Smiley's People (25 page)

Smiley did.

“Fifty grand Swiss. Maybe you want to sign me a cheque?”

Toby waited for a cry of outrage but none came.

“All for Leipzig?”

“Sure. They were Leipzig’s terms. Who else would be so cuckoo?”

“What did Vladimir ask for himself?”

A small hesitation. “Nothing,” said Toby reluctantly. Then, as if to leave that point behind, set off on a fresh wave of indignation.

“
Basta.
So now all Hector got to do is fly to Hamburg at his own expense, take a train north and play rabbit for some crazy entrapment game that Otto Leipzig has lined up for himself with the East Germans, the Russians, the Poles, the Bulgarians, the Cubans, and also no doubt, being modern, the Chinese. I said to him—George, listen to me—I said to him: ‘Vladimir, old friend, excuse me, pay attention to me once. Tell me what in life is so important that the Circus pays five thousand Swiss from its precious reptile fund for one lousy audition with Otto Leipzig? Maria Callas never got so much and believe me she sang a damn lot better than Otto does.’ He’s holding my arm. Here.” Demonstrating, Toby grasped his own biceps. “Squeezing me like I am an orange. That old boy had some strength still, believe me. ‘Fetch the document for me, Hector.’ He is speaking Russian. That’s a very quiet place, that museum. Everyone has stopped to listen to him. I had a bad feeling. He is weeping. ‘For the sake of God, Hector, I am an old man. I got no legs, no passport, no one I can trust but Otto Leipzig. Go to Hamburg and fetch the document. When he sees the proof, Max will believe me, Max has faith.’ I try to console him, make some hints. I tell him émigrés are bad news these days, change of policy, new government. I advise him, ‘Vladimir, go home, play some chess. Listen, I come round to the library one day, have a game maybe.’ Then he says to me: ‘Hector, I began this. It was me sent the order to Otto Leipzig telling him to explore the position. Me who sent the money to him for the groundwork, all I had.’ Listen, that was an old, sad man. Past it.”

Toby made a pause but Smiley did not stir. Toby stood up, went to a cupboard, poured two glasses of an extremely indifferent sherry, and put one on the table beside the Degas maquette. He said “Cheers” and drank back his glass, but still Smiley did not budge. His inertia rekindled Toby’s anger.

“So I killed him, George, okay? It’s Hector’s fault, okay? Hector is personally and totally responsible for the old man’s death. That’s all I need.” He flung out both hands, palms upward. “George! Advise me! George, for this story I should go to Hamburg, unofficial, no cover, no baby-sitter? Know where the East German border is up there? From Lübeck two kilometres? Less? Remember? In Travemünde you got to stay on the left of the street or you’ve defected by mistake.” Smiley did not laugh. “And in the unlikely event I come back, I should call up George Smiley, go round to Saul Enderby with him, knock on the back door like a bum—‘Let us in, Saul, please, we got hot information totally reliable from Otto Leipzig, only five grand Swiss for an audition concerning matters totally forbidden under the Boy Scout laws’? I should do this, George?”

From an inside pocket, Smiley drew a battered packet of English cigarettes. From the packet he drew the home-made contact print, which he passed silently across the table for Toby to look at.

“Who’s the second man?” Smiley asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Not his partner, the Saxon, the man he stole with in the old days? Kretzschmar?”

Shaking his head, Toby Esterhase went on looking at the picture.

“So who’s the second man?” Smiley asked again.

Toby handed back the photograph. “George, pay attention to me, please,” he said quietly. “You listening?”

Smiley might have been and might not. He was threading the print back into the cigarette packet.

“People forge things like that these days, you know that? That’s very easy done, George. I want to put a head on another guy’s shoulders, I got the equipment, it takes me maybe two minutes. You’re not a technical guy, George, you don’t understand these matters. You don’t buy photographs from Otto Leipzig, you don’t buy Degas from Signor Benati, follow me?”

“Do they forge negatives?”

“Sure. You forge the print, then you photograph it, make a new negative—why not?”

“Is this a forgery?” Smiley asked.

Toby hesitated a long time. “I don’t think so.”

“Leipzig travelled a lot. How did we raise him if we needed him?” Smiley asked.

