Smiley's People (20 page)

Not a single message tapped to me over the water-pipes, she thought. Not even a guard’s insult to wake me up.

A
nd still it was the same day; there was no end to it, no bed. For a while after leaving Mikhel, George Smiley let his legs lead him, not knowing where, too tired, too stirred to trust himself to drive, yet bright enough to watch his back, to make the vague yet sudden turnings that catch would-be followers off guard. Bedraggled, heavy-eyed, he waited for his mind to come down, trying to unwind, to step clear of the restless thrust of his twenty-hour marathon. The Embankment had him, so did a pub off Northumberland Avenue, probably The Sherlock Holmes, where he gave himself a large whisky and dithered over telephoning Stella—was she all right? Deciding there was no point—he could hardly phone her every night asking whether she and Villem were alive—he walked again until he found himself in Soho, which on Saturday nights was even nastier than usual. Beard Lacon, he thought. Demand protection for the family. But he had only to imagine the scene to know the idea was stillborn. If Vladimir was not the Circus’s responsibility, then still less could Villem be. And how, pray, do you attach a team of baby-sitters to a long-distance Continental lorry driver? His one consolation was that Vladimir’s assassins had apparently found what they were looking for: that they had no other needs. Yet what about the woman in Paris? What about the writer of the two letters?

Go home, he thought. Twice, from phone-boxes, he made dummy calls, checking the pavement. Once he entered a cul-de-sac and doubled back, watching for the slurred step, the eye that ducked his glance. He considered taking a hotel room. Sometimes he did that, just for a night’s peace. Sometimes his house was too much of a dangerous place for him. He thought of the piece of negative film: time to open the box. Finding himself gravitating by instinct towards his old headquarters at Cambridge Circus, he cut hastily away eastward, finishing by his car again. Confident that he was not observed, he drove to Bayswater, well off his beaten track, but he still watched his mirror intently. From a Pakistani ironmonger who sold everything, he bought two plastic washing-up bowls and a rectangle of commercial glass three and a half inches by five; and from a cash-and-carry chemist not three doors down, ten sheets of Grade 2 resin-coated paper of the same size, and a children’s pocket torch with a spaceman on the handle and a red filter that slid over the lens when you pushed a nickel button. From Bayswater, by a painstaking route, he drove to the Savoy, entering from the Embankment side. He was still alone. In the men’s cloakroom, the same attendant was on duty, and he even remembered their joke.

“I’m still waiting for it to explode,” he said with a smile, handing back the box. “I thought I heard it ticking once or twice, and all.”

At his front door the tiny wedges he had put up before his drive to Charlton were still in place. In his neighbours’ windows he saw Saturday-evening candle-light and talking heads; but in his own, the curtains were still drawn as he had left them, and in the hall, Ann’s pretty little grandmother clock received him in deep darkness, which he hastily corrected.

Dead weary, he nevertheless proceeded methodically.

First he tossed three fire-lighters into the drawing-room grate, lit them, shovelled smokeless coal over them, and hung Ann’s indoor clothes-line across the hearth. For an overall he donned an old kitchen apron, tying the cord firmly round his ample midriff for additional protection. From under the stairs he exhumed a pile of green black-out material and a pair of kitchen steps, which he took to the basement. Having blacked out the window, he went upstairs again, unwrapped the box, opened it, and no, it was not a bomb, it was a letter and a packet of battered cigarettes with Vladimir’s piece of negative film fed into it. Taking it out, he returned to the basement, put on the red torch, and went to work, though Heaven knows he possessed no photographic flair whatever, and could perfectly well—in theory—have had the job done for him in a fraction of the time, through Lauder Strickland, by the Circus’s own photographic section. Or for that matter he could have taken it to any one of half a dozen “tradesmen,” as they are known in the jargon: marked collaborators in certain fields who are pledged, if called upon at any time, to drop everything and, asking no questions, put their skills at the service’s disposal. One such tradesman actually lived not a stone’s throw from Sloane Square, a gentle soul who specialised in wedding photographs. Smiley had only to walk ten minutes and press the man’s doorbell and he could have had his prints in half an hour. But he didn’t. He preferred instead the inconvenience, as well as imperfection, of taking a contact print in the privacy of his home, while upstairs the telephone rang and he ignored it.

