Smiley's People (43 page)

“The Grigorievs left the house in Elfenau five minutes ago,” he said quietly. “Grigorieva’s driving. Most likely they die before they get here.”

“And the bicycles?” Smiley said anxiously.

“Like normal,” said Toby, pulling up a chair.

“Did she drive last week?”

“Also the week before. She insists. George, I mean that woman is a monster.” The girl brought him a coffee unbidden. “Last week, she actually hauled Grigoriev out of the driving seat, then drove the car into the gatepost, clipped the wing. Pauli and Canada Bill were laughing so much we thought we’d get static on the whisperers.” He put a friendly hand on Smiley’s shoulder. “Listen, it’s going to be a nice day. Believe me. Nice light, a nice layout, all you got to do is sit back and enjoy the show.”

The phone rang, and the girl called, “Herr Jacobi!” Toby walked easily to the counter. She handed him the receiver and blushed at something he whispered to her. From the kitchen, the chef came in with his small son: “Herr Jacobi!” The chrysanthemums on Smiley’s table were plastic but someone had put water in the vase.

“
Ciao,
” Toby called cheerfully into the phone, and came back. “Everyone in position, everyone happy,” he announced with satisfaction. “Eat something, okay? Enjoy yourself, George. This is Switzerland.”

Toby stepped gaily into the street.
Enjoy the show,
thought Smiley. That’s right. I wrote it, Toby produced it, and all I can do now is watch. No, he thought, correcting himself: Karla wrote it, and sometimes that worried him quite a lot.

Two girls in hiking kit were entering the double doors of the bank. A moment later and Toby had followed them in. He’s packing the bank, thought Smiley. He’ll man every counter two-deep. After Toby, a young couple, arm in arm, then a stubby woman with two shopping bags. The yellow mail van had not budged: nobody moves a mail van. He noticed a public phone-box, and two figures huddled into it, perhaps sheltering from the rain. Two people are less conspicuous than one, they liked to say at Sarratt, and three are less conspicuous than a pair. An empty tour coach passed. A clock struck twelve and, right on cue, a black Mercedes lurched out of the fog, its dipped headlights glittering on the cobble. Bumping clumsily onto the kerb, it stopped outside the bank, six feet from Toby’s mail van.
Soviet Embassy car numbers end with 73,
Toby had said.
She drops him and drives round the block a couple of times till he comes out.
But today, in the filthy weather, the Grigorievs had apparently decided to flout the parking laws and Karla’s laws too, and rely on their CD plates to keep them out of trouble. The passenger door opened and a stocky figure in a dark suit and spectacles scampered for the bank entrance, carrying a brief-case. Smiley had just time to record the thick grey hair and rimless spectacles of Grigoriev’s photographs before a lorry masked his view. When it moved on, Grigoriev had disappeared, but Smiley had a clear sight of the formidable bulk of Grigorieva herself, with her red hair and learner-driver scowl, seated alone at the steering-wheel.
George, believe me, that’s a very distorting woman.
Seeing her now, her set jaw, her bullish glare, Smiley was able for the first time, if cautiously, to share Toby’s optimism. If fear was the essential concomitant of a successful burn, Grigorieva was certainly someone to be afraid of.

In his mind’s eye Smiley now imagined the scene that was playing inside the bank, exactly as he and Toby had planned. The bank was a small one, a team of seven could flood it. Toby had opened a private account for himself: Herr Jacobi, a few thousand francs. Toby would take one counter and occupy it with small transactions. The foreign-exchange desk was also no problem. Two of Toby’s people, armed with a spread of currencies, could keep them on the run for minutes. He imagined the hubbub of Toby’s hilarity, causing Grigoriev to raise his voice. He imagined the two girl hikers doing a double act, one rucksack dumped carelessly at Grigoriev’s feet, recording whatever he happened to say to the cashier; and the hidden cameras snapping away from toggle bags, rucksacks, brief-cases, bedrolls, or wherever they were stowed. “It’s the same as the firing-squad, George,” Toby explained when Smiley said he was worried about the shutter noise. “Everybody hears the click except the quarry.”

