"Don"t tell me you take any notice of that nonsense," Bill snorted. They had reached the stairs. Haydon went ahead.
"How about you?" Guillam called. "Have you seen much of him?"
"And Ann"s flown the coop," said Bill, ignoring the question. "Pushed off with a sailor boy or a waiter or something." The door to his room was wide open, the desk was heaped with secret files. "Is that right?"
"I didn"t know," said Guillam. "Poor old George."
"Coffee?"
"I think I"ll get back, thanks."
"For tea with Brother Tarr?"
"That"s right. At Fortnum"s. So long."
In Archives Section, Alwyn was back from lunch. "Bag"s all gone, sir," he said gaily. "Should be over in Brixton by now."
"Oh d.a.m.n," said Guillam, firing his last shot. "There was something in it I needed."
A sickening notion had struck him: it seemed so neat and so horribly obvious that he could only wonder why it had come to him so late. Sand was Camilla"s husband. She was living a double life. Now whole vistas of deceit opened before him. His friends, his loves, even the Circus itself, joined and re-formed in endless patterns of intrigue. A line of Mendel"s came back to him, dropped two nights ago as they drank beer in some glum suburban pub: "Cheer up, Peter, old son. Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double."
Tarr, he thought. That b.a.s.t.a.r.d Ricki Tarr.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.
The bedroom was long and low, once a maid"s room, built into the attic. Guillam was standing at the door; Tarr sat on the bed motionless, his head tilted back against the sloped ceiling, hands to either side of him, fingers wide. There was a dormer window above him and from where Guillam stood he could see long reaches of black Suffolk countryside, and a line of black trees traced against the sky. The wallpaper was brown with large red flowers. The one light hung from a black oak truss, lighting their two faces in strange geometric patterns, and when either of them moved, Tarr on the bed or Smiley on the wooden kitchen chair, they seemed by their movement to take the light with them a distance before it resettled.
Left to himself Guillam would have been very rough with Tarr, he had no doubt of it. His nerves were all over the place and on the drive down he had touched ninety before Smiley sharply told him to go steady. Left to himself he would have been tempted to beat the daylights out of Tarr and if necessary he would have brought Fawn in to lend a hand; driving, he had a very clear picture of opening the front door of wherever Tarr lived and hitting him in the face several times, with love from Camilla and her ex-husband, the distinguished doctor of the flute. And perhaps in the shared tension of the journey Smiley had received the same picture telepathically for the little he said was clearly directed to talking Guillam down. "Tarr has not lied to us, Peter. Not in any material way. He has simply done what agents do the world over: he has failed to tell us the whole story. On the other hand he has been rather clever." Far from sharing Guillam"s bewilderment, he seemed curiously confident, even complacent, to the extent of allowing himself a sententious aphorism from Steed Asprey on the arts of double cross; something about not looking for perfection, but for advantage, which again had Guillam thinking about Camilla. "Karla has admitted us to the inner circle," Smiley announced, and Guillam made a bad joke about changing at Charing Cross. After that Smiley contented himself with giving directions and watching the wing mirror.
They had met at Crystal Palace, a van pickup with Mendel driving. They drove to Barnsbury, straight into a car body repair shop at the end of a cobbled alley full of children. There they were received with discreet rapture by an old German and his son, who had stripped the plates off the van almost before they got out of it and led them to a souped-up Vauxhall ready to drive out of the far end of the workshop. Mendel stayed behind with the Testify file which Guillam had brought from Brixton in his night-bag; Smiley said, "Find the A12." There was very little traffic but short of Colchester they hit a cl.u.s.ter of lorries and Guillam suddenly lost patience. Smiley had to order him to pull in. Once they met an old man driving at twenty in the fast lane. As they overtook him on the inside he veered wildly towards them, drunk or ill, or just terrified. And once with no warning they hit a fog wall, it seemed to fall on them from above. Guillam drove clean through it, afraid to brake because of black ice. Past Colchester they took small lanes. On the signposts were names like Little Horkseley, Wormingford and Bures Green, then the signposts stopped and Guillam had a feeling of being nowhere at all.