He preferred the trial and error of exposing the negative for too long, then for too little, under the main room light. Of using as a measure the cumbersome kitchen timer, which ticked and grumbled like something from
Coppélia.
He preferred grunting and cursing in irritation and sweating in the dark and wasting at least six sheets of resin-coated paper before the developer in the washing-up bowl yielded an image even half-way passable, which he laid in the rapid fixer for three minutes. And washed it. And dabbed it with a clean teacloth, probably ruining the cloth for good, he wouldn’t know. And took it upstairs and pegged it to the clothesline. And for those who like a heavy symbol, it is a matter of history that the fire, despite the fire-lighters, was all but out, since the coal consisted in great measure of damp slag, and that George Smiley had to puff at the flames to prevent it from dying, crouching on all fours for the task. Thus it might have occurred to him—though it didn’t, for with his curiosity once more aroused he had put aside his introspective mood—that the action was exactly contrary to Lacon’s jangling order to douse the flames and not to fan them.

Next, with the point safely suspended over the carpet, Smiley addressed himself to a pretty marquetry writing-desk in which Ann kept her “things” with embarrassing openness. Such as a sheet of writing-paper on which she had written the one word “Darling” and not continued, perhaps uncertain which darling to write to. Such as book-matches from restaurants he had never been to and letters in handwriting he did not know. From among such painful bric-à-brac he extracted a large Victorian magnifying glass with a mother-of-pearl handle, which she employed for reading clues to crosswords never completed. Thus armed—the sequence of these actions, because of his fatigue, lacked the final edge of logic—he put on a record of Mahler, which Ann had given him, and sat himself in the leather reading chair that was equipped with a mahogany book-rest designed to swivel like a bed tray across the occupant’s stomach. Tired to death again, he unwisely allowed his eyes to close while he listened, part to the music, part to the occasional
pat-pat
of the dripping photograph, and part to the grudging crackle of the fire. Waking with a start thirty minutes later, he found the print dry and the Mahler revolving mutely on its turntable.

 

He stared, one hand to his spectacles, the other slowly rotating the magnifying glass over the print.

The photograph showed a group, but it was not political, nor was it a bathing party, since nobody was wearing a swimming-suit. The group consisted of a quartet, two men and two women, and they were lounging on quilted sofas round a low table laden with bottles and cigarettes. The women were naked and young and pretty. The men, scarcely better covered, were sprawled side by side, and the girls had twined themselves dutifully around their elected mates. The lighting of the photograph was sallow and unearthly, and from the little Smiley knew of such matters he concluded that the negative was made on fast film, for the print was also grainy. Its texture, when he pondered it, reminded him of the photographs one saw too often of terrorists’ hostages, except that the four in the photograph were concerned with each other, whereas hostages have a way of staring down the lens as if it were a gun barrel. Still in quest of what he would have called operational intelligence, he passed to the probable position of the camera and decided it must have been high above the subjects. The four appeared to be lying at the centre of a pit with the camera looking down on them. A shadow, very black—a balustrade, or perhaps it was a window-sill, or merely the shoulder of somebody in front—obtruded across the lower foreground. It was as if, despite the vantage point, only half the lens had dared to lift its head above the eye-line.

Here Smiley drew his first tentative conclusion. A step—not a large one, but he had enough large steps on his mind already. A technical step, call it: a modest technical step. The photograph had every mark of being what the trade called
stolen.
And stolen moreover with a view to
burning,
meaning “blackmail.” But the blackmail of whom? To what end?

Weighing the problem, Smiley probably fell asleep. The telephone was on Ann’s little desk, and it must have rung three or four times before he was aware of it.

 

“Yes, Oliver?” said Smiley cautiously.

“Ah. George. I tried you earlier. You got back all right, I trust?”

“Where from?” asked Smiley.

