Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

CHAPTER THIRTY

In Jim Prideaux's world Thursday had gone along like any other, except that some time in the small hours of the morning the wound in his shoulder bone started leaking, he supposed because of the inter-house run on Wednesday afternoon. He was woken by the pain, and by the draught on the wet of his back where the discharge flowed. The other time this happened he had driven himself to Taunton General but the nurses took one look at him and slapped him into emergency to wait for doctor somebody and an X-ray, so he filched his clothes and left. He'd done with hospitals and he'd done with medicos. English hospitals, other hospitals, Jim had done with them. They called the discharge a track.

He couldn't reach the wound to treat it, but after last time he had hacked himself triangles of lint and stitched strings to the corners. Having put these handy on the draining board and prepared the hibitane, he cooked hot water, added half a packet of salt and gave himself an improvised shower, crouching to get his back under the jet. He soaked the lint in the hibitane, flung it across his back, strapped it from the front and lay face down on the bunk with a vodka handy. The pain eased and a drowsiness came over him, but he knew if he gave way to it he would sleep all day, so he took the vodka bottle to the window and sat at the table correcting Five B French while Thursday's dawn slipped into the Dip and the rooks started their clatter in the elms.

Sometimes he thought of the wound as a memory he couldn't keep down. He tried his damnedest to patch it over and forget but even his damnedest wasn't always enough.

He took the correcting slowly because he liked it, and because correcting kept his mind in the right places. At six-thirty, seven, he was done so he put on some old flannel bags and a sports coat and walked quietly down to the church, which was never locked. There he knelt a moment in the centre aisle of the Curtois ante-chapel, which was a family monument to the dead from two wars, and seldom visited by anyone. The cross on the little altar had been carved by sappers at Verdun. Still kneeling Jim groped cautiously under the pew until his fingertips discovered the line of several pieces of adhesive tape; and, following these, a casing of cold metal. His devotions over, he bashed up Combe Lane to the hilltop, jogging a bit to get a sweat running, because the warm did him wonders while it lasted, and rhythm soothed his vigilance. After his sleepless night and the early morning vodka, he was feeling a bit lightheaded, so when he saw the ponies down the combe, gawping at him with their fool faces, he yelled at them in bad Somerset - 'Git 'arn there! Damned old fools, take your silly eyes off me!' - before pounding down the lane again for coffee, and a change of bandage.

First lesson after prayers was Five B French and there Jim all but lost his temper: he doled out a silly punishment to Clements, the draper's son, and had to take it back at the end of class. In the common room he went through another routine, of the sort he had followed in the church: quickly, mindlessly, no fumble and out. It was a simple enough notion, the mail check, but it worked. He'd never heard of anyone who used it, among the pros, but then pros don't talk about their game. 'See it this way,' he would have said. 'If the opposition is watching you, it's certain to be watching your mail, because mail's the easiest watch in the game: easier still if the opposition is the home side and has the co-operation of the postal service. So what do you do? Every week, from the same postbox, at the same time, at the same rate, you post one envelope to yourself and a second to an innocent party at the same address. Shove in a bit of trash - charity Christmas card literature, come-on from local supermarket - be sure to seal envelope, stand back and compare times of arrival. If your letter turns up later than the other fellow's you've just felt someone's hot breath on you, in this case Toby's.'

Jim called it, in his odd, chipped vocabulary, water-testing, and once again the temperature was unobjectionable. The two letters clocked in together, but Jim arrived too late to pinch back the one addressed to Marjoribanks, whose turn it was to act as unwitting running mate. So having pocketed his own, Jim snorted at the Daily Telegraph while Marjoribanks with an irritable 'Oh, to hell' tore up a printed invitation to join the Bible Reading Fellowship. From there, school routine carried him again till junior rugger versus St Ermin's, which he was billed to referee. It was a fast game and when it was over his back acted up again, so he drank vodka till first bell, which he'd promised to take for young Elwes. He couldn't remember why he'd promised, but the younger staff and specially the married ones relied on him a lot for odd jobs and he let it happen. The bell was an old ship's tocsin, something Thursgood's father had dug up and now part of the tradition. As Jim rang it he was aware of little Bill Roach standing right beside him, peering up at him with a white smile, wanting his attention, as he wanted it half a dozen times each day.

'Hullo there, Jumbo, what's your headache this time?'

'Sir, please, sir.'

'Come on, Jumbo, out with it.'

'Sir, there's someone asking where you live, sir,' said Roach.

Jim put down the bell.

'What sort of someone, Jumbo? Come on, I won't bite you, come on, hey... hey! What sort of someone? Man someone? Woman? Juju man? Hey! Come on, old feller,' he said softly, crouching to Roach's height. 'No need to cry. What's the matter then? Got a temperature?' He pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve. 'What sort of someone?' he repeated in the same low voice.

'He asked at Mrs McCullum's. He said he was a friend. Then he got back into his car, it's parked in the church yard, sir.' A fresh gust of tears: 'He's just sitting in it.'

'Get the hell away, damn you!' Jim called to a bunch of seniors grinning in a doorway. 'Get the hell!' He went back to Roach. 'Tall friend? Sloppy tall kind of feller, Jumbo? Eyebrows and a stoop? Thin feller? Bradbury, come here and stop gawping! Stand by to take Jumbo up to Matron! Thin feller?' he asked again, kind but very steady.

But Roach had run out of words. He had no memory any more, no sense of size or perspective; his faculty of selection in the adult world had gone. Big men, small men, old, young, crooked, straight, they were a single army of indistinguishable dangers. To say no to Jim was more than he could bear: to say yes was to shoulder the whole awful responsibility of disappointing him.

He saw Jim's eyes on him, he saw the smile go out and felt the merciful touch of one big hand upon his arm.

'Attaboy, Jumbo. Nobody ever watched like you, did they?'

Laying his head hopelessly against Bradbury's shoulder, Bill Roach closed his eyes. When he opened them he saw through his tears that Jim was already halfway up the staircase.

Jim felt calm; almost easy. For days he had known there was someone. That also was part of his routine: to watch the places where the watchers asked. The church, where the ebb and flow of the local population is a ready topic; county hall, register of electors; tradesmen, if they kept customer accounts; pubs, if the quarry didn't use them: in England he knew these were the natural traps which watchers automatically patrolled before they closed on you. And sure enough in Taunton two days ago, chatting pleasantly with the assistant librarian, Jim had come across the footprint he was looking for. A stranger, down from London apparently, had been interested in village wards, yes, a political gentleman - well more in the line of political research, he was, professional, you could tell - and one of the things he wanted, fancy that now, was the up-to-date record of Jim's very village, yes, the voters' list, they were thinking of making a door-to-door survey of a really out-of-the-way community, specially new immigrants. Yes, fancy that, Jim agreed and from then on made his dispositions. He bought railway tickets to places: Taunton Exeter, Taunton London, Taunton Swindon, all valid one month; because he knew that if he were on the run again, tickets would be hard to come by. He had uncached his old identities and his gun and hid them handily above ground; he dumped a suitcase full of clothes in the boot of the Alvis, and kept the tank full. These precautions made sleep a possibility; or would have done, before his back.

'Sir, who won, sir?'

Prebble, a new boy, in dressing gown and toothpaste, on his way to surgery. Sometimes boys spoke to Jim for no reason, his size and crookedness were a challenge.

'Sir, the match, sir, versus St Ermin's.'

'St Vermins,' another boy piped. 'Yes, sir, who won actually?'

'Sir, they did, sir,' Jim barked. 'As you'd have known sir if you'd been watching sir,' and swinging an enormous fist at them in a slow feinted punch, he propelled both boys across the corridor to Matron's dispensary.

'Night, sir.'

'Night, you toads,' Jim sang and stepped the other way into the sick bay for a view of the church and the cemetery. The sick bay was unlit, it had a look and a stink he hated. Twelve boys lay in the gloom dozing between supper and temperatures.

'Who's that?' asked a hoarse voice.

'Rhino,' said another. 'Hey, Rhino, who won against St Vermins?'

To call Jim by his nickname was insubordinate but boys in sick bay feel free from discipline.

'Rhino? Who the hell's Rhino? Don't know him. Not a name to me,' Jim snorted, squeezing between two beds. 'Put that torch away, not allowed. Damn walkover, that's who won. Eighteen points to nothing for Vermins.' That window went down almost to the floor. An old fireguard protected it from boys. 'Too much damn fumble in the three-quarter line,' he muttered, peering down.

'I hate rugger,' said a boy called Stephen.

The blue Ford was parked in the shadow of the church, close in under the elms. From the ground floor it would have been out of sight but it didn't look hidden. Jim stood very still, a little back from the window, studying it for tell-tale signs. The light was fading fast but his eyesight was good and he knew what to look for: discreet aerial, second inside mirror for the legman, burn marks under the exhaust. Sensing the tension in him, the boys became facetious.

'Sir, is it a bird, sir? Is she any good, sir?'

'Sir, are we on fire?'

'Sir, what are her legs like?'

'Gosh, sir, don't say it's Miss Aaronson?' At this everyone started giggling because Miss Aaronson was old and ugly.

'Shut up,' Jim snapped, quite angry. 'Rude pigs, shut up.' Downstairs in assembly Thursgood was calling senior roll before prep.

Abercrombie? Sir. Astor? Sir. Blakeney? Sick, sir.

Still watching, Jim saw the car door open and George Smiley climb cautiously out, wearing a heavy overcoat.

Matron's footsteps sounded in the corridor. He heard the squeak of her rubber heels and the rattle of thermometers in a paste pot.

'My good Rhino, whatever are you doing in my sick bay? And close that curtain, you bad boy, you'll have the whole lot of them dying of pneumonia. William Merridew, sit up at once.'

Smiley was locking the car door. He was alone and he carried nothing, not even a briefcase.

'They're screaming for you in Grenville, Rhino.'

'Going, gone,' Jim retorted briskly and with a jerky 'Night, all,' he humped his way to Grenville dormitory where he was pledged to finish a story by John Buchan. Reading aloud, he noticed that there were certain sounds he had trouble pronouncing, they caught somewhere in his throat. He knew he was sweating, he guessed his back was seeping and by the time he had finished there was a stiffness round his jaw which was not just from reading aloud. But all these things were small symptoms beside the rage which was mounting in him as he plunged into the freezing night air. For a moment, on the overgrown terrace, he hesitated, staring up at the church. It would take him three minutes, less, to untape the gun from underneath the pew, shove it into the waistband of his trousers, left side, butt inward to the groin...

But instinct advised him 'no', so he set course directly for the caravan, singing 'Hey diddle diddle' as loud as his tuneless voice would carry.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Inside the motel room, the state of restlessness was constant. Even when the traffic outside went through one of its rare lulls the windows continued vibrating. In the bathroom the tooth glasses also vibrated, while from either wall and above them they could hear music, thumps and bits of conversation or laughter. When a car arrived in the forecourt, the slam of the door seemed to happen inside the room, and the footsteps too. Of the furnishings, everything matched. The yellow chairs matched the yellow pictures and the yellow carpet. The candlewick bedspreads matched the orange paintwork on the doors, and by coincidence the label on the vodka bottle. Smiley had arranged things properly. He had spaced the chairs and put the vodka on the low table and now as Jim sat glaring at him he extracted a plate of smoked salmon from the tiny refrigerator, and brown bread already buttered. His mood in contrast to Jim's was noticeably bright, his movements swift and purposeful.

'I thought we should at least be comfortable,' he said, with a short smile, setting things busily on the table. 'When do you have to be at school again? Is there a particular time?' Receiving no answer he sat down. 'How do you like teaching? I seem to remember you had a spell of it after the war, is that right? Before they hauled you back? Was that also a prep school? I don't think I knew.'

'Look at the file,' Jim barked. 'Don't you come here playing cat and mouse with me, George Smiley. If you want to know things, read my file.'

Reaching across the table Smiley poured two drinks and handed one to Jim.

'Your personal file at the Circus?'

'Get it from housekeepers. Get it from Control.'

'I suppose I should,' said Smiley doubtfully. 'The trouble is Control's dead and I was thrown out long before you came back. Didn't anyone bother to tell you that when they got you home?'

A softening came over Jim's face at this, and he made in slow motion one of those gestures which so amused the boys at Thursgood's. 'Dear God,' he muttered, 'so Control's gone,' and passed his left hand over the fangs of his moustache, then upward to his moth-eaten hair. 'Poor old devil,' he muttered. 'What did he die of, George? Heart? Heart kill him?'

'They didn't even tell you this at the debriefing?' Smiley asked.

At the mention of a debriefing, Jim stiffened and his glare returned.

'Yes,' said Smiley. 'It was his heart.'

'Who got the job?'

Smiley laughed. 'My goodness, Jim, what did you all talk about at Sarratt, if they didn't even tell you that?'

'God damn it, who got the job? Wasn't you, was it, threw you out! Who got the job, George?'

'Alleline got it,' said Smiley, watching Jim very carefully, noting how the right forearm rested motionless across the knees. 'Who did you want to get it? Have a candidate, did you, Jim?' And after a long pause: 'And they didn't tell you what happened to the Aggravate network, by any chance? To Pribyl, to his wife, and brother-in-law? Or to the Plato network? Landkron, Eva Krieglova, Hanka Bilova? You recruited some of those, didn't you, in the old days before Roy Bland? Old Landkron even worked for you in the war.'

There was something terrible just then about the way Jim would not move forward and could not move back. His red face was twisted with the strain of indecision and the sweat had gathered in studs over his shaggy ginger eyebrows.

'God damn you, George, what the devil do you want? I've drawn a line. That's what they told me to do. Draw a line, make a new life, forget the whole thing.'

'Which they is this, Jim? Roy? Bill, Percy?' He waited. 'Did they tell you what happened to Max, whoever they were? Max is all right, by the way.' Rising, he briskly refreshed Jim's drink, then sat again.

'All right, come on, so what's happened to the networks?'

'They're blown. The story is you blew them to save your own skin. I don't believe it. But I have to know what happened.' He went straight on: 'I know Control made you promise by all that's holy, but that's finished. I know you've been questioned to death and I know you've pushed some things so far down you can hardly find them any more or tell the difference between truth and cover. I know you've tried to draw a line under it and say it didn't happen. I've tried that, too. Well, after tonight you can draw your line. I've brought a letter from Lacon and if you want to ring him he's standing by. I don't want to silence you. I'd rather you talked. Why didn't you come and see me at home when you got back? You could have done. You tried to see me before you left, so why not when you got back? Wasn't just the rules that kept you away.'

'Didn't anyone get out?' Jim said.

'No. They seem to have been shot.'

They had telephoned Lacon and now Smiley sat alone sipping his drink. From the bathroom he could hear the sound of running taps and grunts as Jim sluiced water in his face.

