Karla Trilogy Digital Collection Featuring George Smiley : Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley###s People (9781101570852) Page 10

  Seeing them both, Haydon stood rock-still. It was a month since Guillam had spoken to him; he had probably been away on unexplained business. Now, against the light of his own open doorway, he looked strangely black and tall. He was carrying something—Guillam could not make out what it was—a magazine, a file, or a report; his room, split by his own shadow, was an undergraduate mayhem, monkish and chaotic. Reports, flimsies, and dossiers lay heaped everywhere; on the wall a baize noticeboard jammed with postcards and press cuttings; beside it, askew and unframed, one of Bill’s old paintings, a rounded abstract in the hard flat colours of the desert.

  “Hullo, Bill,” said Guillam.

  Leaving his door open—a breach of housekeeper regulations—Haydon fell in ahead of them, still without a word. He was dressed with his customary dottiness. The leather patches of his jacket were stitched on like diamonds, not squares, which from behind gave him a harlequin look. His spectacles were jammed up into his hair like goggles. For a moment they followed him uncertainly, till, without warning, he suddenly turned himself round, all of him at once like a statue being slowly swivelled on its plinth, and fixed his gaze on Guillam. Then he grinned, so that his crescent eyebrows went straight up like a clown’s, and his face became handsome and absurdly young.

  “What the hell are you doing here, you pariah?” he enquired pleasantly.

  Taking the question seriously, Lauder started to explain about the Frenchman and the dirty money.

  “Well, mind you lock up the spoons,” said Bill, talking straight through him. “Those bloody scalp-hunters will steal the gold out of your teeth. Lock up the girls, too,” he added as an afterthought, his eyes still on Guillam, “if they’ll let you. Since when did scalp-hunters wash their own money? That’s our job.”

  “Lauder’s doing the washing. We’re just spending the stuff.”

  “Papers to me,” Haydon said to Strickland, with sudden curtness. “I’m not crossing any more bloody wires.”

  “They’re already routed to you,” said Guillam. “They’re probably in your in-tray now.”

  A last nod sent them on ahead, so that Guillam felt Haydon’s pale blue gaze boring into his back all the way to the next dark turning.

  “Fantastic fellow,” Lauder declared, as if Guillam had never met him. “London Station could not be in better hands. Incredible ability. Incredible record. Brilliant.”

  Whereas you, thought Guillam savagely, are brilliant by association. With Bill, with the coffee machine, with banks. His meditations were interrupted by Roy Bland’s caustic cockney voice, issuing from a doorway ahead of them.

  “Hey, Lauder, hold on a minute: have you seen Bloody Bill anywhere? He’s wanted urgently.”

  Followed at once by Toby Esterhase’s faithful mid-European echo from the same direction: “Immediately, Lauder; actually, we have put out an alert for him.”

  They had entered the last cramped corridor. Lauder was perhaps three paces on and was already composing his answer to this question as Guillam arrived at the open doorway and looked in. Bland was sprawled massively at his desk. He had thrown off his jacket and was clutching a paper. Arcs of sweat ringed his armpits. Tiny Toby Esterhase was stooped over him like a headwaiter, a stiff-backed miniature ambassador with silvery hair and a crisp unfriendly jaw, and he had stretched out one hand towards the paper as if to recommend a speciality. They had evidently been reading the same document when Bland caught sight of Lauder Strickland passing.

  “Indeed I have seen Bill Haydon,” said Lauder, who had a trick of rephrasing questions to make them sound more seemly. “I suspect Bill is on his way to you this moment. He’s a way back there down the corridor; we were having a brief word about a couple of things.”

  Bland’s gaze moved slowly to Guillam and settled there; its chilly appraisal was uncomfortably reminiscent of Haydon’s. “Hullo, Pete,” he said. At this, Tiny Toby straightened up and turned his eyes also directly towards Guillam; brown and quiet like a pointer’s.

  “Hi,” said Guillam, “what’s the joke?”

