Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (41 page)

“Well, standard I wouldn’t know,” said Esterhase, with a very Hungarian movement of the hand, a spreading of the palm and a tilting either way.

“So who is Polyakov’s agent?”

The question, Guillam saw, mattered very much to Smiley: he had played the whole long hand in order to arrive at it. As Guillam waited, his eyes now on Esterhase, who was by no means so confident any more, now on Smiley’s mandarin face, he realised that he, too, was beginning to understand the shape of Karla’s last clever knot, as Smiley had called it—and of his own gruelling interview with Alleline.

“What I’m asking you is very simple,” Smiley insisted. “Notionally, who is Polyakov’s agent inside the Circus? Good heavens, Toby, don’t be obtuse. If Polyakov’s cover for meeting you people is that he is spying on the Circus, then he must have a Circus spy, mustn’t he? So who is he? He can’t come back to the Embassy after a meeting with you people, loaded with reels of Circus chicken-feed, and say, ‘I got this from the boys.’ There has to be a story—and a good one, at that: a whole history of courtship, recruitment, clandestine meetings, money, and motive. Doesn’t there? Heavens, this isn’t just Polyakov’s cover story: it’s his life-line. It’s got to be thorough. It’s got to be convincing; I’d say it was a very big issue in the game. So who is he?” Smiley enquired pleasantly. “You? Toby Esterhase masquerades as a Circus traitor in order to keep Polyakov in business? My hat, Toby, that’s worth a whole handful of medals.”

They waited while Toby thought.

“You’re on a damn long road, George,” Toby said at last. “What happens you don’t reach the other end?”

“Even with Lacon behind me?”

“You bring Lacon here. Percy, too; Bill. Why you come to the little guy? Go to the big ones, pick on them.”

“I thought you
were
a big guy these days. You’d be a good choice for the part, Toby. Hungarian ancestry, resentment about promotion, reasonable access but not too much . . . quick-witted, likes money . . . With you as his agent, Polyakov would have a cover story that really sits up and works. The big three give you the chicken-feed, you hand it to Polyakov, Centre thinks Toby is all theirs, everyone’s served, everyone’s content. The only problem arises when it transpires that you’ve been handing Polyakov the crown jewels and getting Russian chicken-feed in return. If that
should
turn out to be the case, you’re going to need pretty good friends. Like us. That’s how my thesis runs—just to complete it. That Gerald is a Russian mole, run by Karla. And he’s pulled the Circus inside out.”

Esterhase looked slightly ill. “George, listen. If you’re wrong, I don’t want to be wrong too, get me?”

“But if he’s right, you want to be right,” Guillam suggested, in a rare interruption. “And the sooner you’re right, the happier you’ll be.”

“Sure,” said Toby, quite unaware of any irony. “Sure. I mean George got a nice idea, but Jesus, there’s two sides to everyone, George, agents specially, and maybe it’s you who got the wrong one. Listen: who ever called Witchcraft chicken-feed? No one. Never. It’s the best. You get one guy with a big mouth starts shouting the dirt, and you dug up half London already. Get me? Look, I do what they tell me. Okay? They say act the stooge for Polyakov, I act him. Pass him this film, I pass it. I’m in a very dangerous situation,” he explained. “For me, very dangerous indeed.”

“I’m sorry about that,” said Smiley at the window, where through a chink in the curtain he was once more studying the square. “Must be worrying for you.”

“Extremely,” Toby agreed. “I get ulcers, can’t eat. Very bad predicament.”

For a moment, to Guillam’s fury, they were all three joined in a sympathetic silence over Toby Esterhase’s bad predicament.

“Toby, you wouldn’t be lying about those baby-sitters, would you?” Smiley enquired, still from the window.

“George, I cross my heart, I swear you.”

“What would you use for a job like this? Cars?”

“Pavement artists. Put a bus back by the air terminal, walk them through, turn ’em over.”

“How many?”

“Eight, ten. This time of year—six, maybe. We get a lot ill. Christmas,” he said morosely.

“And one man alone?”

“Never. You crazy. One man! You think I run a toffee shop these days?”

Leaving the window, Smiley sat down again.

“Listen, George, that’s a terrible idea you got there, you know that? I’m a patriotic fellow. Jesus,” Toby repeated.

“What is Polyakov’s job in the London residency?” Smiley asked.

“Polly works solo.”

“Running his master spy inside the Circus?”

