Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (46 page)

“How much of the material was genuine?” Smiley asked.

Obviously the standard varied according to what one wanted to achieve, said Haydon. In theory, fabrication was very easy: Haydon had only to advise Karla of Whitehall’s areas of ignorance and the fabricators would write for them. Once or twice, for the hell of it, said Haydon, he had written the odd report himself. It was an amusing exercise to receive, evaluate, and distribute one’s own work. The advantages of Witchcraft in terms of tradecraft were, of course, inestimable. It placed Haydon virtually out of Control’s reach, and gave him a cast-iron cover story for meeting Polly whenever he wished. Often months would pass without their meeting at all. Haydon would photograph Circus documents in the seclusion of his room—under cover of preparing Polly’s chicken-feed—hand it over to Esterhase with a lot of other rubbish, and let him cart it down to the safe house in Lock Gardens.

“It was a classic,” Haydon said simply. “Percy made the running, I slipstreamed behind him, Roy and Toby did the legwork.”

Here Smiley asked politely whether Karla had ever thought of having Haydon actually take over the Circus himself: why bother with a stalking-horse at all? Haydon stalled and it occurred to Smiley that Karla, like Control, might well have considered Haydon better cast as a subordinate.

Operation Testify, said Haydon, was rather a desperate throw. Haydon was certain that Control was getting very warm indeed. An analysis of the files he was drawing produced an uncomfortably complete inventory of the operations that Haydon had blown, or otherwise caused to abort. He had also succeeded in narrowing the field to officers of a certain age and rank . . .

“Was Stevcek’s original offer genuine, by the way?” Smiley asked.

“Good Lord, no,” said Haydon, actually shocked. “It was a fix from the start. Stevcek existed, of course. He was a distinguished Czech general. But he never made an offer to anyone.”

Here Smiley sensed Haydon falter. For the first time, he actually seemed uneasy about the morality of his behaviour. His manner became noticeably defensive.

“Obviously, we needed to be certain Control would rise, and how he would rise . . . and who he would send. We couldn’t have him picking some half-arsed little pavement artist; it had to be a big gun to make the story stick. We knew he’d only settle for someone outside the mainstream and someone who wasn’t Witchcraft-cleared. If we made it a Czech, he’d have to choose a Czech speaker, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“We wanted old Circus: someone who could bring down the temple a bit.”

“Yes,” said Smiley, remembering that heaving, sweating figure on the hilltop. “Yes, I see the logic of that.”

“Well, damn it, I got him back,” Haydon snapped.

“Yes, that was good of you. Tell me, did Jim come to see you before he left on that Testify mission?”

“Yes, he did, as a matter of fact.”

“To say what?”

For a long, long while Haydon hesitated, then did not answer. But the answer was written there, all the same: in the sudden emptying of his eyes, in the shadow of guilt that crossed his face. He came to warn you, Smiley thought; because he loved you. To warn you; just as he came to tell me that Control was mad, but couldn’t find me because I was in Berlin. Jim was watching your back for you right till the end.

Also, Haydon resumed, it had to be a country with a recent history of counter-revolution: Czecho was honestly the only place.

Smiley appeared not quite to be listening.

“Why did you bring him back?” he asked. “For friendship’s sake? Because he was harmless and you held all the cards?”

It wasn’t just that, Haydon explained. As long as Jim was in a Czech prison (he didn’t say Russian), people would agitate for him and see him as some sort of key. But once he was back, everyone in Whitehall would conspire to keep him quiet; that was the way of it with repatriations.

“I’m surprised Karla didn’t just shoot him. Or did he hold back out of delicacy towards you?”

But Haydon had drifted away again into half-baked political assertions.

Then he began speaking about himself, and already, to Smiley’s eye, he seemed visibly to be shrinking to something quite small and mean. He was touched to hear that Ionesco had recently promised us a play in which the hero kept silent and everyone round him spoke incessantly. When the psychologists and fashionable historians came to write their apologias for him, he hoped they would remember that that was how he saw himself. As an artist he had said all he had to say at the age of seventeen, and one had to do something with one’s later years. He was awfully sorry he couldn’t take some of his friends with him. He hoped Smiley would remember him with affection.

Smiley wanted at that point to tell him that he would not remember him in those terms at all, and a good deal more besides, but there seemed no point and Haydon was having another nosebleed.