'For God's sake let's get somewhere we can breathe,' Jim whispered, as if it were a condition of his talking. Smiley picked up the bottle and walked beside him as they crossed the tarmac to the car.

They drove for twenty minutes; Jim took the wheel. When they parked they were on the plateau, this morning's hilltop free of fog, and a long view down the valley. Scattered lights reached into the distance. Jim sat as still as iron, right shoulder high and hands hung down, gazing through the misted windscreen at the shadow of the hills. The sky was light and Jim's face was cut sharp against it. Smiley kept his first questions short. The anger had left Jim's voice and little by little he spoke with greater ease. Once, discussing Control's tradecraft, he even laughed, but Smiley never relaxed, he was as cautious as if he were leading a child across the street. When Jim ran on, or bridled, or showed a flash of temper, Smiley gently drew him back until they were level again, moving at the same pace and in the same direction. When Jim hesitated, Smiley coaxed him forward over the obstacle. At first, by a mixture of instinct and deduction, Smiley actually fed Jim his own story.

For Jim's first briefing by Control, Smiley suggested, they had made a rendezvous outside the Circus? They had. Where? At a service flat in St James's, a place proposed by Control. Was anyone else present? No one. And to get in touch with Jim in the first place, Control had used MacFadean, his personal janitor? Yes, old Mac came over on the Brixton shuttle with a note asking Jim for a meeting that night. Jim was to tell Mac yes or no and give him back the note. He was on no account to use the telephone, even the internal line, to discuss the arrangement. Jim had told Mac yes and arrived at seven.

'First, I suppose, Control cautioned you?'

'Told me not to trust anyone.'

'Did he name particular people?'

'Later,' said Jim. 'Not at first. At first, he just said: trust nobody. Specially nobody in the mainstream. George?'

'Yes.'

'They were shot all right, were they? Landkron, Krieglova, the Pribyls? Straight shooting?'

'The secret police rolled up both networks the same night. After that no one knows, but next of kin were told they were dead. That usually means they are.'

To their left a line of pine trees like a motionless army climbed out of the valley.

'And then I suppose Control asked you what Czech identities you had running for you,' Smiley resumed. 'Is that right?' He had to repeat the question.

'I told him Hajek,' said Jim finally. 'Vladimir Hajek, Czech journalist based on Paris. Control asked me how much longer the papers were good for. "You never know," I said. "Sometimes they're blown after one trip." ' His voice went suddenly louder, as if he had lost his hold on it. 'Deaf as an adder, Control was, when he wanted to be.'

'So then he told you what he wanted you to do,' Smiley suggested.

'First, we discussed deniability. He said if I was caught, I should keep Control out of it. A scalphunter ploy, bit of private enterprise. Even at the time I thought: Who the hell will ever believe that? Every word he spoke was letting blood,' said Jim. 'All through the briefing I could feel his resistance to telling me anything. He didn't want me to know but he wanted me well briefed. "I've had an offer of service," Control says. "Highly placed official, covername Testify." "Czech official?" I ask. "On the military side," he says. "You're a military-minded man, Jim, you two should hit it off pretty well." That's how it went, the whole damn way. I thought, if you don't want to tell me, don't, but stop dithering.'

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, he 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 21st. 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 sixty-eight. 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 sweat 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 shaggy 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, annotated 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 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, overall?'

'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 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 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 the 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 work-name, 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 Wenceslas Square he had been overtaken by three women, of whom the one in the middle was pushing a pram. The woman nearest the kerb 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, back-up cars standing off with shortwave 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: fur-lined plastic, black, with zips on the outside and soles of thick brown composition which slightly sang 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 by now have done so. They must be after the branch-lines: that is to say, 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 overall 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 glove-board 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.'

'I did.'

'Had you perhaps changed your mind about the mission? Did curiosity draw you after all, was that it? You wanted passionately to know who the mole was, for instance? I'm only speculating, Jim.'

'What's the difference? What the hell does my motive matter in a damn mess like this?'

The half moon was free of cloud and seemed very close. Jim sat on the bench. It was bedded in loose gravel and while he spoke he occasionally picked up a pebble and flicked it backhand into the bracken. Smiley sat beside him, looking nowhere but at Jim. Once, to keep him company, he took a pull of vodka and thought of Tarr and Irina drinking on their own hilltop in Hong Kong. It must be a habit of the trade, he decided: we talk better when there's a view.

Through the window of the parked Fiat, said Jim, the word code passed off without a hitch. The driver was one of those stiff, muscle-bound Czech Magyars with an Edwardian moustache and a mouthful of garlic. Jim didn't like him but he hadn't expected to. The two back doors were locked and there was a row about where he should sit. The Magyar said it was insecure for Jim to be in the back. It was also undemocratic. Jim told him to go to hell. He asked Jim whether he had a gun and Jim said no, which was not true, but if the Magyar didn't believe him he didn't dare say so. He asked whether Jim had brought instructions for the General? Jim said he had brought nothing. He had come to listen.

Jim felt a bit nervy, he said. They drove and the Magyar said his piece. When they reached the lodge there would be no lights and no sign of life. The General would be inside. If there was any sign of life, a bicycle, a car, a light, a dog, if there was any sign that the hut was occupied, then the Magyar would go in first and Jim would wait in the car. Otherwise Jim should go in alone and the Magyar would do the waiting. Was that clear?

Why didn't they just go in together? Jim asked. Because the General didn't want them to, said the Magyar.

They drove for half an hour by Jim's watch, heading northeast at an average of thirty kilometres an hour. The track was winding and steep and tree-lined. There was no moon and he could see very little except occasionally against the skyline more forest, more hilltops. The snow had come from the north, he noticed; it was a point that was useful later. The track was clear but rutted by heavy lorries. They drove without lights. The Magyar had begun telling a dirty story and Jim guessed it was his way of being nervous. The smell of garlic was awful. He seemed to chew it all the time. Without warning he cut the engine. They were running downhill, but more slowly. They had not quite stopped when the Magyar reached for the handbrake and Jim smashed his head against the window post and took his gun. They were at the opening to a side-path. Thirty yards down this path lay a low wooden hut. There was no sign of life.

Jim told the Magyar what he would like him to do. He would like him to wear Jim's fur hat and Jim's coat and take the walk for him. He should take it slowly, keeping his hands linked behind his back, and walking at the centre of the path. If he failed to do either of those things Jim would shoot him. When he reached the hut he should go inside and explain to the General that Jim was indulging in an elementary precaution. Then he should walk back slowly, report to Jim that all was well, and that the General was ready to receive him. Or not, as the case might be.

The Magyar didn't seem very happy about this but he didn't have much choice. Before he got out Jim made him turn the car round and face it down the path. If there was any monkey business, Jim explained, he would put on the headlights and shoot him along the beam, not once, but several times, and not in the legs. The Magyar began his walk. He had nearly reached the hut when the whole area was floodlit: the hut, the path and a large space around. Then a number of things happened at once. Jim didn't see everything because he was busy turning the car. He saw four men fall out of the trees, and, so far as he could work out, one of them sandbagged the Magyar. Shooting started but none of the four paid it any attention, they were standing back while somebody took photographs. The shooting seemed to be directed at the clear sky behind the floodlights. It was very theatrical. Flares exploded, Very lights went up, even tracer, and as Jim raced the Fiat down the track he had the impression of leaving a military tattoo at its climax. He was almost clear - he really felt he was clear - when from the woods to his right someone opened up with a machine-gun at close quarters. The first burst shot off a back wheel and turned the car over. He saw the wheel fly over the bonnet as the car took to the ditch on the left. The ditch might have been ten foot deep but the snow let him down kindly. The car didn't burn so he lay behind it and waited, facing across the track hoping to get a shot at the machine-gunner. The next burst came from behind him and threw him up against the car. The woods must have been crawling with troops. He knew that he had been hit twice. Both shots caught him in the right shoulder and it seemed amazing to him, as he lay there watching the tattoo, that they hadn't taken off the arm. A klaxon sounded, maybe two or three. An ambulance rolled down the track and there was still enough shooting to frighten the game for years. The ambulance reminded him of those old Hollywood fire engines, it was so upright. A whole mock battle was taking place, yet the ambulance boys stood gazing at him without a care in the world. He was losing consciousness as he heard a second car arrive, and men's voices, and more photographs were taken, this time of the right man. Someone gave orders but he couldn't tell what they were because they were given in Russian. His one thought, as they dumped him on the stretcher and the lights went out, concerned going back to London. He imagined himself in the St James's flat, with the coloured charts and the sheaf of notes, sitting in the armchair and explaining to Control how in their old age the two of them had walked into the biggest sucker's punch in the history of the trade. His only consolation was that they had sandbagged the Magyar, but looking back Jim wished very much he'd broken his neck for him: it was a thing he could have managed very easily, and without compunction.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The describing of pain was to Jim an indulgence to be dispensed with. To Smiley, his stoicism had something awesome about it, the more so because he seemed unaware of it. The gaps in his story came mainly where he passed out, he explained. The ambulance drove him, so far as he could fathom, further north. He guessed this from the trees when they opened the door to let the doctor in: the snow was heaviest when he looked back. The surface was good and he guessed they were on the road to Hradec. The doctor gave him an injection; he came round in a prison hospital with barred windows high up, and three men watching him. He came round again after the operation in a different cell with no windows at all, and he thought probably the first questioning took place there, about seventy-two hours after they'd patched him up, but time was already a problem and of course they'd taken away his watch.

They moved him a lot. Either to different rooms, depending on what they were going to do with him, or to other prisons depending on who was questioning him. Sometimes they just moved to keep him awake, walking him down cell corridors at night. He was also moved in lorries, and once by a Czech transport plane, but he was trussed for the flight and hooded, and passed out very soon after they took off. The interrogation which followed this flight was very long. Otherwise he had little sense of progression from one questioning to another and thinking didn't get it any straighter for him, rather the reverse. The thing that was still strongest in his memory was the plan of campaign he formed while he waited for the first interrogation to begin. He knew silence would be impossible and that for his own sanity, or survival, there had to be a dialogue, and at the end of it they had to think he had told them what he knew, all he knew. Lying in hospital he prepared his mind into lines of defence behind which, if he was lucky, he could fall back stage by stage until he had given the impression of total defeat. His forward line, he reckoned, and his most expendable, was the bare bones of Operation Testify. It was anyone's guess whether Stevcek was a plant, or had been betrayed. But whichever was the case, one thing was certain: the Czechs knew more about Stevcek than Jim did. His first concession therefore would be the Stevcek story, since they had it already; but he would make them work for it. First he would deny everything and stick to his cover. After a fight he would admit to being a British spy and give his workname Ellis so that if they published it, the Circus would at least know he was alive and trying. He had little doubt that the elaborate trap and the photographs augured a lot of ballyhoo. After that, in accordance with his understanding with Control, he would describe the operation as his own show, mounted without the consent of his superiors and calculated to win him favour. And he would bury, as deep as they could go and deeper, all thoughts of a spy inside the Circus.

'No mole,' said Jim, to the black outlines of the Quantocks. 'No meeting with Control, no service flat in St James's.'

'No Tinker, Tailor.'

His second line of defence would be Max. He proposed at first to deny that he had brought a legman at all. Then he might say he had brought one but he didn't know his name. Then, because everyone likes a name, he would give them one: the wrong one first, then the right one. By that time Max must be clear, or underground, or caught.

Now came in Jim's imagination a succession of less strongly held positions: recent scalphunter operations, Circus tittle-tattle, anything to make his interrogators think he was broken and talking free and that this was all he had, they had passed the last trench. He would rack his memory for back scalphunter cases, and if necessary he would give them the names of one or two Soviet and satellite officials who had recently been turned or burned; of others who in the past had made a one-time sale of assets and, since they had not defected, might now be considered to be in line for burning or a second bite. He would throw them any bone he could think of, sell them if necessary the entire Brixton stable. And all this would be the smokescreen to disguise what seemed to Jim to be his most vulnerable intelligence, since they would certainly expect him to possess it: the identity of members of the Czech end of the Aggravate and Plato networks.

'Landkron, Krieglova, Bilova, the Pribyls,' said Jim.

Why did he choose the same order for their names? Smiley wondered.

For a long time Jim had no responsibility for these networks. Years earlier, before he took over Brixton, he had helped establish them, recruited some of the founder members; since then a lot had happened to them in the hands of Bland and Haydon of which he knew nothing. But he was certain that he still knew enough to blow them both sky high. And what worried him most was the fear that Control, or Bill, or Percy Alleline, or whoever had the final say these days, would be too greedy, or too slow, to evacuate the networks by the time Jim, under forms of duress he could only guess at, had no alternative but to break completely.

'So that's the joke,' said Jim, with no humour whatever. 'They couldn't have cared less about the networks. They asked me half a dozen questions about Aggravate then lost interest. They knew damn well that Testify wasn't my private brainchild and they knew all about Control buying the Stevcek pass in Vienna. They began exactly where I wanted to end: with the briefing in St James's. They didn't ask me about a legman, they weren't interested in who had driven me to the rendezvous with the Magyar. All they wanted to talk about was Control's rotten-apple theory.'

One word, thought Smiley again, it might be just one word. He said: 'Did they actually know the St James's address?'

'They knew the brand of the bloody sherry, man.'

'And the charts?' asked Smiley quickly. 'The music case?'

'No.' He added: 'Not at first. No.'

Thinking inside out, Steed-Asprey used to call it. They knew because the mole Gerald had told them, thought Smiley. The mole knew what the housekeepers had succeeded in getting out of old MacFadean. The Circus conducts its postmortem: Karla has the benefit of its findings in time to use them on Jim.

'So I suppose by now you were beginning to think Control was right: there was a mole,' said Smiley.

Jim and Smiley were leaning on a wooden gate. The ground sloped sharply away from them in a long sweep of bracken and fields. Below them lay another village, a bay and a thin ribbon of moonlit sea.

'They went straight to the heart of it. "Why did Control go it alone? What did he hope to achieve?" "His comeback," I said. So they laugh: "With tinpot information about military emplacements in the area of Brno? That wouldn't even buy him a square meal in his club." "Maybe he was losing his grip," I said. If Control was losing his grip, they said, who was stamping on his fingers? Alleline, I said, that was the buzz; Alleline and Control were in competition to provide intelligence. But in Brixton we only got the rumours, I said. "And what is Alleline producing that Control is not producing?" "I don't know." "But you just said that Alleline and Control are in competition to provide intelligence." "It's rumour. I don't know." Back to the cooler.'

Time, said Jim, at this stage lost him completely. He lived either in the darkness of the hood, or in the white light of the cells. There was no night or day, and to make it even more weird they kept the noises going most of the time.