Lacon preferred not to answer this question. “I felt I owed you a call, George. We parted on a sour note. I was brusque. Too much on my plate. I apologise. How are things? You are done? Finished?”

In the background Smiley heard Lacon’s daughters squabbling about how much rent was payable on a hotel in Park Place. He’s got them for the week-end, thought Smiley.

“I’ve had the Home Office on the line again, George,” Lacon went on in a lower voice, not bothering to wait for his reply. “They’ve had the pathologist’s report and the body may be released. An early cremation is recommended. I thought perhaps if I gave you the name of the firm that is handling things, you might care to pass it on to those concerned. Unattributably, of course. You saw the press release? What did you think of it? I thought it was apt. I thought it caught the tone exactly.”

“I’ll get a pencil,” Smiley said and fumbled in the drawer once more until he found a pear-shaped plastic object with a leather thong, which Ann sometimes wore around her neck. With difficulty he prised it open, and wrote to Lacon’s dictation: the firm, the address, the firm again, followed yet again by the address.

“Got it? Want me to repeat it? Or should you read it back to me, make assurance double sure?”

“I think I have it, thank you,” Smiley said. Somewhat belatedly, it dawned on him that Lacon was drunk.

“Now, George, we have a date, don’t forget. A seminar on marriage with no holds barred. I have cast you as my elder statesman here. There’s a very decent steak-house downstairs and I shall treat you to a slap-up dinner while you give me of your wisdom. Have you a diary there? Let’s pencil something in.”

With dismal foreboding Smiley agreed on a date. After a lifetime of inventing cover stories for every occasion, he still found it impossible to talk his way out of a dinner invitation.

“And you found nothing?” Lacon asked, on a more cautious note. “No snags, hitches, loose ends. It was a storm in a teacup, was it, as we suspected?”

A lot of answers crossed Smiley’s mind, but he saw no use to any of them.

“What about the phone bill?” Smiley asked.

“Phone bill? What phone bill? Ah, you mean
his.
Pay it and send me the receipt. No problem. Better still, slip it in the post to Strickland.”

“I already sent it to you,” said Smiley patiently. “I asked you for a breakdown of traceable calls.”

“I’ll get on to them at once,” Lacon replied blandly. “Nothing else?”

“No. No, I don’t think so. Nothing.”

“Get some sleep. You sound all in.”

“Good night,” said Smiley.

 

With Ann’s magnifying glass in his plump fist once more, Smiley went back to his examination. The floor of the pit was carpeted, apparently in white; the quilted sofas were formed in a horseshoe following the line of the drapes that comprised the rear perimeter. There was an upholstered door in the background and the clothes the two men had discarded—jackets, neckties, trousers—were hanging from it with hospital neatness. There was an ashtray on the table and Smiley set to work trying to read the writing round the edge. After much manipulation of the glass he came up with what the lapsed philologist in him described as the asterisk (or putative) form of the letters “A-C-H-T,” but whether as a word in their own right—meaning “eight” or “attention,” as well as certain other more remote concepts—or as four letters from a larger word, he could not tell. Nor did he at this stage exert himself to find out, preferring simply to store the intelligence in the back of his mind until some other part of the puzzle forced it into play.

 

Ann rang. Once again, perhaps, he had dozed off, for his recollection ever afterwards was that he did not hear the ring of the phone at all, but simply her voice as he slowly lifted the receiver to his ear: “George, George,” as if she had been crying for him a long time, and he had only now summoned the energy or the caring to answer her.

They began their conversation as strangers, much as they began their love-making.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Very well, thank you. How are you? What can I do for you?”

“I meant it,” Ann insisted. “How are you? I want to know.”

“And I told you I was well.”

“I rang you this morning. Why didn’t you answer?”

“I was out.”

Long silence while she appeared to consider this feeble excuse. The telephone had never been a bother to her. It gave her no sense of urgency.

“Out working?” she asked.

“An administrative thing for Lacon.”

“He begins his administration early these days.”

“His wife’s left him,” Smiley said by way of explanation.