Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (The Karla Trilogy, #1)

by John Le Carré

It was raining as they reached Stratford tube station; a bunch of pedestrians was huddled under the canopy.

Closing the passenger door after him, Guillam had a sudden urge to wish Smiley good night or even good luck, so he leaned across the seat and lowered the window and drew in his breath to call. But Smiley was gone. He had never known anyone who could disappear so quickly in a crowd.

“Well, I don’t think that’s quite as illogical as it sounds, as a matter of fact. After all, we’ve run the odd Russian network from time to time, and though I say it myself we ran them rather well. We gave them the best material we could afford. Rocketry, war planning. You were in on that yourself”—this to Lacon, who threw a jerky nod of agreement. “We tossed them agents we could do without; we gave them good communications, safed their courier links, cleared the air for their signals so that we could listen to them. That was the price we paid for running the opposition—what was your expression?—‘for knowing how they briefed their commissars.’ I’m sure Karla would do as much for us if he was running our networks. He’d do more, wouldn’t he, if he had his eye on the American market, too?” He broke off and glanced at Lacon. “Much, much more. An American connection—a big American dividend, I mean—would put the mole Gerald right at the top table. The Circus, too, by proxy of course. As a Russian, one would give almost anything to the English if . . . well, if one could buy the Americans in return.”

“All power corrupts but some must govern, and in that case Brother Lacon will reluctantly scramble to the top of the heap.” “It hasn’t changed,” said Smiley. Sam drew ruminatively on his cigarette. The music switched to phrases of Noël Coward.

He told it plainly but precisely, the way a good soldier recalls a battle, not to win or lose any more, but simply to remember.

There was steeplechasing at Kempton, which he hadn’t watched for years. Early evening, he took another walk around the lines and tested the alarm pads on the floor of the general registry. Three out of fifteen didn’t work, and by this time the janitors were really loving him. He cooked himself an egg, and when he’d eaten it he trotted upstairs to take a pound off old Mac and give him a beer.

“Why you bother, George? Circus don’t be no good for Czecho. Allies don’t be no good for Czecho. No rich guy don’t get no poor guy out of prison! You want know some history? How you say ‘Märchen,’ please, George?” “Fairy tale,” said Smiley. “Okay, so don’t tell me no more damn fairy tale how English got to save Czecho no more!”

“Too much firewater not good for braves,” Jerry intoned solemnly. For years they had had this Red Indian joke running, Smiley remembered with a sinking heart.

“How,” said Smiley. “How,” said Jerry, and they drank.

Jerry Westerby screwed up his face in perplexity. “That’s what the boy wanted to tell me, you see, George. That’s what he was trying to put over in Stan’s bar. What all the rumours were about. The Russians moved in on Friday. They didn’t shoot Hajek till Saturday. So the wise lads were saying: there you are, Russians were waiting for Hajek to turn up. Knew he was coming. Knew the lot. Lay in wait. Bad story, you see. Bad for our reputation—see what I mean? Bad for big chief. Bad for tribe. How.” “How,” said Smiley, into his beer.

“Told me it was most likely a put-up ploy. Boy was a provocateur. Disruption job to make the Circus chase its own tail. Tore my ears off for disseminating half-baked rumours. I said to him, George: ‘Old boy,’ I said. ‘Tobe, I was only reporting, old boy. No need to get hot under the collar. Yesterday you thought I was the cat’s whiskers. No point in turning round and shooting the messenger. If you’ve decided you don’t like the story, that’s your business.’ Wouldn’t sort of listen any more—know what I mean? Illogical, I thought it was. Bloke like that. Hot one minute and cold the next. Not his best performance—know what I mean?”

‘Okie-dokie,’ I said, ‘forget it. I’ll write it up for the rag. Not the part about the Russians getting there first. The other part. “Dirty work in the forest,” that sort of tripe.’ I said to him, ‘If it isn’t good enough for the Circus, it’ll do for the rag.’ Then he went up the wall again. Next day some owl rings the old man. Keep that baboon Westerby off the Ellis story. Rub his nose in the D notice: formal warning. ‘All further references to Jim Ellis alias Hajek against the national interest, so put ’em on the spike.’ Back to women’s Ping-Pong. Cheers.” “But by then you’d written to me,” Smiley reminded him.

Through his embarrassment he managed a painful grin. “Then I heard on the grapevine that the firm had given you the heave-ho, so I felt an even bigger damn fool. Not hunting alone, are you, old boy? Not . . .” He left the question unasked; but not, perhaps, unanswered.