They were working him on the production-line principle, he explained: no sleep, relays of questions, a lot of disorientation, a lot of muscle, till the interrogation became to him a slow race between going a bit dotty, as he called it, and breaking completely. Naturally, he hoped he'd go dotty but that wasn't something you could decide for yourself, because they had a way of bringing you back. A lot of the muscle was done electrically.

'So we start again. New tack. "Stevcek was an important general. If he asked for a senior British officer, he could expect him to be properly informed about all aspects of his career. Are you telling us you did not inform yourself?" "I'm saying I got my information from Control." "Did you read Stevcek's dossier at the Circus?" "No." "Did Control?" "I don't know." "What conclusions did Control draw from Stevcek's second appointment in Moscow? Did Control speak to you about Stevcek's role in the Warsaw Pact Liaison Committee?" "No." They stuck to that question and I suppose I stuck to my answer because after a few more no's they got a bit crazy. They seemed to lose patience. When I passed out they hosed me down and had another crack.'

Movement, said Jim. His narrative had become oddly jerky. Cells, corridors, car... at the airport, VIP treatment and a mauling before the aeroplane... on the flight, dropped off to sleep and was punished for it: 'Came round in a cell again, smaller, no paint on the walls. Sometimes I thought I was in Russia. I worked out by the stars that we had flown east. Sometimes I was in Sarratt, back on the interrogation resistance course.'

For a couple of days they let him alone. Head was muzzy. He kept hearing the shooting in the forest and he saw the tattoo again, and when finally the big session started, the one he remembered as the marathon, he had the disadvantage of feeling half defeated when he went in.

'Matter of health much as anything,' he explained, very tense now.

'We could make a break if you wanted,' Smiley said, but where Jim was, there were no breaks, and what he wanted was irrelevant.

That was the long one, Jim said. Sometime in the course of it, he told them about Control's notes and his charts and the coloured inks and crayons. They were going at him like the devil and he remembered an all-male audience, at one end of the room, peering like a lot of damn medicos and muttering to one another, and he told them about the crayons just to keep the talk alive, to make them stop and listen. They listened but they didn't stop.

'Once they had the colours they wanted to know what the colours meant. "What did blue mean?" "Control didn't have blue." "What did red mean? What did red stand for? Give us an example of red on the chart. What did red mean? What did red mean? What did red mean?" Then everybody clears out except a couple of guards and one little frosty fellow, stiff back, seemed to be head boy. The guards take me over to a table and this little fellow sits beside me like a bloody gnome with his hands folded. He's got two crayons in front of him, red and green, and a chart of Stevcek's career.'

It wasn't that Jim broke exactly, he just ran out of invention. He couldn't think up any more stories. The truths which he had locked away so deeply were the only things that suggested themselves.

'So you told him about the rotten apple,' Smiley suggested. 'And you told him about Tinker, Tailor.'

Yes, Jim agreed, he did. He told him that Control believed Stevcek could identify a mole inside the Circus. He told him about the Tinker, Tailor code and who each of them was, name by name.

'What was his reaction?'

'Thought for a bit then offered me a cigarette. Hated the damn thing.'

'Why?'

'Tasted American. Camel, one of those.'

'Did he smoke one himself?'

Jim gave a short nod. 'Bloody chimney,' he said.

Time, after that, began once more to flow, said Jim. He was taken to a camp, he guessed outside a town, and lived in a compound of huts with a double perimeter of wire. With the help of a guard he was soon able to walk; one day they even went for a stroll in the forest. The camp was very big: his own compound was only a part of it. At night he could see the glow of a city to the east. The guards wore denims and didn't speak so he still had no way of telling whether he was in Czecho or in Russia, but his money was heavily on Russia, and when the surgeon came to take a look at his back he used a Russian-English interpreter to express his contempt for his predecessor's handiwork. The interrogation continued sporadically, but without hostility. They put a fresh team on him but it was a leisurely crowd by comparison with the first eleven. One night he was taken to a military airport and flown by RAF fighter to Inverness. From there he went by small plane to Elstree, then by van to Sarratt; both were night journeys.

Jim was winding up fast. He was already launched on his experiences at the Nursery, in fact, when Smiley asked: 'And the head man, the little frosty one: you never saw him again?'

Once, Jim conceded; just before he left.

'What for?'

'Gossip.' Much louder. 'Lot of damned tripe about Circus personalities, matter of fact.'

'Which personalities?'

Jim ducked that question. Tripe about who was on the up staircase, he said, who was on the down. Who was next in line for Chief: ' "How should I know?" I said. "Bloody janitors hear it before Brixton does." '

'So who came in for the tripe precisely?'

Mainly Roy Bland, said Jim sullenly. How did Bland reconcile his left-wing leanings with the work of the Circus? He hasn't got any left-wing leanings, said Jim, that's how. What was Bland's standing with Esterhase and Alleline? What did Bland think of Bill's paintings? Then how much Roy drank and what would become of him if Bill ever withdrew his support for him? Jim gave meagre answers to these questions.

'Was anyone else mentioned?'

'Esterhase,' Jim snapped, in the same taut tone. 'Bloody man wanted to know how anyone could trust a Hungarian.'

Smiley's next question seemed, even to himself, to cast an absolute silence over the whole black valley.

'And what did he say about me?' He repeated: 'What did he say about me?'

'Showed me a cigarette lighter. Said it was yours. Present from Ann. "With all my love". Her signature. Engraved.'

'Did he mention how he came by it? What did he say, Jim? Come on, I'm not going to weaken at the knees just because some Russian hood made a bad joke about me.'

Jim's answer came out like an army order. 'He reckoned that after Bill Haydon's fling with her, she might care to redraft the inscription.' He swung away towards the car. 'I told him,' he shouted furiously. 'Told him to his wrinkled little face. You can't judge Bill by things like that. Artists have totally different standards. See things we can't see. Feel things that are beyond us. Bloody little man just laughed. "Didn't know his pictures were that good," he said. I told him, George. "Go to hell. Go to bloody hell. If you had one Bill Haydon in your damned outfit, you could call it set and match." I said to him: "Christ Almighty," I said, "what are you running over here? A service or the bloody Salvation Army?" '

'That was well said,' Smiley remarked at last, as if commenting on some distant debate. 'And you'd never seen him before?'

'Who?'

'The little frosty chap. He wasn't familiar to you - from long ago for instance? Well, you know how we are. We're trained to see a lot of faces, photographs of Centre personalities, and sometimes they stick. Even if we can't put a name to them any more. This one didn't anyway. I just wondered. It occurred to me you had a lot of time to think,' he went on, conversationally. 'You lay there recovering, waiting to come home, and what else had you to do, but think?' He waited. 'So what did you think of, I wonder? The mission. Your mission, I suppose.'

'Off and on.'

'With what conclusions? Anything useful? Any suspicions, insights, any hints for me to take away?'

'Damn all, thank you,' Jim snapped, very hard. 'You know me, George Smiley, I'm not a juju man, I'm a-'

'You're a plain fieldman who lets the other chaps do his thinking. Nevertheless: when you know you have been led into a king-sized trap, betrayed, shot in the back, and have nothing to do for months but lie or sit on a bunk, or pace a Russian cell, I would guess that even the most dedicated man of action' - his voice had lost none of its friendliness - 'might put his mind to wondering how he landed in such a scrape. Let's take Operation Testify a minute,' Smiley suggested to the motionless figure before him. 'Testify ended Control's career. He was disgraced and he couldn't pursue his mole, assuming there was one. The Circus passed into other hands. With a sense of timeliness, Control died. Testify did something else too. It revealed to the Russians - through you, actually - the exact reach of Control's suspicions. That he'd narrowed the field to five, but apparently no further. I'm not suggesting you should have fathomed all that for yourself in your cell, waiting. After all you had no idea, sitting in the pen, that Control had been thrown out - though it might have occurred to you that the Russians laid on that mock battle in the forest in order to raise a wind. Did it?'

'You've forgotten the networks,' said Jim dully.

'Oh, the Czechs had the networks marked down long before you came on the scene. They only rolled them up in order to compound Control's failure.'

The discursive, almost chatty tone with which Smiley threw out these theories found no resonance in Jim. Having waited in vain for him to volunteer some word, Smiley let the matter drop. 'Well let's just go over your reception at Sarratt, shall we? To wrap it up?'

In a rare moment of forgetfulness he helped himself to the vodka bottle before passing it to Jim.

To judge by his voice, Jim had had enough. He spoke fast and angrily, with that same military shortness that was his refuge from intellectual incursions.

For four days Sarratt was limbo, he said: 'Ate a lot, drank a lot, slept a lot. Walked round the cricket ground.' He'd have swum, but the pool was under repair, as it had been six months before: damned inefficient. He had a medical, watched television in his hut and played a bit of chess with Cranko, who was running reception.

Meanwhile he waited for Control to show up, but he didn't. The first person from the Circus to visit him was the resettlement officer, talking about a friendly teaching agency, next came some pay wallah to discuss his pension entitlement, then the doctor again to assess him for a gratuity. He waited for the inquisitors to appear but they never did, which was a relief because he didn't know what he would have told them until he had the green light from Control and he'd had enough of questions. He guessed Control was holding them off. It seemed mad that he should keep from the inquisitors what he had already told the Russians and the Czechs but until he heard from Control, what else could he do? When Control still sent no word, he formed notions of presenting himself to Lacon and telling his story. Then he decided that Control was waiting for him to get clear of the Nursery before he contacted him. He had a relapse for a few days and when it was over Toby Esterhase turned up in a new suit, apparently to shake him by the hand and wish him good luck. But in fact to tell him how things stood.

'Bloody odd fellow to send, but he seemed to have come up in the world. Then I remembered what Control said about only using chaps from outstations.'

Esterhase told him that the Circus had very nearly gone under as a result of Testify and that Jim was currently the Circus's number one leper. Control was out of the game and a reorganisation was going on in order to appease Whitehall.

'Then he told me not to worry,' said Jim.

'In what way not worry?'

'About my special brief. He said a few people knew the real story, and I needn't worry because it was being taken care of. All the facts were known. Then he gave me a thousand quid in cash to add to my gratuity.'

'Who from?'

'He didn't say.'

'Did he mention Control's theory about Stevcek? Centre's spy inside the Circus?'

'The facts were known,' Jim repeated, glaring. 'He ordered me not to approach anyone or try to get my story heard because it was all being taken care of at the highest level and anything I did might spoil the kill. The Circus was back on the road. I could forget Tinker, Tailor and the whole damn game: moles, everything. "Drop out," he said. "You're a lucky man, Jim," he kept saying. "You've been ordered to become a lotus-eater." I could forget it. Right? Forget it. Just behave as if it had never happened.' He was shouting. 'And that's what I've been doing: obeying orders and forgetting!'

The night landscape seemed to Smiley suddenly innocent; it was like a great canvas on which nothing bad or cruel had ever been painted. Side by side, they stared down the valley over the clusters of lights to a tor raised against the horizon. A single tower stood at its top and for a moment it marked for Smiley the end of the journey.

'Yes,' he said. 'I did a bit of forgetting too. So Toby actually mentioned Tinker, Tailor to you. However did he get hold of that story, unless... And no word from Bill?' he went on. 'Not even a postcard.'

'Bill was abroad,' said Jim shortly.

'Who told you that?'

'Toby.'

'So you never saw Bill: since Testify, your oldest, closest friend, he disappeared.'

'You heard what Toby said. I was out of bounds. Quarantine.'

'Bill was never much of a one for regulations, though, was he?' said Smiley, in a reminiscent tone.

'And you were never one to see him straight,' Jim barked.

'Sorry I wasn't there when you called on me before you left for Czecho,' Smiley remarked after a small pause. 'Control had pushed me over to Germany to get me out of the light and when I came back - what was it that you wanted, exactly?'

'Nothing. Thought Czecho might be a bit hairy. Thought I'd give you the nod, say goodbye.'

'Before a mission?' cried Smiley in mild surprise. 'Before such a special mission?' Jim showed no sign that he had heard. 'Did you give anyone else the nod? I suppose we were all away. Toby, Roy - Bill, did he get one?'

'No one.'

'Bill was on leave, wasn't he? But I gather he was around all the same.'

'No one,' Jim insisted, as a spasm of pain caused him to lift his right shoulder and rotate his head. 'All out,' he said.

'That's very unlike you, Jim,' said Smiley in the same mild tone, 'to go round shaking hands with people before you go on vital missions. You must have been getting sentimental in your old age. It wasn't...' He hesitated. 'It wasn't advice or anything that you wanted, was it? After all, you did think the mission was poppycock, didn't you? And that Control was losing his grip. Perhaps you felt you should take your problem to a third party? It all had rather a mad air, I agree.'

Learn the facts, Steed-Asprey used to say, then try on the stories like clothes.

With Jim locked in a furious silence they returned to the car.

At the motel Smiley drew twenty postcard-sized photographs from the recesses of his greatcoat and laid them out in two lines across the ceramic table. Some were snaps, some portraits; all were of men and none of them looked English. With a grimace Jim picked out two and handed them to Smiley. He was sure of the first, he muttered, less sure of the second. The first was the head man, the frosty gnome. The second was one of the swine who watched from the shadows while the thugs took Jim to pieces. Smiley returned the photographs to his pocket. As he topped up their glasses for a nightcap, a less tortured observer than Jim might have noticed a sense not of triumph but of ceremony about him; as though the drink were putting a seal on something.

'So when was the last time you saw Bill, actually? To talk to,' Smiley asked, just as one might about any old friend. He had evidently disturbed Jim in other thoughts, for he took a moment to lift his head and catch the question.

'Oh, round about,' he said carelessly. 'Bumped into him in the corridors I suppose.'

'And to talk to? Never mind.' For Jim had returned to his other thoughts.

Jim would not be driven all the way to school. Smiley had to drop him short, at the top of the tarmac path that led through the graveyard to the church. He had left some workbooks in the ante-chapel, he said. Momentarily, Smiley felt disposed to disbelieve him, but could not understand why. Perhaps because he had come to the opinion that after thirty years in the trade, Jim was still a rather poor liar. The last Smiley saw of him was that lopsided shadow striding towards the Norman porch as his heels cracked like gunshot between the tombs.

Smiley drove to Taunton and from the Castle Hotel made a string of telephone calls. Though exhausted he slept fitfully between visions of Karla sitting at Jim's table with two crayons, and Cultural Attaché Polyakov alias Viktorov, fired by concern for the safety of his mole Gerald, waiting impatiently in the interrogation cell for Jim to break. Lastly of Toby Esterhase bobbing into Sarratt in place of the absent Haydon, cheerfully advising Jim to forget all about Tinker, Tailor, and his dead inventor, Control.