“Oh, I’m to ask you to avoid publicity, by the way. Miles Sercombe made quite a thing of it.”

Here Haydon managed a laugh. Having messed up the Circus in private, he said, he had no wish to repeat the process in public.

Before he left, Smiley asked the one question he still cared about.

“I’ll have to break it to Ann. Is there anything particular you want me to pass on to her?”

It required discussion for the implication of Smiley’s question to get through to him. At first, he thought Smiley had said “Jan,” and couldn’t understand why he had not yet called on her.

“Oh,
your
Ann,” he said, as if there were a lot of Ann’s around.

It was Karla’s idea, he explained. Karla had long recognised that Smiley represented the biggest threat to the mole Gerald. “He said you were quite good.”

“Thank you.”

“But you had this one price: Ann. The last illusion of the illusionless man. He reckoned that if I were known to be Ann’s lover around the place you wouldn’t see me very straight when it came to other things.” His eyes, Smiley noticed, had become very fixed. Pewtery, Ann called them. “Not to strain it or anything but, if it was possible, join the queue. Point?”

“Point,” said Smiley.

For instance, on the night of Testify, Karla was adamant that if possible Haydon should be dallying with Ann. As a form of insurance.

“And wasn’t there in fact a small hitch that night?” Smiley asked, remembering Sam Collins and the matter of whether Ellis had been shot. Haydon agreed that there had been. If everything had gone according to plan, the first Czech bulletins should have broken at ten-thirty. Haydon would have had a chance to read his club ticker-tape after Sam Collins had rung Ann, and before he arrived at the Circus to take over. But because Jim had been shot, there was fumble at the Czech end and the bulletin was released after his club had closed.

“Lucky no one followed it up,” he said, helping himself to another of Smiley’s cigarettes. “Which one was I, by the way?” he asked conversationally. “I forget.”

“Tailor. I was Beggarman.”

By then Smiley had had enough, so he slipped out, not bothering to say goodbye. He got into his car and drove for an hour anywhere, till he found himself on a side road to Oxford doing eighty, so he stopped for lunch and headed back for London. He still couldn’t face Bywater Street, so he went to a cinema, dined somewhere, and got home at midnight, slightly drunk, to find both Lacon and Miles Sercombe on the doorstep, and Sercombe’s fatuous Rolls, the black bedpan, all fifty feet of it, shoved up on the curb in everyone’s way.

They drove to Sarratt at a mad speed, and there, in the open night under a clear sky, lit by several hand torches and stared at by several white-faced inmates of the Nursery, sat Bill Haydon on a garden bench facing the moonlit cricket field. He was wearing striped pyjamas under his overcoat; they looked more like prison clothes. His eyes were open and his head was propped unnaturally to one side, like the head of a bird when its neck has been expertly broken.

There was no particular dispute about what had happened. At ten-thirty Haydon had complained to his guards of sleeplessness and nausea: he proposed to take some fresh air. His case being regarded as closed, no one thought to accompany him and he walked out into the darkness alone. One of the guards remembered him making a joke about “examining the state of the wicket.” The other was too busy watching the television to remember anything. After half an hour they became apprehensive, so the senior guard went off to take a look while his assistant stayed behind in case Haydon should return. Haydon was found where he was now sitting; the guard thought at first that he had fallen asleep. Stooping over him, he caught the smell of alcohol—he guessed gin or vodka—and decided that Haydon was drunk, which surprised him since the Nursery was officially dry. It wasn’t till he tried to lift him that his head flopped over, and the rest of him followed as dead weight. Having vomited (the traces were over there by the tree), the guard propped him up again and sounded the alarm.

Had Haydon received any messages during the day? Smiley asked.

No. But his suit had come back from the cleaners and it was possible a message had been concealed in it—for instance inviting him to a rendezvous.

“So the Russians did it,” the Minister announced with satisfaction to Haydon’s unresponsive form. “To stop him peaching, I suppose. Bloody thugs.”

“No,” said Smiley. “They take pride in getting their people back.”

“Then who the hell
did?”

Everyone waited on Smiley’s answer, but none came. The torches went out and the group moved uncertainly towards the car.

“Can we lose him just the same?” the Minister asked on the way back.

“He was a Soviet citizen. Let them have him,” said Lacon.