“He was strictly arm’s length. Totally.”

“So how did we raise him?”

“For a routine rendezvous the
Hamburger Abendblatt
marriage ads. Petra, aged twenty-two, blonde, petite, former singer—that crap. George, listen to me. Leipzig is a dangerous bum with very many lousy connections, mostly still in Moscow.”

“What about emergencies? Did he have a house, a girl?”

“He never had a house in his life. For crash meetings, Claus Kretzschmar played key-holder. George, for God’s sake, hear me once—”

“So how did we reach Kretzschmar?”

“He’s got a couple of night-clubs. Cat houses. We left a message there.”

A warning buzzer rang and from upstairs they heard the sound of voices raised in argument.

“I’m afraid Signor Benati has a conference in Florence today,” the blonde girl was saying. “That’s the trouble with being international.”

But the caller refused to believe her; Smiley could hear the rising tide of his protest. For a fraction of a second Toby’s brown eyes lifted sharply to the sound; then with a sigh he pulled open a wardrobe and drew out a grimy raincoat and a brown hat, despite the sunlight in the ceiling window.

“What’s it called?” Smiley asked. “Kretzschmar’s night-club—what’s it called?”

“The Blue Diamond. George, don’t do it, okay? Whatever it is, drop it. So the photo is genuine, then what? The Circus has a picture of some guy rolling in the snow courtesy of Otto Leipzig. You think that’s a gold-mine suddenly? You think that makes Saul Enderby horny?”

Smiley looked at Toby, and remembered him, and remembered also that in all the years they had known each other and worked together, Toby had never once volunteered the truth, that information was money to him; even when he counted it valueless, he never threw it away.

“What else did Vladimir tell you about Leipzig’s information?” Smiley asked.

“He said it was some old case come alive. Years of investment. Some crap about the Sandman. He was a child again, remembering fairy tales, for God’s sake. See what I mean?”

“What about the Sandman?”

“To tell you it concerned the Sandman. That’s all. The Sandman is making a legend for a girl. Max will understand. George, he was weeping, for Christ’s sake. He’d have said anything that came into his head. He wanted the action. He was an old spy in a hurry. You used to say they were the worst.”

Toby was at the far door, already half-way gone. But he turned and came back despite the approaching clamour from upstairs, because something in Smiley’s manner seemed to trouble him—“a definitely harder stare,” he called it afterward, “like I’d completely insulted him somehow.”

“George? George, this is Toby, remember? If you don’t get the hell out of here, that guy upstairs will sequester you in part-payment, hear me?”

Smiley hardly did. “Years of investment and the Sandman was making a legend for a girl?” he repeated. “What else? Toby, what else!”

“He was behaving like a crazy man again.”

“The General was? Vladi was?”

“No, the Sandman. George, listen. ‘The Sandman is behaving like a crazy man again, the Sandman is making a legend for a girl, Max will understand.’
Finito.
The total garbage. I’ve told you every word. Go easy now, hear me?”

From upstairs, the sounds of argument grew still louder. A door slammed, they heard footsteps stamping towards the staircase. Toby gave Smiley’s arm a last, swift pat.

“Goodbye, George. You want a Hungarian baby-sitter some day, call me. Hear that? You’re messing around with a creep like Otto Leipzig, then you better have a creep like Toby look after you. Don’t go out alone nights, you’re too young.”

Climbing the steel ladder back to the gallery, Smiley all but knocked over an irate creditor on his way down. But this was not important to Smiley; neither was the insolent sigh of the ash-blonde girl as he stepped into the street. What mattered was that he had put a name to the second face in the photograph; and to the name, the story, which like an undiagnosed pain had been nagging at his memory for the last thirty-six hours—as Toby might have said, the story of a legend.

And that, indeed, is the dilemma of those would-be historians who are concerned, only months after the close of the affair, to chart the interplay of Smiley’s knowledge and his actions. Toby told him this much, they say, so he did that much. Or: if so-and-so had not occurred, then there would have been no resolution. Yet the truth is more complex than this, and far less handy. As a patient tests himself on coming out of the anaesthetic—this leg, that leg, do the hands still close and open?—so Smiley by a succession of cautious movements grew into his own strength of body and mind, probing the motives of his adversary as he probed his own.

