Call for the Dead

by John Le Carré

Sawley, in fact, declared at the wedding that ‘Sercomb was mated to a bullfrog in a sou’wester’. And Smiley, unaware of this description, had waddled down the aisle in search of the kiss that would turn him into a Prince.

But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equip them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation.

partir c’est courir un peu, and he appeared to be unaware that though Lady Ann just ran away, a little of George Smiley had indeed died.

His first operational posting was relatively pleasant: a two-year appointment as englischer Dozent at a provincial German university: lectures on Keats and vacations in Bavarian hunting lodges with groups of earnest and solemnly promiscuous German students.

intrigued him to evaluate from a detached position what he had learnt to describe as ‘the agent potential’ of a human being; to devise minuscule tests of character and behaviour which could inform him of the qualities of a candidate. This part of him was bloodless and inhuman – Smiley in this role was the international mercenary of his trade, amoral and without motive beyond that of personal gratification.

Conversely it saddened him to witness in himself the gradual death of natural pleasure. Always withdrawn, he now found himself shrinking from the temptations of friendship and human loyalty; he guarded himself warily from spontaneous reaction. 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.

Smiley had discovered in himself a talent for the part which went beyond the rudimentary change to his hair and the addition of a small moustache.

His appearance seemed to reflect this discomfort in a kind of physical recession which made him more hunched and frog-like than ever. He blinked more, and acquired the nickname of ‘Mole’. But his débutante secretary adored him, and referred to him invariably as ‘My darling teddy-bear’.

Which goes some way to explaining why George Smiley sat in the back of a London taxi at two o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, 4 January, on his way to Cambridge Circus.

He felt safe in the taxi. Safe and warm. The warmth was contraband, smuggled from his bed and hoarded against the wet January night. Safe because unreal: it was his ghost that ranged the London streets and took note of their unhappy pleasure-seekers, scuttling under commissionaires’ umbrellas; and of the tarts, gift-wrapped in polythene. It was his ghost, he decided, which had climbed from the well of sleep and stopped the telephone shrieking on the bedside table

Surrey police had no further interest in the case, but Sparrow had sent down independently a Special Branch officer to remain at the police station and act if necessary as liaison between Security and the police. There was no doubt about the manner of Fennan’s death. He had been shot through the temple at point blank range by a small French pistol manufactured in Lille in 1957. The pistol was found beneath the body. All the circumstances were consistent with suicide.

‘You’re the man who interviewed my husband,’ she said; ‘about loyalty.’ She led him into the low, dark drawing-room. There was no fire. Smiley felt suddenly sick and cheap. Loyalty to whom, to what. She didn’t sound resentful. He was an oppressor, but she accepted oppression.

She did not respond to his sympathy: ‘Thank you, but 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. We have lived longer than most people already. ‘As for the terrible loss. Yes, I suppose so. But you know, Mr Smiley, for so long I owned nothing but a toothbrush, so I’m not really used to possession, even after eight years of marriage. Besides, I have the experience to suffer with discretion.’

She paused, showing no sign of emotion beyond the burning of her dark eyes. ‘It’s an old illness you suffer from, Mr Smiley,’ she continued, taking a cigarette from the box; ‘and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes the division between your world and ours is incomplete; the files grow heads and arms and legs, and that’s a terrible moment, isn’t it? The names have families as well as records, and human motives to explain the sad little dossiers and their make-believe sins. When that happens I am sorry for you.’ She paused for a moment, then continued: ‘It’s like the State and the People. The State is a dream too, a symbol of nothing at all, an emptiness, a mind without a body, a game played with clouds in the sky. But States make war, don’t they, and imprison people? To dream in doctrines – how tidy! My husband and I have both been tidied now, haven’t we?’ She was looking at him steadily. Her accent was more noticeable now. ‘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.’ She had not raised her voice, she looked above him now, and beyond. ‘You seem shocked. I should be weeping, I suppose, but I’ve no more tears, Mr Smiley – I’m barren; the children of my grief are dead. Thank you for coming, ...

‘It’s not the letter, Mr Smiley, that I’m thinking of. It’s what he said to me.’ ‘How do you mean?’ ‘He was deeply upset by the interview, he told me so. When he came back on Monday night he was desperate, almost incoherent. He collapsed in a chair and I persuaded him to go to bed. I gave him a sedative which lasted him half the night. He was still talking about it the next morning. It occupied his whole mind until his death.’

