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

by John Le Carré

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SAILOR, RICH MAN, POOR MAN, BEGGARMAN, THIEF. Small children’s fortune-telling rhyme used when counting cherry stones, waistcoat buttons, daisy petals, or the seeds of the Timothy grass. —from the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes

Smiley did not bother to write anything down, since it was common ground between them that their conversation was being recorded anyway. The statement began with a long apologia, of which he afterwards recalled only a few sentences. “We live in an age where only fundamental issues matter . . . “The United States is no longer capable of undertaking its own revolution . . . “The political posture of the United Kingdom is without relevance or moral viability in world affairs . . .” With much of it, Smiley might, in other circumstances, have agreed; it was the tone, rather than the music, that alienated him. “In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen . . . “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.