Smiley's People

TWENTY-SIX

To every clandestine operation, says the folklore, belong more days of waiting than are numbered in Paradise, and for both George Smiley and Toby Esterhase, in their separate ways, the days and nights between Sunday evening and Friday seemed often numberless, and surely bore no relation to the Hereafter. They lived not so much by Moscow Rules, said Toby, as by George's war rules. Both changed hotels and identities that same Sunday night, Smiley decamping to a small hôtel garni in the old town, the Arca, and Toby to a distasteful motel outside the town. Thereafter the two men communicated between call-boxes according to an agreed rota, and if they needed to meet, they selected crowded outdoor places, walking a short distance together before parting. Toby had decided to change his tracks, he said, and was using cars as sparingly as possible. His task was to keep the watch on Grigoriev. All week he clung to his stated conviction that, having so recently enjoyed the luxury of one confession, Grigoriev was sure to treat himself to another. To forestall this, he kept Grigoriev on as short a rein as possible, but to keep up with him at all was a nightmare. For example, Grigoriev left his house at quarter to eight each morning and had a five-minute walk to the Embassy. Very well : Toby would make one car sweep down the road at seven-fifty exactly. If Grigoriev carried his brief-case in his right hand, Toby would know that nothing was happening. But the left hand meant 'emergency', with a crash meeting in the gardens of the Elfenau palace, and a fallback in the town. On the Monday and Tuesday, Grigoriev went the distance using his tight hand only. But on the Wednesday it was snowing, he wished to clear his spectacles, and therefore he stopped to locate his handkerchief, with the result that Toby first saw the brief-case in his left hand, but when he raced round the block again to check, Grigoriev was grinning like a madman and waving the brief-case at him with his right. Toby, according to his own account, had 'a total heart attack'. The next day, the crucial Thursday, Toby achieved a car meeting with Grigoriev in the little village of Allmendingen, just outside the town, and was able to talk to him face to face. An hour earlier, the courier Krassky had arrived, bringing Karla's weekly orders : Toby had seen him enter the Grigoriev residence. So where were the instructions from Moscow? Toby demanded. Grigoriev was cantankerous and a little drunk. He demanded ten thousand dollars for the letter; which so enraged Toby that he threatened Grigoriev with exposure then and there; he threatened to make a citizen's arrest and take him straight down to the police station and charge him personally with posing as a Swiss national; abusing his diplomatic status, evading Swiss tax laws, and about fifteen other things, including venery and espionage. The bluff worked, Grigoriev produced the letter, already treated, with the secret writing showing between the handwritten lines. Toby took several photographs of it, then returned it to Grigoriev.

Karla's questions from Moscow, which Toby showed to Smiley late that night in a rare meeting at a country inn, had a beseeching ring : '... report more fully on Alexandra's appearance and state of mind...Is she lucid? Does she laugh and does her laughter make a happy or a sad impression? Is she clean in her personal habits, clean finger-nails, brushed hair? What is the doctor's latest diagnosis; does he recommend some other treatment?'

But Grigoriev's main preoccupations at their rendezvous in Allmendigen turned out not to be with Krassky, nor with the letter, nor its author. His lady-friend of the Visa Section had been demanding outright to know about his Friday excursions, he said. Hence his depression and drunkenness. Grigoriev had answered her vaguely; but now he suspected her of being a Moscow spy, put there either by the priest or, worse, by some other frightful organ of Soviet Security. Toby, as it happened, shared this belief, but did not feel that much would be served by saying so.

'I have told her I shall not make love to her again until I completely trust her,' Grigoriev said earnestly. 'Also I have not yet decided whether she shall be permitted to accompany me in my new life in Australia.'

'George, this is a madhouse!' Toby told Smiley in a furious mixture of images, while Smiley continued to study Karla's solicitous questions; even though they were written in Russian. 'Listen, I mean how long can we hold the dam? This guy is a total crazy!'

'When does Krassky return to Moscow?' Smiley asked.

