Smiley's People (47 page)

“Unfortunately, I was prevented from adhering to these arrangements by the intervention of members of the Thirteenth Directorate of Moscow Centre, known also as the Karla Directorate. I was summoned to attend an interview immediately.”

 

At which moment, the telephone rang. Toby took the call, rang off, and spoke to Smiley.

“She’s arrived back at the house,” he said, still in German.

Without demur, Smiley turned straight to Grigoriev: “Counsellor, we are advised that your wife has returned home. It has now become necessary for you to telephone her.”

“Telephone her?” Horrified, Grigoriev swung round on Toby. “He tells me, telephone her! What do I say? ‘Grigorieva, here is loving husband! I have been kidnapped by Western spies!’ Your commissar is mad! Mad!”

“You will please tell her you are unavoidably delayed,” Smiley said.

His placidity added fuel to Grigoriev’s outrage: “I tell this to my wife? To Grigorieva? You think she will believe me? She will report me to the Ambassador immediately. ‘Ambassador, my husband has run away! Find him!’”

“The courier Krassky brings your weekly orders from Moscow, does he not?” Smiley asked.

“The commissar knows everything,” Grigoriev told Toby, and wiped his hand across his chin. “If he knows everything, why doesn’t he speak to Grigorieva himself?”

“You are to adopt an official tone with her, Counsellor,” Smiley advised. “Do not refer to Krassky by name, but suggest that he has ordered you to meet him for a conspiratorial discussion somewhere in the town. An emergency. Krassky has changed his plans. You have no idea when you will be back, or what he wants. If she protests, rebuke her. Tell her it is a secret of State.”

They watched him worry, they watched him wonder. Finally, they watched a small smile settle over his face.

“A secret,” Grigoriev repeated, to himself. “A secret of State. Yes.”

Stepping boldly to the telephone, he dialled a number. Toby stood over him, one hand discreetly poised to slam the cradle should he try some trick, but Smiley with a small shake of the head signalled him away. They heard Grigorieva’s voice saying “Yes?” in German. They heard Grigoriev’s bold reply, followed by his wife—it is all on tape—demanding sharply to know where he was. They saw him stiffen and lift his chin, and put on an official face; they heard him snap out a few short phrases, and ask a question to which there was apparently no answer. They saw him ring off again, bright-eyed and pink with pleasure, and his short arms fly in the air with delight, like someone who has scored a goal. The next thing they knew, he had burst out laughing, long, rich gusts of Slav laughter, up and down the scale. Uncontrollably, the others began laughing with him—Skordeno, de Silsky, and Toby. Grigoriev was shaking Toby’s hand.

“Today I like very much conspiracy!” Grigoriev cried, between further gusts of cathartic laughter. “Conspiracy is very good today!”

Smiley had not joined in the general festivity, however. Having cast himself deliberately as the killjoy, he sat turning the pages of his notebook, waiting for the fun to end.

“You were describing how you were approached by members of the Thirteenth Directorate,” Smiley said, when all was quiet again. “Known also as the Karla Directorate. Kindly continue with your narrative, Counsellor?”

D
id Grigoriev sense the new alertness round him—the discreet freezing of gestures? Did he notice how the eyes of Skordeno and de Silsky, both, hunted out Smiley’s impassive face and held it in their gaze? How Millie McCraig slipped silently to the kitchen to check her tape recorders yet again, in case, by an act of a malevolent god, both the main set and the reserve had failed at once? Did he notice Smiley’s now almost Oriental self-effacement—the very opposite of interest—the retreat of his whole body into the copious folds of his brown tweed travelling coat, while he patiently licked his thumb and finger and turned a page?

Toby, at least, noticed these things. Toby in his dark corner by the telephone had a grandstand seat from which he could observe everyone and remain as good as unobserved himself. A fly could not have crossed the floor, but Toby’s watchful eyes would have recorded its entire odyssey. Toby even describes his own symptoms—a hot feeling around the neckband, he says, a knotting of the throat and stomach muscles—Toby not only endured these discomforts, but remembered them faithfully. Whether Grigoriev was responsive to the atmosphere is another matter. Most likely he was too consumed by his central rôle. The triumph of the telephone call had stimulated him, and revived his self-confidence; and it was significant that his first statement, when he once more had the floor, concerned not the Karla Directorate, but his prowess as the lover of little Natasha: “Fellows of our age
need
a girl like that,” he explained to Toby with a wink. “They make us into young men again, like we used to be!”