“Thanks, Jerry. So long. How.”

One reason why he joined so many clubs at Oxford was that after a messy education abroad he had no natural English contemporaries from school . . .

Smiley was nearly asleep as he read the last entry on the file, tossed in haphazard long after Jim’s formal clearance had come through from the competition. It was a cutting from an Oxford newspaper of the day giving a review of Haydon’s one-man exhibition in June, 1938, headed “Real or Surreal? An Oxford Eye.”

He dozed, his mind a controlled clutter of doubts, suspicions, and certainties. He thought of Ann, and in his tiredness cherished her profoundly, longing to protect her frailty with his own. Like a young man, he whispered her name aloud and imagined her beautiful face bowing over him in the half-light, while Mrs. Pope Graham yelled prohibition through the keyhole. He thought of Tarr and Irina, and pondered uselessly on love and loyalty; he thought of Jim Prideaux and what tomorrow held. He was aware of a modest sense of approaching conquest. He had been driven a long way; he had sailed backwards and forwards. Tomorrow, if he was lucky, he might spot land: a peaceful little desert island, for instance. Somewhere Karla had never heard of. Just for himself and Ann. He fell asleep.

“ ‘There’s a rotten apple, Jim,’ Control said, ‘and he’s infecting all the others.’ ” Jim was going straight on. His voice had stiffened, his manner also. “Kept talking about elimination, how he’d backtracked and researched and was nearly there. There were five possibilities, he said. Don’t ask me how he dug them up. ‘It’s one of the top five,’ he says. ‘Five fingers to a hand.’ He gave me a drink and we sat there like a pair of schoolboys making up a code, me and Control. We used Tinker, Tailor. We sat there in the flat putting it together, drinking that cheap Cyprus sherry he always gave. If I couldn’t get out, if there was any fumble after I’d met Stevcek, if I had to go underground, I must get the one word to him, even if I had to go to Prague and chalk it on the Embassy door or ring the Prague resident and yell it at him down the phone. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. Alleline was Tinker, Haydon was Tailor, Bland was Soldier, and Toby Esterhase was Poorman. We dropped Sailor because it rhymed with Tailor. You were Beggarman,” Jim said.

“Why not? Rationally we always accepted that sooner or later it would happen. We always warned one another: be on your guard. We’ve turned up enough members of other outfits: Russians, Poles, Czechs, French. Even the odd American. What’s so special about the British, all of a sudden?”

In Czecho, said Jim, surveillance was not usually a problem. The security services knew next to nothing about street-watching, probably because no administration in living memory had ever had to feel shy about it. The tendency, said Jim, was still to throw cars and pavement artists around like Al Capone, and that was what Jim was looking for: black Skodas and trios of squat men in trilbies. In the cold, spotting these things is marginally harder because the traffic is slow, the people walk faster, and everyone is muffled to the nose. All the same, till he reached Masaryk Station—or Central, as they’re pleased to call it these days—he had no worries. But at Masaryk, said Jim, he got a whisper, more instinct than fact, about two women who’d bought tickets ahead of him.

The ambulance reminded him of those old Hollywood fire engines, it was so upright. A whole mock battle was taking place, yet the ambulance boys stood gazing at him without a care in the world.

The describing of pain was to Jim an indulgence to be dispensed with. To Smiley, his stoicism had something awesome about it, the more so because he seemed unaware of it. The gaps in his story came mainly where he passed out, he explained. The ambulance drove him, so far as he could fathom, further north. He guessed this from the trees when they opened the door to let the doctor in: the snow was heaviest when he looked back. The surface was good and he guessed they were on the road to Hradec. The doctor gave him an injection; he came round in a prison hospital with barred windows high up, and three men watching him. He came round again after the operation, in a different cell with no windows at all, and he thought probably the first questioning took place there, about seventy-two hours after they’d patched him up, but time was already a problem and of course they’d taken away his watch.

They were working him on the production-line principle, he explained: no sleep, relays of questions, a lot of disorientation, a lot of muscle, till the interrogation became to him a slow race between going a bit dotty, as he called it, and breaking completely. Naturally, he hoped he’d go dotty but that wasn’t something you could decide for yourself, because they had a way of bringing you back. A lot of the muscle was done electrically.