'Saturday midday.'

'Grigoriev must arrange a meeting with him before he leaves. He's to tell Krassky he will have a special message for him. An urgent one.'

'Sure,' said Toby. 'Sure, George.' And that was that.

Where had George gone in his mind? Toby wondered, watching him vanish into the crowd once more. Karla's instructions to Grigoriev seemed to have upset Smiley quite absurdly. 'I was caught between one total loony and one complete depressive,' Toby claims of this taxing period.

While Toby, however, could at least agonize over the vagaries of his master and his agent, Smiley had less substantial fare with which to occupy his time, which may have been his problem. On the Tuesday, he took a train to Zurich and lunched quietly at the Kronenhalle with Peter Guillam, who had flown in by way of London at Saul Enderby's behest. Their discussion was restrained, and not merely on the grounds of security. Guillam had taken it upon himself to speak to Ann while he was in London, he said, and was keen to know whether there was any message he might take back to her. Smiley said icily that there was none, and came as near as Guillam could remember to bawling him out. On another occasion - he suggested - perhaps Guillam would be good enough to keep his damned fingers out of Smiley's affairs? Guillam switched the topic hastily to business. Concerning Grigoriev, he said, Saul Enderby had a notion to sell him to the Cousins as found rather than process him at Sarratt. How did George feel about that one? Saul had a sort of hunch that the glamour of a senior Russian defector would give the Cousins a much-needed lift in Washington, even if he hadn't anything to tell, while Grigoriev in London might, so to speak, mar the pure wine to come. How did George feel on that one, actually?

'Quite,' said Smiley.

'Saul also rather wondered whether your plans for next Friday were strictly necessary,' said Guillam, with evident reluctance.

Picking up a table-knife, Smiley stared along the blade.

'She's worth his career to him,' he said at last, with a most unnerving tautness. 'He steals for her, lies for her, risks his neck for her. He has to know whether she cleans her finger-nails and brushes her hair. Don't you think we owe her a look?'

Owe to whom? Guillam wondered nervously as he flew back to London to report. Had Smiley meant that he owed it to himself? Or did he mean to Karla? But he was far too cautious to air these theories to Saul Enderby.

From a distance, it might have been a castle, or one of those small farmsteads which sit on hilltops in the Swiss wine country, with turrets, and moats with covered bridges leading to inner courtyards. Closer to, it took on a more utilitarian appearance, with an incinerator, and an orchard, and modern outbuildings with rows of small windows rather high. A sign at the edge of the village pointed to it, praising its quiet position, its comfort, and the solicitude of its staff. The community was described as 'interdenominational Christian theosophist', and foreign patients were a speciality. Old, heavy snow cluttered fields and roof-tops, but the road which Smiley drove was clear. The day was all white; sky and snow had merged into a single, uncharted void. From the gatehouse a dour porter telephoned ahead of him and, receiving somebody's permission, waved him through. There was a bay marked 'DOCTORS' and a bay marked 'VISITORS' and he parked in the second. When he pressed the bell, a dull-looking woman in a grey habit opened the door to him, blushing even before she spoke. He heard crematorium music, and the clanking of crockery from a kitchen, and human voices all at once. It was a house with hard floors and no curtains.

'Mother Felicity is expecting you,' said Sister Beatitude in a shy whisper.

A scream would fill the entire house, thought Smiley. He noticed pot plants out of reach. At a door marked 'OFFICE' his escort thumped lustily, then shoved it open. Mother Felicity was a large, inflamed-looking woman with a disconcerting worldliness in her gaze. Smiley sat opposite her. An ornate cross rested on her large bosom, and while she spoke, her heavy hands consoled it with a couple of touches. Her German was slow and regal.

'So,' she said. 'So, you are Herr Lachmann, and Herr Lachmann is an acquaintance of Herr Glaser, and Herr Glaser is this week indisposed.' She played on these names as if she knew as well as he did they were lies. 'He was not so indisposed that he could not telephone, but he was so indisposed that he could not bicycle. That is correct?'