The same night Peter Guillam drove west, clean across England to Liverpool, with Ricki Tarr as his only passenger. It was a tedious journey in beastly conditions. For most of it Tarr boasted about the rewards he would claim, and the promotion, once he had carried out his mission. From there he talked about his women: Danny, her mother, Irina. He seemed to envisage a ménage à quatre in which the two women would jointly care for Danny, and for himself.

'There's a lot of the mother in Irina. That's what frustrates her, naturally.' Boris, he said, could get lost, he would tell Karla to keep him. As their destination approached, his mood changed again and he fell silent. The dawn was cold and foggy. In the suburbs they had to drop to a crawl and cyclists overtook them. A reek of soot and steel filled the car.

'Don't hang about in Dublin, either,' said Guillam suddenly. 'They expect you to work the soft routes so keep your head down. Take the first plane out.'

'We've been through all that.'

'Well I'm going through it all again,' Guillam retorted. 'What's Mackelvore's workname?'

'For Christ's sake,' Tarr breathed, and gave it.

It was still dark when the Irish ferry sailed. There were soldiers and police everywhere: this war, the last, the one before. A fierce wind was blowing off the sea and the going looked rough. At the dockside, a sense of fellowship briefly touched the small crowd as the ship's lights bobbed quickly into the gloom. Somewhere a woman was crying, somewhere a drunk was celebrating his release.

He drove back slowly, trying to work himself out: the new Guillam who starts at sudden noises, has nightmares and not only can't keep his girl but makes up crazy reasons for distrusting her. He had challenged her about Sand, and the hours she kept, and about her secrecy in general. After listening with her grave brown eyes fixed on him she told him he was a fool, and left. 'I am what you think I am,' she said, and fetched her things from the bedroom. From his empty flat he telephoned Toby Esterhase, inviting him for a friendly chat later that day.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Smiley sat in the Minister's Rolls, with Lacon beside him. In Ann's family the car was called the black bed-pan, and hated for its flashiness. The chauffeur had been sent to find himself breakfast. The Minister sat in the front and everyone looked forward down the long bonnet, across the river to the foggy towers of Battersea Power Station. The Minister's hair was full at the back, and licked into small black horns around the ears.

'If you're right,' the Minister declared, after a funereal silence, 'I'm not saying you're not, but if you are, how much porcelain will he break at the end of the day?'

Smiley did not quite understand.

'I'm talking about scandal. Gerald gets to Moscow. Right, so then what happens? Does he leap on a soapbox and laugh his head off in public about all the people he's made fools of over here? I mean Christ, we're all in this together, aren't we? I don't see why we should let him go just so's he can pull the bloody roof down over our heads and the competition sweep the bloody pool.'

He tried a different tack. 'I mean to say, just because the Russians know our secrets doesn't mean everyone else has to. We got plenty of other fish to fry apart from them, don't we? What about all the black men: are they going to be reading the gory details in the Wallah-Wallah News in a week's time?'

Or his constituents, Smiley thought.

'I think that's always been a point the Russians accept,' said Lacon. 'After all, if you make your enemy look a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.' He added: They've never made use of their opportunities so far, have they?'

'Well, make sure they toe the line. Get it in writing. No, don't. But you tell them what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. We don't go round publishing the batting order at Moscow Centre, so they can bloody well play ball too, for once.'

Declining a lift, Smiley said the walk would do him good.

It was Thursgood's day for duty and he felt it badly. Headmasters, in his opinion, should be above the menial tasks, they should keep their minds clear for policy and leadership. The flourish of his Cambridge gown did not console him, and as he stood in the gymnasium watching the boys file in for morning line-up, his eye fixed on them balefully, if not with downright hostility. It was Marjoribanks, though, who dealt the deathblow.

'He said it was his mother,' he explained, in a low murmur to Thursgood's left ear. 'He'd had a telegram and proposed to leave at once. He wouldn't even stay for a cup of tea. I promised to pass on the message.'

'It's monstrous, absolutely monstrous,' said Thursgood.

'I'll take his French if you like. We can double up Five and Six.'

'I'm furious,' said Thursgood. 'I can't think, I'm so furious.'

'And Irving says he'll take the rugger final.'

'Reports to be written, exams, rugger finals to play off. What's supposed to be the matter with the woman? Just a flu, I suppose, a seasonal flu. Well we've all got that, so have our mothers. Where does she live?'

'I rather gathered from what he said to Sue that she was dying.'

'Well that's one excuse he won't be able to use again,' said Thursgood, quite unmollified, and with a sharp bark quelled the noise and read the roll.

'Roach?'

'Sick, sir.'

That was all he needed to fill his cup. The school's richest boy having a nervous breakdown about his wretched parents, and the father threatening to remove him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

It was almost four o'clock on the afternoon of the same day. Safe houses I have known, thought Guillam, looking round the gloomy flat. He could write of them the way a commercial traveller could write about hotels: from your five-star hall of mirrors in Belgravia with Wedgwood pilasters and gilded oak-leaves, to this two-room scalphunters' shakedown in Lexham Gardens, smelling of dust and drains, with a three-foot fire extinguisher in the pitch-dark hall. Over the fireplace, cavaliers drinking out of pewter. On the nest of tables, sea shells for ashtrays, and in the grey kitchen, anonymous instructions to Be Sure and Turn Off the Gas Both Cocks. He was crossing the hall when the house bell rang, exactly on time. He lifted the phone and heard Toby's distorted voice howling in the earpiece. He pressed the button and heard the clunk of the electric lock echoing in the stairwell. He opened the front door but left it on the chain till he was sure Toby was alone.

'How are we?' said Guillam cheerfully, letting him in.

'Fine actually, Peter,' said Toby, pulling off his coat and gloves.

There was tea on a tray: Guillam had prepared it, two cups. To safe houses belongs a certain standard of catering. Either you are pretending you live there, or that you are adept anywhere; or simply that you think of everything. In the trade, naturalness is an art, Guillam decided. That was something Camilla could not appreciate.

'Actually it's quite strange weather,' Esterhase announced, as if he had really been analysing its qualities. Safe house small talk was never much better. 'One walks a few steps and is completely exhausted already. So we are expecting a Pole?' he said, sitting down. 'A Pole in the fur trade who you think might run courier for us?'

'Due here any minute.'

'Do we know him? I had my people look up the name but they found no trace.'

My people, thought Guillam: I must remember to use that one. 'The Free Poles made a pass at him a few months back and he ran a mile,' he said. 'Then Karl Stack spotted him round the warehouses and thought he might be useful to the scalphunters.' He shrugged. 'I liked him but what's the point? We can't even keep our own people busy.'

'Peter, you are very generous,' said Esterhase reverently, and Guillam had the ridiculous feeling he had just tipped him. To his relief the front-door bell rang and Fawn took up his place in the doorway.

'Sorry about this, Toby,' Smiley said, a little out of breath from the stairs. 'Peter, where shall I hang my coat?'

Turning him to the wall, Guillam lifted Toby's unresisting hands and put them against it, then searched him for a gun, taking his time. Toby had none.

'Did he come alone?' Guillam asked. 'Or is there some little friend waiting in the road?'

'Looked all clear to me,' said Fawn.

Smiley was at the window, gazing down into the street. 'Put the light out a minute, will you?' he said.

'Wait in the hall,' Guillam ordered, and Fawn withdrew, carrying Smiley's coat. 'Seen something?' he asked Smiley, joining him at the window.

Already the London afternoon had taken on the misty pinks and yellows of evening. The square was Victorian residential; at the centre, a caged garden, already dark. 'Just a shadow, I suppose,' said Smiley with a grunt, and turned back to Esterhase. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed four. Fawn must have wound it up.

'I want to put a thesis to you, Toby. A notion about what's going on. May I?'

Esterhase didn't move an eyelash. His little hands rested on the wooden arms of his chair. He sat quite comfortably, but slightly to attention, toes and heels of his polished shoes together.

'You don't have to speak at all. There's no risk to listening, is there?'

'Maybe.'

'It's two years ago. Percy Alleline wants Control's job, but he has no standing in the Circus. Control has made sure of that. Control is sick and past his prime but Percy can't dislodge him. Remember the time?'

Esterhase gave a neat nod.

'One of those silly seasons,' said Smiley in his reasonable voice. 'There isn't enough work outside so we start intriguing around the service, spying on one another. Percy's sitting in his room one morning with nothing to do. He has a paper appointment as operational director, but in practice he's a rubber stamp between the regional sections and Control, if that. Percy's door opens and somebody walks in. We'll call him Gerald, it's just a name. "Percy," he says, "I've stumbled on a major Russian source. It could be a gold mine." Or perhaps he doesn't say anything till they're outside the building, because Gerald is very much a field man, he doesn't like to talk with walls and telephones around. Perhaps they take a walk in the park or a drive in a car. Perhaps they eat a meal somewhere, and at this stage there isn't much Percy can do but listen. Percy's had very little experience of the European scene, remember, least of all Czecho or the Balkans. He cut his teeth in South America and after that he worked the old possessions: India, the Middle East. He doesn't know a lot about Russians or Czechs or what you will, he's inclined to see red as red and leave it at that. Unfair?'

Esterhase pursed his lips and frowned a little, as if to say he never discussed a superior.

'Whereas Gerald is an expert on those things. His operational life has been spent weaving and ducking round the Eastern markets. Percy's out of his depth but keen. Gerald's on his home ground. This Russian source, says Gerald, could be the richest the Circus has had for years. Gerald doesn't want to say too much but he expects to be getting some trade samples in a day or two and when he does, he'd like Percy to run his eye over them just to get a notion of the quality. They can go into source details later. "But why me?" says Percy. "What's it all about?" So Gerald tells him. "Percy," he says. "Some of us in the regional sections are worried sick by the level of operational losses. There seems to be a jinx around. Too much loose talk inside the Circus and out. Too many people being cut in on distribution. Out in the field, our agents are going to the wall, our networks are being rolled up or worse, and every new ploy ends up a street accident. We want you to help us put that right." Gerald is not mutinous, and he's careful not to suggest that there's a traitor inside the Circus who's blowing all the operations, because you and I know that once talk like that gets around the machinery grinds to a halt. Anyway the last thing Gerald wants is a witch-hunt. But he does say that the place is leaking at the joints, and that slovenliness at the top is leading to failures lower down. All balm to Percy's ear. He lists the recent scandals and he's careful to lean on Alleline's own Middle East adventure, which went so wrong and nearly cost Percy his career. Then he makes his proposal. This is what he says. In my thesis, you understand; it's just a thesis.'

'Sure, George,' said Toby, and licked his lips.

'Another thesis would be that Alleline was his own Gerald, you see. It just happens that I don't believe it: I don't believe Percy is capable of going out and buying himself a top Russian spy and manning his own boat from then on. I think he'd mess it up.'

'Sure,' said Esterhase, with absolute confidence.

'So this, in my thesis, is what Gerald says to Percy next. "We - that is, myself and those like-minded souls who are associated with this project - would like you to act as our father-figure, Percy. We're not political men, we're operators. We don't understand the Whitehall jungle. But you do. You handle the committees, we'll handle Merlin. If you act as our cut-out, and protect us from the rot that's set in, which means in effect limiting knowledge of the operation to the absolute minimum, we'll supply the goods." They talk over ways and means in which this might be done, then Gerald leaves Percy to fret for a bit. A week, a month, I don't know. Long enough for Percy to have done his thinking. One day Gerald produces the first sample. And of course it's very good. Very, very good. Naval stuff as it happens, which couldn't suit Percy better because he's very well in at the Admiralty, it's his supporters' club. So Percy gives his naval friends a sneak preview and they water at the mouth. "Where does it come from? Will there be more?" There's plenty more. As to the identity of the source - well that's a big, big mystery at this stage, but so it should be. Forgive me if I'm a little wide of the mark here and there but I've only the file to go by.'

The mention of a file, the first indication that Smiley might be acting in some official capacity, produced in Esterhase a discernible response. The habitual licking of the lips was accompanied by a forward movement of the head and an expression of shrewd familiarity, as if Toby by all these signals was trying to indicate that he too had read the file, whatever file it was, and entirely shared Smiley's conclusions. Smiley had broken off to drink some tea.

'More for you, Toby?' he asked, over his cup.

'I'll get it,' said Guillam with more firmness than hospitality. 'Tea, Fawn,' he called through the door. It opened at once and Fawn appeared on the threshold, cup in hand.

Smiley was back at the window. He had parted the curtain an inch, and was staring into the square.

'Toby?'

'Yes, George?'

'Did you bring a babysitter?'

'No.'

'No one?'

'George, why should I bring babysitters if I am just going to meet Peter and a poor Pole?'

Smiley returned to his chair. 'Merlin as a source,' he resumed. 'Where was I? Yes, well conveniently Merlin wasn't just one source, was he, as little by little Gerald explained to Percy and the two others he had by now drawn into the magic circle. Merlin was a Soviet agent all right, but rather like Alleline he was also the spokesman of a dissident group. We love to see ourselves in other people's situations, and I'm sure Percy warmed to Merlin from the start. This group, this caucus of which Merlin was the leader, was made up of, say, half a dozen like-minded Soviet officials, each in his way well placed. With time, I suspect, Gerald gave his lieutenants, and Percy, a pretty close picture of these sub-sources, but I don't know. Merlin's job was to collate their intelligence and get it to the West, and over the next few months he showed remarkable versatility in doing just that. He used all manner of methods, and the Circus was only too willing to feed him the equipment. Secret writing, microdots stuck over full-stops on innocent-looking letters, dead letter boxes in Western capitals, filled by God knows what brave Russian, and dutifully cleared by Toby Esterhase's brave lamplighters. Live meetings even, arranged and watched over by Toby's babysitters' - a minute pause as Smiley glanced again towards the window - 'a couple of drops in Moscow that had to be fielded by the local residency, though they were never allowed to know their benefactor. But no clandestine radio; Merlin doesn't care for it. There was a proposal once - it even got as far as the Treasury - to set up a permanent long-arm radio station in Finland, just to service him, but it all foundered when Merlin said: "Not on your Nellie." He must have been taking lessons from Karla, mustn't he? You know how Karla hates radio. The great thing is, Merlin has mobility: that's his biggest talent. Perhaps he's in the Moscow Trade Ministry and can use the travelling salesmen. Anyway, he has the resources and he has the leads out of Russia. And that's why his fellow conspirators look to him to deal with Gerald and agree the terms, the financial terms. Because they do want money. Lots of money. I should have mentioned that. In that respect, secret services and their customers are like anyone else, I'm afraid. They value most what costs most, and Merlin costs a fortune. Ever bought a fake picture?'

'I sold a couple once,' said Toby with a flashy, nervous smile, but no one laughed.

