"Golfers," Control snapped. Golfers and Conservatives, for Alleline in those days was flirting with the opposition and was received with open arms, not least by Miles Sercombe, Ann"s lamentably unremoved cousin, and now Lacon"s Minister. Yet Control had little power to resist. The Circus was in the doldrums and there was loose talk of sc.r.a.pping the existing outfit entirely and starting elsewhere with a new one. Failures in that world occur traditionally in series but this had been an exceptionally long run. Product had slumped; more and more of it had turned out to be suspect. In the places where it mattered Control"s hand was none too strong.

This temporary incapacity did not mar Control"s joy in the drafting of Percy Alleline"s personal charter as Operational Director. He called it Percy"s Fool"s Cap.

There was nothing Smiley could do. Bill Haydon was in Washington by then, trying to negotiate an intelligence treaty with what he called the fascist puritans of the American agency. But Smiley had risen to the fifth floor and one of his tasks was to keep pet.i.tioners off Control"s back. So it was to Smiley that Alleline came to ask: "Why?" Would call on him in his office when Control was out, invite him to that dismal flat of his having first sent his paramour to the cinema, interrogate him in his plaintive brogue. "Why?" He even invested in a bottle of a malt whisky which he forced on Smiley liberally while sticking to the cheaper brand himself.

"What have I done to him, George, that"s so d.a.m.n special? We"d a brush or two. What"s so unusual to that, if you"ll tell me? Why does he pick on me? All I want is a place at the top table. G.o.d knows my record ent.i.tles me to that!"

By top table, he meant the fifth floor.

The charter which Control had drafted for him, and which at a glance had a most impressive shape, gave Alleline the right to examine all operations before they were launched. The small print made this right conditional upon the consent of the operational sections and Control made sure that this was not forthcoming. The charter invited him to "co-ordinate resources and break down regional jealousies", a concept Alleline had since achieved with the establishment of London Station. But the resources sections, such as the lamplighters, the forgers, the listeners and the wranglers, declined to open their books to him and he lacked the powers to force them. So Alleline starved, his trays were empty from lunchtime onwards.

"I"m mediocre, is that it? We"ve all to be geniuses these days, prima donnas and no d.a.m.n chorus; old men at that." For Alleline, though it was easily forgettable in him, was still a young man to be at the top table, with eight or ten years to brandish over Haydon and Smiley, and more over Control.

Control was immovable: "Percy Alleline would sell his mother for a knighthood and this service for a seat in the House of Lords." And later, as his hateful illness began creeping over him: "I refuse to bequeath my life"s work to a parade horse. I"m too vain to be flattered, too old to be ambitious and I"m ugly as a crab. Percy"s quite the other way and there are enough witty men in Whitehall to prefer his sort to mine."

Which was how, indirectly, Control might be said to have brought Witchcraft upon his own head.

"George, come in here," Control snapped one day over the buzzer. "Brother Percy"s trying to twist my tail. Come in here or there"ll be bloodshed."

It was a time, Smiley remembered, when unsuccessful warriors were returning from foreign parts. Roy Bland had just flown in from Belgrade, where with Toby Esterhase"s help he had been trying to save the wreck of a dying network; Paul Skordeno, at that time head German, had just buried his best Soviet agent in East Berlin, and as to Bill, after another fruitless trip he was back in the pepper pot fuming about Pentagon arrogance, Pentagon idiocy, Pentagon duplicity; and claiming that "the time had come to do a deal with the b.l.o.o.d.y Russians instead".

And in the Islay it was after midnight; a late guest was ringing the bell. Which will cost him ten bob to Norman, thought Smiley, for whom the revised British coinage was still something of a puzzle. With a sigh, he drew towards him the first of the Witchcraft files, and having vouchsafed a gingerly lick to his right finger and thumb, set to work matching the official memory with his own.

"We spoke," wrote Alleline, only a couple of months after that interview, in a slightly hysterical personal letter to Ann"s distinguished cousin the Minister and entered on Lacon"s file. "Witchcraft reports derive from a source of extreme sensitivity. To my mind no existing method of Whitehall distribution meets the case. The despatch box system which we used for GADFLY fell down when keys were lost by Whitehall customers, or in one disgraceful case when an overworked Under Secretary gave his key to his personal a.s.sistant. I have already spoken to Lilley of naval intelligence who is prepared to put at our disposal a special reading room in the Admiralty main building where the material is made available to customers and watched over by a senior janitor of this service. The reading room will be known, for cover purposes, as the conference room of the Adriatic Working Party or the AWP room for short. Customers with reading rights will not have pa.s.ses, since these also are open to abuse. Instead they will identify themselves personally to my janitor" - Smiley noted the p.r.o.noun - "who will be equipped with an indoctrination list ill.u.s.trated with customers" photographs." Lacon, not yet convinced, to the Treasury through his odious master, the Minister, on whose behalf his submissions were invariably made: "Even allowing that this is necessary, the reading room will have to be extensively rebuilt.

