Call for the Dead

by John Le Carré

They loved each other and believed they loved mankind, they fought each other and believed they fought the world.

There was another thing about that interview: Smiley’s conviction that Fennan had left something important unsaid.

The interview had been informal, that was true. The walk in the park reminded him more of Oxford than of Whitehall. The walk in the park, the café in Millbank – yes, there had been a procedural difference too, but what did it amount to? An official of the Foreign Office walking in the park, talking earnestly with an anonymous little man … Unless the little man was not anonymous!

Yes, that was the only possible conclusion: unless whoever saw them together recognized not only Fennan but Smiley as well, and was violently opposed to their association. Why? In what way was Smiley dangerous? His eyes suddenly opened very wide. Of course – in one way, in one way only– as a security officer.

And so whoever killed Sam Fennan was anxious that he should not talk to a security officer. Someone in the Foreign Office, perhaps. But essentially someone who knew Smiley too. Someone Fennan had known at Oxford, known as a communist, someone who feared exposure, who thought that Fennan would talk, had talked already, perhaps? And if he had talked already then of course Smiley would have to be killed – killed quickly before he could put in his report. That would explain the murder of Fennan and the assault on Smiley. It made some sense, but not much. He had built a card-house as high as it would go, and he still had cards in his hand. What about Elsa, her lies, her complicity, her fear? What about the car and the eight-thirty call? What about the anonymous letter? If the murderer was frightened of contact between Smiley and Fennan, he would scarcely call attention to Fennan by denouncing him. Who then? Who?

‘Blondie didn’t come to Scarr in January and February, did he?’ ‘No,’ said Mendel; ‘this was the first year.’ ‘Fennan always went skiing in January and February. This was the first time in four years he’d missed.’

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

He knew that look, and Scarr had known it too … the look of complete negation that reposes in the eyes of a young killer. Not the look of a wild beast, not the grinning savagery of a maniac, but the look born of supreme efficiency, tried and proven. It was a stage beyond the experience of war. The witnessing of death in war brings a sophistication of its own; but beyond that, far beyond, is the conviction of supremacy in the heart of the professional killer. Yes, Mendel had seen it before: the one that stood apart from the gang, pale eyed, expressionless, the one the girls went after, spoke of without smiling. Yes, he was a cool one all right.

Odd little beggar, Smiley was. Reminded Mendel of a fat boy he’d played football with at school. Couldn’t run, couldn’t kick, blind as a bat but played like hell, never satisfied till he’d got himself torn to bits. Used to box, too. Came in wide open swinging his arms about: got himself half killed before the referee stopped it. Clever bloke, too.

‘Dieter had a theory that was pure Faust. 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: an order does not exist if it is not obeyed. He used to quote Kleist a great deal: “if all eyes were made of green glass, and if all that seems white was really green, who would be the wiser?” Something like that.

‘What are you saying?’ she whispered. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ Smiley suddenly wanted to hurt her, to break the last of her will, to remove her utterly as an enemy. For so long she had haunted him as he had lain helpless, had been a mystery and a power.

‘What games did you think you were playing, you two? Do you think you can flirt with power like theirs, give a little and not give all? Do you think that you can stop the dance – control the strength you give them? What dreams did you cherish, Mrs Fennan, that had so little of the world in them?’ She buried her face in her hands and he watched the tears run between her fingers. Her body shook with great sobs and her words came slowly, wrung from her. ‘No, no dreams. I had no dream but him. He had one dream, yes … one great dream.’ She went on crying, helpless, and Smiley, half in triumph, half in shame, waited for her to speak again. Suddenly she raised her head and looked at him, the tears still running down her cheeks. ‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘What dream did they leave me? I dreamt of long golden hair and they shaved my head, I dreamt of a beautiful body and they broke it with hunger. I have seen what human beings are, how could I believe in a formula for human beings? I said to him, oh I said to him a thousand times: “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.” I told him that. We talked whole nights away. But no, that little boy must have his dream, and if a new world was to be built, Samuel Fennan must build it. I said to him, “Listen,” I said. “They have given you all you have, a home, money and trust. Why do you do it to them?” And he said to me: “I do ...

She looked like a child rescued from the sea. She sat on the edge of the sofa holding the cup tightly in her frail hands, nursing it against her body. Her thin shoulders were hunched forward, her feet and ankles pressed tightly together. Smiley, looking at her, felt he had broken something he should never have touched because it was so fragile. He felt an obscene, coarse bully, his offerings of tea a futile recompense for his clumsiness.

