A Legacy of Spies

by John Le Carré

‘To kill you, Pierrot,’ he explained, with no lift or variation to his voice. ‘To shoot your fucking head off. Bingo. You’re dead.’

‘Here?’ I asked. ‘In front of all these people? How?’ With a Walther P38 semi-automatic pistol: the one he has drawn from the right-hand

‘I’ve told the powers that be of your offer, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ I threw in mendaciously. ‘They’re thinking about it. Her Majesty’s bean-counters don’t cough up a million euros overnight, naturally.’

‘Christoph, that’s not true. Your dad and Liz Gold weren’t killed by me or anyone else in the Circus. They were killed by Hans-Dieter Mundt of the Stasi.’

But Jim had never cared much for women, and there was no answer I could offer him that didn’t include the name of his nemesis and former lover Bill Haydon, who had recruited him to the Circus, betrayed him to his masters and slept with Smiley’s wife for cover along the way.

‘It’s the whole Windfall operation,’ I said. ‘There’s a king-sized parliamentary inquiry getting its knife into the Circus. In George’s absence, they’ve cast me as the villain of the piece.’

‘Bugger all to do with George! That bastard Mundt killed her!

Killed them all! Killed Alec, killed his girl!’

Who was to blame for my lifetime of dutiful dissembling, if not George Smiley? Was it I who had suggested I should befriend Liz Gold? Was it my idea to lie to Alec, our tethered goat, as Tabitha had called him – then watch him walk into the trap George had set for Mundt?

‘Windfall haunts me to this day. It will always haunt me. I blame myself entirely. I counted on Mundt’s ruthlessness, but I underrated it. The temptation to kill off the witnesses was simply too much for him.’

‘I believe you came to accuse me of something, Peter. Am I right?’ And

‘Was it for the things we did, would you say? Or why we did them at all?’

‘Why did I do them, which is more to the point. You were a loyal foot soldier. It wasn’t your job to ask w...