1 Will you authorise cost?

2 If so the cost should seem to be borne by the Admiralty. Department will covertly reimburse.

3 There is also the question of extra janitors, a further expense..."

And there is the question of Alleline"s greater glory, Smiley commented as he slowly turned the pages. It shone already like a beacon everywhere: Percy is heading for the top table and Control might already be dead.

From the stairwell came the sound of rather beautiful singing. A Welsh guest, very drunk, was wishing everyone good night.

Witchcraft, Smiley recalled - his memory again, the files knew nothing so plainly human - Witchcraft was by no means Percy Alleline"s first attempt, in his new post, at launching his own operation; but since his charter bound him to obtain Control"s approval, its predecessors had been stillborn. For a while, for instance, he had concentrated on tunnelling. The Americans had built audio tunnels in Berlin and Belgrade, the French had managed something similar against the Americans. Very well, under Percy"s banner the Circus would get in on the market. Control looked on benignly, an inter-services committee was formed (known as the Alleline Committee), a team of boffins from Nuts and Bolts made a survey of the foundations of the Soviet Emba.s.sy in Athens, where Alleline counted on the unstinted support of the latest military regime which, like its predecessors, he greatly admired. Then very gently Control knocked over Percy"s bricks and waited for him to come up with something new. Which, after several shots between, was exactly what Percy was doing that grey morning when Control peremptorily summoned Smiley to the feast.

Control was sitting at his desk, Alleline was standing at the window, between them lay a plain folder, bright yellow and closed.

"Sit over there and take a look at this nonsense."

Smiley sat in the easy chair and Alleline stayed at the window resting his big elbows on the sill, staring over the rooftops to Nelson"s Column and the spires of Whitehall beyond.

Inside the folder was a photograph of what purported to be a high-level Soviet naval despatch fifteen pages long.

"Who made the translation?" Smiley asked, thinking that it looked good enough to be Roy Bland"s work.

"G.o.d," Control replied. "G.o.d made it, didn"t he, Percy? Don"t ask him anything, George, he won"t tell you."

It was Control"s time for looking exceptionally youthful. Smiley remembered how he had lost weight, how his cheeks were pink, and how those who knew him little tended to congratulate him on his good appearance. Only Smiley, perhaps, ever noticed the tiny beads of sweat which even in those days habitually followed his hairline.

Precisely, the doc.u.ment was an appreciation, allegedly prepared for the Soviet High Command, of a recent Soviet naval exercise in the Mediterranean and Black Sea. In Lacon"s file it was entered simply as Report No. 1, under the tide: "Naval". For months the Admiralty had been screaming at the Circus for anything relating to this exercise. It therefore had an impressive topicality which at once, in Smiley"s eyes, made it suspect. It was detailed but it dealt with matters which Smiley did not understand even at a distance: sh.o.r.e-to-sea strike power, radio activation of enemy alert procedures, the higher mathematics of the balance of terror. If it was genuine it was gold dust but there was no earthily reason to suppose it was genuine. Every week the Circus processed dozens of unsolicited so-called Soviet doc.u.ments. Most were straight pedlar material. A few were deliberate plants by allies with an axe to grind, a few more were Russian chickenfeed. Very rarely one or other turned out to be sound, but usually after it had been rejected.

"Whose initials are these?" Smiley asked, referring to some annotations pencilled in Russian in the margin. "Does anyone know?"

Control tilted his head at Alleline. "Ask the authority. Don"t ask me."

"Zharov," said Alleline. "Admiral, Black Sea Fleet."

"It"s not dated," Smiley objected.

"It"s a draft," Alleline replied complacently, his brogue richer than usual. "Zharov signed it Thursday. The finished despatch with those amendments went out on circulation Monday, dated accordingly."

Today was Tuesday.

"Where does it come from?" Smiley asked, still lost.

"Percy doesn"t feel able to tell," said Control.

"What do our own evaluators say?"

