Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (36 page)

After more circling, said Jim, Control announced that Testify was a Czech general of artillery. His name was Stevcek; he was known as a pro-Soviet hawk in the Prague defence hierarchy, whatever that was worth; he had worked in Moscow on liaison and was one of the very few Czechs the Russians trusted. Stevcek had conveyed to Control, through an intermediary whom Control had personally interviewed in Austria, his desire to talk to a ranking officer of the Circus on matters of mutual interest. The emissary must be a Czech speaker, somebody able to take decisions. On Friday, October 20th, Stevcek would be inspecting the weapon research station at Tisnov, near Brno, about a hundred miles north of the Austrian border. From there he would be visiting a hunting-lodge for the weekend, alone. It was a place high up in the forests not far from Racice. He would be willing to receive an emissary there on the evening of Saturday, the twenty-first. He would also supply an escort to and from Brno.

Smiley asked, “Did Control have any suggestions about Stevcek’s motive?”

“A girlfriend,” Jim said. “Student he was going with, having a last spring, Control said; twenty years’ age difference between them. She was shot during the uprising of summer ’68. Till then, Stevcek had managed to bury his anti-Russian feelings in favour of his career. The girl’s death put an end to all that: he was out for their blood. For four years he’d lain low acting friendly and salting away information that would really hurt them. Soon as we gave him assurances and fixed the trade routes, he was ready to sell.”

“Had Control checked any of this?”

“What he could. Stevcek was well enough documented. Hungry desk general with a long list of staff appointments. Technocrat. When he wasn’t on courses, he was sharpening his teeth abroad: Warsaw, Moscow, Peking for a year, spell of military attaché in Africa, Moscow again. Young for his rank.”

“Did Control tell you what you were to expect in the way of information?”

“Defence material. Rocketry. Ballistics.”

“Anything else?” said Smiley, passing the bottle.

“Bit of politics.”

“Anything else?”

Not for the first time, Smiley had the distinct sense of stumbling not on Jim’s ignorance but on the relic of a willed determination not to remember. In the dark, Jim Prideaux’s breathing became suddenly deep and greedy. He had lifted his hands to the top of the wheel and was resting his chin on them, peering blankly at the frosted windscreen.

“How long were they in the bag before being shot?” Jim demanded to know.

“I’m afraid, a lot longer than you were,” Smiley confessed.

“Holy God,” said Jim. With a handkerchief taken from his sleeve, he wiped away the perspiration and whatever else was glistening on his face.

“The intelligence Control was hoping to get out of Stevcek,” Smiley prompted, ever so softly.

“That’s what they asked me at the interrogation.”

“At Sarratt?”

Jim shook his head. “Over there.” He nodded his untidy head towards the hills. “They knew it was Control’s operation from the start. There was nothing I could say to persuade them it was mine. They laughed.”

Once again Smiley waited patiently till Jim was ready to go on.

“Stevcek,” said Jim. “Control had this bee in his bonnet: Stevcek would provide the answer, Stevcek would provide the key. ‘What key?’ I asked. ‘What key?’ Had his bag, that old brown music case. Pulled out charts, annoted all in his own handwriting. Charts in coloured inks, crayons. ‘Your visual aid,’ he says. ‘This is the fellow you’ll be meeting.’ Stevcek’s career plotted year by year: took me right through it. Military academies, medals, wives. ‘He’s fond of horses,’ he says. ‘You used to ride yourself, Jim. Something else in common—remember it.’ I thought, That’ll be fun, sitting in Czecho with the dogs after me, talking about breaking thoroughbred mares.” He laughed a little strangely, so Smiley laughed, too.

“The appointments in red were for Stevcek’s Soviet liaison work. Green were his intelligence work. Stevcek had had a finger in everything. Fourth man in Czech army intelligence, chief boffin on weaponry, secretary to the national internal security committee, military counsellor of some sort to the Praesidium, Anglo-American desk in the Czech military intelligence set-up. Then Control comes to this patch in the mid-sixties, Stevcek’s second spell in Moscow, and it’s marked green and red fifty-fifty. Ostensibly, Stevcek was attached to the Warsaw Pact Liaison staff as a colonel general, says Control, but that was just cover. ‘He’d nothing to do with the Warsaw Pact Liaison staff. His real job was in Moscow Centre’s England section. He operated under the workname of Minin,’ he says. ‘His job was dovetailing Czech efforts with Centre’s. This is the treasure,’ Control says. ‘What Stevcek really wants to sell us is the name of Moscow Centre’s mole inside the Circus.’ ”

It might be only one word, Smiley thought, remembering Max, and felt again that sudden wave of apprehension. In the end, he knew, that was all it would be: a name for the mole Gerald, a scream in the dark.