  Their greeting was not merely frosty; it was downright hostile. Guillam had lived cheek by jowl with Toby Esterhase for three months on a very dodgy operation in Switzerland and Toby had never smiled once, so his stare came as no surprise. But Roy Bland was one of Smiley’s discoveries, a warmhearted and impulsive fellow for that world, red-haired and burly, an intellectual primitive whose idea of a good evening was talking Wittgenstein in the pubs round Kentish Town. He’d spent ten years as a Party hack, plodding the academic circuit in Eastern Europe, and now, like Guillam, he was grounded, which was even something of a bond. His usual style was a big grin, a slap on the shoulder, and a blast of last night’s beer; but not today.

  “No joke, Peter, old boy,” said Roy, mustering a belated smile. “Just surprised to see you, that’s all. We’re used to having this floor to ourselves.”

  “Here’s Bill,” said Lauder, very pleased to have his prognostication so promptly confirmed. In a strip of light, as he entered it, Guillam noticed the queer colour of Haydon’s cheeks. A blushing red, daubed high on the bones, but deep, made up of tiny broken veins. It gave him, thought Guillam in his heightened state of nervousness, a slightly Dorian Gray look.

  His meeting with Lauder Strickland lasted an hour and twenty minutes; Guillam spun it out that long, and throughout it his mind went back to Bland and Esterhase and he wondered what the hell was eating them.

  “Well, I suppose I’d better go and clear all this with the Dolphin,” he said at last. “We all know how she is about Swiss banks.” The housekeepers lived two doors down from Banking. “I’ll leave this here,” he added and tossed the pass on to Lauder’s desk.

  Diana Dolphin’s room smelt of fresh deodorant; her chain-mail handbag lay on the safe beside a copy of the Financial Times. She was one of those groomed Circus brides whom no one ever marries. Yes, he said wearily, the operational papers were already on submission to London Station. Yes, he understood that freewheeling with dirty money was a thing of the past.

  “Then we shall look into it and let you know,” she announced, which meant she would go and ask Phil Porteous, who sat next door.

  “I’ll tell Lauder, then,” said Guillam, and left.

  Move, he thought.

  In the men’s room he waited thirty seconds at the basins, watching the door in the mirror and listening. A curious quiet had descended over the whole floor. Come on, he thought, you’re getting old; move. He crossed the corridor, stepped boldly into the duty officers’ room, closed the door with a slam, and looked round. He reckoned he had ten minutes, and he reckoned that a slammed door made less noise in that silence than a door surreptitiously closed. Move.

  He had brought the camera but the light was awful. The net-curtained window looked onto a courtyard full of blackened pipes. He couldn’t have risked a brighter bulb even if he’d had one with him, so he used his memory. Nothing much seemed to have changed since the takeover. In the daytime the place was used as a restroom for girls with the vapours, and to judge by the smell of cheap scent it still was. Along one wall lay the imitation-leather divan, which at night made into a rotten bed; beside it the first-aid chest with the red cross peeling off the front, and a clapped-out television. The steel cupboard stood in its same place between the switchboard and the locked telephones, and he made a beeline for it. It was an old cupboard and he could have opened it with a tin opener. He had brought his picks and a couple of light alloy tools. Then he remembered that the combination used to be 31-22-11 and he tried it, four anti, three clock, two anti, clockwise till she springs. The dial was so jaded it knew the way. When he opened the door, dust rolled out of the bottom in a cloud, crawled a distance, then slowly lifted towards the dark window. At the same moment, he heard what sounded like a single note played on a flute: it came from a car, most likely, braking in the street outside; or the wheel of a file trolley squeaking on linoleum. But for that moment it was one of those long, mournful notes which made up Ca
milla’s practice scales. She played exactly when she felt like it. At midnight, in the early morning, or whenever. She didn’t give a damn about the neighbours; she seemed quite nerveless altogether. He remembered her that first evening: “Which is your side of the bed? Where shall I put my clothes?” He prided himself on his delicate touch in such things, but Camilla had no use for it; technique was already a compromise, a compromise with reality—she would say an escape from it. All right, so get me out of this lot.