"Left here and left again at the dower house. Go as far as you can but park short of the gates."
They reached what seemed to be a hamlet but there were no lights, no people and no moon. As they got out the cold hit them and Guillam smelt a cricket field and woodsmoke and Christmas all at once; he thought he had never been anywhere so quiet or so cold or so remote. A church tower rose ahead of them, a white fence ran to one side, and up on the slope stood what he took to be the rectory, a low rambling house, part thatched; he could make out the fringe of gable against the sky. Fawn was waiting for them; he came to the car as they parked, and climbed silently into the back.
"Ricki"s been that much better today, sir," he reported. He had evidently done a lot of reporting to Smiley in the last few days. He was a steady, soft-spoken boy with a great will to please, but the rest of the Brixton pack seemed to be afraid of him, Guillam didn"t know why. "Not so nervy, more relaxed I"d say. Did his pools this morning, loves the pools Ricki does, this afternoon we dug up fir trees for Miss Ailsa, so"s she could drive them into market. This evening we had a nice game of cards and early bed."
"Has he been out alone?" asked Smiley.
"No, sir."
"Has he used the telephone?"
"Gracious no, sir, not while I"m around, and I"m sure not while Miss Ailsa was either."
Their breath had misted the windows of the car, but Smiley would not have the engine on so there was no heater and no de-mister.
"Has he mentioned his daughter Danny?"
"Over the weekend he did a lot. Now he"s sort of cooled off about them. I think he"s shut them out of his mind in view of the emotional side."
"He hasn"t talked about seeing them again?"
"No, sir."
"Nothing about arrangements for meeting when all this is over?"
"No, sir."
"Or bringing them to England?"
"No, sir."
"Nor about providing them with doc.u.ments?"
"No, sir."
Guillam chimed in irritably: "So what has he talked about, for heaven"s sake?"
"The Russian lady, sir. Irina. He likes to read her diary. He says when the mole"s caught, he"s going to make Centre swap him for Irina. Then we"ll get her a nice place, sir, like Miss Ailsa"s but up in Scotland where it"s nicer. He says he"ll see me right, too. Give me a big job in the Circus. He"s been encouraging me to learn another language to increase my scope."
There was no telling, from the flat voice behind them in the dark, what Fawn made of this advice.
"Where is he now?"
"In bed, sir."
"Close the doors quietly."
Ailsa Brimley was waiting in the front porch for them: a grey-haired lady of sixty with a firm, intelligent face. She was old Circus, Smiley said, one of Lord Lansbury"s coding ladies from the war, now in retirement but still formidable. She wore a trim brown suit. She shook Guillam by the hand and said "How do you do", bolted the door and when he looked again she had gone. Smiley led the way upstairs. Fawn should wait on the lower landing in case he was needed.
"It"s Smiley," he said, knocking on Tarr"s door. "I want a chat with you."
Tarr opened the door fast. He must have heard them coming, he must have been waiting just the other side. He opened it with his left hand, holding the gun in his right, and he was looking past Smiley down the corridor.
"It"s only Guillam," said Smiley.
"That"s what I mean," said Tarr. "Babies can bite."
They stepped inside. He wore slacks and some sort of cheap Malay wrap. Spelling cards lay spread over the floor and in the air hung a smell of curry which he had cooked for himself on a ring.
"I"m sorry to be pestering you," said Smiley with an air of sincere commiseration. "But I must ask you again what you did with those two Swiss escape pa.s.sports you took with you to Hong Kong."
"Why?" said Tarr at last.
The jauntiness was all gone. He had a prison pallor, he had lost weight and as he sat on the bed with the gun on the pillow beside him, his eyes sought them out nervously, each in turn, trusting nothing.
Smiley said: "Listen. I want to believe your story. Nothing is altered. Once we know, we"ll respect your privacy. But we have to know. It"s terribly important. Your whole future stands by it."
And a lot more besides, thought Guillam, watching; a whole chunk of devious arithmetic was hanging by a thread, if Guillam knew Smiley at all.