There was something intimate and touching about the arrangement, and perhaps for the first time Smiley was filled with an immediate sense of the tragedy of Fennan’s death. He returned to the drawing-room.

Suddenly he stared at her. Something had occurred to him which he should have realized upstairs in the bedroom, something so improbable that for a moment his brain was unable to grasp it. Mechanically he went on talking; he must get out of there, get away from the telephone and Maston’s hysterical questions, get away from Elsa Fennan and her dark, restless house. Get away and think.

He returned to the police station, full of disturbing thoughts. To begin with it was not Elsa Fennan who had asked the exchange for an eight-thirty call that morning.

The CID Superintendent at Walliston was a large, genial soul who measured professional competence in years of service and saw no fault in the habit. Sparrow’s Inspector Mendel on the other hand was a thin, weasel-faced gentleman who spoke very rapidly out of the corner of his mouth. Smiley secretly likened him to a gamekeeper – a man who knew his territory and disliked intruders.

He rang off, tore the page from the pad, and put it in his pocket. Smiley spoke quickly: ‘There’s a beastly café down the road. I need some breakfast. Come and have a cup of coffee.’ The telephone was ringing; Smiley could almost feel Maston on the other end. Mendel looked at him for a moment and seemed to understand. They left it ringing and walked quickly out of the police station towards the High Street.

The Fountain Café (Proprietor Miss Gloria Adam) was all Tudor and horse brasses and local honey at sixpence more than anywhere else. Miss Adam herself dispensed the nastiest coffee south of Manchester and spoke of her customers as ‘My Friends’. Miss Adam did not do business with friends, but simply robbed them, which somehow added to the illusion of genteel amateurism which Miss Adam was so anxious to preserve. Her origin was obscure, but she often spoke of her late father as ‘The Colonel’. It was rumoured among those of Miss Adam’s friends who had paid particularly dearly for their friendship that the colonelcy in question had been granted by the Salvation Army.

‘Facsimile of the letter. Super said to give you a copy. They’re sending the original to the FO and another copy straight to Marlene Dietrich.’ ‘Who the devil’s she?’ ‘Sorry, sir. What we call your Adviser, sir. Pretty general in the Branch, sir. Very sorry, sir.’ How beautiful, thought Smiley, how absolutely beautiful.

Smiley stood beside him. ‘I’ve got to go back to London.’ ‘Well, this will put the cat among the pigeons.’ The weasel face turned abruptly towards him; ‘Or will it?’ He spoke with the front of his mouth while the back of it continued to deal with the bun.

Back to London, he thought, back to Maston’s Ideal Home, back to the rat-race of blame. And back to the unreality of containing a human tragedy in a three-page report.

She looked at him for a moment, and then smiled suddenly – the first time he had seen her do so. It was an enchanting smile; her whole face lit up like a child’s. Smiley had a fleeting vision of Elsa Fennan as a child – a spindly, agile tomboy like George Sand’s ‘Petite Fadette’ – half woman, half glib, lying girl. He saw her as a wheedling Backfisch, fighting like a cat for herself alone, and he saw her too, starved and shrunken in prison camp, ruthless in her fight for self-preservation. It was pathetic to witness in that smile the light of her early innocence, and a steeled weapon in her fight for survival.

Occasionally, when there is something I simply have to remember, I ring the exchange and ask for a call a few minutes before the appointed time. It’s like a knot in one’s handkerchief, but a knot can’t ring a bell at you, can it?’ Smiley peered at her. His throat felt rather dry, and he had to swallow before he spoke. ‘And what was the call for this time, Mrs Fennan?’ Again the enchanting smile: ‘There you are. I completely forget.’

It was one of the subtler landmarks of middle age, perhaps, that he could no longer thus subdue his mind. It needed sterner measures now: 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. It was Ann who had robbed him of his peace, Ann who had once made the present so important and taught him the habit of reality, and when she went there was nothing.

He could not believe that Elsa Fennan had killed her husband. Her instinct was to defend, to hoard the treasures of her life, to build about herself the symbols of normal existence. There was no aggression in her, no will but the will to preserve.

‘Strange to wander in the mist, each is alone. No tree knows his neig...

We’re not policemen, Smiley.’ ‘No. I sometimes wonder what we are.’