  The duty logbooks were on the top shelf, in bound volumes with the dates pasted on the spines. They looked like family account books. He took down the volume for April and studied the list of names on the inside cover, wondering whether anyone could see him from the dupe-room across the courtyard, and if they could, would they care? He began working through the entries, searching for the night of the tenth and eleventh, when the signals traffic between London Station and Tarr was supposed to have taken place. Hong Kong was eight hours ahead, Smiley had pointed out: Tarr’s telegram and London’s first answer had both happened out of hours.

  From the corridor came a sudden swell of voices, and for a second he even fancied he could pick out Alleline’s growling border brogue lifted in humourless banter, but fancies were two a penny just now. He had a cover story and a part of him believed it already. If he was caught, the whole of him would believe it; and if the Sarratt inquisitors sweated him, he had a fallback—he never travelled without one. All the same, he was terrified. The voices died, and the ghost of Percy Alleline with them. Sweat was running over his ribs. A girl tripped past humming a tune from Hair. If Bill hears you, he’ll murder you, he thought; if there’s one thing that sends Bill spare it’s humming. “What are you doing here, you pariah?”

  Then, to his fleeting amusement, he actually heard Bill’s infuriated roar, echoing from God knows what distance: “Stop that moaning. Who is the fool?”

  Move. Once you stop, you never start again: there is a special stage-fright that can make you dry up and walk away, that burns your fingers when you touch the goods and turns your stomach to water. Move. He put back the April volume and drew four others at random: February, June, September, and October. He flicked through them fast, looking for comparisons, returned them to the shelf, and dropped into a crouch. He wished to God the dust would settle; there seemed to be no end to it. Why didn’t someone complain? Always the same when a lot of people use one place: no one’s responsible, no one gives a hoot. He was looking for the night janitors’ attendance lists. He found them on the bottom shelf, jammed in with the tea-bags and the condensed milk: sheafs of them in envelope-type folders. The janitors filled them in and brought them to you twice in your twelve-hour tour of duty: at midnight and again at 6 A.M. You vouched for their correctness—God knows how, since the night staff were scattered all over the building—signed them off, kept the third copy, and chucked it in the cupboard, no one knew why. That was the procedure before the Flood, and it seemed to be the procedure now.

  Dust and tea-bags on one shelf, he thought. How long since anyone made tea?

  Once again he fixed his sights on April 10th–11th. His shirt was clinging to his ribs. What’s happened to me? Christ, I’m over the hill. He turned forward and back, forward again, twice, three times, then closed the cupboard on the lot. He waited, listened, took a last worried look at the dust, then stepped boldly across the corridor, back to the safety of the men’s room. On the way the clatter hit him: coding machines, the ringing of the telephones, a girl’s voice calling “Where’s that damn float—I had it in my hand,” and that mysterious piping again, but no longer like Camilla’s in the small hours. Next time I’ll get her to do the job, he thought savagely; without compromise, face to face, the way life should be.

  In the men’s room he found Spike Kaspar and Nick de Silsky standing at the hand basins and murmuring at each other into the mirror: legmen for Haydon’s Soviet networks, they’d been around for years, known simply as “the Russians.” Seeing Guillam, they at once stopped talking.

  “Hullo, you two. Christ, you really are inseparable.”

  They were blond and squat and they looked more like Russians than the real ones. He waited till they’d gone, rinsed the dust off his fingers, then drifted back to Lauder Strickland’s room.

  “Lord save us, that Dolphin does talk,” he said carelessly.

  “Very able officer. Nearest thing to indispensable we have around here. Extremely competent, you can take my word for it,” said Lauder. He looked closely at his watch before he signed the chit, then led Guillam back to the lifts. Toby Esterhase was at the barrier, talking to an unfriendly young janitor.

  “You are going back to Brixton, Peter?” His tone was casual, his expression as usual impenetrable.

  “Why?”

  “I have a car outside, actually. I thought maybe I could run you. We have some business out that way.”

  Run you: Tiny Toby spoke no known language perfectly, but he spoke them all. In Switzerland, Guillam had heard his French and it had a German accent; his German had a Slav accent and his English was full of stray flaws and stops and false vowel sounds.

  “It’s all right, Tobe, I think I’ll just go home. Night.”

  “Straight home? I would run you, that’s all.”

  “Thanks, I’ve got shopping to do. All those bloody godchildren.”