"I told you, I burned them. I didn"t fancy the numbers. I reckoned they were blown. Might as well put a label round your neck: "Tarr, Ricki Tarr, Wanted", soon as use those pa.s.sports."
Smiley"s questions were terribly slow in coming. Even to Guillam it was painful waiting for them in the deep silence of the night.
"What did you burn them with?"
"What the h.e.l.l does that matter?"
But Smiley apparently did not feel like giving reasons for his enquiries, he preferred to let the silence do its work, and he seemed confident that it would. Guillam had seen whole interrogations conducted that way: a laboured catechism swathed in deep coverings of routine, wearying pauses as each answer was written down in longhand and the suspect"s brain besieged itself with a thousand questions to the interrogator"s one; and his hold on his story weakened from day to day.
"When you bought your British pa.s.sport in the name of Poole," Smiley asked, after another age, "did you buy any other pa.s.sports from the same source?"
"Why should I?"
But Smiley did not feel like giving reasons.
"Why should I?" Tarr repeated. "I"m not a d.a.m.n collector for Christ"s sake, all I wanted was to get out from under."
"And protect your child," Smiley suggested, with an understanding smile. "And protect her mother too, if you could. I"m sure you gave a lot of thought to that," he said in a flattering tone. "After all, you could hardly leave them behind to the mercy of that inquisitive Frenchman, could you?"
Waiting, Smiley appeared to examine the lexicon cards, reading off the words longways and sideways. There was nothing to them: they were random words. One was mis-spelt, Guillam noticed "epistle" with the last two letters back to front. What"s he been doing up there, Guillam wondered, in that stinking fleapit of a hotel? What furtive little tracks has his mind been following, locked away with the sauce bottles and the commercial travellers?
"All right," said Tarr sullenly, "so I got pa.s.sports for Danny and her mother. Mrs Poole, Miss Danny Poole. What do we do now; cry out in ecstasy?"
Again it was the silence that accused.
"Now why didn"t you tell us that before?" Smiley asked, in the tone of a disappointed father. "We"re not monsters. We don"t wish them harm. Why didn"t you tell us? Perhaps we could even have helped you," and went back to his examination of the cards. Tarr must have used two or three packs, they lay in rivers over the coconut carpet. "Why didn"t you tell us?" he repeated. "There"s no crime in looking after the people one loves."
If they"ll let you, thought Guillam, with Camilla in mind.
To help Tarr answer, Smiley was making helpful suggestions: "Was it because you dipped into your operational expenses to buy these British pa.s.sports? Was that the reason you didn"t tell us? Good heavens, no one here is worried about money. You"ve brought us a vital piece of information. Why should we quarrel about a couple of thousand dollars?" And the time ticked away again without anyone using it.
"Or was it," Smiley suggested, "that you were ashamed?"
Guillam stiffened, his own problems forgotten.
"Rightly ashamed in a way, I suppose. It wasn"t a very gallant act, after all, to leave Danny and her mother with blown pa.s.sports, at the mercy of that so-called Frenchman who was looking so hard for Mr Poole, was it? While you yourself escaped to all this VIP treatment? It is horrible to think of," Smiley agreed, as if Tarr, not he, had made the point. "It is horrible to contemplate the lengths Karla would go to in order to obtain your silence. Or your services."
The sweat on Tarr"s face was suddenly unbearable. There was too much of it, it was like tears all over. The cards no longer interested Smiley, his eye had settled on a different game. It was a toy, made of two steel rods like the shafts of a pair of tongs. The trick was to roll a steel ball along them. The further you rolled it the more points you won when it fell into one of the holes underneath.
"The other reason you might not have told us, I suppose, is that you burnt them. You burnt the British pa.s.sports, I mean, not the Swiss ones."
Go easy, George, thought Guillam, and softly moved a pace nearer to cover the gap between them. Just go easy.
"You knew that Poole was blown, so you burnt the Poole pa.s.sports you had bought for Danny and her mother, but you kept your own because there was no alternative. Then you made travel bookings for the two of them in the name of Poole in order to convince everybody that you still believed in the Poole pa.s.sports. By everybody, I think I mean Karla"s footpads, don"t I? You doctored the Swiss escapes, one for Danny, one for her mother, took a chance that the numbers wouldn"t be noticed, and you made a different set of arrangements which you didn"t advertise. Arrangements which matured earlier than those you made for the Pooles. How would that be? Such as staying out East but somewhere else, like Djakarta: somewhere you have friends."