'The more you pay for it, the less inclined you are to doubt it. Silly, but there we are. It's also comforting for everyone to know that Merlin is venal. That's a motive we all understand, right, Toby? Specially in the Treasury. Twenty thousand francs a month into a Swiss bank: well, there's no knowing who wouldn't bend a few egalitarian principles for money like that. So Whitehall pays him a fortune, and calls his intelligence priceless. And some of it is good,' Smiley conceded. 'Very good, I do think, and so it should be. Then one day, Gerald admits Percy to the greatest secret of all. The Merlin caucus has a London end. It's the start, I should tell you now, of a very, very clever knot.'

Toby put down his cup and with his handkerchief primly dabbed the corners of his mouth.

'According to Gerald, a member of the Soviet Embassy here in London is actually ready and able to act as Merlin's London representative. He is even in the extraordinary position of being able to use, on rare occasions, the Embassy facilities to talk to Merlin in Moscow, to send and receive messages. And if every imaginable precaution is taken, it is even possible now and then for Gerald to arrange clandestine meetings with this wonderman, to brief and debrief him, to put follow-up questions and receive answers from Merlin almost by return of post. We'll call this Soviet official Aleksey Aleksandrovich Polyakov, and we'll pretend he's a member of the cultural section of the Soviet Embassy. Are you with me?'

'I didn't hear anything,' said Esterhase. 'I gone deaf.'

'The story is, he's been a member of the London Embassy quite a while - nine years to be precise - but Merlin's only recently added him to the flock. While Polyakov was on leave in Moscow, perhaps?'

'I'm not hearing nothing.'

'Very quickly Polyakov becomes important, because before long Gerald appoints him linchpin of the Witchcraft operation and a lot more besides. The dead drops in Amsterdam and Paris, the secret inks, the microdots: they all go on all right, but at less of a pitch. The convenience of having Polyakov right on the doorstep is too good to miss. Some of Merlin's best material is smuggled to London by diplomatic bag: all Polyakov has to do is slit open the envelopes and pass them to his counterpart in the Circus: Gerald or whomever Gerald nominates. But we must never forget that this part of the Merlin operation is deathly, deathly secret. The Witchcraft committee itself is of course secret too, but large. That's inevitable. The operation is large, the take is large, processing and distribution alone requires a mass of clerical supervision: transcribers, translators, codists, typists, evaluators and God knows what. None of that worries Gerald at all, of course: he likes it in fact, because the art of being Gerald is to be one of a crowd. Is the Witchcraft committee led from below? From the middle or from the top? I rather like Karla's description of committees don't you? Is it Chinese? A committee is an animal with four back legs.

'But the London end - Polyakov's leg - that part is confined to the original magic circle. Skordeno, de Silsky, all the pack: they can tear off abroad and devil like mad for Merlin away from home. But here in London, the operation involving brother Polyakov, the way that knot is tied, that's a very special secret, for very special reasons. You, Percy, Bill Haydon and Roy Bland. You four are the magic circle. Right? Now let's just speculate about how it works, in detail. There's a house, we know that. All the same, meetings there are very elaborately arranged, we can be sure of that, can't we? Who meets him, Toby? Who has the handling of Polyakov? You? Roy? Bill?'

Taking the fat end of his tie, Smiley turned the silk lining outwards and began polishing his glasses. 'Everyone does,' he said, answering his own question. 'How's that? Sometimes Percy meets him. I would guess Percy represents the authoritarian side with him: "Isn't it time you took a holiday? Have you heard from your wife this week?" Percy would be good at that. But the Witchcraft committee uses Percy sparingly. Percy's the big gun and he must have rarity value. Then there's Bill Haydon; Bill meets him. That would happen more often, I think. Bill's impressive on Russia and he has entertainment value. I have a feeling that he and Polyakov would hit it off pretty well. I would think Bill shone when it came to the briefing and the follow-up questions, wouldn't you? Making certain that the right messages went to Moscow? Sometimes he takes Roy Bland with him, sometimes he sends Roy on his own. I expect that's something they work out between themselves. And Roy of course is an economic expert, as well as top man on satellites, so there'll be lots to talk about in that department also. And sometimes - I imagine birthdays, Toby, or a Christmas, or special presentations of thanks and money - there's a small fortune written down to entertainment, I notice, let alone bounties - sometimes, to make the party go, you all four trot along, and raise your glasses to the king across the water: to Merlin, through his envoy, Polyakov. Finally I suppose Toby himself has things to talk to friend Polyakov about. There's tradecraft to discuss, there are the useful snippets about goings-on inside the Embassy, which are so handy to the lamplighters in their bread-and-butter surveillance operations against the residency. So Toby also has his solo sessions. After all, we shouldn't overlook Polyakov's local potential, quite apart from his role as Merlin's London representative. It's not every day we have a tame Soviet diplomat in London eating out of our hands. A little training with a camera and Polyakov could be very useful just at the straight domestic level. Provided we all remember our priorities.'

His gaze had not left Toby's face. 'I can imagine that Polyakov might run to quite a few reels of film, can't you? And that one of the jobs of whoever was seeing him might be to replenish his stock: take him little sealed packets. Packets of film. Unexposed film, of course, since it came from the Circus. Tell me, Toby, could you please, is Lapin a name to you?'

A lick, a frown, a smile, a forward movement of the head: 'Sure, George, I know Lapin.'

'Who ordered the lamplighter reports on Lapin destroyed?'

'I did, George.'

'On your own initiative?'

The smile broadened a fraction. 'Listen, George, I made some rungs up the ladder these days.'

'Who said Connie Sachs had to be pushed downhill?'

'Look, I think it was Percy, okay? Say it was Percy, maybe Bill. You know how it is in a big operation. Shoes to mend, pots to clean, always a thing going.' He shrugged. 'Maybe it was Roy, huh?'

'So you take orders from all of them,' said Smiley lightly. 'That's very indiscriminate of you, Toby. You should know better.'

Esterhase didn't like that at all.

'Who told you to cool off Max, Toby? Was it the same three people? Only I have to report all this to Lacon, you see. He's being awfully pressing just at the moment. He seems to have the Minister on his back. Who was it?'

'George, you been talking to the wrong guys.'

'One of us has,' Smiley agreed pleasantly. 'That's for sure. They also want to know about Westerby: just who put the muzzle on him. Was it the same person who sent you down to Sarratt with a thousand quid in notes and a brief to put Jim Prideaux's mind at rest? It's only facts I'm after, Toby, not scalps. You know me, I'm not the vindictive sort. Anyway, what's to say you're not a very loyal fellow? It's just a question of who to.' He added: 'Only they do badly want to know, you see. There's even some ugly talk of calling in the competition. Nobody wants that, do they? It's like going to solicitors when you've had a row with your wife: an irrevocable step. Who gave you the message for Jim about Tinker, Tailor? Did you know what it meant? Did you have it straight from Polyakov, was that it?'

'For God's sake,' Guillam whispered. 'Let me sweat the bastard.'

Smiley ignored him. 'Let's keep talking about Lapin. What was his job over here?'

'He worked for Polyakov.'

'His secretary in the cultural department?'

'His legman.'

'But my dear Toby: what on earth is a cultural attaché doing with his own legman?'

Esterhase's eyes were on Smiley all the time. He's like a dog, thought Guillam, he doesn't know whether to expect a kick or a bone. They flickered from Smiley's face to his hands, then back to his face, constantly checking the tell-tale places.

'Don't be damn silly, George,' Toby said carelessly. 'Polyakov is working for Moscow Centre. You know that as well as I do.' He crossed his little legs and, with a resurgence of all his former insolence, sat back in his chair and took a sip of cold tea.

Whereas Smiley, to Guillam's eye, appeared momentarily set back; from which Guillam in his confusion drily inferred that he was doubtless very pleased with himself. Perhaps because Toby was at last doing the talking.

'Come on, George,' Toby said. 'You're not a child. Think how many operations we ran this way. We buy Polyakov, okay? Polyakov's a Moscow hood but he's our joe. But he's got to pretend to his own people that he's spying on us. How else does he get away with it? How does he walk in and out of that house all day, no gorillas, no babysitters, everything so easy? He comes down to our shop so he got to take home the goodies. So we give him goodies. Chickenfeed, so he can pass it home and everyone in Moscow clap him on the back and tell him he's a big guy, happens every day.'

If Guillam's head by now was reeling with a kind of furious awe, Smiley's seemed remarkably clear.

'And that's pretty much the standard story, is it, among the four initiated?'

'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 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 chickenfeed, 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 lifeline. 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 chickenfeed, 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 chickenfeed 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 you 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 chickenfeed? No one. Never. It's the best. You get one guy with a big mouth starts shooting 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 babysitters, 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 got 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 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 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 western 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 an off-licence. 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 off-licence with his brown bag, he 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 racquet jammed behind the safe of his room in Brixton, which brought tears to the eyes of his unemotional secretary.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Probably 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 Elysees, Ricki Tarr would unlock the passenger door and hold him up at gun-point. 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 insecure 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 extra-territorial registration and CC 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 chalkmark here and there, play postman to some ploy by London Station, and show a time to the visiting firemen.

Until now, that was, as he sat in his own car with Tarr's gun jammed against his rib-cage, and Tarr's hand resting affectionately on his right shoulder, ready to wrench his head off if he tried any monkey business. A couple of feet away, girls hurried past on their way to the Metro and six feet beyond that the traffic had come to a standstill: it could stay that way for an hour. None was faintly stirred by the sight of two men having a cosy chat in a parked car.

Tarr had been talking ever since Mackelvore sat down. He needed to send a message to Alleline, he said. It would be personal and decypher yourself and Tarr would like Steve to work the machine for him while Tarr stood off with the gun.

'What the hell have you been up to, Ricki?' Mackelvore complained, as they walked arm in arm back to the residency. 'The whole Service is looking for you, you know that, don't you? They'll skin you alive if they find you. We're supposed to do bloodcurdling things to you on sight.'

He thought of turning into the hold and smacking Tarr's neck but he knew he hadn't the speed, and Tarr would kill him.

The message would run to about two hundred groups, said Tarr, as Mackelvore unlocked the front door and put on the lights. When Steve had transmitted them they would sit on the machine and wait for Percy's answer. By tomorrow, if Tarr's instinct was correct, Percy would be coming over to Paris hotfoot to have a conference with Ricki. This conference would also take place in the residency, because Tarr reckoned it was marginally less likely that the Russians would try to kill him on British consular premises.

'You're berserk, Ricki. It's not the Russians who want to kill you. It's us.'

The front room was called Reception, it was what remained of the cover. It had an old wooden counter and out of date Notices to British Subjects hanging on the grimy wall. Here, with his left hand, Tarr searched Mackelvore for a weapon but found none. It was a courtyard house and most of the sensitive stuff was across the yard: the cypher room, the strong room and the machines.

'You're out of your mind, Ricki,' Mackelvore warned monotonously, as he led the way through a couple of empty offices and pressed the bell to the cypher room. 'You always thought you were Napoleon Bonaparte and now it's got you completely. You'd too much religion from your Dad.'

The steel message hatch slid back and a mystified, slightly silly face appeared in the opening. 'You can go home, Ben boy. Go home to your missus but stay close to your phone in case I need you, there's a lad. Leave the books where they are and put the keys in the machines. I'll be talking to London presently, under my own steam.'

The face withdrew and they waited while the boy unlocked the door from inside: one key, two keys, a spring lock.

'This gentleman's from out East, Ben,' Mackelvore explained as the door opened. 'He's one of my most distinguished connections.'

'Hullo, sir,' said Ben. He was a tall, mathematical-looking boy with spectacles and an unblinking gaze.

'Get along with you, Ben. I'll not dock it against your duty pay. You've the weekend free on full rates, and you'll not owe me time either. Off you go, then.'

'Ben stays here,' said Tarr.

In Cambridge Circus the lighting was quite yellow and from where Mendel stood, on the third floor of the clothes shop, the wet tarmac glistened like cheap gold. It was nearly midnight and he had been standing three hours. He stood between a net curtain and a clothes-horse. He stood the way coppers stand the world over, weight on both feet equally, legs straight, leaning slightly backward over the line of balance. He had pulled his hat low and turned up his collar to keep the white of his face from the street, but his eyes as they watched the front entrance below him glittered like a cat's eyes in a coal hole. He would wait another three hours or another six: Mendel was back on the beat, the scent of the hunt was in his nostrils. Better still, he was a night bird; the darkness of that fitting room woke him wonderfully. Such light as reached him from the street lay upside down in pale pieces on the ceiling. All the rest, the cutting benches, the bolts of cloth, the draped machines, the steam iron, the signed photographs of princes of the blood, these were there because he had seen them on his reconnaissance that afternoon; the light did not reach them and even now he could barely make them out.

From his window he covered most of the approaches: eight or nine unequal roads and alleys which for no good reason had chosen Cambridge Circus as their meeting point. Between them, the buildings were gimcrack, cheaply fitted out with bits of empire: a Roman bank, a theatre like a vast desecrated mosque. Behind them, high-rise blocks advanced like an army of robots. Above, a pink sky was slowly filling with fog.

Why was it so quiet? he wondered. The theatre had long emptied but why didn't the pleasure trade of Soho, only a stone's-throw from his window, fill the place with taxis, groups of loiterers? Not a single fruit lorry had rumbled down Shaftesbury Avenue on its way to Covent Garden.

Through his binoculars Mendel once more studied the building straight across the road from him. It seemed to sleep even more soundly than its neighbours. The twin doors of the portico were closed and no light was visible in the ground-floor windows. Only on the fourth floor, out of the second window from the left, a pale glow issued and Mendel knew it was the duty officer's room; Smiley had told him. Briefly he raised the glasses to the roof, where a plantation of aerials made wild patterns against the sky; then down a floor to the four blackened windows of the radio section.

'At night everyone uses the front door,' Guillam had said. 'It's an economy measure to cut down on janitors.'

In those three hours, only three events had rewarded Mendel's vigil: one an hour is not much. At half past nine a blue Ford Transit delivered two men carrying what looked like an ammunition box. They unlocked the door for themselves and closed it as soon as they were inside, while Mendel murmured his commentary into the telephone. At ten o'clock the shuttle arrived: Guillam had warned him of this too. The shuttle collected hot documents from the out-stations and stored them for safekeeping at the Circus over the weekend. It called at Brixton, Acton and Sarratt in that order, said Guillam, lastly at the Admiralty, and it made the Circus by about ten. In the event it arrived on the dot of ten, and this time two men from inside the building came out to help unload; Mendel reported that too, and Smiley acknowledged with a patient 'Thank you'.

