely through his memory. Days of plain terror in Morocco as one by one his agent lines went dead on him, and every footfall on the stair had him scurrying to the window to check the street; days of idleness in Brixton when he watched that poor world slip by and wondered how long before he joined it. And suddenly the written report was there before him on his desk: duplicated on blue flimsy because it was traded, source unknown, and probably unreliable, and every word of it came back to him in letters a foot high:

According to a recently released prisoner from Lubianka, Moscow Centre held a secret execution in the punishment block in July. The victims were three of its own functionaries. One was a woman. All three were shot in the back of the neck.

“It was stamped ‘internal,’ ” Guillam said dully. They had parked in a layby beside a roadhouse hung with fairy lights. “Somebody from London Station had scribbled on it: ‘Can anyone identify the bodies?’ ”

By the coloured glow of the lights, Guillam watched Smiley’s face pucker in disgust.

“Yes,” he agreed at last. “Yes, well now, the woman was Irina, wasn’t she? Then there was Ivlov and then there was Boris, her husband, I suppose.” His voice remained extremely matter-of-fact. “Tarr mustn’t know,” he continued, as if shaking off lassitude. “It is vital that he should have no wind of this. God knows what he would do, or not do, if he knew that Irina was dead.” For some moments neither moved; perhaps for their different reasons neither had the strength just then, or the heart.

“I ought to telephone,” said Smiley, but he made no attempt to leave the car.

“George?”

“I have a phone call to make,” Smiley muttered. “Lacon.”

“Then make it.”

Reaching across him, Guillam pushed open the door. Smiley clambered, walked a distance over the tarmac, then seemed to change his mind and came back.

“Come and eat something,” he said through the window, in the same preoccupied tone. “I don’t think even Toby’s people would follow us in here.”

It was once a restaurant, now a transport café with trappings of old grandeur. The menu was bound in red leather and stained with grease. The boy who brought it was half asleep.

“I hear the
coq au vin
is always reliable,” said Smiley, with a poor effort at humour as he returned from the telephone booth in the corner. And in a quieter voice, that fell short and echoed nowhere: “Tell me, how much do you know about Karla?”

“About as much as I know about Witchcraft and Source Merlin, and whatever else it said on the paper I signed for Porteous.”

“Ah, well, now, that’s a very good answer, as it happens. You meant it as a rebuke, I expect, but as it happens, the analogy was most apt.” The boy reappeared, swinging a bottle of Burgundy like an Indian club. “Would you please let it breathe a little?”

The boy stared at Smiley as if he were mad.

“Open it and leave it on the table,” said Guillam curtly.

It was not the whole story Smiley told. Afterwards Guillam did notice several gaps. But it was enough to lift his spirits from the doldrums where they had strayed.

23

“I
t is the business of agent runners to turn themselves into
I
legends,” Smiley began, rather as if he were delivering a trainee lecture at the Nursery. “They do this first to impress their agents. Later they try it out on their colleagues and, in my personal experience, make rare asses of themselves in consequence. A few go so far as to try it on themselves. Those are the charlatans and they must be got rid of quickly, there’s no other way.”

Yet legends were made and Karla was one of them. Even his age was a mystery. Most likely Karla was not his real name. Decades of his life were not accounted for, and probably never would be, since the people he worked with had a way of dying off or keeping their mouths shut.

“There’s a story that his father was in the Okhrana and later reappeared in the Cheka. I don’t think it’s true but it may be. There’s another that he worked as a kitchen boy on an armoured train against Japanese Occupation troops in the East. He is said to have learnt his tradecraft from Berg—to have been his ewe lamb, in fact—which is a bit like being taught music by . . . oh, name a great composer. So far as I am concerned, his career began in Spain in 1936, because that at least is documented. He posed as a White Russian journalist in the Franco cause and recruited a stable of German agents. It was a most intricate operation, and for a young man remarkable. He popped up next in the Soviet counter-offensive against Smolensk in the autumn of 1941 as an intelligence officer under Konev. He had the job of running networks of partisans behind the German lines. Along the way he discovered that his radio operator had been turned round and was transmitting radio messages to the enemy. He turned him back and from then on played a radio game which had them going in all directions.”

