Call for the Dead

by John Le Carré

Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.

the fantastic prospect of working completely alone.

By the strength of his intellect, he forced himself to observe humanity with clinical objectivity, and because he was neither immortal nor infallible he hated and feared the falseness of his life.

there had been a night, a terrible night in the winter of 1937, when Smiley had stood at his window and watched a great bonfire in the university court: round it stood hundreds of students, their faces exultant and glistening in the dancing light. And into the pagan fire they threw books in their hundreds.

dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle age without ever being young, and that he was – in the nicest possible way – on the shelf.

It comforted the Great to deal with a man they knew, a man who could reduce any colour to grey, who knew his masters and could walk among them.

He felt safe in the taxi. Safe and warm. The warmth was contraband, smuggled from his bed and hoarded against the wet January night.

(You’re dangerous, Maston. You’re weak and frightened. Anyone’s neck before yours, I know. You’re looking at me that way – measuring me for the rope.)

then we went to an espresso café he knew near Millbank.’ ‘A what?’ ‘An espresso bar. They sell a special kind of coffee for a shilling a cup. We had some.’

toying with the businessman’s cutlery – paper knife, cigarette box, lighter – the whole chemistry set of official hospitality.

It was a worn face, racked and ravaged long ago, the face of a child grown old on starving and exhaustion, the eternal refugee face, the prison-camp face, thought Smiley.

I can scarcely hope to sleep today. Sleep is not a luxury I enjoy.’ She looked down wryly at her own tiny body; ‘My body and I must put up with one another twenty hours a day.

I have the experience to suffer with discretion.’

‘You call yourself the State, Mr Smiley; you have no place among real people. You dropped a bomb from the sky: don’t come down here and look at the blood, or hear the scream.’

he even tried on occasion to plan in his head a walk through a European city – to record the shops and buildings he would pass, for instance, in Berne on a walk from the Münster to the university. But despite such energetic mental exercise, the ghosts of time present would intrude and drive his dreams away.

Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.

Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective. He used to say that the greatest mistake man ever made was to distinguish between the mind and the body:

“Only make no laws, no fine theories, no judgements, and the people may love, but give them one theory, let them invent one slogan, and the game begins again.”

It was as if Dieter’s brilliant and imaginative tricks had been compressed into a manual which Mundt had learnt by heart, adding only the salt of his own brutality.

He was wearing a white tennis shirt with short sleeves, which had somehow remained spotlessly clean throughout the race, setting off those black monkey arms with repulsive clarity.

let me shatter your world again: my own bores me.

‘I don’t think she liked labels. I think she wanted to help build one society which could live without conflict. Peace is a dirty word now, isn’t it? I think she wanted peace.’