Call for the Dead

by John Le Carré

‘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.