Her account of Fennan’s reaction to my interview entirely substantiates the letter.’ He was silent for a minute, blinking rather stupidly before him. ‘What I am trying to say is that I don’t believe her. I don’t believe Fennan wrote that letter, or that he had any intention of dying.’ He turned to Maston. ‘We simply cannot dismiss the inconsistencies. Another thing,’ he plunged on, ‘I haven’t had an expert comparison made but there’s a similarity between the anonymous letter and Fennan’s suicide note. The type looks identical. It’s ridiculous I know but there it is. We must bring the police in – give them the facts.’

‘If you or I, Smiley, were ever driven to that dreadful point where we were determined to destroy ourselves, who can tell what our last thoughts on earth would be? And what of Fennan? He sees his career in ruins, his life has no meaning. Is it not conceivable that he should wish, in a moment of weakness or irresolution, to hear another human voice, feel again the warmth of human contact before he dies? Fanciful, sentimental, perhaps; but not improbable in a man so overwrought, so obsessed that he takes his own life.’

Abruptly he felt inside himself the rising panic of frustration beyond endurance. With panic came an uncontrollable fury with this posturing sycophant, this obscene cissy with his greying hair and his reasonable smile. Panic and fury welled up in a sudden tide, flooding his breast, suffusing his whole body. His face felt hot and red, his spectacles blurred and tears sprang to his eyes, adding to his humiliation.

He looked at it stodgily for several minutes, holding it stiffly before him and inclining his head to the left. Then he put the letter down, opened a drawer of the desk and took out a single clean sheet of paper. He wrote a brief letter of resignation to Maston, and attached Fennan’s invitation with a pin. He pressed the bell for a secretary, left the letter in his out-tray and made for the lift. As usual it was stuck in the basement with the registry’s tea trolley, and after a short wait he began walking downstairs. Halfway down he remembered that he had left his mackintosh and a few bits and pieces in his room. Never mind, he thought, they’ll send them on. He sat in his car in the car park, staring through the drenched windscreen. He didn’t care, he just damn well didn’t care. He was surprised certainly. Surprised that he had so nearly lost control. Interviews had played a great part in Smiley’s life, and he had long ago come to consider himself proof against them all: disciplinary, scholastic, medical and religious. His secretive nature detested the purpose of all interviews, their oppressive intimacy, their inescapable reality.

‘Listen, minx, while I explain the Smiley Chameleon–Armadillo technique for the impertinent interviewer.’

‘The technique is based on the theory that the interviewer, loving no one as well as himself, will be attracted by his own image. You therefore assume the exact social, temperamental, political and intellectual colour of your inquisitor.’ ‘Pompous toad. But intelligent lover.’ ‘Silence. Sometimes this method founders against the idiocy or ill-disposition of the inquisitor. If so, become an armadillo.’ ‘And wear linear belts, toad?’ ‘No, place him in a position so incongruous that you are superior to him. I was prepared for confirmation by a retired bishop. I was his whole flock, and received on one half holiday sufficient guidance for a diocese. But by contemplating the bishop’s face, and imagining that under my gaze it became covered in thick fur, I maintained the ascendancy. From then on the skill grew. I could turn him into an ape, get him stuck in sash windows, send him naked to Masonic banquets, condemn him, like the serpent, to go about on his belly …’

Smiley had never seen him before. Tall, fair, handsome, thirty-five odd. A light grey suit, white shirt and silver tie – habillé en diplomate. German or Swede. His left hand remained nonchalantly in his jacket pocket.

‘Always wanted to keep them, see what it’s all about. Been reading it all up – frightens me stiff, I can tell you. Odd little beggars.’ He nodded a couple of times in support of this statement, and Smiley looked at him again with interest. His face was thin but muscular, its expression entirely uncommunicative; his iron-grey hair was cut very short and spiky. He seemed quite indifferent to the weather, and the weather to him. Smiley knew exactly the life that lay behind Mendel, had seen in policemen all over the world the same leathern skin, the same reserves of patience, bitterness and anger. He could guess the long, fruitless hours of surveillance in every kind of weather, waiting for someone who might never come … or come and go too quickly. And he knew how much Mendel and the rest of them were at the mercy of personalities – capricious and bullying, nervous and changeful, occasionally wise and sympathetic.

He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man.

He could guess what Ann would have said about Mendel. She would have loved him, made a person of him, had a special voice and face for imitating him, would have made a story of him until he fitted into their lives and wasn’t a mystery any more: ‘Darling, who’d have thought he could be so cosy! The last man I’d ever thought would tell me where to buy cheap fish. And what a darling little house – no bother – he must know Toby jugs are hell and he just doesn’t care. I think he’s a pet. Toad, do ask him to dinner. You must. Not to giggle at but to like.’ He wouldn’t have asked him, of course, but Ann would be content – she’d found a way to like him. And having done so, forgotten him.