H
e was driving on a high plateau and the plateau was above the tree-line because the pines had been planted low in the valley’s cleft. It was early evening of the same day and in the plain the first lights were pricking the wet gloom. On the horizon lay the city of Oxford, lifted by ground mist, an academic Jerusalem. The view from that side was new to him and increased his sense of unreality, of being conveyed rather than determining his own journey; of being in the grasp of thoughts that were not his to command. His visit to Toby Esterhase had fallen, arguably, within the crude guide-lines of Lacon’s brief; but this journey, he knew, led for better or for worse to the forbidden province of his secret interest. Yet he was aware of no alternative, and wanted none. Like an archaeologist who has delved all his life in vain, Smiley had begged for one last day, and this was it.

At first he had watched his rear-view mirror constantly, how the familiar motor cycle had hung behind him like a gull at sea. But when he left the last roundabout the man called Ferguson had not followed him, and when he pulled up to read the map nothing passed him either; so either they had guessed his destination or, for some arcane reason of procedure, they had forbidden their man to cross the county border. Sometimes, as he drove, a trepidation gripped him. Let her be, he thought. He had heard things; not much, but enough to guess the rest. Let her be, let her find her own peace where she can. But he knew that peace was not his to give, that the battle he was involved in must be continuous to have any meaning at all.

The kennel sign was like a painted grin: “MERRILEE BOARDING ALL PETS WELCOME EGGS.” A daubed yellow dog wearing a top hat pointed one paw down a cart-track; the track, when he took it, led so steeply downward that it felt like a free fall. He passed a pylon and heard the wind howling in it; he entered the plantation. First came the young trees; then the old ones darkened over him and he was in the Black Forest of his German childhood heading for some unrevealed interior. He switched on his headlights, rounded a steep bend, and another, and a third, and there was the cabin much as he had imagined it—her
dacha,
as she used to call it. Once she had had the house in Oxford and the
dacha
as a place away from it. Now there was only the
dacha;
she had quitted towns for ever. It stood in its own clearing of tree trunks and trodden mud, with a ramshackle veranda and a wood-shingle roof and a tin chimney with smoke coming out of it. The clapboard walls were blackened with creosote, a galvanised iron feed-tub almost blocked the front porch. On a bit of lawn stood a home-made bird-table with enough bread to feed an ark, and dotted round the clearing, like allotment huts, stood the asbestos sheds and wire runs that held the chickens and all the pets welcome without discrimination.

Karla, he thought. What a place to look for you.

He parked, and his arrival set loose a bedlam as dogs sobbed in torment and thin walls thundered to desperate bodies. He walked to the house, carrier-bag in hand, the bottles bumping against his legs. Above the din he heard his own feet rattling up the six steps of the veranda. A notice on the door read: “If OUT do NOT leave pets on spec.” And underneath, seemingly added in a fury, “No bloody monkeys.”

The bell-pull was a donkey’s tail in plastic. He reached for it but the door had already opened and a frail pretty woman peered at him from the interior darkness of the cabin. Her eyes were timid and grey, she had that period English beauty which had once been Ann’s: accepting, and grave. She saw him and stopped dead. “Oh, Lord,” she whispered. “Gosh.” Then looked downward at her brogues, brushing back her forelock with one finger, while the dogs barked themselves hoarse at him from behind their wire.

“I’m sorry, Hilary,” said Smiley, with great gentleness. “It’s only for an hour, I promise. That’s all it is. An hour.”

A deep, masculine voice, very slow, issued out of the darkness behind her. “What is it, Hils?” growled the voice. “Bogweevil, budgie, or giraffe?”

The question was followed by a slow thud like the movement of cloth over something hollow.

“It’s human, Con,” Hilary called over her shoulder, and went back to looking at her brogues.

“
She
human or the other thing?” the voice demanded.

“It’s George, Con. Don’t be cross, Con.”

“
George?
Which
George?
George the Lorry, who waters my coal, or George the Meat, who poisons my dogs?”

“It’s just some questions,” Smiley assured Hilary in the same deeply compassionate tone. “An old case. Nothing momentous, I promise you.”

“It doesn’t matter, George,” Hilary said, still looking downward. “Honestly. It’s fine.”