That was another part of the legend, said Smiley: at Yelnya, thanks to Karla, the Germans shelled their own forward line.

“And between these two sightings,” he continued, “in 1936 and 1941, Karla visited Britain; we think he was here six months. But even today we don’t know—that’s to say,
I
don’t know—under what name or cover. Which isn’t to say Gerald doesn’t. But Gerald isn’t likely to tell us, at least not on purpose.”

Smiley had never talked to Guillam this way. He was not given to confidences or long lectures; Guillam knew him as a shy man, for all his vanities, and one who expected very little of communication.

“In ’48-odd, having served his country loyally, Karla did a spell in prison and later in Siberia. There was nothing personal about it. He simply happened to be in one of those sections of Red army intelligence which, in some purge or other, ceased to exist.”

And certainly, Smiley went on, after his post-Stalin reinstatement, he went to America; because when the Indian authorities in the summer of ’55 arrested him in Delhi on vague immigration charges, he had just flown in from California. Circus gossip later linked him with the big treason scandals in Britain and the States.

Smiley knew better: “Karla was in disgrace again. Moscow was out for his blood, and we thought we might persuade him to defect. That was why I flew to Delhi. To have a chat with him.”

There was a pause while the weary boy slouched over and enquired whether everything was to their satisfaction. Smiley, with great solicitude, assured him that it was.

“The story of my meeting with Karla,” he resumed, “belonged very much to the mood of the period. In the mid-fifties, Moscow Centre was in pieces on the floor. Senior officers were being shot or purged wholesale and its lower ranks were seized with a collective paranoia. As a first result, there was a crop of defections among Centre officers stationed overseas. All over the place—Singapore, Nairobi, Stockholm, Canberra, Washington, I don’t know where—we got this same steady trickle from the residencies: not just the big fish, but the legmen, drivers, cypher clerks, typists. Somehow we had to respond—I don’t think it’s ever realised how much the industry stimulates its own inflation—and in no time I became a kind of commercial traveller, flying off one day to a capital city, the next to a dingy border outpost—once even to a ship at sea—to sign up defecting Russians. To seed, to stream, to fix the terms, to attend to debriefing and eventual disposal.”

Guillam was watching him all the while, but even in that cruel neon glow Smiley’s expression revealed nothing but a slightly anxious concentration.

“We evolved, you might say, three kinds of contract for those whose stories held together. If the client’s access wasn’t interesting, we might trade him to another country and forget him. Buy him for stock, as you would say, much as the scalp-hunters do today. Or we might play him back into Russia—that’s assuming his defection had not already been noticed there. Or, if he was lucky, we took him; cleaned him of whatever he knew and resettled him in the West. London decided, usually. Not me. But remember this. At that time Karla—or Gerstmann, as he called himself—was just another client. I’ve told his story back to front; I didn’t want to be coy with you, but you have to bear in mind now, through anything that happened between us—or didn’t happen, which is more to the point—that all I or anyone in the Circus knew when I flew to Delhi was that a man calling himself Gerstmann had been setting up a radio link between Rudnev, head of illegal networks at Moscow Centre, and a Centre-run apparatus in California that was lying fallow for want of a means of communication. That’s all. Gerstmann had smuggled a transmitter across the Canadian border and lain up for three weeks in San Francisco breaking in the new operator. That was the assumption, and there was a batch of test transmissions to back it up.”

For these test transmissions between Moscow and California, Smiley explained, a book code was used: “Then, one day, Moscow signalled a straight order—”

“Still on the book code?”