That was what Smiley wanted, really – a way to like Mendel. He was not as quick as Ann at finding one. But Ann was Ann – she practically murdered an Etonian nephew once for drinking claret with fish, but if Mendel had lit a pipe over her crêpe Suzette, she probably would not have noticed.

‘Couldn’t say, sir. But you can have him any time for illegal betting. And Adam’s practically under the Act already.’ They drove towards Battersea Hospital. The park on their right looked black and hostile behind the street lamps. ‘What’s under the Act?’ asked Smiley. ‘Oh, he’s only joking. It means your record’s so long you’re eligible for Preventive Detention – years of it. He sounds like my type,’ Mendel continued. ‘Leave him to me.’

‘Who is he?’ asked Mendel. ‘Him? Scarr his name is. Adam Scarr. Christ knows why Adam. See him in the Garden of Eden: bloody grotesque, that’s what it is. They say round here that if Eve gave him an apple he’d eat the ruddy core.’ The landlord sucked his teeth and shook his head. Then he shouted to Scarr: ‘Still, you’re good for business, aren’t you, Adam? They come bloody miles to see you, don’t they? Teenage monster from outer space, that’s what you are. Come and see. Adam Scarr: one look and you’ll sign the pledge.’

He had begun to raise his arm as the blow fell. It was a terrible blow – it seemed to split his skull in two. As he fell he could feel the warm blood running freely over his left ear. Not again, oh Christ, not again, thought Smiley. But he hardly felt the rest – just a vision of his own body, far away, being slowly broken like rock; cracked and split into fragments, then nothing. Nothing but the warmth of his own blood as it ran over his face into the cinders, and far away the beating of the stonebreakers. But not here. Far away.

‘Stolen, was it?’ said Mendel. ‘Stolen by a tall Scotsman with a walking stick and an address in Ealing. Decent of him to bring it back, wasn’t it? Friendly gesture, after all this time. You’ve mistaken your bloody market, Scarr.’ Mendel was shaking with anger. ‘And why are the sidelights on? Open the door.’

He hated the bed as a drowning man hates the sea. He hated the sheets that imprisoned him so that he could move neither hand nor foot. And he hated the room because it frightened him. There was a trolley by the door with instruments on it, scissors, bandages and bottles, strange objects that carried the terror of the unknown, swathed in white linen for the last Communion. There were jugs, tall ones half covered with napkins, standing like white eagles waiting to tear at his entrails, little glass ones with rubber tubing coiled inside them like snakes. He hated everything, and he was afraid. He was hot and the sweat ran off him, he was cold and the sweat held him, trickling over his ribs like cold blood. Night and day alternated without recognition from Smiley. He fought a relentless battle against sleep, for when he closed his eyes they seemed to turn inwards on the chaos of his brain; and when sometimes by sheer weight his eyelids drew themselves together he would summon all his strength to tear them apart and stare again at the pale light wavering somewhere above him.

So the problem of dying once more became an academic one – a debt he would postpone until he was rich and could pay in his own way. It was a luxurious feeling, almost of purity. His mind was wonderfully lucid, ranging like Prometheus over his whole world; where had he heard that: ‘the mind becomes separated from the body, rules a paper kingdom …’?

‘They were so small – that’s what I remember best – small and dark like elves. We hoped they’d sing and they did. But not for us – for themselves. That was the first time I had met Welshmen. ‘It made me understand my own race better, I think – I’m a Jew, you know.’

‘They didn’t know what to do when the Welshmen had gone. What do you do when a dream has come true? They realized then why the Party didn’t much care about intellectuals. I think they felt cheap, mostly, and ashamed. Ashamed of their beds and their rooms, their full bellies and their clever essays. Ashamed of their talents and their humour. They were always saying how Keir Hardie taught himself shorthand with a piece of chalk on the coal face, you know. They were ashamed of having pencils and paper. But it’s no good just throwing them away, is it? That’s what I learnt in the end. That’s why I left the Party, I suppose.’

He had shared nothing with them, he had come to realize that. They were not men, but children, who dreamt of freedom-fires, gipsy music, and one world tomorrow, who rode on white horses across the Bay of Biscay or with a child’s pleasure bought beer for starving elves from Wales; children who had no power to resist the Eastern sun, and obediently turned their tousled heads towards it.