Was Smiley sitting down? Was he in the darkness like Mendel? Mendel had a notion he was. Of all the odd coves he had known, Smiley was the oddest. You thought, to look at him, that he couldn't cross the road alone, but you might as well have offered protection to a hedgehog. Funnies, Mendel mused. A lifetime of chasing villains and how do I end up? Breaking and entering, standing in the dark and spying on the Funnies. He'd never held with Funnies till he met Smiley. Thought they were an interfering lot of amateurs and college boys; thought they were unconstitutional; thought the best thing the Branch could do, for its own sake and the public's, was say 'Yes, sir, no, sir' and lose the correspondence. Come to think of it, with the notable exception of Smiley and Guillam, that's exactly what he thought tonight.

Shortly before eleven, just an hour ago, a cab arrived. A plain licensed London hackney cab, and it drew up at the theatre. Even that was something Smiley had warned him about: it was the habit within the service not to take taxis to the door. Some stopped at Foyles, some in Old Compton Street or at one of the shops; most people had a favourite cover destination and Alleline's was the theatre. Mendel had never seen Alleline but he had their description of him and as he watched him through the glasses he recognised him without a doubt, a big, lumbering fellow in a dark coat, even noticed how the cabby had pulled a bad face at his tip and called something after him as Alleline delved for his keys.

The front door is not secured, Guillam had explained, it is only locked. The security begins inside once you have turned left at the end of the corridor. Alleline lives on the fifth floor. You won't see his windows light up but there's a skylight and the glow should catch the chimney stack. Sure enough, as he watched, a patch of yellow appeared on the grimy brickwork of the chimney: Alleline had entered his room.

And young Guillam needs a holiday, thought Mendel. He'd seen that happen before, too: the tough ones who crack at forty. They lock it away, pretend it isn't there, lean on grown-ups who turn out not to be so grown up after all, then one day it's all over them, and their heroes come tumbling down and they're sitting at their desks with the tears pouring on to the blotter.

He had laid the receiver on the floor. Picking it up, he said: 'Looks like Tinker's clocked in.'

He gave the number of the cab, then went back to waiting. 'How did he look?' Smiley murmured.

'Busy,' said Mendel.

'So he should be.'

That one won't crack, though, Mendel decided with approval; one of your flabby oak trees, Smiley was. Think you could blow him over with one puff but when it comes to the storm he's the only one left standing at the end of it. At this point in his reflections a second cab drew up, squarely at the front entrance, and a tall slow figure cautiously climbed the steps one at a time like a man who takes care of his heart.

'Here's your Tailor,' Mendel murmured into the telephone. 'Hold on, here's Soldier-boy too. Proper gathering of the clans by the look of it. I say, take it easy.'

An old Mercedes 190 shot out of Earlham Street, swung directly beneath his window, and held the curve with difficulty as far as the northern outlet of the Charing Cross Road, where it parked. A young heavy fellow with ginger hair clambered out, slammed the door and clumped across the street to the entrance without taking the key out of the dash. A moment later another light went up on the fourth floor as Roy Bland joined the party.

All we need to know now is who comes out, thought Mendel.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Lock Gardens, which presumably drew its name from the Camden and Hampstead Road Locks nearby, was a terrace of four flat-fronted nineteenth-century houses built at the centre of a crescent, each with three floors and a basement and a strip of walled back garden running down to the Regent's Canal. The numbers ran two to five: number one had either fallen down or never been built. Number five made up the north end and as a safe house it could not have been improved, for there were three approaches in thirty yards and the canal towpath offered two more. To the north lay Camden High Street for joining traffic; south and west lay the parks and Primrose Hill. Better still, the neighbourhood possessed no social identity and demanded none. Some of the houses had been turned into one-roomed flats, and had ten door bells laid out like a typewriter. Some were got up grandly and had only one. Number five had two: one for Millie McCraig and one for her lodger Mr Jefferson.

Mrs McCraig was churchy and collected for everything, which was incidentally an excellent way of keeping an eye on the locals, though that was scarcely how they viewed her zeal. Jefferson, her lodger, was known vaguely to be foreign and in oil and away a lot. Lock Gardens was his pied-à-terre. The neighbours, when they bothered to notice him, found him shy and respectable. They would have formed the same impression of George Smiley if they happened to spot him in the dim light of the porch at nine that evening as Millie McCraig admitted him to her front room and drew the pious curtains.

She was a wiry Scottish widow with brown stockings and bobbed hair and the polished, wrinkled skin of an old man. In the interest of God and the Circus she had run Bible Schools in Mozambique and a seamen's mission in Hamburg and though she had been a professional eavesdropper for twenty years since then, she was still inclined to treat all menfolk as transgressors. Smiley had no way of telling what she thought. Her manner, from the moment he arrived, had a deep and lonely stillness; she showed him round the house like a chatelaine whose guests had long since died.

First the semi-basement where she lived herself, full of plants and that medley of old postcards, brass table tops and carved black furniture which seems to attach itself to travelled British ladies of a certain age and class. Yes, if the Circus wanted her at night they rang her on the basement phone. Yes, there was a separate line upstairs, but it was only for outgoing calls. The basement phone had an extension in the upstairs dining room. Then up to the ground floor, a veritable shrine to the costly bad taste of the housekeepers: loud Regency stripes, gilded reproduction chairs, plush sofas with roped corners. The kitchen was untouched and squalid. Beyond it lay a glass outhouse, half conservatory, half scullery, which looked down to the rough garden and the canal. Strewn over the tiled floor: an old mangle, a copper and crates of tonic water.

'Where are the mikes, Millie?' Smiley had returned to the drawing room.

They were in pairs, Millie murmured, bedded behind the wallpaper, two pairs to each room on the ground floor, one to each room upstairs. Each pair was connected with a separate recorder. He followed her up the steep stairs. The top floor was unfurnished, save for an attic bedroom which contained a grey steel frame with eight tape machines, four up, four down.

'And Jefferson knows all about this?'

'Mr Jefferson,' said Millie primly, 'is run on a basis of trust.' That was the nearest she came to expressing her disapproval of Smiley, or her devotion to Christian ethics.

Downstairs again, she showed him the switches which controlled the system. An extra switch was fitted in each finger panel. Any time Jefferson or one of the boys, as she put it, wanted to go over to record, he had only to get up and turn down the left-hand light switch. From then on, the system was voice-activated; that is to say, the tape deck did not turn unless somebody was speaking.

'And where are you while all this goes on, Millie?'

She remained downstairs, she said, as if that were a woman's place.

Smiley was pulling open cupboards, lockers, walking from room to room. Then back to the scullery again, with its view to the canal. Taking out a pocket torch he signalled one flash into the darkness of the garden.

'What are the safety procedures?' Smiley asked, as he thoughtfully fingered the end light switch by the drawing-room door.

Her reply came in a liturgical monotone: 'Two full milk bottles on the doorstep, you may come in and all's well. No milk bottles and you're not to enter.'

From the direction of the sunroom came a faint tapping. Returning to the scullery Smiley opened the glazed door and after a hastily murmured conversation reappeared with Guillam.

'You know Peter, don't you, Millie?'

Millie might, she might not, her little hard eyes had fixed on him with scorn. He was studying the switch panel, feeling in his pocket as he did so.

'What's he doing? He's not to do that. Stop him.'

If she was worried, said Smiley, she should ring Lacon on the basement phone. Millie McCraig didn't stir, but two red bruises had appeared on her leathery cheeks and she was snapping her fingers in anger. With a small screwdriver Guillam had cautiously removed the screws from either side of the plastic panel, and was peering at the wiring behind. Now, very carefully, he turned the end switch upside down, twisting it on its wires, then screwed the plate back in position, leaving the remaining switches undisturbed.

'We'll just try it,' said Guillam, and while Smiley went upstairs to check the tape deck, Guillam sang 'Old Man River' in a low Paul Robeson growl.

'Thank you,' said Smiley with a shudder, coming down again, 'that's more than enough.'

Millie had gone to the basement to ring Lacon. Quietly, Smiley set the stage. He put the telephone beside an armchair in the drawing room, then cleared his line of retreat to the scullery. He fetched two bottles of milk from the Coca-Cola ice-box in the kitchen and placed them on the doorstep to signify, in the eclectic language of Millie McCraig, that you may come in and all's well. He removed his shoes and left them in the scullery, and having put out all the lights, took up his post in the armchair just as Mendel made his connecting call.

On the canal towpath, meanwhile, Guillam had resumed his vigil of the house. The footpath is closed to the public one hour before dark: after that it can be anything from a trysting place for lovers to a haven for down-and-outs; both, for different reasons, are attracted by the darkness of the bridges. That cold night Guillam saw neither. Occasionally an empty train raced past, leaving a still greater emptiness behind. His nerves were so taut, his expectations so varied, that for a moment he saw the whole architecture of that night in apocalyptic terms: the signals on the railway bridge turned to gallows, the Victorian warehouses to gigantic prisons, their windows barred and arched against the misty sky. Closer at hand, the ripple of rats and the stink of still water. Then the drawing room lights went out; the house stood in darkness except for the chinks of yellow to either side of Millie's basement window. From the scullery a pin of light winked at him down the unkempt garden. Taking a pen torch from his pocket he slipped out the silver hood, sighted it with shaking fingers at the point from which the light had come, and signalled back. From now on they could only wait.

Tarr tossed the incoming telegram back to Ben, together with the one-time pad from the safe.

'Come on,' he said, 'earn your pay. Unbutton it.'

'It's personal for you,' Ben objected. 'Look. "Personal from Alleline decypher yourself." I'm not allowed to touch it. It's the tops.'

'Do as he asks, Ben,' said Mackelvore, watching Tarr.

For ten minutes no word passed between the three men. Tarr was standing across the room from them, very nervous from the waiting. He had jammed the gun in his waistband, butt inward to the groin. His jacket lay over a chair. The sweat had stuck his shirt to his back all the way down. Ben was using a ruler to read off the number groups, then carefully writing his findings on the block of graph paper before him. To concentrate he put his tongue against his teeth, and now he made a small click as he withdrew it. Putting aside his pencil, he offered Tarr the tearsheet.

'Read it aloud,' Tarr said.

Ben's voice was kindly, and a little fervent. ' "Personal for Tarr from Alleline decypher yourself. I positively require clarification and/or trade samples before meeting your request. Quote information vital to safeguarding of the Service unquote does not qualify. Let me remind you of your bad position here following your disgraceful disappearance stop urge you confide Mackelvore immediately repeat immediately stop Chief."'

Ben had not quite finished before Tarr began laughing in a strange, excited way.

'That's the way, Percy boy!' he cried. 'Yes repeat no! Know why he's stalling, Ben, darling? He's sizing up to shoot me in the bloody back! That's how he got my Russki girl. He's playing the same tune, the bastard.' He was ruffling Ben's hair, shouting at him, laughing. 'I warn you Ben: there's some damn lousy people in this outfit, so don't you trust the one of them, I'm telling you, or you'll never grow up strong!'

Alone in the darkness of the drawing room Smiley also waited, sitting in the housekeeper's uncomfortable chair, his head propped awkwardly against the earpiece of the telephone. Occasionally he would mutter something and Mendel would mutter back, most of the time they shared the silence. His mood was subdued, even a little glum. Like an actor he had a sense of approaching anti-climax before the curtain went up, a sense of great things dwindling to a small, mean end; as death itself seemed small and mean to him after the struggles of his life. He had no sense of conquest that he knew of. His thoughts, as often when he was afraid, concerned people. He had no theories or judgments in particular. He simply wondered how everyone would be affected; and he felt responsible. He thought of Jim and Sam and Max and Connie and Jerry Westerby and personal loyalties all broken; in a separate category he thought of Ann and the hopeless dislocation of their talk on the Cornish cliffs; he wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion; he wished he could just get up and walk out before it happened, but he couldn't. He worried, in a quite paternal way, about Guillam, and wondered how he would take the late strains of growing up. He thought again of the day he buried Control. He thought about treason and wondered whether there was mindless treason in the same way, supposedly, as there was mindless violence. It worried him that he felt so bankrupt; that whatever intellectual or philosophical precepts he clung to broke down entirely now that he was faced with the human situation.

'Anything?' he asked Mendel, into the telephone.

'A couple of drunks,' said Mendel, 'singing "See the jungle when it's wet with rain".'

'Never heard of it.'

Changing the telephone to his left side he drew the gun from the wallet pocket of his jacket, where it had already ruined the excellent silk lining. He discovered the safety catch and for a moment played with the idea that he didn't know which way was on and which way off. He snapped out the magazine and put it back, and remembered doing this hundreds of times on the trot, in the night range at Sarratt before the war; he remembered how you always shot with two hands, sir, one to hold the gun and one the magazine, sir; and how there was a piece of Circus folklore which demanded that he should lay his finger along the barrel and pull the trigger with his second. But when he tried it the sensation was ridiculous and he forgot about it.

'Just taking a walk,' he murmured, and Mendel said 'Righty ho.'

The gun still in his hand he returned to the scullery, listening for a creak in the floorboards that might give him away, but the floor must have been concrete under the tatty carpet; he could have jumped and caused not even a vibration. With his torch he signalled two short flashes, a long delay then two more. At once Guillam replied with three short.

'Back again.'

'Got you,' said Mendel.

He settled, thinking glumly of Ann: to dream the impossible dream. He put the gun in his pocket. From the canal side, the moan of a hooter. At night? Boats moving at night? Must be a car. What if Gerald has a whole emergency procedure which we know nothing about? A callbox to callbox, a car pick-up? What if Polyakov has after all a legman, a helper whom Connie never identified. He'd been through that already. This system was built to be watertight, to accommodate meetings in all contingencies. When it comes to tradecraft, Karla is a pedant.

And his fancy that he was being followed? What of that? What of the shadow he never saw, only felt, till his back seemed to tingle with the intensity of his watcher's gaze; he saw nothing, heard nothing, only felt. He was too old not to heed the warning. The creak of a stair that had not creaked before; the rustle of a shutter when no wind was blowing; the car with a different number plate but the same scratch on the offside wing; the face on the underground that you know you have seen somewhere before: for years at a time these were signs he had lived by; any one of them was reason enough to move, change towns, identities. For in that profession there is no such thing as coincidence.

'One gone,' said Mendel suddenly. 'Hullo?'

'I'm here.'

Somebody had just come out of the Circus, said Mendel. Front door but he couldn't be certain of the identification. Mackintosh and hat. Bulky and moving fast. Must have ordered a cab to the door and stepped straight into it.

'Heading north, your way.'

Smiley looked at his watch. Give him ten minutes, he thought. Give him twelve, he'll have to stop and phone Polyakov on the way. Then he thought: don't be silly, he's done that already from the Circus.

'I'm ringing off,' said Smiley.

'Cheers,' said Mendel.

On the footpath, Guillam read three long flashes. The mole is on his way.