“ ‘There’s a rotten apple, Jim,’ Control said, ‘and he’s infecting all the others.’ ” Jim was going straight on. His voice had stiffened, his manner also. “Kept talking about elimination, how he’d backtracked and researched and was nearly there. There were five possibilities, he said. Don’t ask me how he dug them up. ‘It’s one of the top five,’ he says. ‘Five fingers to a hand.’ He gave me a drink and we sat there like a pair of schoolboys making up a code, me and Control. We used Tinker, Tailor. We sat there in the flat putting it together, drinking that cheap Cyprus sherry he always gave. If I couldn’t get out, if there was any fumble after I’d met Stevcek, if I had to go underground, I must get the one word to him, even if I had to go to Prague and chalk it on the Embassy door or ring the Prague resident and yell it at him down the phone. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. Alleline was Tinker, Haydon was Tailor, Bland was Soldier, and Toby Esterhase was Poorman. We dropped Sailor because it rhymed with Tailor. You were Beggarman,” Jim said.

“Was I, now? And how did you take to it, Jim, to Control’s theory? How did the idea strike you, over-all?”

“Damn silly. Poppycock.”

“Why?”

“Just damn silly,” he repeated in a tone of military stubbornness. “Think of any one of you—mole—
mad!”

“But did you believe it?”

“No! Lord alive, man, why do you—”

“Why not? Rationally we always accepted that sooner or later it would happen. We always warned one another: be on your guard. We’ve turned up enough members of other outfits: Russians, Poles, Czechs, French. Even the odd American. What’s so special about the British, all of a sudden?”

Sensing Jim’s antagonism, Smiley opened his door and let the cold air pour in.

“How about a stroll?” he said. “No point in being cooped up when we can walk around.”

With movement, as Smiley had anticipated, Jim found a new fluency of speech.

They were on the western rim of the plateau, with only a few trees standing and several lying felled. A frosted bench was offered, but they ignored it. There was no wind, the stars were very clear, and as Jim took up his story they went on walking side by side, Jim adjusting always to Smiley’s pace, now away from the car, now back again. Occasionally they drew up, shoulder to shoulder, facing down the valley.

First Jim described his recruitment of Max and the manoeuvres he went through in order to disguise his mission from the rest of the Circus. He let it leak that he had a tentative lead to a high-stepping Soviet cypher clerk in Stockholm, and booked himself to Copenhagen in his old workname Ellis. Instead, he flew to Paris, switched to his Hajek papers, and landed by scheduled flight at Prague airport at ten on Saturday morning. He went through the barriers like a song, confirmed the time of his train at the terminus, then took a walk because he had a couple of hours to kill and thought he might watch his back a little before he left for Brno. That autumn there had been freak bad weather. There was snow on the ground and more falling.

In Czecho, said Jim, surveillance was not usually a problem. The security services knew next to nothing about street-watching, probably because no administration in living memory had ever had to feel shy about it. The tendency, said Jim, was still to throw cars and pavement artists around like Al Capone, and that was what Jim was looking for: black Skodas and trios of squat men in trilbies. In the cold, spotting these things is marginally harder because the traffic is slow, the people walk faster, and everyone is muffled to the nose. All the same, till he reached Masaryk Station—or Central, as they’re pleased to call it these days—he had no worries. But at Masaryk, said Jim, he got a whisper, more instinct than fact, about two women who’d bought tickets ahead of him.