The bank doors slid open. Two businessmen emerged, adjusting their raincoats as if they had been to the lavatory. The stubby woman with the two shopping bags followed them out, and Toby came after her, chatting volubly to the girl hikers. Next came Grigoriev himself. Oblivious of everything, he hopped into the black Mercedes and planted a kiss on his wife’s cheek before she had time to turn away. He saw her mouth show criticism of him, and Grigoriev’s placatory smile as he replied. Yes, Smiley thought, he certainly has something to be guilty about; yes, he thought, remembering the watchers’ affection for him; yes, I understand that too. But the Grigorievs did not leave; not yet. Grigoriev had hardly closed his door before a tall, vaguely familiar woman in a green Loden coat came striding down the pavement, tapped fiercely on the passenger window, and delivered herself of what seemed to be a homily upon the sins of parking on pavements. Grigoriev was embarrassed, Grigorieva leaned across him and bawled at her—Smiley even heard the word
Diplomat
in heavy German rise above the sound of the traffic—but the woman remained where she was, her handbag under her arm, still swearing at them as they drove away. She’ll have snapped them in the car with the bank doors in the background, he thought. They photograph through perforations: half a dozen pin-holes and the lens can see perfectly.

Toby had returned and was sitting beside him at the table. He had lit a small cigar. Smiley could feel him trembling like a dog after the chase.

“Grigoriev drew his normal ten thousand,” he said. His English had become a little rash. “Same as last week, same as the week before. We got it, George, the whole scene. The boys are very happy, the girls too. George, I mean they are fantastic. Completely the best. I never had so good. What do you think of him?”

Surprised to be asked, Smiley actually laughed.

“He’s certainly henpecked,” he agreed.

“And a nice fellow, know what I mean? Reasonable. I think he’ll act reasonable too. That’s my view, George. The boys are the same.”

“Where do the Grigorievs go from here?”

A sharp male voice interrupted him. “Herr Jacobi!”

But it was only the chef, holding up a glass of schnapps to drink Toby’s health. Toby returned the toast.

“Lunch at the station buffet, first-class,” he continued. “Grigorieva takes pork chop and chips, Grigoriev steak, a glass of beer. Maybe they take also a couple of vodkas.”

“And after lunch?”

Toby gave a brisk nod, as if the question required no elucidation.

“Sure,” he said. “That’s where they go. George, cheer up. That guy will fold, believe me. You never had a wife like that. And Natasha’s a cute kid.” He lowered his voice. “Karla’s his meal ticket, George. You don’t always understand the simple things. You think she’d let him give up the new apartment? The Mercedes?”

 

Alexandra’s weekly visitor arrived, always punctual, always at the same time, which was on Fridays after rest. At one o’clock came lunch, which on Fridays consisted of cold meat and
Rösti
and
Kompott
of apples or perhaps plums, depending on the season, but she couldn’t eat it and sometimes she made a show of sicking it up or running to the lavatory or calling Felicity-Felicity and complaining, in the basest language, about the quality of the food. This never failed to annoy her. The hostel took great pride in growing its own fruit, and the hostel’s brochures in Felicity-Felicity’s office contained many photographs of fruit and blossom and Alpine streams and mountains indiscriminately, as if God, or the sisters, or Dr. Rüedi, had grown the whole lot specially for the inmates. After lunch came an hour’s rest and on Fridays this daily hour was Alexandra’s worst, her worst of the whole week, when she had to lie on the white iron bedstead and pretend she was relaxing, while she prayed to any God that would have her that Uncle Anton might be run over or have a heart attack, or, best of all, cease to exist—locked away with her own past and her own secrets and her own name of Tatiana. She thought of his rimless spectacles and in her imagination she drove them into his head and out the other side, taking his eyes with them, so that instead of his soggy gaze to stare at, she would see straight through him to the world outside.

And now at last rest had ended, and Alexandra stood in the empty dining hall in her best frock, watching the lodge through the window while two of the Marthas scoured the tiled floor. She felt sick. Crash, she thought. Crash on your silly bicycle. Other girls had visitors, but they came on Saturdays and none had Uncle Anton, few had men of any sort; it was mainly wan aunts and bored sisters who attended. And none got Felicity-Felicity’s study to sit in, either, with the door closed and nobody present but the visitor; that was a privilege which Alexandra and Uncle Anton enjoyed alone, as Sister Beatitude never tired of pointing out. But Alexandra would have traded all of those privileges, and a good few more besides, for the privilege of not having Uncle Anton’s visit at all.