Smiley said it was.

'Please do not lower your voice merely because I am a nun. We run a noisy house here and nobody is the less pious for it. You look pale. You have a flu?'

'No. No, I am well.'

'Then you are better off than Herr Glaser who has succumbed to a flu. Last year we had an Egyptian flu, the year before it was an Asian flu, but this year the malheur seems to be our own entirely. Does Herr Lachmann have documents, may I ask, which legitimize him for who he is?'

Smiley handed her a Swiss identity card.

'Come. Your hand is shaking. But you have no flu. "By occupation, professor," she read aloud. 'Herr Lachmann hides his light. He is Professor Lachmann. Of which subject is he professor, may one ask?'

'Of philology.'

'So. Philology. And Herr Glaser, what is his profession? He has never revealed it to me.'

'I understand he is in business,' Smiley said.

'A businessman who speaks perfect Russian. You also speak perfect Russian, Professor?'

'Alas, no.'

'But you are friends.' She handed back the identity card. 'A Swiss-Russian businessman and a modest professor of philology are friends. So. Let us hope the friendship is a fruitful one.'

'We are also neighbours,' Smiley said.

'We are all neighbours, Herr Lachmann. Have you met Alexandra before?'

'No.'

'Young girls are brought here in many capacities. We have god-children. We have wards. Nieces. Orphans. Cousins. Aunts, a few. A few sisters. And now a Professor. But you would be very surprised how few daughters there are in the world. What is the family relationship between Herr Glaser and Alexandra, for example?'

'I understand he is a friend of Monsieur Ostrakov.'

'Who is in Paris. But is invisible. As also is Madame Ostrakova. Invisible. As also, today, is Herr Glaser. You see how difficult it is for us to come to grips with the world, Herr Lachmann? When we ourselves scarcely know who we are, how can we tell them who they are? You must be very careful with her.' A bell was ringing for the end of rest. 'Sometimes she lives in the dark. Sometimes she sees too much. Both are painful. She has grown up in Russia. I don't know why. It is a complicated story, full of contrasts, full of gaps. If it is not the cause of her malady, it is certainly, let us say, the framework. You do not think Herr Glaser is the father for instance?'

'No.'

'Nor do I. Have you met the invisible Ostrakov? You have not. Does the invisible Ostrakov exist? Alexandra insists he is a phantom. Alexandra will have a quite different parentage. Well, so would many of us!'

'May I ask what you have told her about me?'

'All I know. Which is nothing. That you are a friend of Uncle Anton, whom she refuses to accept as her uncle. That Uncle Anton is ill, which appears to delight her, but probably it worries her very much. I have told her it is her father's wish to have someone visit her every week, but she tells me her father is a brigand and pushed her mother off a mountain at dead of night. I have told her to speak German but she may still decide that Russian is best.'

'I understand,' said Smiley.

'You are lucky, then,' Mother Felicity retorted. 'For I do not.'

Alexandra entered and at first he saw only her eyes : so clear, so defenceless. In his imagination, he had drawn her, for some reason, larger. Her lips were full at the centre, but at the corners already thin and too agile, and her smile had a dangerous luminosity. Mother Felicity told her to sit, said something in Russian, gave her a kiss on her flaxen head. She left, and they heard her keys jingle as she strode off down the corridor, yelling at one of the sisters in French to have this mess cleared up. Alexandra wore a green tunic with long sleeves gathered at the wrists and a cardigan over her shoulders like a cape. She seemed to carry her clothes rather than wear them, as if someone had dressed her for the meeting.

'Is Anton dead?' she asked, and Smiley noticed that there was no natural link between the expression on her face and the thoughts in her head.

'No, Anton has a bad flu,' he replied.

'Anton says he is my uncle but he is not,' she explained. Her German was good, and he wondered whether, despite what Karla had said to Grigoriev, she had that from her mother too, or whether she had inherited her father's gift for languages, or both. 'He also pretends he has no car.' As her father had once done, she watched him without emotion, and without commitment. 'Where is your list?' she asked. 'Anton always brings a list.'