"They"ve not seen it," said Alleline, "and what"s more they"re not going to."

Control said icily: "My brother in Christ, Lilley, of naval intelligence, has pa.s.sed a preliminary opinion, however, has he not, Percy? Percy showed it to him last night - over a pink gin, was it, Percy, at the Travellers"?"

"At the Admiralty."

"Brother Lilley, being a fellow Caledonian of Percy"s, is as a rule sparing in his praise. However when he telephoned me half an hour ago he was positively fulsome. He even congratulated me. He regards the doc.u.ments as genuine and is seeking our permission - Percy"s, I suppose I should say - to apprise his fellow sealords of its conclusions."

"Quite impossible," said Alleline. "It"s for his eyes only, at least for a couple more weeks."

"The stuff is so hot," Control explained, "that it has to be cooled off before it can be distributed."

"But where does it come from?" Smiley insisted.

"Oh Percy"s dreamed up a covername, don"t you worry. Never been slow on covernames, have we, Percy?"

"But what"s the access? Who"s the case officer?"

"You"ll enjoy this," Control promised, aside. He was extraordinarily angry. In their long a.s.sociation Smiley could not remember him so angry. His slim, freckled hands were shaking and his normally lifeless eyes were sparkling with fury.

"Source Merlin," Alleline said, prefacing the announcement with a slight but very Scottish sucking of the teeth, "is a highly placed source with access to the most sensitive levels of Soviet policy-making." And as if he were royalty: "We have dubbed his product Witchcraft."

He had used the identical form of words, Smiley noticed, in a top secret and personal letter to a fan at the Treasury, requesting for himself greater discretion in ad hoc payments to agents.

"He"ll be saying he won him at the football pool next," Control warned, who despite his second youth had an old man"s inaccuracy when it came to popular idiom. "Now get him to tell you why he won"t tell you."

Alleline was undeterred. He too was flushed, but with triumph, not disease. He filled his big chest for a long speech, which he delivered entirely to Smiley, tonelessly, rather as a Scottish police sergeant might give evidence before the courts.

"The ident.i.ty of Source Merlin is a secret which is not mine to divulge. He"s the fruit of a long cultivation by certain people in this service. People who are bound to me, as I am to them. People who are not at all entertained, either, by the failure rate around this place. There"s been too much blown. Too much lost, wasted, too many scandals. I"ve said so many times but I might as well have spoken to the wind for all the d.a.m.n care he paid me."

"He"s referring to me," Control explained from the sidelines. "I am he in this speech, you follow, George?"

"The ordinary principles of tradecraft and security have gone to the wall in this service. Need to know: where is it? Compartmentation at all levels: where is it, George? There"s too much regional back-biting, stimulated from the top."

"Another reference to myself," Control put in.

"Divide and rule, that"s the principle at work these days. Personalities who should be helping to fight Communism are all at one another"s throats. We"re losing our top partners."

"He means the Americans," Control explained.

"We"re losing our livelihood. Our self-respect. We"ve had enough." He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. "We"ve had a bellyful, in fact."

"And like everyone who"s had enough," said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, "he wants more."

Now for a while Lacon"s files, instead of Smiley"s memory, once more took up the story. It was typical of the atmosphere of those last months that, having been brought in on the affair at the beginning, Smiley should have received no subsequent word of how it had developed. Control detested failure, as he detested illness, and his own failures most. He knew that to recognise failure was to live with it; that a service that did not struggle did not survive. He detested the silk-shirt agents, who hogged large chunks of the budget to the detriment of the bread-and-b.u.t.ter networks in which he put his faith. He loved success, but he detested miracles if they put the rest of his endeavour out of focus. He detested weakness as he detested sentiment and religion, and he detested Percy Alleline who had a dash of most of them. His way of dealing with them was literally to close the door: to withdraw into the dingy solitude of his upper rooms, receive no visitors and have all his phone calls fed to him by the mothers. The same quiet ladies fed him jasmine tea and the countless office files which he sent for and returned in heaps. Smiley would see them piled before the door as he went about his own business of trying to keep the rest of the Circus afloat. Many were old, from the days before Control led the pack. Some were personal, the biographies of past and present members of the service.