“Very well, you flew to Moscow alone,” Smiley said, quite snappishly. “The conference got under way, you were approached for an interview. Please continue from there. We have not got all afternoon, you know.”

The conference started on the Monday, Grigoriev agreed, obediently resuming his official statement. When the Friday afternoon came, I returned to my hostel in order to fetch my belongings and take them to Evdokia’s apartment for our little week-end together. Instead of this, however, I was met by three men who ordered me into their car with even less explanation than you did—a glance at Toby—saying to me only that I was required for a special task. During the journey they advised me that they were members of the Thirteenth Directorate of Moscow Centre, which everybody in official Moscow knows to be the élite. I formed the impression that they were intelligent men, above the common run of their profession, which, saving your presence, sir, is not high. I had the impression they could be officers rather than mere lackeys. Nevertheless I was not unduly worried. I assumed that my professional expertise was being required for some secret matter, that was all. They were courteous and I was even somewhat flattered . . .

“How long was the journey?” Smiley interrupted, as he continued writing.

Across town, Grigoriev replied vaguely. Across town, then into countryside till dark. Till we reached this one little man like a monk, sitting in a small room, who seemed to be their master.

 

Once again, Toby insists on bearing witness here to Smiley’s unique mastery of the occasion. It was the strongest proof yet of Smiley’s tradecraft, says Toby—as well as of his command of Grigoriev altogether—that throughout Grigoriev’s protracted narrative, he never once, whether by an over-hasty follow-up question or the smallest false inflection of his voice, departed from the faceless rôle he had assumed for the interrogation. By his self-effacement, Toby insists, George held the whole scene “like a thrush’s egg in his hand.” The slightest careless movement on his part could have destroyed everything, but he never made it. And as the crowning example, Toby likes to offer this crucial moment, when the actual figure of Karla was for the first time introduced. Any other inquisitor, he says, at the very mention of a “little man like a monk who seemed to be their master,” would have pressed for a description—his age, rank, what was he wearing, smoking, how did you know he was their master? Not Smiley. Smiley with a suppressed exclamation of annoyance tapped his ballpoint pen on his pad, and in a long-suffering voice invited Grigoriev, then and for the future, kindly
not
to foreshorten factual detail:

“Let me put the question again. How long was the journey? Please describe it precisely as you remember it and let us proceed from there.”

Crestfallen, Grigoriev actually apologised. He would say they drove for four hours at speed, sir; perhaps more. He remembered now that they twice stopped to relieve themselves. After four hours they entered a guarded area—no, sir, I saw no shoulder-boards, the guards wore plain clothes—and drove for at least another half hour into the heart of it. Like a nightmare, sir.

Yet again, Smiley objected, determined to keep the temperature as low as possible. How could it have been a nightmare, he wanted to know, since Grigoriev had only a moment before claimed that he was not frightened?

Well, not a nightmare exactly, sir, more a dream. At this stage, Grigoriev had had an impression he was being taken to the
landlord—
he used the Russian word, and Toby translated it—while he himself felt increasingly like a poor peasant. Therefore he was not frightened, sir, because he had no control over events, and accordingly nothing for which to reproach himself. But when the car finally stopped, and one of the men put a hand on his arm, and addressed a warning to him: at this point, his attitude changed entirely, sir: “You are about to meet a great Soviet fighter and a powerful man,” the man told him. “If you are disrespectful to him, or attempt to tell lies, you may never again see your wife and family.”

“What is the name of this man?” Grigoriev had asked.

But the men replied, without smiling, that this great Soviet fighter had no name. Grigoriev asked whether he was Karla himself; knowing that Karla was the code name for the head of the Thirteenth Directorate. The men only repeated that the great fighter had no name.

“So that was when the dream became a nightmare, sir,” said Grigoriev humbly. “They told me also that I could say goodbye to my week-end of love. Little Evdokia would have to get her fun elsewhere, they said. Then one of them laughed.”

