The Secret Pilgrim (George Smiley, #8)

by John Le Carré

Stumbling on my last year’s diary, I began flipping through it, thinking how much more of life we live than we remember.

“Stefanie is a light to the ungodly and a paragon to the virtuous,”

Sans pareil.

“Well,” he said. “Enter the third murderer.”

Some operations are like that, and stagnation favours them. They are not expensive, they are not conclusive, they don’t necessarily lead anywhere—but then neither does political stalemate—they are free of scandal. And each year when the annual audit is taken, they are waved through without a vote, until their longevity becomes their justification.

Very few conspiracies, Smiley once remarked, survive contact with reality.

“I only ever cared about the man,” Smiley announced. And it was typical of his artfulness that he should have opened with a riddle, then waited a moment before setting out to explain it. “I never gave a fig for the ideologies, unless they were mad or evil, I never saw institutions as being worthy of their parts, or policies as much other than excuses for not feeling. Man, not the mass, is what our calling is about. It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn’t notice. It wasn’t weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we’ve had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they’ve had their day. Because they have no heart of their own. They’re the whores and angels of our striving selves. One day, history may tell us who really won. If a democratic Russia emerges—why then, Russia will have been the winner. And if the West chokes on its own materialism, then the West may still turn out to have been the loser. History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. You asked me how...