Here, with the dispassionate ease of a professional, Jim went back over the ground. In a covered shopping arcade beside Wenceslaus Square he had been overtaken by three women, of whom the one in the middle was pushing a pram. The woman nearest the curb carried a red plastic handbag and the woman on the inside was walking a dog on a lead. Ten minutes later two other women came towards him, arm in arm, both in a hurry, and it crossed his mind that if Toby Esterhase had had the running of the job, an arrangement like this would be his handwriting; quick profile changes from the pram, backup cars standing off with short-wave radio or bleep, with a second team lying back in case the forward party overran. At Masaryk, looking at the two women ahead of him in the ticket queue, Jim was faced with the knowledge that it was happening now. There is one garment that a watcher has neither time nor inclination to change, least of all in sub-Arctic weather, and that is his shoes. Of the two pairs offered for his inspection in the ticket queue, Jim recognised one: furlined plastic, black, with zips on the outside and soles of a thick brown composition that sang slightly in the snow. He had seen them once already that morning, in the Sterba passage, worn with different top clothes by the woman who had pushed past him with the pram. From then on, Jim didn’t suspect. He knew, just as Smiley would have known.

At the station bookstall, Jim bought himself a
Rude Pravo
and boarded the Brno train. If they had wanted to arrest him, they would have done so by now. They must be after the branch lines: they were following Jim in order to house his contacts. There was no point in looking for reasons, but Jim guessed that the Hajek identity was blown and they’d primed the trap the moment he booked himself on the plane. As long as they didn’t know he had flushed them, he still had the edge, said Jim; and for a moment Smiley was back in occupied Germany, in his own time as a field agent, living with terror in his mouth, naked to every stranger’s glance.

He was supposed to catch the thirteen-eight arriving Brno sixteen-twenty-seven. It was cancelled, so he took some wonderful stopping train, a special for the football match, which called at every other lamp-post, and each time Jim reckoned he could pick out the hoods. The quality was variable. At Chocen, a one-horse place if ever he saw one, he got out and bought himself a sausage, and there were no fewer than five, all men, spread down the tiny platform with their hands in their pockets, pretending to chat to one another and making damn fools of themselves.

“If there’s one thing that distinguishes a good watcher from a bad one,” said Jim, “it’s the gentle art of doing damn all convincingly.”

At Svitavy two men and a woman entered his carriage and talked about the big match. After a while Jim joined the conversation; he had been reading up the form in his newspaper. It was a club replay, and everyone was going crazy about it. By Brno, nothing more had happened, so he got out and sauntered through shops and crowded areas where they had to stay close for fear of losing him.

He wanted to lull them, demonstrate to them that he suspected nothing. He knew now that he was the target of what Toby would call a grand-slam operation. On foot they were working teams of seven. The cars changed so often he couldn’t count them. The over-all direction came from a scruffy green van driven by a thug. The van had a loop aerial and a chalk star scrawled high on the back where no child could reach. The cars, where he picked them out, were declared to one another by a woman’s handbag on the gloveboard and a passenger sun visor turned down. He guessed there were other signs but those two were good enough for him. He knew from what Toby had told him that jobs like this could cost a hundred people and were unwieldy if the quarry bolted. Toby hated them for that reason.

There is one store in Brno main square that sells everything, said Jim. Shopping in Czecho is usually a bore because there are so few retail outlets for each state industry, but this place was new and quite impressive. He bought children’s toys, a scarf, some cigarettes, and tried on shoes. He guessed his watchers were still waiting for his clandestine contact. He stole a fur hat and a white plastic raincoat and a carrier bag to put them in. He loitered at the men’s department long enough to confirm that two women who formed the forward pair were still behind him but reluctant to come too close. He guessed they had signalled for men to take over, and were waiting. In the men’s lavatory he moved very fast. He pulled the white raincoat over his overcoat, stuffed the carrier bag into the pocket, and put on the fur hat. He abandoned his remaining parcels, then ran like a madman down the emergency staircase, smashed open a fire door, pelted down an alley, strolled up another, which was one-way, stuffed the white raincoat into the carrier bag, sauntered into another store, which was just closing, and there bought a black raincoat to replace the white one. Using the departing shoppers for cover, he squeezed into a crowded tram, stayed aboard till the last stop but one, walked for an hour, and made the fallback with Max to the minute.

Here he described his dialogue with Max and said they nearly had a standing fight.

Smiley asked, “It never crossed your mind to drop the job?”

“No. It did not,” Jim snapped, his voice rising in a threat.

“Although, right from the start, you thought the idea was poppycock?” There was nothing but deference in Smiley’s tone. No edge, no wish to score: only a wish to have the truth, clear under the night sky. “You just kept marching. You’d seen what was on your back, you thought the mission absurd, but you still went on, deeper and deeper into the jungle.”