Control never said what he was doing. If Smiley asked the mothers, or if Bill Haydon sauntered in, favourite boy, and made the same enquiry, they only shook their heads or silently raised their eyebrows towards paradise: "A terminal case," said these gentle glances. "We are humouring a great man at the end of his career." But Smiley - as he now patiently leafed through file after file, and in a corner of his complex mind rehea.r.s.ed Irina"s letter to Ricki Tarr - Smiley knew, and in a quite real way took comfort from the knowledge, that he was not after all the first to make this journey of exploration; that Control"s ghost was his companion into all but the furthest reaches; and might even have stayed the whole distance if Operation Testify, at the eleventh hour, had not stopped him dead.

Breakfast again and a much subdued Welshman not drawn by undercooked sausage and overcooked tomato.

"Do you want these back," Lacon demanded, "or have you done with them? They can"t be very enlightening since they don"t even contain the reports."

"Tonight, please, if you don"t mind."

"I suppose you realise you look a wreck."

He didn"t realise, but at Bywater Street when he returned there Ann"s pretty gilt mirror showed his eyes red-rimmed and his plump cheeks clawed with fatigue. He slept a little, then went his mysterious ways. When evening came Lacon was actually waiting for him. Smiley went straight on with his reading.

For six weeks, according to the files, the naval despatch had no successor. Other sections of the Ministry of Defence echoed the Admiralty"s enthusiasm for the original despatch, the Foreign Office remarked that "this doc.u.ment sheds an extraordinary sidelight on Soviet aggressive thinking", whatever that meant; Alleline persisted in his demands for special handling of the material but he was like a general with no army. Lacon referred frostily to "the somewhat delayed follow-up", and suggested to his Minister that he should "defuse the situation with the Admiralty". From Control, according to the file, nothing. Perhaps he was lying low and praying it would blow over. In the lull a Treasury Moscow-gazer sourly pointed out that Whitehall had seen plenty of this in recent years: an encouraging first report, then silence, or, worse, a scandal.

He was wrong. In the seventh week Alleline announced publication of three new Witchcraft reports all on the same day. All took the form of secret Soviet interdepartmental correspondence, though the topics differed widely.

Witchcraft No. 2, according to Lacon"s summary, described tensions inside Comecon and spoke of the degenerative effect of Western trade deals on its weaker members. In Circus terms, this was a cla.s.sic report from Roy Bland territory, covering the very target which the Hungarian-based Aggravate network had been attacking in vain for years. "Excellent tour d"horizon," wrote a Foreign Office customer, "and backed by good collateral."

Witchcraft No. 3 discussed revisionism in Hungary and Radar"s renewed purges in political and academic life: the best way to end loose talk in Hungary, said the author of the paper, borrowing a phrase coined by Khrushchev long before, would be to shoot some more intellectuals. Once again this was Roy Bland territory. "A salutary warning," wrote the same Foreign Office commentator, "to all those who like to think the Soviet Union is going soft on satellites."

These two reports were both in essence background, but Witchcraft No. 4 was sixty pages long and held by the customers to be unique. It was an immensely technical Soviet Foreign Service appreciation of the advantages and disadvantages of negotiating with a weakened American president. The conclusion, on balance, was that by throwing the President a bone for his own electorate, the Soviet Union could buy useful concessions in forthcoming discussions on multiple nuclear warheads. But it seriously questioned the desirability of allowing the United States to feel too much the loser, since this could tempt the Pentagon into a retributive or pre-emptive strike. The report was from the very heart of Bill Haydon territory. But as Haydon himself wrote in a touching minute to Alleline - promptly copied without Haydon"s knowledge to the Minister and entered on the Cabinet Office file - in twenty-five years of attacking the Soviet nuclear target he had not laid his hands on anything of this quality.

"Nor," he concluded, "unless I am extremely mistaken, have our American brothers-in-arms. I know that these are early days, but it does occur to me that anyone taking this material to Washington could drive a very hard bargain in return. Indeed, if Merlin maintains the standard, I would venture to predict that we could buy anything there is to have in the American agency"s shop."

Percy Alleline had his reading room; and George Smiley made himself a coffee on the derelict burner beside the washstand. Midway the meter ran out and in a temper he called for Norman and ordered five pounds" worth of shillings.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

With mounting interest Smiley continued his journey through Lacon"s meagre records from that first meeting of protagonists until the present day. At the time, such a mood of suspicion had gripped the Circus that even between Smiley and Control the subject of Source Merlin became taboo. Alleline brought up the Witchcraft reports and waited in the anteroom while the mothers took them to Control, who signed them at once in order to demonstrate that he had not read them. Alleline took back the file, poked his head round Smiley"s door, grunted a greeting, and clumped down the staircase. Bland kept his distance, and even Bill Haydon"s breezy visits, traditionally a part of the life up there, of the talking shop which Control in the old days had liked to foster among his senior lieutenants, became fewer and shorter, then ceased entirely.