'Oh, I have my questions in my head.'

'It is forbidden to ask questions without a list. Questions out of the head are all completely forbidden by my father.'

'Who is your father?' Smiley asked.

For a time he saw only her eyes again, staring at him out of their private lonely place. She picked up a roll of Scotch tape from Mother Felicity's desk, and lightly traced the shiny surface with her finger.

'I saw your car,' she said. ' "BE" stands for Berne.'

'Yes, it does,' said Smiley.

'What kind of car does Anton have?'

'A Mercedes. A black one. Very grand.'

'How much did he pay for it?'

'He bought it second-hand. About five thousand francs, I should imagine.'

'Then why does he come and see me on a bicycle?'

'Perhaps he needs the exercise.'

'No,' she said. 'He has a secret.'

'Have you got a secret, Alexandra?' Smiley asked.

She heard his question, and smiled at it, and nodded a couple of times as if to someone a long way off. 'My secret is called Tatiana.'

'That's a good name,' said Smiley. 'Tatiana. How did you come by that?'

Raising her head, she smiled radiantly at the icons on the wall. 'It is forbidden to talk about it,' she said. 'If you talk about it, nobody will believe you, but they put you in a clinic.'

'But you are in a clinic already,' Smiley pointed out.

Her voice did not lift, it only quickened. She remained so absolutely still that she seemed not even to draw breath between her words. Her lucidity and her courtesy were awesome. She respected his kindness, she said, but she knew that he was an extremely dangerous man, more dangerous than teachers or police. Dr Rüedi had invented property and prisons and many of the clever arguments by which the world lived out its lies, she said. Mother Felicity was too close to God, she did not understand that God was somebody who had to be ridden and kicked like a horse till he took you in the right direction.

'But you, Herr Lachmann, represent the forgiveness of the authorities. Yes, I am afraid you do.'

She sighed, and gave him a tired smile of indulgence, but when he looked at the table he saw that she had seized hold of her thumb, and was forcing it back upon itself till it looked like snapping.

'Perhaps you are my father, Herr Lachmann,' she suggested with a smile.

'No, alas, I have no children,' Smiley replied.

'Are you God?'

'No, I'm just an ordinary person.'

'Mother Felicity says that in every ordinary person, there is a part that is God.'

This time it was Smiley's turn to take a long while to reply. His mouth opened, then with uncharacteristic hesitation closed again.

'I have heard it said too,' he replied, and looked away from her a moment.

'You are supposed to ask me whether I have been feeling better.'

'Are you feeling better, Alexandra?'

'My name is Tatiana,' she said.

'Then how does Tatiana feel?'

She laughed. Her eyes were delightfully bright. 'Tatiana is the daughter of a man who is too important to exist,' she said. 'He controls the whole of Russia, but he does not exist. When people arrest her, her father arranges for her to be freed. He does not exist but everyone is afraid of him. Tatiana does not exist either,' she added. 'There is only Alexandra.'

'What about Tatiana's mother?'

'She was punished,' said Alexandra calmly, confiding this information to the icons rather than to Smiley. 'She was not obedient to history. That is to say, she believed that history had taken a wrong course. She was mistaken. The people should not attempt to change history. It is the task of history to change the people. I would like you to take me with you, please. I wish to leave this clinic.'

Her hands were fighting each other furiously while she continued to smile at the icons.

'Did Tatiana ever meet her father? ' he asked.

'A small man used to watch the children walk to school,' she replied. He waited but she said no more.

'And then?' he asked.

'From a car. He would lower the window but he looked only at me.'

'Did you look at him?'

'Of course. How else would I know he was looking at me?'

'What was his appearance? His manner? Did he smile?'

'He smoked. Feel free, if you wish. Mother Felicity likes a cigarette occasionally. Well, it's only natural, isn't it? Smoking calms the conscience, I am told.'

