Smiley's People (32 page)

Herr Kretzschmar was writing his instructions for Smiley on a leather-backed jotting pad with gold corners.

“Otto lives in bad circumstances,” he said. “One cannot alter that. Giving him money does not improve his social standards. He remains”—Herr Kretzschmar hesitated—“he remains at heart, Herr Max, a
gypsy.
Do not misunderstand me.”

“Will you warn him that I am coming?”

“We have agreed not to use the telephone. The official link between us is completely closed.” He handed him the sheet of paper. “I strongly advise you to take care,” Herr Kretzschmar said. “Otto will be very angry when he hears the old General has been shot.” He saw Smiley to the door. “What did they charge you down there?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Downstairs. How much did they take from you?”

“A hundred and seventy-five marks for membership.”

“With the drinks inside, at least two hundred. I’ll tell them to give it back to you at the door. You English are poor these days. Too many trade unions. How’d you like the show?”

“It was very artistic,” said Smiley.

Herr Kretzschmar was once again very pleased with Smiley’s answer. He patted Smiley on the shoulder: “Maybe you should have more fun in life.”

“Maybe I should have done,” Smiley agreed.

“Greet Otto for me,” said Herr Kretzschmar.

“I will,” Smiley promised.

Herr Kretzschmar hesitated, and the same momentary bewilderment came over him.

“And you have nothing for me?” he repeated. “No papers, for example?”

“No.”

“Pity.”

As Smiley left, Herr Kretzschmar was already at the telephone, attending to other special requests.

 

He returned to the hotel. A drunken night porter opened the door to him, full of suggestions about the wonderful girls he could send to Smiley’s room. He woke, if he had ever slept, to the chime of church bells and the honk of shipping in the harbour, carried to him on the wind. But there are nightmares that do not go away with daylight, and as he drove northward over the fens in his hired Opel, the terrors that hovered in the mist were the same as those that had plagued him in the night.

T
he roads were as empty as the landscape. Through breaks in the mist, he glimpsed now a patch of cornfield, now a red farmhouse crouched low against the wind. A blue notice said “KAI.” He swung sharply into a slip-road, dropping two flights, and saw ahead of him the wharf, a complex of low grey barracks dwarfed by the decks of cargo ships. A red-and-white pole guarded the entrance, there was a customs notice in several languages, but not a human soul in sight. Stopping the car, Smiley got out and walked lightly to the barrier. The red push-button was as big as a saucer. He pressed it and the shriek of its bell set a pair of herons flapping into the white mist. A control tower stood to his left on tubular legs. He heard a door slam and a ring of metal and watched a bearded figure in blue uniform stomp down the iron staircase to the bottom step. The man called to him, “What do you want then?” Not waiting for an answer, he released the boom and waved Smiley through. The tarmac was like a vast bombed area cemented in, bordered by cranes and pressed down by the fogged white sky. Beyond it, the low sea looked too frail for the weight of so much shipping. He glanced in the mirror and saw the spires of a sea town etched like an old print half-way up the page. He glanced out to sea and saw through the mist the line of buoys and winking lamps that marked the water border to East Germany and the start of seven and a half thousand miles of Soviet Empire. That’s where the herons went, he thought. He was driving at a crawl between red-and-white traffic cones towards a container-park heaped with car tyres and logs. “Left at the container-park,” Herr Kretzschmar had said. Obediently, Smiley swung slowly left, looking for an old house, though an old house in this Hanseatic dumping ground seemed a physical impossibility. But Herr Kretzschmar had said, “Look for an old house marked ‘Office,’” and Herr Kretzschmar did not make errors.

He bumped over a railway track and headed for the cargo ships. Beams of morning sun had broken through the mist, making their white paintwork dazzle. He entered an alley comprised of control rooms for the cranes, each like a modern signal-box, each with green levers and big windows. And there at the end of the alley, exactly as Herr Kretzschmar had promised, stood the old tin house with a high tin gable cut like fretwork and crowned with a peeling flag-post. The electric wires that led into it seemed to hold it up; there was an old water pump beside it, dripping, with a tin mug chained to its pedestal. On the wooden door, in faded Gothic lettering, stood the one word “BUREAU,” in the French spelling, not the German, above a newer notice saying “P.K. BERGEN, IMPORT-EXPORT.”
He works there as the night clerk,
Herr Kretzschmar had said.
What he does by day only God and the Devil know.

He rang the bell, then stood well back from the door, very visible. He was keeping his hands clear of his pockets and they were very visible too. He had buttoned his overcoat to the neck. He wore no hat. He had parked the car sideways to the house so that anyone indoors could see the car was empty.
I am alone and unarmed,
he was trying to say.
I am not their man, but yours.
He rang the bell again and called “Herr Leipzig!” An upper window opened, and a pretty woman looked out blearily, holding a blanket round her shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” Smiley called up to her politely. “I was looking for Herr Leipzig. It’s rather important.”

“Not here,” she replied, and smiled.

A man joined her. He was young and unshaven, with tattoo marks on his arms and chest. They spoke together a moment, Smiley guessed in Polish.

“Nix hier,”
the man confirmed guardedly.
“Otto nix hier.”

“We’re just the temporary tenants,” the girl called down. “When Otto’s broke, he moves to his country villa and rents us the apartment.”

She repeated this to her man, who this time laughed.

“Nix hier,”
he repeated. “No money. Nobody has money.”

They were enjoying the crisp morning, and the company.

“How long since you saw him?” Smiley asked.

More conference. Was it this day or that day? Smiley had the impression they had lost track of time.

“Thursday,” the girl announced, smiling again.

“Thursday,” her man repeated.