“Precisely. That is the point. Owing to a temporary inattention on the part of Rudnev’s cryptographers, we were ahead of the game. The wranglers broke the code and that’s how we got our information. Gerstmann was to leave San Francisco at once and head for Delhi for a rendezvous with the Tass correspondent, a talent-spotter who had stumbled on a hot Chinese lead and needed immediate direction. Why they dragged him all the way from San Francisco to Delhi, why it had to be Karla and no one else—well, that’s a story for another day. The only material point is that when Gerstmann kept the rendezvous in Delhi, the Tass man handed him an aeroplane ticket and told him to go straight home to Moscow. No questions. The order came from Rudnev personally. It was signed with Rudnev’s workname and it was brusque even by Russian standards.”

Whereupon the Tass man fled, leaving Gerstmann standing on the pavement with a lot of questions and twenty-eight hours until take-off.

“He hadn’t been standing there long when the Indian authorities arrested him at our request and carted him off to Delhi jail. As far as I remember, we had promised the Indians a piece of the product. I
think
that was the deal,” he remarked and, like someone suddenly shocked by the faultiness of his own memory, fell silent and looked distractedly down the steamy room. “Or perhaps we said they could have him when we’d done with him. Dear, oh dear.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Guillam said.

“For once in Karla’s life, as I say, the Circus was ahead of him,” Smiley resumed, having taken a sip of wine and made a face. “He couldn’t know it but the San Francisco network which he had just serviced had been rolled up hide and hair the day he left for Delhi. As soon as Control had the story from the wranglers, he traded it to the Americans on the understanding that they missed Gerstmann but hit the rest of the Rudnev network in California. Gerstmann flew on to Delhi unaware, and he was still unaware when I arrived at Delhi jail to sell him a piece of insurance, as Control called it. His choice was very simple. There could not be the slightest doubt, on present form, that Gerstmann’s head was on the block in Moscow, where to save his own neck Rudnev was busy denouncing him for blowing the San Francisco network. The affair had made a great splash in the States, and Moscow was very angry at the publicity. I had with me the American press photographs of the arrest, even of the radio set Karla had imported and the signal plans he had cached before he left. You know how prickly we all become when things get into the papers.”

Guillam did; and with a jolt remembered the Testify file, which he had left with Mendel earlier that evening.

“To sum it up, Karla was the proverbial cold-war orphan. He had left home to do a job abroad. The job had blown up in his face, but he couldn’t go back: home was more hostile than abroad. We had no powers of permanent arrest, so it was up to Karla to ask us for protection. I don’t think I had ever come across a clearer case for defection. I had only to convince him of the arrest of the San Francisco network—wave the press photographs and cuttings from my briefcase at him—talk to him a little about the unfriendly conspiracies of Brother Rudnev in Moscow, and cable the somewhat overworked inquisitors in Sarratt, and with any luck I’d make London by the weekend. I rather think I had tickets for Sadler’s Wells. It was Ann’s great year for ballet.”

Yes, Guillam had heard about that, too: a twenty-year-old Welsh Apollo, the season’s wonder boy. They had been burning up London for months.

The heat in the jail was appalling, Smiley continued. The cell had an iron table at the centre and iron cattle rings let into the wall. “They brought him manacled, which seemed silly because he was so slight. I asked them to free his hands and when they did, he put them on the table in front of him and watched the blood come back. It must have been painful but he didn’t comment on it. He’d been there a week and he was wearing a calico tunic. Red. I forget what red meant. Some piece of prison ethic.” Taking a sip of wine, he again pulled a face, then slowly corrected the gesture as the memories once more bore in upon him.

“Well, at first sight, he made little impression on me. I would have been hard put to it to recognise in the little fellow before me the master of cunning we have heard about in Irina’s diary, poor woman. I suppose it’s also true that my nerve-ends had been a good deal blunted by so many similar encounters in the last few months, by travel, and well by—well, by things at home.”

In all the time Guillam had known him, it was the nearest Smiley had ever come to acknowledging Ann’s infidelities.