In the scullery Smiley had once more checked his thoroughfare, shoved some deck chairs aside and pinned a string to the mangle to guide him because he saw badly in the dark. The string led to the open kitchen door, the kitchen led to the drawing room and dining room both, it had the two doors side by side. The kitchen was a long room, actually an annexe to the house before the glass scullery was added. He had thought of using the dining room but it was too risky and besides from the dining room he couldn't signal to Guillam. So he waited in the scullery, feeling absurd in his stockinged feet, polishing his spectacles because the heat of his face kept misting them. It was much colder in the scullery. The drawing room was close and overheated but the scullery had these outside walls, and this glass and this concrete floor beneath the matting, which made his feet feel wet. The mole arrives first, he thought, the mole plays host: that is protocol, part of the pretence that Polyakov is Gerald's agent.

A London taxi is a flying bomb.

The comparison rose in him slowly, from deep in his unconscious memory. The clatter as it barges into the crescent, the metric tick-tick as the bass notes die. The cut-off: where has it stopped, which house, when all of us in the street are waiting in the dark, crouching under tables or clutching pieces of string, which house? Then the slam of the door, the explosive anti-climax: if you can hear it, it's not for you.

But Smiley heard it, and it was for him.

He heard the tread of one pair of feet on the gravel, brisk and vigorous. They stopped. It's the wrong door, Smiley thought absurdly, go away. He had the gun in his hand, he had dropped the catch. Still he listened, heard nothing. You're suspicious, Gerald, he thought. You're an old mole, you can sniff there's something wrong. Millie, he thought: Millie has taken away the milk bottles, put up a warning, headed him off. Millie's spoilt the kill. Then he heard the latch turn, one turn, two, it's a Banham lock, he remembered, my God we must keep Banham's in business. Of course: the mole had been patting his pockets; looking for his key. A nervous man would have had it in his hand already, would have been clutching it, cosseting it in his pocket all the way in the taxi; but not the mole. The mole might be worried but he was not nervous. At the same moment as the latch turned, the bell chimed: housekeeper's taste again, high tone, low tone, high tone. That will mean it's one of us, Millie had said; one of the boys, her boys, Connie's boys, Karla's boys. The front door opened, someone stepped into the house, he heard the shuffle of the mat, he heard the door close, he heard the light switches snap and saw a pale line appear under the kitchen door. He put the gun in his pocket and wiped the palm of his hand on his jacket, then took it out again and in the same moment he heard a second flying bomb, a second taxi pulling up, and footsteps fast: Polyakov didn't just have the key ready, he had his taxi money ready too: do Russians tip, he wondered, or is tipping undemocratic? Again the bell rang, the front door opened and closed, and Smiley heard the double chink as two milk bottles were put on the hall table in the interest of good order and sound tradecraft.

Lord save me, thought Smiley in horror as he stared at the old Coca-Cola ice box beside him, it never crossed my mind: suppose he had wanted to put them back in the fridge?

The strip of light under the kitchen door grew suddenly brighter as the drawing room lights were switched on. An extraordinary stillness descended over the house. Holding the string, Smiley edged forward over the icy floor. Then he heard voices. At first they were indistinct. They must still be at the far end of the room, he thought. Or perhaps they always begin in a low tone. Now Polyakov came nearer: he was at the trolley, pouring drinks.

'What is our cover story in case we are disturbed?' he asked in good English.

Lovely voice, Smiley remembered, mellow like yours, I often used to play the tapes twice just to hear him speaking. Connie, you should hear him now.

From the further end of the room still, a muffled murmur answered each question. Smiley could make nothing of it. 'Where shall we regroup?' 'What is our fallback?' 'Have you anything on you that you would prefer me to be carrying during our talk, bearing in mind I have diplomatic immunity?'

It must be a catechism, Smiley thought, part of Karla's school routine.

'Is the switch down? Will you please check? Thank you. What will you drink?'

'Scotch,' said Haydon, 'a bloody great big one.'

With a feeling of utter disbelief, Smiley listened to the familiar voice reading aloud the very telegram which Smiley himself had drafted for Tarr's use only forty-eight hours ago.

Then for a moment one part of Smiley broke into open revolt against the other. The wave of angry doubt which had swept over him in Lacon's garden, and ever since had pulled against his progress like a worrying tide, drove him now on to the rocks of despair, and then to mutiny: I refuse. Nothing is worth the destruction of another human being. Somewhere the path of pain and betrayal must end. Until that happened, there was no future: there was only a continued slide into still more terrifying versions of the present. This man was my friend and Ann's lover, Jim's friend and for all I know Jim's lover too; it was the treason, not the man, that belonged to the public domain.

Haydon had betrayed. As a lover, a colleague, a friend; as a patriot, as a member of that inestimable body which Ann loosely called the Set: in every capacity, Haydon had overtly pursued one aim and secretly achieved its opposite. Smiley knew very well that even now he did not grasp the scope of that appalling duplicity; yet there was a part of him that rose already in Haydon's defence. Was not Bill also betrayed? Connie's lament rang in his ears: 'Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves... You're the last, George, you and Bill.' He saw with painful clarity an ambitious man born to the big canvas, brought up to rule, divide and conquer, whose visions and vanities all were fixed, like Percy's, upon the world's game; for whom the reality was a poor island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the water. Thus Smiley felt not only disgust; but, despite all that the moment meant to him, a surge of resentment against the institutions he was supposed to be protecting: 'The social contract cuts both ways, you know,' said Lacon. The Minister's lolling mendacity, Lacon's tight-lipped moral complacency, the bludgeoning greed of Percy Alleline: such men invalidated any contract: why should anyone be loyal to them?

He knew, of course. He had always known it was Bill. Just as Control had known, and Lacon in Mendel's house. Just as Connie and Jim had known, and Alleline and Esterhase, all of them had tacitly shared that unexpressed half-knowledge which like an illness they hoped would go away if it was never owned to, never diagnosed.

And Ann? Did Ann know? Was that the shadow that fell over them that day on the Cornish cliffs?

For a space, that was how Smiley stood: a fat, barefooted spy, as Ann would say, deceived in love and impotent in hate, clutching a gun in one hand, a bit of string in the other, as he waited in the darkness. Then, gun still in hand, he tiptoed backward as far as the window, from which he signalled five short flashes in quick succession. Having waited long enough to read the acknowledgment, he returned to his listening post.

Guillam raced down the canal tow-path, the torch jolting wildly in his hand, till he reached a low-arched bridge and a steel stairway which led upward in zigzags to Gloucester Avenue. The gate was closed and he had to climb it, ripping one sleeve to the elbow. Lacon was standing at the corner of Princess Road, wearing an old country coat and carrying a briefcase.

'He's there. He's arrived,' Guillam whispered. 'He's got Gerald.'

'I won't have bloodshed,' Lacon warned. 'I want absolute calm.'

Guillam didn't bother to reply. Thirty yards down the road Mendel was waiting in a tame cab. They drove for two minutes, not so much, and stopped the cab short of the crescent. Guillam was holding Esterhase's doorkey. Reaching number five, Mendel and Guillam stepped over the gate rather than risk the noise of it and kept to the grass verge. As they went, Guillam glanced back and thought for a moment he saw a figure watching them, man or woman he couldn't tell, from the shadow of a doorway across the road; but when he drew Mendel's attention to the spot there was nothing there, and Mendel ordered him quite roughly to calm down. The porch light was out. Guillam went ahead, Mendel waited under an apple tree. Guillam inserted the key, felt the lock ease as he turned it. Damn fool, he thought triumphantly, why didn't you drop the latch? He pushed open the door an inch and hesitated. He was breathing slowly, filling his lungs for action. Mendel moved forward another bound. In the street two young boys went by, laughing loudly because they were nervous of the night. Once more Guillam looked back but the crescent was clear. He stepped into the hall. He was wearing suede shoes and they squeaked on the parquet; there was no carpet. At the drawing room door he listened long enough for the fury to break in him at last.

His butchered agents in Morocco, his exile to Brixton, the daily frustration of his efforts as daily he grew older and youth slipped through his fingers; the drabness that was closing round him; the truncation of his power to love, enjoy and laugh; the constant erosion of the plain, heroic standards he wished to live by; the checks and stops he imposed on himself in the name of tacit dedication; he could fling them all in Haydon's sneering face. Haydon, once his confessor; Haydon, always good for a laugh, a chat and a cup of burnt coffee; Haydon, a model on which he built his life.

More, far more. Now that he saw, he knew. Haydon was more than his model, he was his inspiration, the torch-bearer of a certain kind of antiquated romanticism, a notion of English calling which - for the very reason that it was vague and understated and elusive - had made sense of Guillam's life till now. In that moment, Guillam felt not merely betrayed; but orphaned. His suspicions, his resentments for so long turned outwards on the real world - on his women, his attempted loves - now swung upon the Circus and the failed magic which had formed his faith. With all his force he shoved open the door and sprang inside, gun in hand. Haydon and a heavy man with a black forelock were seated either side of a small table. Polyakov - Guillam recognised him from the photographs - was smoking a very English pipe. He wore a grey cardigan with a zip down the front, like the top half of a track suit. He had not even taken the pipe from his mouth before Guillam had Haydon by the collar. With a single heave he lifted him straight out of his chair. He had thrown away his gun and was hurling Haydon from side to side, shaking him like a dog, shouting. Then suddenly there seemed no point. After all, it was only Bill and they had done a lot together. Guillam had drawn back long before Mendel took his arm, and he heard Smiley, politely as ever inviting 'Bill and Colonel Viktorov', as he called them, to raise their hands and place them on their heads till Percy Alleline arrived.

'There was no one out there, was there, that you noticed?' Smiley asked of Guillam, while they waited.

'Quiet as the grave,' said Mendel, answering for both of them.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur. For Guillam and all those present, this was one. Smiley's continued distraction and his frequent cautious glances from the window; Haydon's indifference, Polyakov's predictable fit of indignation, his demands to be treated as became a member of the Diplomatic Corps - demands which Guillam from his place on the sofa tersely threatened to meet - the flustered arrival of Alleline and Bland, more protestations and the pilgrimage upstairs where Smiley played the tapes, the long glum silence that followed their return to the drawing room; the arrival of Lacon and finally of Esterhase and Fawn, Millie McCraig's silent ministrations with the teapot: all these events and cameos unrolled with a theatrical unreality which, much like the trip to Ascot an age before, was intensified by the unreality of the hour of the day. It was also true that these incidents, which included at an early point the physical constraint of Polyakov, and a stream of Russian abuse directed at Fawn for hitting him, heaven knows where, despite Mendel's vigilance, were like a silly subplot against Smiley's only purpose in convening the assembly: to persuade Alleline that Haydon offered Smiley one chance to treat with Karla, and to salve, in humanitarian if not professional terms, whatever was left of the networks which Haydon had betrayed. Smiley was not empowered to conduct these transactions, nor did he seem to want to; perhaps he reckoned that between them Esterhase and Bland and Alleline were better placed to know what agents were still theoretically in being. In any event he soon took himself upstairs, where Guillam heard him once more restlessly padding from one room to the other as he continued his vigil from the windows.

So while Alleline and his lieutenants withdrew with Polyakov to the dining room to conduct their business alone, the rest of them sat in silence in the drawing room, either looking at Haydon, or deliberately away from him. He seemed unaware that they were there. Chin in hand, he sat apart from them in a corner, watched over by Fawn, and he looked rather bored. The conference ended, they all trooped out of the dining room and Alleline announced to Lacon, who insisted on not being present at the discussions, that an appointment had been made three days hence at this address, by which time 'the Colonel will have had a chance to consult his superiors'. Lacon nodded. It might have been a board meeting.

The departures were even stranger than the arrivals. Between Esterhase and Polyakov in particular, there was a curiously poignant farewell. Esterhase, who would always rather have been a gentleman than a spy, seemed determined to make a gallant occasion of it, and offered his hand, which Polyakov struck petulantly aside. Esterhase looked round forlornly for Smiley, perhaps in the hope of ingratiating himself further with him, then shrugged and flung an arm across Bland's broad shoulder. Soon afterwards they left together. They didn't say goodbye to anybody, but Bland looked dreadfully shaken and Esterhase seemed to be consoling him, though his own future at that moment could hardly have struck him as rosy. Soon afterwards a radio cab arrived for Polyakov and he too left without a nod to anyone. By now, the conversation had died entirely; without the Russian present, the show became wretchedly parochial. Haydon remained in his familiar bored pose, still watched by Fawn and Mendel, and stared at in mute embarrassment by Lacon and Alleline. More telephone calls were made, mainly for cars. At some point Smiley reappeared from upstairs and mentioned Tarr. Alleline phoned the Circus and dictated one telegram to Paris saying that he could return to England with honour, whatever that meant; and a second to Mackelvore saying that Tarr was an acceptable person, which again seemed to Guillam a matter of opinion.

Finally, to the general relief, a windowless van arrived from the Nursery and two men got out whom Guillam had never seen before, one tall and limping, the other doughy and ginger-haired. With a shudder he realised they were inquisitors. Fawn fetched Haydon's coat from the hall, went through the pockets and respectfully helped him into it. At this point, Smiley gently interposed himself and insisted that Haydon's walk from the front door to the van should take place without the hall light on, and that the escort should be large. Guillam, Fawn, even Alleline were pressed into service, and finally with Haydon at its centre the whole motley group shuffled through the garden to the van.

'It's simply a precaution,' Smiley insisted. No one was disposed to argue with him. Haydon climbed in, the inquisitors followed, locking the grille from inside. As the doors closed Haydon lifted one hand in an amiable if dismissive gesture directed at Alleline.

So it was only afterwards that separate things came back to Guillam and single people came forward for his recollection; the unqualified hatred, for instance, directed by Polyakov against everyone present from poor little Millie McCraig upwards, and which actually distorted him: his mouth curved in a savage, uncontrollable sneer, he turned white and trembled, but not from fear and not from anger. It was just plain hatred, of the sort that Guillam could not visit on Haydon, but then Haydon was of his own kind.

For Alleline, in the moment of his defeat, Guillam discovered a sneaking admiration: Alleline at least had shown a certain bearing. But later Guillam was not so sure whether Percy realised, on that first presentation of the facts, quite what the facts were: after all, he was still Chief, and Haydon was still his Iago.

But the strangest thing to Guillam, the insight that he took away with him and thought over much more deeply than was commonly his policy, was that despite his banked-up anger at the moment of breaking into the room, it required an act of will on his own part, and quite a violent one at that, to regard Bill Haydon with much other than affection. Perhaps, as Bill would say, he had finally grown up. Best of all, on the same evening, he climbed the steps to his flat and heard the familiar notes of Camilla's flute echoing in the well. And if Camilla that night lost something of her mystery, at least by morning he had succeeded in freeing her from the toils of double-cross to which he had latterly consigned her.