  “Sure,” said Toby as if he hadn’t any, and stuck in his little granite jaw in disappointment.

  What the hell does he want, Guillam thought. Tiny Toby and Big Roy, both: why were they giving me the eye? Was it something they were reading or something they ate?

  Out in the street he sauntered down the Charing Cross Road peering at the windows of the bookshops while his other mind checked both sides of the pavement. It had turned much colder, a wind was getting up, and there was a promise to people’s faces as they bustled by. He felt elated. Till now he had been living too much in the past, he decided. Time to get my eye in again. In Zwemmer’s he examined a coffee-table book called Musical Instruments Down the Ages and remembered that Camilla had a late lesson with Dr. Sand, her flute-teacher. He walked back as far as Foyle’s, glancing down bus queues as he went. Think of it as abroad, Smiley had said. Remembering the duty room and Roy Bland’s fishy stare, Guillam had no difficulty. And Bill, too: was Haydon party to their same suspicion? No. Bill was his own category, Guillam decided, unable to resist a surge of loyalty to Haydon. Bill would share nothing that was not his own in the first place. Set beside Bill, those other two were pygmies.

  In Soho he hailed a cab and asked for Waterloo Station. At Waterloo, from a reeking phone box, he telephoned a number in Mitcham, Surrey, and spoke to an Inspector Mendel, formerly of Special Branch, known to both Guillam and Smiley from other lives. When Mendel came on the line, Guillam asked for Jenny and heard Mendel tell him tersely that no Jenny lived there. He apologised and rang off. He dialed the time and feigned a pleasant conversation with the automatic announcer because there was an old lady outside waiting for him to finish. By now he should be there, he thought. He rang off and dialed a second number in Mitcham, this time a call-box at the end of Mendel’s avenue.

  “This is Will,” said Guillam.

  “And this is Arthur,” said Mendel cheerfully. “How’s Will?” He was a quirkish, loping tracker of a man, sharp-faced and sharp-eyed, and Guillam had a very precise picture of him just then, leaning over his policeman’s notebook with his pencil poised.

  “I want to give you the headlines now in case I go under a bus.”

  “That’s right, Will,” said Mendel consolingly. “Can’t be too careful.”

  He gave his message slowly, using the scholastic cover they had agreed on as a last protection against random interception: exams, students, stolen papers. Each time he paused, he heard nothing but a faint scratching. He imagined Mendel writing slowly and legibly and not speaking till he had it all down.

  “I got those happy snaps from the chemist, by the by,” said Mendel fina
lly, when he had checked it all back. “Come out a treat. Not a miss among them.”

  “Thanks. I’m glad.”

  But Mendel had already rung off.

  I’ll say one thing for moles, thought Guillam: it’s a long dark tunnel all the way. As he held open the door for the old lady, he noticed the telephone receiver lying on its cradle, how the sweat crawled over it in drips. He considered his message to Mendel; he thought again of Roy Bland and Toby Esterhase staring at him through the doorway; he wondered quite urgently where Smiley was, and whether he was taking care. He returned to Eaton Place needing Camilla badly, and a little afraid of his reasons. Was it really age that was against him suddenly? Somehow, for the first time in his life, he had sinned against his own notions of nobility. He had a sense of dirtiness, even of self-disgust.

  12

  There are old men who go back to Oxford and find their youth beckoning to them from the stones. Smiley was not one of them. Ten years ago he might have felt a pull. Not now. Passing the Bodleian, he vaguely thought, I worked there. Seeing the house of his old tutor in Parks Road, he remembered that before the war in its long garden Jebedee had first suggested he might care to talk to “one or two people I know in London.” And hearing Tom Tower strike the evening six, he found himself thinking of Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux, who must have arrived here the year that he went down, and were then gathered up by the war; and he wondered idly how they must have looked together then; Bill, the painter, polemicist, and socialite; Jim, the athlete, hanging on his words. In their heyday together in the Circus, he reflected, that distinction had all but evened out: Jim grew nimble at the brainwork and Bill in the field was no man’s fool. Only at the end, the old polarity asserted itself: the workhorse went back to his stable, the thinker to his desk.