Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (20 page)

“Who would I do that for, George?” Toby had asked, dead-eyed. “You know in my book that’s completely illegal.” And idiom, in Toby’s book, had a way of being ludicrous.

“Well, I can see you doing it for Percy Alleline, for one,” Smiley suggested, feeding him the excuse: “After all, if Percy
ordered
you to do something and not to record it, you’d be in a very difficult position.”

“What sort of something, though, George, I wonder?”

“Clear a foreign letter-box, prime a safe house, watch someone’s back, spike an embassy. Percy’s Director of Operations, after all. You might think he was acting on instructions from the fifth floor. I can see that happening quite reasonably.”

Toby looked carefully at Smiley. He was holding a cigarette, but apart from lighting it he hadn’t smoked it at all. It was a hand-rolled affair, taken from a silver box, but once lit, it never went into his mouth. It swung around, along the line or away to the side; sometimes it was poised to take the plunge, but it never did. Meanwhile Toby made his speech: one of Toby’s personal statements, supposedly definitive about where he stood at this point in his life.

Toby liked the service, he said. He would prefer to remain in it. He felt sentimental about it. He had other interests and at any time they could claim him altogether, but he liked the service best. His trouble was, he said, promotion. Not that he wanted it for any greedy reason. He would say his reasons were social.

“You know, George, I have so many years’ seniority I feel actually quite embarrassed when these young fellows ask me to take orders from them. You know what I mean? Acton, even—just the name of Acton for them is ridiculous.”

“Oh,” said Smiley mildly. “Which young fellows are these?”

But Esterhase had lost interest. His statement completed, his face settled again into its familiar blank expression, his doll’s eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance.

“Do you mean Roy Bland?” Smiley asked. “Or Percy? Is Percy young? Who, Toby?”

It was no good, Toby regretted: “George, when you are overdue for promotion and working your fingers to the bones, anyone looks young who’s above you on the ladder.”

“Perhaps Control could move you up a few rungs,” Smiley suggested, not much caring for himself in this role.

Esterhase’s reply struck a chill. “Well, actually, you know, George, I am not too sure he is able these days. Look here”—opening a drawer—“I give Ann something. When I heard you were coming, I phone a couple of friends of mine; something beautiful, I say, something for a faultless woman; you know I never forget her since we met once at Bill Haydon’s cocktail?”

So Smiley carried off the consolation prize—a costly scent, smuggled, he assumed, by one of Toby’s homing lamplighters—and took his beggar bowl to Bland, knowing as he did so that he was coming one step nearer to Haydon.

Returning to the Major’s table, Smiley searched through Lacon’s files till he came to a slim volume marked “Operation Witchcraft, direct subsidies,” which recorded the earliest expenses incurred through the running of Source Merlin. “For reasons of security it is proposed,” wrote Alleline in yet another personal memo to the Minister, this one dated almost two years ago, “to keep the Witchcraft financing
absolutely separate
from all other Circus imprests. Until some proper cover can be found, I am asking you for
direct subventions from Treasury funds
rather than mere supplementaries to the Secret Vote, which in due course
are certain to find their way into the mainstream of Circus accounting.
I shall then account to you personally.”

“Approved,” wrote the Minister a week later, “provided always . . .”

There were no provisions. A glance at the first row of figures showed Smiley all he needed to know: already by May of that year, when that interview at Acton took place, Toby Esterhase had personally made no fewer than eight trips on the Witchcraft budget, two to Paris, two to The Hague, one to Helsinki, and three to Berlin. In each case the purpose of the journey was curtly described as “Collecting product.” Between May and November, when Control faded from the scene, he made a further nineteen. One of these took him to Sofia, another to Istanbul. None required him to be absent for more than three full days. Most took place at weekends. On several such journeys, he was accompanied by Bland.

Not to put too fine an edge on it, Toby Esterhase, as Smiley had never seriously doubted, had lied in his teeth. It was nice to find the record confirming his impression.