“That’s very unlike you, Jim,” said Smiley in the same mild tone, “to go round shaking hands with people before you go on vital missions. You must have been getting sentimental in your old age. It wasn’t . . .” he hesitated. “It wasn’t advice or anything that you wanted, was it? After all, you did think the mission was poppycock, didn’t you? And that Control was losing his grip. Perhaps you felt you should take your problem to a third party? It all had rather a mad air, I agree.” Learn the facts, Steed-Asprey used to say, then try on the stories like clothes.

Reaching Marloes Road, he crossed to the west pavement, bought an evening paper, and began walking at a leisurely rate past villas set in deep gardens. He was counting off pedestrians, cyclists, cars, while out ahead of him, steadily plodding the far pavement, he picked out George Smiley, the very prototype of the homegoing Londoner.

An old Mercedes 190 shot out of Earlham Street, swung directly beneath his window, and held the curve with difficulty as far as the northern outlet of the Charing Cross Road, where it parked. A young heavy fellow with ginger hair clambered out, slammed the door, and clumped across the street to the entrance without even taking the key out of the dash. A moment later another light went up on the fourth floor as Roy Bland joined the party. All we need to know now is who comes out, thought Mendel.

The neighbours, when they bothered to notice him, found him shy and respectable. They would have formed the same impression of George Smiley if they had happened to spot him in the dim light of the porch at nine that evening, as Millie McCraig admitted him to her front room and drew the pious curtains. She was a wiry Scottish widow with brown stockings and bobbed hair and the polished, wrinkled skin of an old man. In the interest of God and the Circus, she had run Bible schools in Mozambique and a seaman’s mission in Hamburg, and though she had been a professional eavesdropper for twenty years since then, she was still inclined to treat all menfolk as transgressors.

“Where are the mikes, Millie?” Smiley had returned to the drawing-room. They were in pairs, Millie murmured, bedded behind the wallpaper: two pairs to each room on the ground floor, one to each room upstairs. Each pair was connected with a separate recorder. He followed her up the steep stairs. The top floor was unfurnished save for an attic bedroom that contained a grey steel frame with eight tape machines, four up, four down. “And Jefferson knows all about this?” “Mr. Jefferson,” said Millie primly, “is run on a basis of trust.”

Downstairs again, she showed him the switches that controlled the system. An extra switch was fitted in each finger panel. Any time Jefferson or one of the boys, as she put it, wanted to go over to record, he had only to get up and turn down the left-hand light switch. From then on, the system was voice-activated; that is to say, the tape deck did not turn unless somebody was speaking.

“What are the safety procedures?” Smiley asked as he thoughtfully fingered the end light switch by the drawing-room door. Her reply came in a liturgical monotone. “Two full milk bottles on the doorstep, you may come in and all’s well. No milk bottles and you’re not to enter.”

Millie had gone to the basement to ring Lacon. Quietly, Smiley set the stage. He put the telephone beside an armchair in the drawing-room, then cleared his line of retreat to the scullery. He fetched two full bottles of milk from the icebox and placed them on the doorstep to signify, in the eclectic language of Millie McCraig, that you may come in and all’s well. He removed his shoes and took them to the scullery, and having put out all the lights, took up his post in the armchair just as Mendel made his connecting call.

Closer at hand, the ripple of rats and the stink of still water. Then the drawing-room lights went out; the house stood in darkness except for the chinks of yellow to either side of Millie’s basement window. From the scullery a pin of light winked at him down the unkempt garden. Taking a pen torch from his pocket, he slipped out the silver hood, sighted it with shaking fingers at the point from which the light had come, and signalled back. From now on, they could only wait.

Changing the telephone to his left side, he drew the gun from the wallet pocket of his jacket, where it had already ruined the excellent silk lining. He discovered the safety catch, and for a moment played with the idea that he didn’t know which way was on and which way off. He snapped out the magazine and put it back, and remembered doing this hundreds of times on the trot, in the night range at Sarratt before the war; he remembered how you always shot with two hands, sir, one to hold the gun and one the magazine, sir; and how there was a piece of Circus folklore which demanded that he should lay his index finger along the barrel and pull the trigger with his second. But when he tried it the sensation was ridiculous and he forgot about it.

Somebody had just come out of the Circus, said Mendel. Front door, but he couldn’t be certain of the identification. Mackintosh and hat. Bulky and moving fast. He must have ordered a cab to the door and stepped straight into it. “Heading north, your way.” Smiley looked at his watch. Give him ten minutes, he thought. Give him twelve; he’ll have to stop and phone Polyakov on the way. Then he thought, Don’t be silly, he’s done that already from the Circus.