They agreed it was a pity about the networks. Better see whether Karla would do the deal anyhow.

“He won’t,” said Smiley.

39

R
ecalling all this in the seclusion of his first-class compartment, Smiley had the curious sensation of watching Haydon through the wrong end of a telescope. He had eaten very little since last night, but the bar had been open for most of the journey.

Leaving King’s Cross, he had had a wistful notion of liking Haydon and respecting him: Bill was a man, after all, who had had something to say and had said it. But his mental system rejected this convenient simplification. The more he puzzled over Haydon’s rambling account of himself, the more conscious he was of the contradictions. He tried at first to see Haydon in the romantic newspaper terms of a thirties intellectual, for whom Moscow was the natural Mecca. “Moscow was Bill’s discipline,” he told himself. “He needed the symmetry of an historical and economic solution.” This struck him as too sparse, so he added more of the man whom he was trying to like: “Bill was a romantic and a snob. He wanted to join an elitist vanguard and lead the masses out of darkness.” Then he remembered the half-finished canvases in the girl’s drawing-room in Kentish Town: cramped, over-worked, and condemned. He remembered also the ghost of Bill’s authoritarian father—Ann had called him simply the Monster—and he imagined Bill’s Marxism making up for his inadequacy as an artist and for his loveless childhood. Later, of course, it hardly mattered if the doctrine wore thin. Bill was set on the road and Karla would know how to keep him there. Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided, seeing Bill again stretched out on the floor in Bywater Street, while Ann played him music on the gramophone.

Bill had loved it, too. Smiley didn’t doubt that for a moment. Standing at the middle of a secret stage, playing world against world, hero and playwright in one: oh, Bill had loved that, all right.

Smiley shrugged it all aside, distrustful as ever of the standard shapes of human motive. He settled instead for a picture of one of those wooden Russian dolls that open up, revealing one person inside the other, and another inside him. Of all men living, only Karla had seen the last little doll inside Bill Haydon. When was Bill recruited, and how? Was his right-wing stand at Oxford a pose, or was it paradoxically the state of sin from which Karla summoned him to grace?

Ask Karla: pity I didn’t.

Ask Jim: I never shall.

Over the flat East Anglian landscape as it slid slowly by, the unyielding face of Karla replaced Bill Haydon’s crooked death mask. “But you had this one price: Ann. The last illusion of the illusionless man. He reckoned that if I were known to be Ann’s lover around the place you wouldn’t see me very straight when it came to other things.”

Illusion? Was that really Karla’s name for love? And Bill’s?

“Here,” said the guard very loudly, and perhaps for the second time. “Come on with it, you’re for Grimsby, aren’t you?”

“No, no—Immingham.” Then he remembered Mendel’s instructions and clambered onto the platform.

There was no cab in sight, so, having enquired at the ticket office, he made his way across the empty forecourt and stood beside a green sign marked “Queue.” He had hoped she might collect him, but perhaps she hadn’t received his wire. Ah well: the post office at Christmas: who could blame them? He wondered how she would take the news about Bill; till, remembering her frightened face on the cliffs in Cornwall, he realised that by then Bill was already dead for her. She had sensed the coldness of his touch, and somehow guessed what lay behind it.

Illusion? He repeated to himself. Illusionless?

It was bitterly cold. He hoped very much that her wretched lover had found her somewhere warm to live.

He wished he had brought her fur boots from the cupboard under the stairs.

He remembered the copy of Grimmelshausen, still uncollected at Martindale’s club.

Then he saw her: her disreputable car shunting towards him down the lane marked “Buses Only” and Ann at the wheel staring the wrong way. Saw her get out, leaving the indicator winking, and walk into the station to enquire: tall and puckish, extraordinarily beautiful, essentially another man’s woman.

For the rest of that term, Jim Prideaux behaved in the eyes of Roach much as his mother had behaved when his father went away. He spent a lot of time on little things, like fixing up the lighting for the school play and mending the soccer nets with string, and in French he took enormous pains over small inaccuracies. But big things, like his walks and solitary golf, he gave up altogether, and in the evenings stayed in and kept clear of the village. Worst of all was his staring empty look when Roach caught him unaware, and the way he forgot things in class, even red marks for merit. Roach had to remind him to hand them in each week.