Even from where he stood, Guillam was too slow. Tarr"s hands were at Smiley"s throat, the chair toppled and Tarr fell with him. From the heap, Guillam selected Tarr"s right arm and flung it into a lock against his back, bringing it very near to breaking as he did so. From nowhere Fawn appeared, took the gun from the pillow and walked back to Tarr as if to give him a hand. Then Smiley was straightening his suit and Tarr was back on the bed, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief.
Smiley said: "I don"t know where they are. As far as I know, no harm has come to them. You believe that, do you?"
Tarr was staring at him, waiting. His eyes were furious, but over Smiley a kind of calm had settled, and Guillam guessed it was the rea.s.surance he had been hoping for.
"Maybe you should keep a better eye on your own d.a.m.n woman and leave mine alone," Tarr whispered, his hand across his mouth. With an exclamation, Guillam sprang forward but Smiley restrained him.
"As long as you don"t try to communicate with them," Smiley continued, "it"s probably better that I shouldn"t know. Unless you want me to do something about them. Money or protection or comfort of some sort?"
Tarr shook his head. There was blood in his mouth, a lot of it, and Guillam realised Fawn must have hit him but he couldn"t work out when.
"It won"t be long now," Smiley said. "Perhaps a week. Less if I can manage it. Try not to think too much."
By the time they left, Tarr was grinning again, so Guillam guessed that the visit, or the insult to Smiley or the smash in the face, had done him good.
"Those football pool coupons," Smiley said quietly to Fawn as they climbed into the car: "You don"t post them anywhere, do you?"
"No, sir."
"Well, let"s hope to G.o.d he doesn"t have a win," Smiley remarked in a most unusual fit of jocularity, and there was laughter all round.
The memory plays strange tricks on an exhausted, overladen brain. As Guillam drove, one part of his conscious mind upon the road and another still wretchedly grappling with even more gothic suspicions of Camilla, odd images of this and other long days drifted freely through his memory. Days of plain terror in Morocco as one by one his agent lines went dead on him, and every footfall on the stair had him scurrying to the window to check the street; days of idleness in Brixton when he watched that poor world slip by and wondered how long before he joined it. And suddenly the written report was there before him on his desk: cyclostyled on blue flimsy because it was traded, source unknown and probably unreliable, and every word of it came back to him in letters a foot high.
According to a recently released prisoner from Lubianka, Moscow Centre held a secret execution in the punishment block in July. The victims were three of its own functionaries. One was a woman. All three were shot in the back of the neck.
"It was stamped "internal"," Guillam said dully. They had parked in a layby beside a roadhouse hung with fairy lights. "Somebody from London Station had scribbled on it: Can anyone identify the bodies?
By the coloured glow of the lights, Guillam watched Smiley"s face pucker in disgust.
"Yes," he agreed at last. "Yes, well now the woman was Irina, wasn"t she? Then there was Ivlov and then there was Boris, her husband, I suppose." His voice remained extremely matter of fact. "Tarr mustn"t know," he continued, as if shaking off la.s.situde. "It is vital that he should have no wind of this. G.o.d knows what he would do, or not do, if he knew that Irina was dead." For some moments neither moved; perhaps for their different reasons neither had the strength just then, or the heart.
"I ought to telephone," said Smiley, but he made no attempt to leave the car.
"George?"
"I have a phone call to make," he muttered. "Lacon."
"Then make it."
Reaching across him, Guillam pushed open the door. Smiley clambered out, walked a distance over the tarmac, then seemed to change his mind and came back.
"Come and eat something," he said through the window, in the same preoccupied tone. "I don"t think even Toby"s people would follow us in here."
It was once a restaurant, now a transport cafe with trappings of old grandeur. The menu was bound in red leather and stained with grease. The boy who brought it was half asleep.