“Sure. They take him off regular work, give him a free hand so’s he can handle Toby, master spy. We work it all out; hours on end I sit with him. ‘Listen,’ I say. ‘Bill is suspecting me, my wife is suspecting me, my kid got measles, and I can’t pay the doctor.’ All the crap that agents give you, I give it to Polly so’s he can pass it home for real.”

“And who’s Merlin?”

Esterhase shook his head.

“But at least you’ve heard he’s based in Moscow,” Smiley said. “And a member of the Soviet intelligence establishment, whatever else he isn’t?”

“That much they tell me,” Esterhase agreed.

“Which is how Polyakov can communicate with him. In the Circus’s interest, of course. Secretly, without his own people becoming suspicious?”

“Sure.” Toby resumed his lament, but Smiley seemed to be listening to sounds that were not in the room.

“And Tinker, Tailor?”

“I don’t know what the hell it is. I do what Percy tells me.”

“And Percy told you to square Jim Prideaux?”

“Sure. Maybe it was Bill. Or Roy, maybe. Listen, it was Roy. I got to eat, George, understand? I don’t cut my throat two ways, follow me?”

“It is the perfect fix; you see that, don’t you, Toby, really?” Smiley remarked in a quiet, rather distant way. “Assuming it
is
a fix. It makes everyone wrong who’s right: Connie Sachs, Jerry Westerby . . . Jim Prideaux . . . even Control. Silences the doubters before they’ve even spoken out . . . The permutations are infinite, once you’ve brought off the basic lie. Moscow Centre must be allowed to think she has an important Circus source; Whitehall on no account must get wind of the same notion. Take it to its logical conclusion and Gerald would have us strangling our own children in their beds. It would be beautiful in another context,” he remarked almost dreamily. “Poor Toby; yes, I do see. What a time you must have been having, running between them all.”

Toby had his next speech ready: “Naturally, if there is anything I can do of a practical nature, you know me, George, I am always pleased to help—no trouble. My boys are pretty well trained; you want to borrow them, maybe we can work a deal. Naturally, I have to speak to Lacon first. All I want, I want to get this thing cleared up. For the sake of the Circus, you know. That’s all I want. The good of the firm. I’m a modest man; I don’t want anything for myself—okay?”

“Where’s this safe house you keep exclusively for Polyakov?”

“Five Lock Gardens, Camden Town.”

“With a caretaker?”

“Mrs. McCraig.”

“Lately a listener?”

“Sure.”

“Is there built-in audio?”

“What do you think?”

“So Millie McCraig keeps house and mans the recording instruments.”

She did, said Toby, ducking his head with great alertness.

“In a minute, I want you to telephone her and tell her I’m staying the night and I’ll want to use the equipment. Tell her I’ve been called in on a special job and she’s to do whatever I ask. I’ll be round about nine. What’s the procedure for contacting Polyakov if you want a crash meeting?”

“My boys have a room on Haverstock Hill. Polly drives past the window each morning on the way to the Embassy, each night going home. If they put up a yellow poster protesting against traffic, that’s the signal.”

“And at night? At weekends?”

“Wrong-number phone call. But nobody likes that.”

“Has it ever been used?”

“I don’t know.”

“You mean you don’t listen to his phone?”

No answer.

“I want you to take the weekend off. Would that raise eyebrows at the Circus?” Enthusiastically, Esterhase shook his head. “I’m sure you’d prefer to be out of it, anyway, wouldn’t you?” Esterhase nodded. “Say you’re having girl trouble or whatever sort of trouble you’re in these days. You’ll be spending the night here, possibly two. Fawn will look after you; there’s food in the kitchen. What about your wife?”

While Guillam and Smiley looked on, Esterhase dialled the Circus and asked for Phil Porteous. He said his lines perfectly: a little self-pity, a little conspiracy, a little joke. Some girl who was passionate about him up north, Phil, and threatening wild things if he didn’t go and hold her hand.

“Don’t tell me, I know it happens to you every day, Phil. Hey, how’s that gorgeous new secretary of yours? And listen, Phil, if Mara phones from home, tell her Toby’s on a big job, okay? Blowing up the Kremlin, back on Monday. Make it nice and heavy, huh? Cheers, Phil.”