“I’ve got good news for him,” Smiley explained cheerfully, catching her mood. He patted his side pocket. “Money.
Pinkapinka.
All for Otto. He’s earned it in commission. I promised to bring it to him yesterday.”

The girl interpreted all this and the man argued with her, and the girl laughed again.

“My friend says don’t give it to him or Otto will come back and move us out and we’ll have nowhere to make love!”

Try the water camp, she suggested, pointing with her bare arm. Two kilometres along the main road, over the railway and past the windmill, then right—she looked at her hands, then curved one prettily towards her lover—yes, right; right towards the lake, though you don’t see the lake till you get to it.

“What is the place called?” Smiley asked.

“It has no name,” she said. “It’s just a place. Ask for holiday houses to let, then drive on towards the boats. Ask for Walther. If Otto is around, Walther will know where to find him.”

“Thank you.”

“Walther knows everything!” she called. “He is like a professor!”

She translated this also, but this time her man looked angry.

“
Bad
professor!” he called down. “Walther bad man!”

“Are you a professor too?” the girl asked Smiley.

“No. No, unfortunately not.” He laughed and thanked them, and they watched him get into his car as if they were children at a celebration. The day, the spreading sunshine, his visit—everything was fun for them. He lowered the window to say goodbye and heard her say something he couldn’t catch.

“What was that?” he called up to her, still smiling.

“I said, ‘Then Otto is twice lucky, for a change!’” the girl repeated.

“Why?” asked Smiley, and stopped the engine. “Why is he twice lucky?”

The girl shrugged. The blanket was slipping from her shoulders and the blanket was all she wore. Her man put an arm round her and pulled it up again for decency.

“Last week the unexpected visit from the East,” she said. “And today the money.” She opened her hands. “Otto is Sunday’s child for once. That’s all.”

Then she saw Smiley’s face, and the laughter went clean out of her voice.

“Visitor?” Smiley repeated. “Who was the visitor?”

“From the East,” she said.

Seeing her dismay, terrified she might disappear altogether, Smiley with difficulty resurrected his appearance of good humour.

“Not his brother, was it?” he asked gaily, all enthusiasm. He held out one hand, cupping it over the mythical brother’s head. “A small chap? Spectacles like mine?”

“No,
no!
A big fellow. With a chauffeur. Rich.”

Smiley shook his head, affecting light-hearted disappointment. “Then I don’t know him,” he said. “Otto’s brother was certainly never rich.” He succeeded in laughing outright. “Unless he was the chauffeur, of course,” he added.

He followed her directions exactly, with the secret calmness of emergency. To be conveyed. To have no will of his own. To be conveyed, to pray, to make deals with your Maker. Oh, God, don’t make it happen, not another Vladimir. In the sunlight the brown fields had turned to gold, but the sweat on Smiley’s back was like a cold hand stinging his skin. He followed her directions seeing everything as if it were his last day, knowing that the big fellow with the chauffeur had gone ahead of him. He saw the farmhouse with the old horse-plough in the barn, the faulty beer sign with its neon blinking, the window-boxes of geraniums like blood. He saw the windmill like a giant pepper-mill and the field full of white geese all running with the gusty wind. He saw the herons skimming like sails over the fens. He was driving too fast. I should drive more often, he thought; I’m out of practice, out of control. The road changed from tarmac to gravel, gravel to dust, and the dust blew up round the car like a sandstorm. He entered some pine trees and on the other side of them saw a sign saying “HOLIDAY HOUSES TO LET,” and a row of shuttered asbestos bungalows waiting for their summer paint. He kept going and in the distance saw a coppice of masts, and brown water low in its basin. He headed for the masts, bumped over a pot-hole, and heard a frightful crack from under the car. He supposed it was the exhaust, because the noise of his engine was suddenly much louder, and half the water birds in Schleswig-Holstein had taken fright at his arrival.

He passed a farm and entered the protective darkness of trees, then emerged in a stark and brilliant frame of whiteness of which a broken jetty and a few faint olive-coloured reeds made up the foreground, and an enormous sky the rest. The boats lay to his right, beside an inlet. Shabby caravans were parked along the track that led to them, grubby washing hung between the television aerials. He passed a tent in its own vegetable patch and a couple of broken huts that had once been military. On one, a psychedelic sunrise had been painted, and it was peeling. Three old cars and some heaped rubbish stood beside it. He parked and followed a mud path through the reeds to the shore. In the grass harbour lay a cluster of improvised houseboats, some of them converted landing-craft from the war. It was colder here, and for some reason darker. The boats he had seen were day boats, moored in a huddle apart, mostly under tarpaulins. A couple of radios played, but at first he saw nobody. Then he noticed a backwater, and a blue dinghy made fast in it. And, in the dinghy, one gnarled old man in a sailcloth jacket and a black peaked cap, massaging his neck as if he had just woken up.

“Are you Walther?” Smiley asked.

Still rubbing his neck, the old man seemed to nod.

“I’m looking for Otto Leipzig. They told me at the wharf I might find him here.”

Walther’s eyes were cut almond-shaped into the crumpled brown paper of his skin.

“
Isadora,
” he said.

He pointed at a rickety jetty farther down the shore. The
Isadora
lay at the end of it, a forty-foot motor launch down on her luck, a Grand Hotel awaiting demolition. The portholes were curtained; one of them was smashed, another was repaired with Scotch tape. The planks of the jetty yielded alarmingly to Smiley’s tread. Once he nearly fell, and twice, to bridge the gaps, he had to stride much wider than seemed safe to his short legs. At the end of the jetty, he realised that the
Isadora
was adrift. She had slipped her moorings at the stern and shifted twelve feet out to sea, which was probably the longest journey she would ever make. The cabin doors were closed, their windows curtained. There was no small boat.