She had pressed the bell : reached out and pressed it for a long time. He heard the jingle of Mother Felicity's keys again, coming towards them down the corridor, and the shuffle of her feet at the door as she paused to unlock it, just like the sounds of any prison in the world.

'I wish to come with you in your car,' said Alexandra.

Smiley paid her bill and Alexandra watched him count the notes out under the lamp, exactly the way Uncle Anton did it. Mother Felicity intercepted Alexandra's studious look and perhaps she sensed trouble, for she glanced sharply at Smiley as if she suspected some misconduct in him. Alexandra accompanied him to the door and helped Sister Beatitude open it, then shook Smiley's hand in a very stylish way, lifting her elbow up and outward, and bending her front knee. She tried to kiss his hand but Sister Beatitude prevented her. She watched him to the car and she began waving, and he was already moving when he heard her screaming from very close, and saw that she was trying to open the car door and travel with him, but Sister Beatitude hauled her off and dragged her, still screaming, back into the house.

Half an hour later in Thun, in the same café from which he had observed Grigoriev's visit to the bank a week before, Smiley silently handed Toby the letter he had prepared. Grigoriev was to give it to Krassky tonight or whenever they met, he said.

'Grigoriev wants to defect tonight,' Toby objected.

Smiley shouted. For once in his life, shouted. He opened his mouth very wide, he shouted, and the whole café sat up with a jolt - which is to say, that the barmaid looked up from her marriage advertisements, and of the four card-players in the corner, one at least turned his head.

'Not yet!'

Then, to show that he had himself completely under control, he repeated the words quietly : 'Not yet, Toby. Forgive me. Not yet.'

Of the letter which Smiley sent to Karla by way of Grigoriev, no copy exists, which is perhaps what Smiley intended, but there can be little doubt of the substance, since Karla himself was anyway a self-professed exponent of the arts of what he liked to call pressure. Smiley would have set out the bare facts : that Alexandra was known to be his daughter by a dead mistress of manifest anti-Soviet tendencies, that he had arranged her illegal departure from the Soviet Union by pretending that she was his secret agent; that he had misappropriated public money and resources; that he had organized two murders and perhaps also the conjectured official execution of Kirov, all in order to protect his criminal scheme. Smiley would have pointed out that the accumulated evidence of this was quite sufficient, given Karla's precarious position within Moscow Centre, to secure his liquidation by his peers in the Collegium; and that if this were to happen, his daughter's future in the West - where she was residing under false pretences - would be uncertain, to say the least. There would be no money for her, and Alexandra would become a perpetual and ailing exile, ferried from one public hospital to another, without friends, proper papers, or a penny to her name. At worst, she would be brought back to Russia, to have visited upon her the full wrath of her father's enemies.

After the stick, Smiley offered Karla the same carrot he had offered him twenty years before, in Delhi : save your skin, come to us, tell us what you know, and we will make a home for you. A straight replay, said Saul Enderby later, who liked a sporting metaphor. Smiley would have promised Karla immunity from prosecution for complicity in the murder of Vladimir, and there is evidence that Enderby obtained a similar concession through his German liaison regarding the murder of Otto Leipzig. Without a question, Smiley also threw in general guarantees about Alexandra's future in the West - treatment, maintenance, and if necessary, citizenship. Did he take the line of kinship, as he had done before, in Delhi? Did he appeal to Karla's humanity, now so demonstrably on show? Did he add some clever seasoning, calculated to spare Karla humiliation, and knowing his pride, head him off perhaps from an act of self-destruction?

Certainly, he gave Karla very little time to make up his mind. For that too is an axiom of pressure, as Karla was well aware : time to think is dangerous, except that in this case, there is reason to suppose that it was dangerous to Smiley also, though, for vastly different reasons; he might have relented at the eleventh hour. Only the immediate call to action, says the Sarratt folklore, will force the quarry to slip the ropes of his restraint, and against every impulse born or taught to him, sail into the blue. The same, on this occasion, may be said to have applied equally to the hunter.