He rang off and dialled a number in north London. “Mrs. M., hullo, this is your favourite boyfriend—recognise the voice? Good. Listen, I’m sending you a visitor tonight—an old, old friend, you’ll be surprised. She hates me,” he explained to them, his hand over the mouthpiece. “He wants to check the wiring,” he went on. “Look it all over, make sure it’s working okay, no bad leaks—all right?”

“If he’s any trouble,” Guillam said to Fawn with real venom as they left, “bind him hand and foot.”

In the stairwell, Smiley lightly touched his arm. “Peter, I want you to watch my back. Will you do that for me? Give me a couple of minutes, then pick me up on the corner of Marloes Road, heading north. Stick to the west pavement.”

Guillam waited, then stepped into the street. A thin drizzle lay on the air, which had an eerie warmness like a thaw. Where lights shone, the moisture shifted in fine clouds, but in shadow he neither saw nor felt it: simply, a mist blurred his vision, making him half close his eyes. He completed one round of the gardens, then entered a pretty mews well south of the pick-up point. Reaching Marloes Road, he crossed to the west pavement, bought an evening paper, and began walking at a leisurely rate past villas set in deep gardens. He was counting off pedestrians, cyclists, cars, while out ahead of him, steadily plodding the far pavement, he picked out George Smiley, the very prototype of the homegoing Londoner. “Is it a team?” Guillam had asked. Smiley could not be specific. “Short of Abingdon Villas, I’ll cross over,” he said. “Look for a solo. But look!”

As Guillam watched Smiley pulled up abruptly, as if he had just remembered something, stepped perilously into the road, and scuttled between the angry traffic to disappear at once through the doors of a liquor store. As he did so, Guillam saw, or thought he saw, a tall crooked figure in a dark coat step out after him, but at that moment a bus drew up, screening both Smiley and his pursuer; and when it pulled away, it must have taken his pursuer with it, for the only survivor on that strip of pavement was an older man in a black plastic raincoat and cloth cap lolling at the bus stop while he read his evening paper; and when Smiley emerged from the store with his brown bag, the man did not so much as lift his head from the sporting pages. For a short while longer, Guillam trailed Smiley through the smarter reaches of Victorian Kensington as he slipped from one quiet square to another, sauntered into a mews and out again by the same route. Only once, when Guillam forgot Smiley and out of instinct turned upon his own tracks, did he have a suspicion of a third figure walking with them: a fanged shadow thrown against the broadloom brickwork of an empty street, but when he started forward, it was gone.

The night had its own madness after that; events ran too quickly for him to fasten on them singly. Not till days afterwards did he realise that the figure, or the shadow of it, had struck a chord of familiarity in his memory. Even then, for some time, he could not place it. Then one early morning, waking abruptly, he had it clear in his mind: a barking, military voice, a gentleness of manner heavily concealed, a squash racket jammed behind the safe of his room in Brixton, which brought tears to the eyes of his unemotional secretary.

35

P
robably the only thing which Steve Mackelvore did wrong that same evening, in terms of classic tradecraft, was blame himself for leaving the passenger door of his car unlocked. Climbing in from the driver’s side, he put it down to his own negligence that the other lock was up. Survival, as Jim Prideaux liked to recall, is an infinite capacity for suspicion. By that purist standard, Mackelvore should have suspected that in the middle of a particularly vile rush-hour, on a particularly vile evening, in one of those blaring side streets that feed into the lower end of the Elysées, Ricki Tarr would unlock the passenger door and hold him up at gunpoint. But life in the Paris residency these days did little to keep a man’s wits sharp, and most of Mackelvore’s working day had been taken up with filing his weekly expenses and completing his weekly returns of staff for the housekeepers. Only lunch, a longish affair with an insincere anglophile in the French security labyrinth, had broken the monotony of that Friday.

His car, parked under a lime tree that was dying of exhaust fumes, had an extraterritorial registration and “C.C.” plastered on the back, for the residency cover was consular, though no one took it seriously. Mackelvore was a Circus elder, a squat, white-haired Yorkshireman with a long record of consular appointments which in the eyes of the world had brought him no advancement. Paris was the last of them. He did not care particularly for Paris, and he knew from an operational lifetime in the Far East that the French were not for him. But as a prelude to retirement it could not be bettered. The allowances were good, the billet was comfortable, and the most that had been asked of him in the ten months he had been here was to welfare the occasional agent in transit, put up a chalk-mark here and there, play postman to some ploy by London Station, and show a time to the visiting firemen.