The comparison rose in him slowly, from deep in his unconscious memory. The clatter as it barges into the crescent, the metric tick-tick as the bass notes die. The cut-off: where has it stopped, which house—when all of us on the street are waiting in the dark, crouching under tables or clutching at pieces of string—which house? Then the slam of the door, the explosive anti-climax: if you can hear it, it’s not for you.

At the same moment the latch turned, the bell chimed—housekeepers’ taste again: high tone, low tone, high tone. That will mean it’s one of us, Millie had said; one of the boys, her boys, Connie’s boys, Karla’s boys. The front door opened, someone stepped into the house, he heard the shuffle of the mat, he heard the door close, he heard the light switches snap and saw a pale line appear under the kitchen door. He put the gun in his pocket and wiped the palm of his hand on his jacket, then took it out again and in the same moment he heard a second flying bomb, a second taxi pulling up, and footsteps fast.

Smiley heard the double chink as two milk bottles were put on the hall table in the interest of good order and sound tradecraft.

The strip of light under the kitchen door grew suddenly brighter as the drawing-room lights were switched on. An extraordinary silence descended over the house. Holding the string, Smiley edged forward over the icy floor. Then he heard voices. At first they were indistinct. They must still be at the far end of the room, he thought. Or perhaps they always begin in a low tone. Now Polyakov came nearer: he was at the trolley, pouring drinks.

From the further end of the room still, a muffled murmur answered each question. Smiley could make nothing of it. “Where shall we regroup?” “What is our fallback?” “Have you anything on you that you would prefer me to be carrying during our talk, bearing in mind I have diplomatic immunity?” It must be a catechism, Smiley thought; part of Karla’s school routine.

He knew, of course.

Just as Control had known, and Lacon in Mendel’s house. Just as Connie and Jim had known, and Alleline and Esterhase; all of them had tacitly shared that unexpressed half-knowledge which was like an illness they hoped would go away if it was never owned to, never diagnosed.

In other ways also, over the next few days, his life took on a brighter look. Percy Alleline had been dispatched on indefinite leave; Smiley had been asked to come back for a while and help sweep up what was left. For Guillam himself there was talk of being rescued from Brixton. It was not till much, much later that he learned that there had been a final act; and he put a name and a purpose to that familiar shadow which had followed Smiley through the night streets of Kensington.

“The cold war began in 1917 but the bitterest struggles lie ahead of us, as America’s death-bed paranoia drives her to greater excesses abroad . . .” He spoke not of the decline of the West, but of its death by greed and constipation. He hated America very deeply, he said, and Smiley supposed he did.

For a while, after ’45, he said, he had remained content with Britain’s part in the world, till gradually it dawned on him just how trivial this was. How and when was a mystery. In the historical mayhem of his own lifetime he could point to no one occasion; simply he knew that if England were out of the game, the price of fish would not be altered by a farthing. He had often wondered which side he would be on if the test ever came; after prolonged reflection he had finally to admit that if either monolith had to win the day, he would prefer it to be the East.

From then on, he said, it was only a matter of time before he put his efforts where his convictions lay.

“Oh, look, first I’m to give you that,” said Smiley, reaching in an inside pocket, and handing her the envelope with the cheque. “Bread,” said the girl, and put the envelope beside her. “Bread,” said Smiley, answering her grin; then something in his expression, or the way he echoed that one word, made her take up the envelope and rip it open.

Not knowing what she was doing, she walked across the room to the fireplace and put the cheque with the grocery bills in an old tin on the mantelpiece. She went into the kitchen and mixed two cups of Nescafé, but she came out with only one.

“Which one was I, by the way?” he asked conversationally. “I forget.” “Tailor. I was Beggarman.”

To support him, Roach took the job of dimmer man on the lighting. Thus at rehearsals Jim had to give him a special signal—to Bill and no one else. He was to raise his arm and drop it to his side when he wanted the footlights to fade. With time, Jim seemed to respond to treatment, however. His eye grew clearer and he became alert again, as the shadow of his mother’s death withdrew. By the night of the play, he was more light-hearted than Roach had ever known him. “Hey, Jumbo, you silly toad, where’s your mac—can’t you see it’s raining?” he called out as, tired but triumphant, they trailed back to the main building after the performance. “His real name is Bill,” he heard him explain to a visiting parent. “We were new boys together.” The gun, Bill Roach had finally convinced himself, was, after all, a dream.