Smiley’s feelings towards Roy Bland had at that time been ambivalent. Recalling them now, he decided they still were. A don had spotted him, Smiley had recruited him; the combination was oddly akin to the one that had brought Smiley himself into the Circus net. But this time there was no German monster to fan the patriotic flame, and Smiley had always been a little embarrassed by protestations of anti-Communism. Like Smiley, Bland had no real childhood. His father was a docker, a passionate trade-unionist, and a Party member. His mother died when Bland was a boy. His father hated education as he hated authority, and when Bland grew clever the father took it into his head that he had lost his son to the ruling class and beat the life out of him. Bland fought his way to grammar school and in the holidays worked his fingers, as Toby would say, to the bones, in order to raise the extra fee. When Smiley met him in his tutor’s rooms at Oxford, he had the battered look of someone just arrived from a bad journey.

Smiley took him up, and over several months edged closer to a proposition, which Bland accepted—largely, Smiley assumed, out of animosity towards his father. After that he passed out of Smiley’s care. Subsisting on odd grants undescribed, Bland toiled in the Marx Memorial Library and wrote leftish papers for tiny magazines that would have died long ago had the Circus not subsidized them. In the evenings he disputed loud and long at smoky meetings in pubs and school halls. In the vacations he went to the Nursery, where a fanatic called Thatch ran a charm school for outward-bound penetration agents, one pupil at a time. Thatch trained Bland in tradecraft and carefully nudged his progressive opinions nearer to his father’s Marxist camp. Three years to the day after his recruitment, partly thanks to his proletarian pedigree, and his father’s influence at King Street, Bland won a year’s appointment as assistant lector in economics at the University of Poznan. He was launched.

From Poland he applied successfully for a post at the Budapest Academy of Sciences, and for the next eight years he lived the nomadic life of a minor left-wing intellectual in search of light, often liked but never trusted. He staged in Prague, returned to Poland, did a hellish two semesters in Sofia and six in Kiev, where he had a nervous breakdown, his second in as many months. Once more the Nursery took charge of him, this time to dry him out. He was passed as clean, his networks were given to other fieldmen, and Roy himself was brought into the Circus to manage, mainly from a desk, the networks he had recruited in the field. Recently, it had seemed to Smiley, Bland had become very much Haydon’s colleague. If Smiley chanced to call on Roy for a chat, like as not Bill was lounging in his armchair surrounded by papers, charts, and cigarette smoke; if he dropped in on Bill, it was no surprise to find Bland, in a sweat-soaked shirt, padding heavily back and forth across the carpet. Bill had Russia, Bland the satellites; but already in those early days of Witchcraft, the distinction had all but vanished.

They met at a pub in St. John’s Wood—still May—half past five on a dull day and the garden empty. Roy brought a child, a boy of five or so, a tiny Bland, fair, burly, and pink-faced. He didn’t explain the boy, but sometimes as they talked he shut off and watched him where he sat on a bench away from them, eating nuts. Nervous breakdowns or not, Bland still bore the imprimatur of the Thatch philosophy for agents in the enemy camp: self-faith, positive participation, Pied Piper appeal, and all those other uncomfortable phrases which in the high day of the cold-war culture had turned the Nursery into something close to a moral-rearmament centre.

“So what’s the deal?” Bland asked affably.

“There isn’t one really, Roy. Control feels that the present situation is unhealthy. He doesn’t like to see you getting mixed up in a cabal. Nor do I.”

“Great. So what’s the deal?”

“What do you want?”

On the table, soaked from the earlier rain fall, was a cruet set left over from lunchtime, with a bunch of paper-wrapped cellulose toothpicks in the centre compartment. Taking one, Bland spat the paper onto the grass and began working his back teeth with the fat end.

“Well, how about a five-thousand-quid backhander out the reptile fund?”

“And a house and a car?” said Smiley, making a joke of it.

“And the kid to Eton,” Bland added, and winked across the concrete paving to the boy while he went on working with the toothpick. “I’ve paid, see, George. You know that. I don’t know what I’ve bought with it but I’ve paid a hell of a lot. I want some back. Ten years’ solitary for the fifth floor; that’s big money at any age. Even yours. There must have been a reason why I fell for all that spiel, but I can’t quite remember what it was. Must be your magnetic personality.”