Now a great fear had seized Grigoriev, he said, and by the time he had entered the first room and advanced upon the second door, he was so scared his knees were shaking. He even had time to be scared for his beloved Evdokia. Who could this supernatural person be, he wondered in awe, that he could know almost before Grigoriev himself knew, that he was pledged to meet Evdokia for the week-end?

“So you knocked on the door,” said Smiley, as he wrote.

And I was ordered to enter! Grigoriev went on. His enthusiasm for confession was mounting; so was his dependence upon his interrogator. His voice had become louder, his gestures more free. It was as if, says Toby, he was trying physically to coax Smiley out of his posture of reticence; whereas in reality it was Smiley’s feigned indifference which was coaxing Grigoriev into the open. And I found myself not in a large and splendid office at all, sir, as became a senior official and a great Soviet fighter, but in a room so barren it would have done duty for a prison cell, with a bare wood desk at the centre, and a hard chair for a visitor to sit on:

“Imagine, sir, a great Soviet fighter and a powerful man! And all he had was a bare desk, which was illuminated only by a most inferior light! And behind it sat this priest, sir, a man of no affectation or pretence at all—a man of deep experience, I would say—a man from the very roots of his country—with small, straight eyes, and short grey hair, and a habit of holding his hands together while he smoked.”

“Smoked
what?
” Smiley asked, writing.

“Please?”

“What did he smoke? The question is plain enough. A pipe, cigarettes, cigar?”

“Cigarettes. American, and the room was full of their aroma. It was like Potsdam again, when we were negotiating with the American officers from Berlin. ‘If this man smokes American all the time,’ I thought, ‘then he is certainly a man of influence.’” Rounding on Toby again in his excitement, Grigoriev put the same point to him in Russian. To smoke American, chain smoke them, he said: imagine the cost, the influence necessary to obtain so many packets!

Then Smiley, true to his pedantic manner, asked Grigoriev to demonstrate what he meant by “holding his hands together” while he smoked. And he looked on impassively while Grigoriev took a brown wood pencil from his pocket and linked his chubby hands in front of his face, and held the pencil in both of them, and sucked at it in caricature, like someone drinking two-handed from a mug.

“So!” he explained, and with another volatile switch of mood, shouted something in high laughter to Toby in Russian, which Toby did not see fit, at the time, to translate, and in the transcription is rendered only as “obscene.”

The priest ordered Grigoriev to sit, and for ten minutes described to him the most intimate details of Grigoriev’s love affair with Evdokia, and also of his indiscretions with two other girls, who had both worked for him as secretaries, one in Potsdam and one in Bonn, and had ended up, unknown to Grigorieva, by sharing his bed. At which point, if Grigoriev was to be believed, he made a show of courage, and rose to his feet, demanding to know whether he had been brought half-way across Russia in order to attend a court of morals: “To sleep with one’s secretary was not an unknown phenomenon, I told him, even in the Politburo! I assured him that I had never been indiscreet with foreign girls, only Russians. ‘This too I know,’ he says. ‘But Grigorieva is unlikely to appreciate the distinction.’”

And then, to Toby’s continuing amazement, Grigoriev gave vent to another burst of throaty laughter; and though both de Silsky and Skordeno discreetly joined in, Grigoriev’s mirth outlived everybody’s, so that they had to wait for it to run down.

“Kindly tell us, please, why the man you call the priest summoned you,” Smiley said, from deep in his brown overcoat.

“He advised me that he had special work for me in Berne on behalf of the Thirteenth Directorate. I should reveal it to nobody, not even to my Ambassador, it was too secret for any of them. ‘But,’ says the priest, ‘you shall tell your wife. Your personal circumstances render it impossible for you to make a conspiracy without the knowledge of your wife. This I know, Grigoriev. So tell her.’ And he was right,” Grigoriev commented. “This was wise of him! This was clear evidence that the man was familiar with the human condition.”

Smiley turned a page and continued writing. “Go on, please,” he said.

 

First, said the priest, Grigoriev was to open a Swiss bank account. The priest handed him a thousand Swiss francs in one hundred notes and told him to use them as the first payment. He should open the account not in Berne, where he was known, nor in Zurich, where there was a Soviet trade bank.