The lodge gates opened and she began trembling on purpose, shaking her hands from the wrists as if she had seen a mouse, or a spider, or a naked man aroused for her. A tubby figure in a brown suit began cycling down the drive. He was not a natural cyclist, she could tell from his self-consciousness. He had not cycled here from any distance, bringing a breath of outside. It could be baking hot, but Uncle Anton neither sweated nor burned. It could be raining heavily, but Uncle Anton’s mackintosh and hat, when he reached the main door, would scarcely be wet, and his shoes were never muddied. Only when the giant snowfall had come, three weeks ago, or call it years, and put a metre’s thickness of extra padding round the dead castle, did Uncle Anton look anything like a real man living in the real elements; in his thick knee boots and anorak and fur hat, skirting the pine trees as he plodded up the track, he stepped straight out of the memories she was never to mention. And when he had embraced her, calling her “my little daughter,” slapping his big gloves down on Felicity-Felicity’s highly polished table, she felt such a surge of kinship and hope that she would catch herself smiling for days afterwards.

“He was so warm,” she confided to Sister Beatitude in her bit of French. “He held me like a friend! Why does the snow make him so fond?”

But today there was only sleet and fog and big floppy flakes that would not settle on the yellow gravel.

He comes in a car, Sasha—Sister Beatitude told her once—with a
woman,
Sasha. Beatitude had seen them. Twice. Watched them, naturally. They had two bicycles strapped to the roof of the car, upside down, and the woman did the driving, a big strong woman, a bit like Mother Felicity but not so Christian, with hair red enough to scare a bull. When they reached the edge of the village, they parked the car behind Andreas Gertsch’s barn, and Uncle Anton untied his bicycle and rode it to the lodge. But the woman stayed in the car and smoked, and read
Schweizer Illustrierte,
sometimes scowling at the mirror, and her bicycle never left the roof; it stayed there like an upturned sow while she read her magazine! And guess what! Uncle Anton’s bicycle was
illegal!
The bicycle—as a good Swiss, Sister Beatitude had checked the point quite naturally—Uncle Anton’s bicycle had no
plaque,
no licence, he was a criminal at large, and so was the woman, though she was probably too fat to ride it!

But Alexandra cared nothing for illegal bicycles. It was the car she wanted to know about. What type? Rich or poor? What colour, and above all, where did it come from? Was it from Moscow, from Paris, where? But Sister Beatitude was a country girl and simple, and in the world beyond the mountains most foreign places were alike to her. Then what letters were on the number-plate, for goodness’ sake, silly? Alexandra had cried. Sister Beatitude had not noticed such matters. Sister Beatitude shook her head like the dumb dairymaid she was. Bicycles and cows she understood. Cars were beyond her mark.

Alexandra watched Grigoriev arrive, she waited for the moment when he leaned his head forward over the handle-bars and raised his ample bottom in the air and swung one short leg over the crossbars as if he were climbing off a woman. She saw how the short ride had reddened his face, she watched him unfasten the brief-case from the rack over the back wheel. She ran to the door and tried to kiss him, first on the cheek, then on the lips, for she had an idea of putting her tongue into his mouth as an act of welcome, but he scurried past her with his head down as if he were already going back to his wife.

“Greetings, Alexandra Borisovna,” she heard him whisper, all of a flurry, uttering her patronymic as if it were a state secret.

“Greetings, Uncle Anton,” she replied; then Sister Beatitude caught her by the arm, and whispered to her to behave herself or else.

 

Mother Felicity’s study was at once both sparse and sumptuous. It was small and bare and very hygienic, and the Marthas scrubbed it and polished it every day so that it smelt like a swimming-pool. Yet her little pieces of Russia glistened like caskets. She had icons, and she had richly framed sepia photographs of princesses she had loved, and bishops she had served, and on her saint’s day—or was it her birthday or the bishop’s?—she had taken them all down and made a theatre of them with candles and a Virgin and a Christ-child. Alexandra knew this because Felicity had called her in to sit with her, and had read old Russian prayers to her aloud, and chanted bits of liturgy in a marching rhythm to her, and given her sweet cake and a glass of sweet wine, all to have Russian company on her saint’s day—or was it Easter or Christmas? Russians were the best in the world, she said. Gradually, though she had had a lot of pills, Alexandra had realised that Felicity-Felicity was stone drunk, so she lifted up her old feet and put a pillow for her, and kissed her hair and let her fall asleep on the tweed sofa where parents sat when they came to enrol fresh patients. It was the same sofa where Alexandra sat now, staring at Uncle Anton while he pulled the little notebook from his pocket. He was having one of his brown days, she noticed: brown suit, brown tie, brown shirt.