And shall I tell you something? Hungary made no difference to Samuel, not a tiny bit of difference. Dieter was frightened about him then, I know, because Freitag told me. When Fennan gave me the things to take to Weybridge that November I nearly went mad. I shouted at him: “Can’t you see it’s the same? The same guns, the same children dying in the streets? Only the dream has changed, the blood is the same colour. Is that what you want?” I asked him: “Would you do this for Germans, too? It’s me who lies in the gutter, will you let them do it to me?” But he just said: “No, Elsa, this is different.” And I went on taking the music case. Do you understand?’

She looked at him for a long time. He had never seen in any face such hopeless misery. He remembered how she had said to him before: ‘The children of my grief are dead.’ He understood that now, and heard it in her voice when at last she spoke: ‘Why, isn’t it obvious? The night he murdered Samuel. ‘That’s the great joke, Mr Smiley. At the very moment when Samuel could have done so much for them – not just a piece here and a piece there, but all the time – so many music cases – at that moment their own fear destroyed them, turned them into animals and made them kill what they had made. ‘Samuel always said: “They will win because they know and the others will perish because they do not: men who work for a dream will work for ever” – that’s what he said. But I knew their dream, I knew it would destroy us. What has not destroyed? Even the dream of Christ.’

Smiley went over to her, sat beside her on the sofa and took her hand. She turned on him in a fury and began screaming at him: ‘Take your hands off me! Do you think I’m yours because I don’t belong to them? Go away! Go away and kill Freitag and Dieter, keep the game alive, Mr Smiley. But don’t think I’m on your side, d’you hear? Because I’m the wandering Jewess, the no-man’s land, the battlefield for your toy soldiers. You can kick me and trample on me, see, but never, never touch me, never tell me you’re sorry, d’you hear? Now get out! Go away and kill.’ She sat there, shivering as if from cold. As he reached the door he looked back. There were no tears in her eyes. Mendel was waiting for him in the car.

Smiley had deliberately left no forwarding address and a heap of mail lay on the door mat. He picked it up, put it on the hall table and began opening doors and peering about him, a puzzled, lost expression on his face. The house was strange to him, cold and musty. As he moved slowly from one room to another he began for the first time to realize how empty his life had become.

He sat in an armchair in the living-room and his eyes wandered over the bookshelves and the odds and ends he had collected on his travels. When Ann had left him he had begun by rigorously excluding all trace of her. He had even got rid of her books. But gradually he had allowed the few remaining symbols that linked his life with hers to reassert themselves: wedding presents from close friends which had meant too much to be given away.

‘I dreamed of long golden hair and they shaved my head.’ He realized with sickening accuracy why she dyed her hair. She might have been like this shepherdess, round-bosomed and pretty. But the body had been broken with hunger so that it was frail and ugly, like the carcass of a tiny bird.

Smiley got up, the letter still in his hand, and stood again before the porcelain group. He remained there several minutes, gazing at the little shepherdess. She was so beautiful.

Dieter had his arm round Elsa’s shoulders now, he had gathered the folds of her thin wrap about her neck and protected her as if she were a sleeping child.

He hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century. Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. That was why he hated Dieter now, hated what he stood for more strongly than ever before: it was the fabulous impertinence of renouncing the individual in favour of the mass. When had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom?

shouted again, but his voice choked and tears sprang to his eyes. ‘Oh dear God what have I done, oh Christ, Dieter, why didn’t you stop me, why didn’t you hit me with the gun, why didn’t you shoot?’ He pressed his clenched hands to his face, tasting the salt blood in the palms mixed with the salt of his tears. He leant against the parapet and cried like a child. Somewhere beneath him a cripple dragged himself through the filthy water, lost and exhausted, yielding at last to the stenching blackness till it held him and drew him down. He woke to find Peter Guillam sitting on the end of his bed pouring out tea.

Dieter was dead, and he had killed him. The broken fingers of his right hand, the stiffness of his body and the sickening headache, the nausea of guilt, all testified to this. And Dieter had let him do it, had not fired the gun, had remembered their friendship when Smiley had not. They had fought in a cloud, in the rising stream of the river, in a clearing in a timeless forest; they had met, two friends rejoined, and fought like beasts. Dieter had remembered and Smiley had not. They had come from different hemispheres of the night, from different worlds of thought and conduct. Dieter, mercurial, absolute, had fought to build a civilization. Smiley, rationalistic, protective, had fought to prevent him. ‘Oh God,’ said Smiley aloud, ‘who was then the gentleman …?

As she saw the new Germany rebuilt in the image of the old, saw the plump pride return, as she put it, I think it was just too much for her; I think she looked at the futility of her suffering and the prosperity of her persecutors and rebelled. Five years ago, she told me, they met Dieter on a skiing holiday in Germany. By that time the re-establishment of Germany as a prominent western power was well under way.’