"Control"s going potty," Haydon told Smiley with contempt. "And if I"m not mistaken he"s also dying. It"s just a question of which gets him first."

The customary Tuesday meetings were discontinued, and Smiley found himself constantly hara.s.sed by Control either to go abroad on some blurred errand, or to visit the domestic outstations - Sarratt, Brixton, Acton and the rest - as his personal envoy. He had a growing feeling that Control wanted him out of the way. When they talked, he felt the heavy strain of suspicion between them, so that even Smiley seriously wondered whether Bill was right and Control was unfit for his job.

The Cabinet Office files made it clear that those next three months saw a steady flowering of the Witchcraft operation, without any help from Control. Reports came in at the rate of two or even three a month and the standard, according to the customers, continued excellent, but Control"s name was seldom mentioned and he was never invited to comment. Occasionally the evaluators produced quibbles. More often they complained that corroboration was not possible since Merlin took them into uncharted areas: could we not ask the Americans to check? We could not, said the Minister. Not yet, said Alleline; who in a confidential minute seen by no one, added: "When the time is ripe we shall do more than barter our material for theirs. We are not interested in a one-time deal. Our task is to establish Merlin"s track record beyond all doubt. When that is done, Haydon can go to market..."

There was no longer any question of it. Among the chosen few who were admitted to the chambers of the Adriatic Working Party, Merlin was already a winner. His material was accurate, often other sources confirmed it retrospectively. A Witchcraft committee formed with the Minister in the chair. Alleline was vice-chairman. Merlin had become an industry, and Control was not even employed. Which was why in desperation he had sent out Smiley with his beggar"s bowl: "There are three of them and Alleline," he said. "Sweat them, George. Tempt them, bully them, give them whatever they eat."

Of those meetings also, the files were blessedly ignorant, for they belonged in the worst rooms of Smiley"s memory. He had known already by then that there was nothing in Control"s larder that would satisfy their hunger.

It was April. Smiley had come back from Portugal, where he had been burying a scandal, to find Control living under siege. Files lay strewn over the floor; new locks had been fitted to the windows. He had put the tea cosy over his one telephone and from the ceiling hung a baffler against electronic eavesdropping, a thing like an electric fan which constantly varied its pitch. In the three weeks Smiley had been away, Control had become an old man.

"Tell them they"re buying their way in with counterfeit money," he ordered, barely looking up from his files. "Tell them any d.a.m.n thing. I need time."

"There are three of them and Alleline," Smiley now repeated to himself, seated at the major"s card table and studying Lacon"s list of those who had been Witchcraft-cleared. Today there were sixty-eight licensed visitors to the Adriatic Working Party"s reading room. Each, like a member of the Communist Party, was numbered according to the date of his admission. The list had been retyped since Control"s death; Smiley was not included. But the same four founding fathers still headed the list: Alleline, Bland, Esterhase and Bill Haydon. Three of them and Alleline, Control had said.

Suddenly Smiley"s mind, open as he read to every inference, every oblique connection, was a.s.sailed by a quite extraneous vision: of himself and Ann walking the Cornish cliffs. It was the time immediately after Control"s death, the worst time Smiley could remember in their long, puzzled marriage. They were high on the coast, somewhere between Lamorna and Porthcurno, they had gone there out of season ostensibly for Ann to take the sea air for her cough. They had been following the coast path, each lost in his thoughts: she to Haydon, he supposed, he to Control, to Jim Prideaux and Testify, and the whole mess he had left behind him on retirement. They shared no harmony. They had lost all calmness in one another"s company; they were a mystery to each other, and the most ba.n.a.l conversation could take strange, uncontrollable directions. In London, Ann had been living wildly, taking anyone who would have her. He knew only that she was trying to bury something that hurt or worried her very much; but he knew no way to reach her.

"If I had died," she demanded suddenly, "rather than Control, say, how would you feel towards Bill?"

Smiley was still pondering his answer when she threw in: "I sometimes think I safeguard your opinion of him. Is that possible? That I somehow keep the two of you together. Is that possible?"

"It"s possible." He added: "Yes, I suppose I"m dependent on Bill in a way."

"Is Bill still important in the Circus?"

"More than he was, probably."

"And he still goes to Washington, wheels and deals with them, turns them upside down?"