In other ways also, over the next few days, his life took on a brighter look. Percy Alleline had been despatched on indefinite leave; Smiley had been asked to come back for a while and help sweep up what was left. For Guillam himself there was talk of being rescued from Brixton. It was not till much, much later that he learned that there had been a final act; and he put a name and a purpose to that familiar shadow which had followed Smiley through the night streets of Kensington.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

For the next two days George Smiley lived in limbo. To his neighbours, when they noticed him, he seemed to have lapsed into a wasting grief. He rose late and pottered round the house in his dressing gown, cleaning things, dusting, cooking himself meals and not eating them. In the afternoon, quite against the local bye-laws he lit a coal fire and sat before it reading among his German poets or writing letters to Ann which he seldom completed and never posted. When the telephone rang he went to it quickly, only to be disappointed. Outside the window the weather continued foul, and the few passers-by - Smiley studied them continuously - were huddled in Balkan misery. Once Lacon called with a request from the Minister that Smiley should 'stand by to help clear up the mess at Cambridge Circus, were he called upon to do so' - in effect to act as nightwatchman till a replacement for Percy Alleline could be found. Replying vaguely, Smiley again prevailed on Lacon to take extreme care of Haydon's physical safety while he was at Sarratt.

'Aren't you being a little dramatic?' Lacon retorted. 'The only place he can go is Russia and we're sending him there anyway.'

'When? How soon?'

The details would take several more days to arrange.

Smiley disdained, in his state of anticlimactic reaction, to ask how the interrogation was progressing meanwhile, but Lacon's manner suggested that the answer would have been 'badly'. Mendel brought him more solid fare.

'Immingham railway station's shut,' he said. 'You'll have to get out at Grimsby and hoof it or take a bus.'

More often Mendel simply sat and watched him, as one might an invalid.

'Waiting won't make her come, you know,' he said once. 'Time the mountain went to Mohammed. Faint heart never won fair lady, if I may say so.'

On the morning of the third day, the door bell rang and Smiley answered it so fast that it might have been Ann, having mislaid her key as usual. It was Lacon. Smiley was required at Sarratt, he said; Haydon insisted on seeing him. The inquisitors had got nowhere and time was running out. The understanding was that if Smiley would act as confessor, Haydon would give a limited account of himself.

'I'm assured there has been no coercion,' Lacon said.

Sarratt was a sorry place after the grandeur which Smiley remembered. Most of the elms had gone with the disease; pylons burgeoned over the old cricket field. The house itself, a sprawling brick mansion, had also come down a lot since the heyday of the cold war in Europe and most of the better furniture seemed to have disappeared, he supposed into one of Alleline's houses. He found Haydon in a Nissen hut hidden among the trees.

Inside, it had the stink of an army guardhouse, black-painted walls and high-barred windows. Guards manned the rooms to either side and they received Smiley respectfully, calling him sir. The word, it seemed, had got around. Haydon was dressed in denims, he was trembling and he complained of dizziness. Several times he had to lie on his bed to stop the nose bleeds. He had grown a half-hearted beard: apparently there was a dispute about whether he was to be allowed a razor.

'Cheer up,' said Smiley. 'You'll be out of here soon.'

He had tried, on the journey down, to remember Prideaux, and Irina, and the Czech networks, and he even entered Haydon's room with a vague notion of public duty: somehow, he thought, he ought to censure him on behalf of right-thinking men. He felt instead rather shy; he felt he had never known Haydon at all, and now it was too late. He was also angry at Haydon's physical condition, but when he taxed the guards they professed mystification. He was angrier still to learn that the additional security precautions he had insisted on had been relaxed after the first day. When he demanded to see Craddox, head of Nursery, Craddox was unavailable and his assistant acted dumb.

Their first conversation was halting and banal.

Would Smiley please forward the mail from his club, and tell Alleline to get a move on with the horsetrading with Karla? And he needed tissues, paper tissues for his nose. His habit of weeping, Haydon explained, had nothing to do with remorse or pain, it was a physical reaction to what he called the pettiness of the inquisitors who had made up their minds that Haydon knew the names of other Karla recruits, and were determined to have them before he left. There was also a school of thought which held that Fanshawe of the Christ Church Optimates had been acting as a talent-spotter for Moscow Centre as well as for the Circus, Haydon explained: 'Really, what can one do with asses like that?' He managed, despite his weakness, to convey that his was the only level head around.

They walked in the grounds and Smiley established with something close to despair that the perimeter was not even patrolled any more, either by night or day. After one circuit, Haydon asked to go back to the hut, where he dug up a piece of floorboard and extracted some sheets of paper covered in hieroglyphics. They reminded Smiley forcibly of Irina's diary. Squatting on the bed he sorted through them, and in that pose, in that dull light, with his long forelock dangling almost to the paper, he might have been lounging in Control's room, back in the Sixties, propounding some wonderfully plausible and quite inoperable piece of skulduggery for England's greater glory. Smiley did not bother to write anything down, since it was common ground between them that their conversation was being recorded anyway. The statement began with a long apologia, of which he afterwards recalled only a few sentences:

'We live in an age where only fundamental issues matter...

'The United States is no longer capable of undertaking its own revolution...

'The political posture of the United Kingdom is without relevance or moral viability in world affairs...'

With much of it, Smiley might in other circumstances have agreed: it was the tone, rather than the music, which alienated him.

'In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen.

'The cold war began in 1917 but the bitterest struggles lie ahead of us, as America's deathbed paranoia drives her to greater excesses abroad..."

He spoke not of the decline of the West, but of its death by greed and constipation. He hated America very deeply, he said, and Smiley supposed he did. Haydon also took it for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nation's political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.

Finally he came to his own case. At Oxford, he said, he was genuinely of the right, and in the war, it scarcely mattered where one stood as long as one was fighting the Germans. For a while, after forty-five, he said, he had remained content with Britain's part in the world, till gradually it dawned on him just how trivial this was. How and when was a mystery. In the historical mayhem of his own lifetime he could point to no one occasion: simply he knew that if England were out of the game, the price of fish would not be altered by a farthing. He had often wondered which side he would be on if the test ever came; after prolonged reflection he had finally to admit that if either monolith had to win the day, he would prefer it to be the East.

'It's an aesthetic judgment as much as anything,' he explained, looking up. 'Partly a moral one, of course.'

'Of course,' said Smiley politely.

From then on, he said, it was only a matter of time before he put his efforts where his convictions lay.

That was the first day's take. A white sediment had formed on Haydon's lips, and he had begun weeping again. They agreed to meet tomorrow at the same time.

'It would be nice to go into the detail a little if we could, Bill,' Smiley said as he left.

'Oh and look, tell Jan, will you?' Haydon was lying on the bed, staunching his nose again. 'Doesn't matter a hoot what you say, long as you make it final.' Sitting up, he wrote out a cheque and put it in a brown envelope. 'Give her that for the milk bill.'

Realising perhaps that Smiley was not quite at ease with this brief, he added: 'Well, I can't take her with me, can I? Even if they let her come, she'd be a bloody millstone.'

The same evening, following Haydon's instructions, Smiley took a tube to Kentish Town and unearthed a cottage in an unconverted mews. A flat-faced fair girl in jeans opened the door to him; there was a smell of oil paint and baby. He could not remember whether he had met her at Bywater Street so he opened with: 'I'm from Bill Haydon. He's quite all right but I've got various messages from him.'

'Jesus,' said the girl softly. 'About bloody time and all.'

The living room was filthy. Through the kitchen door he saw a pile of dirty crockery and he knew she used everything until it ran out, then washed it all at once. The floorboards were bare except for long psychedelic patterns of snakes and flowers and insects painted all over them.

'That's Bill's Michelangelo ceiling,' she said conversationally. 'Only he's not going to have Michelangelo's bad back. Are you government?' she asked, lighting a cigarette. 'He works for government, he told me.' Her hand was shaking and she had yellow smudges under her eyes.

'Oh look, first I'm to give you that,' said Smiley, and delving in an inside pocket handed her the envelope with the cheque.

'Bread,' said the girl, and put the envelope beside her.

'Bread,' said Smiley, answering her grin, then something in his expression, or the way he echoed that one word, made her take up the envelope and rip it open. There was no note, just the cheque, but the cheque was enough: even from where Smiley sat, he could see it had four figures.

Not knowing what she was doing, she walked across the room to the fireplace and put the cheque with the grocery bills in an old tin on the mantelpiece. She went into the kitchen and mixed two cups of Nescafe, but she only came out with one.

'Where is he?' she said. She stood facing him. 'He's gone chasing after that snotty little sailor boy again. Is that it? And this is the pay-off, is that it? Well you bloody tell him from me...'

Smiley had had scenes like this before, and now absurdly the old words came back to him.

'Bill's been doing work of national importance. I'm afraid we can't talk about it, and nor must you. A few days ago he went abroad on a secret job. He'll be away some while. Even years. He wasn't allowed to tell anyone he was leaving. He wants you to forget him. I really am most awfully sorry.'

He got that far before she burst out. He didn't hear all she said, because she was blurting and screaming, and when the baby heard her it started screaming too, from upstairs. She was swearing, not at him, not even particularly at Bill, just swearing dry-eyed and demanding to know who the hell, who the bloody bloody hell believed in government any more? Then her mood changed. Round the walls, Smiley noticed Bill's other paintings, mainly of the girl: few were finished, and they had a cramped, condemned quality by comparison with his earlier work.

'You don't like him, do you? I can tell,' she said. 'So why do you do his dirty work for him?'

To this question also there seemed no immediate answer. Returning to Bywater Street, he again had the impression of being followed, and tried to telephone Mendel with the number of a cab which had twice caught his eye, asking him to make immediate enquiries. For once, Mendel was out till after midnight: Smiley slept uneasily and woke at five. By eight he was back at Sarratt, to find Haydon in festive mood. The inquisitors had not bothered him; he had been told by Craddox that the exchanges had been agreed and he should expect to travel tomorrow or the next day. His requests had a valedictory ring; the balance of his salary and the proceeds of any odd sales made on his behalf should be forwarded to him care of the Moscow Narodny Bank, who would also handle his mail. The Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol had a few pictures of his, including some early watercolours of Damascus, which he coveted. Could Smiley please arrange? Then, the cover for his disappearance.

'Play it long,' he advised. 'Say I've been posted, lay on the mystery, give it a couple of years then run me down...'

'Oh I think we can manage something, thank you,' Smiley said.

For the first time since Smiley had known him, Haydon was worried about clothes. He wanted to arrive looking like someone, he said: first impressions were so important. 'Those Moscow tailors are unspeakable. Dress you up like a bloody beadle.'

'Quite,' said Smiley, whose opinion of London tailors was no better.

Oh and there was a boy, he added carelessly, a sailor friend, lived in Notting Hill. 'Better give him a couple of hundred to shut him up. Can you do that out of the reptile fund?'

'I'm sure.'

He wrote out an address. In the same spirit of good fellowship, Haydon then entered into what Smiley had called the details.

He declined to discuss any part of his recruitment nor of his lifelong relationship with Karla. 'Lifelong?' Smiley repeated quickly. 'When did you meet?' The assertions of yesterday appeared suddenly nonsensical, but Haydon would not elaborate.

From about nineteen fifty onwards, if he was to be believed, Haydon had made Karla occasional selected gifts of intelligence. These early efforts were confined to what he hoped would discreetly advance the Russian cause over the American; he was 'scrupulous not to give them anything harmful to ourselves' as he put it, or harmful to our agents in the field.

The Suez adventure in fifty-six finally persuaded him of the inanity of the British situation and of the British capacity to spike the advance of history while not being able to offer anything by way of contribution. The sight of the Americans sabotaging the British action in Egypt was, paradoxically, an additional incentive. He would say therefore that from fifty-six on, he was a committed, full-time Soviet mole with no holds barred. In sixty-one he formally received Soviet citizenship, and over the next ten years two Soviet medals - quaintly, he would not say which, though he insisted that they were 'top stuff'. Unfortunately, overseas postings during this period limited his access; and since he insisted on his information being acted upon wherever possible - 'rather than being chucked into some daft Soviet archive' - his work was dangerous as well as uneven. With his return to London, Karla sent him Polly (which was evidently the house name for Polyakov) as a helpmate, but Haydon found the constant pressure of clandestine meetings difficult to sustain, particularly in view of the quantity of stuff he was photographing.

He declined to discuss cameras, equipment, pay or trade-craft during this pre-Merlin period in London, and Smiley was conscious all the while that even the little Haydon was telling him was selected with meticulous care from a greater, and perhaps somewhat different truth.

Meanwhile both Karla and Haydon were receiving signals that Control was smelling a rat. Control was ill, of course, but clearly he would never willingly give up the reins while there was a chance that he was making Karla a present of the service. It was a race between Control's researches and his health. Twice, he had very nearly struck gold - again, Haydon declined to say how - and if Karla had not been quick on his feet, the mole Gerald would have been trapped. It was out of this nervy situation that first Merlin, and finally Operation Testify, were born. Witchcraft was conceived primarily to take care of the succession: to put Alleline next to the throne, and hasten Control's demise. Secondly, of course, Witchcraft gave Centre absolute autonomy over the product flowing into Whitehall. Thirdly - and in the long run most important, Haydon insisted - it brought the Circus into position as a major weapon against the American target.

'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 chickenfeed - 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 which 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 thin 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 quite 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 nose bleed.

'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 Anns 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 was 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 tickertape 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 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 foot of it, shoved up on the kerb 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, still watching Smiley in the darkness.

They agreed it was a pity about the networks. Better see whether Karla would do the deal anyhow. 'He won't,' said Smiley.

Recalling 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 the darkness.' Then he remembered the half-finished canvases in the girl's drawing room in Kentish Town: cramped, overworked 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, and 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 deathmask. '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 then, aren't you?'

'No, no: Immingham.' Then he remembered Mendel's instructions and clambered on to 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'd 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, these 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 unawares, and the way he forgot things in class, even red marks for merit: Roach had to remind him to hand them in each week.

To support him, Roach took the job of dimmer man on the lighting. Thus at rehearsals Jim had to give him a special signal, to Bill and no one else. He was to raise his arm and drop it to his side, when he wanted the footlights to fade.

With time, Jim seemed to respond to treatment, however. His eye grew clearer and he became alert again, as the shadow of his mother's death withdrew. By the night of the play he was more light-hearted than Roach had ever known him. 'Hey Jumbo you silly toad, where's your mac, can't you see it's raining?' he called out, as tired but triumphant they trailed back to the main building after the performance. 'His real name is Bill,' he heard him explain to a visiting parent. 'We were new boys together.'

The gun, Bill Roach had finally convinced himself, was after all a dream.

END