Smiley’s glass was still going, so Bland fetched himself another from the bar, and something for the boy as well.

“You’re an educated sort of swine,” he announced easily as he sat down again. “An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function: who dreamed that one up?”

“Scott Fitzgerald,” Smiley replied, thinking for a moment that Bland was proposing to say something about Bill Haydon.

“Well, Fitzgerald knew a thing or two,” Bland affirmed. As he drank, his bulging eyes slid sideways toward the fence, as if in search of someone. “And I’m definitely functioning, George. As a good Socialist, I’m going for the money. As a good capitalist, I’m sticking with the revolution, because if you can’t beat it spy on it. Don’t look like that, George. It’s the name of the game these days: you scratch my conscience, I’ll drive your Jag, right?” He was already lifting an arm as he said this. “With you in a minute!” he called across the lawn. “Set one up for me!”

Two girls were hovering on the other side of the wire fence.

“Is that Bill’s joke?” Smiley asked, suddenly quite angry.

“Is what?”

“Is that one of Bill’s jokes about materialist England, the pigs-in-clover society?”

“Could be,” said Bland, and finished his drink. “Don’t you like it?”

“Not too much, no. I never knew Bill before as a radical reformer. What’s come over him all of a sudden?”

“That’s not radical,” Bland retorted, resenting any devaluation of his Socialism, or of Haydon. “That’s just looking out the bloody window. That’s just England now, man. Nobody wants that, do they?”

“So how do you propose,” Smiley demanded, hearing himself at his pompous worst, “to destroy the acquisitive and competitive instincts in Western society without also destroying . . .”

Bland had finished his drink; and the meeting, too. “Why should you be bothered? You’ve got Bill’s job. What more do you want? Long as it lasts.”

And Bill’s got my wife, Smiley thought as Bland rose to go; and, damn him, he’s told you.

The boy had invented a game. He had laid a table on its side and was rolling an empty bottle onto the gravel. Each time, he started the bottle higher up the table-top. Smiley left before it smashed.

Unlike Esterhase, Bland had not even bothered to lie. Lacon’s files made no pretence of his involvement with the Witchcraft operation:

“Source Merlin,” wrote Alleline, in a minute dated soon after Control’s departure, “is in every sense a committee operation . . . I cannot honestly say which of my three assistants deserves most praise. The energy of Bland has been an inspiration to us all . . .” He was replying to the Minister’s suggestion that those responsible for Witchcraft should be honoured in the New Year’s list. “While Haydon’s operational ingenuity is at times little short of Merlin’s own,” he added. The medals went to all three; Alleline’s appointment as Chief was confirmed, and with it his beloved knighthood.

18

W
hich left me Bill, thought Smiley. In the course of most London nights, there is one respite from alarm. Ten, twenty minutes, thirty, even an hour, and not a drunk groans or a child cries or a car’s tyres whine into a collision. In Sussex Gardens it happens around three. That night it came early, at one, as Smiley stood once more at his dormer window peering down like a prisoner at Mrs. Pope Graham’s sand patch, where a Bedford van had recently parked. Its roof was daubed with slogans: “Sydney 90 Days,” “Athens Non-Stop,” “Mary Lou Here We Come.” A light glowed inside, and he presumed some children were sleeping there in unmarried bliss. “Kids,” he was supposed to call them. Curtains covered the windows.

Which left me Bill, he thought, still staring at the closed curtains of the van and its flamboyant globe-trotting proclamations; which left me Bill, and our friendly little chat in Bywater Street—just the two of us, old friends, old comrades-at-arms, “sharing everything,” as Martindale had it so elegantly, but Ann sent out for the evening so that the men could be alone. “Which left me Bill,” he repeated hopelessly, and felt the blood rise, and the colours of his vision heighten, and his sense of moderation begin its dangerous slide.