"Oh good."

"And your wife, she"s in the pink and so on?"

His expressions were also boyish.

"Very bonny, thank you," said Smiley, trying gallantly to respond in kind.

They were watching the double doors. From far off they heard the jangle of footsteps on a ceramic floor. Smiley guessed two people, both men. The doors opened and a tall figure appeared half in silhouette. For the fraction of a moment Smiley glimpsed a second man behind him, dark, small and attentive; but only the one man stepped into the room before the doors were closed by unseen hands.

"Lock us in please," Lacon called, and they heard the snap of the key. "You know Smiley, don"t you?"

"Yes, I think I do," said the figure as he began the long walk towards them out of the far gloom. "I think he once gave me a job, didn"t you, Mr Smiley?"

His voice was as soft as a southerner"s drawl but there was no mistaking the colonial accent. "Tarr, sir. Ricki Tarr from Penang."

A fragment of firelight illuminated one side of the stark smile and made a hollow of one eye. "The lawyer"s boy, remember? Come on, Mr Smiley, you changed my first nappies."

And then absurdly they were all four standing and Guillam and Lacon looked on like G.o.dparents while Tarr shook Smiley"s hand once, then again, then once more for the photographs.

"How are you, Mr Smiley? It"s real nice to see you, sir."

Relinquishing Smiley"s hand at last he swung away in the direction of his appointed chair, while Smiley thought: Yes, with Ricki Tarr it could have happened. With Tarr, anything could have happened. My G.o.d, he thought; two hours ago I was telling myself I would take refuge in the past. He felt thirsty and supposed it was fear.

Ten? Twelve years ago? It was not his night for understanding time. Among Smiley"s jobs in those days was the vetting of recruits: no one was taken on without his nod, no one trained without his signature on the schedule. The cold war was running high, scalphunters were in demand, the Circus"s residencies abroad had been ordered by Haydon to look out for likely material. Steve Mackelvore from Djakarta came up with Tarr. Mackelvore was an old pro with cover as a shipping agent and he had found Tarr angry drunk, kicking round the docks looking for a girl called Rose who had walked out on him.

According to Tarr"s story he was mixed up with a bunch of Belgians running guns between the islands and up-coast. He disliked Belgians and he was bored with gunrunning and he was angry because they"d stolen Rose. Mackelvore reckoned he would respond to discipline and was young enough to train for the type of mailfist operation that the scalphunters undertook from behind the walls of their glum Brixton schoolhouse. After the usual searches Tarr was forwarded to Singapore for a second look, then to the Nursery at Sarratt for a third. At that point Smiley came into the act as moderator at a succession of interviews, some hostile. Sarratt Nursery was the training compound, but it had s.p.a.ce for other uses.

Tarr"s father was an Australian solicitor living in Penang, it seemed. The mother was a small-time actress from Bradford who came East with a British drama group before the war. The father, Smiley recalled, had an evangelical streak and preached in local gospel halls. The mother had a small criminal record in England but Tarr"s father either didn"t know or didn"t care. When the war came the couple evacuated to Singapore for the sake of their young son. A few months later Singapore fell and Ricki Tarr began his education in Changi jail under j.a.panese supervision. In Changi the father preached G.o.d"s charity to everyone in sight, and if the j.a.ps hadn"t persecuted him his fellow prisoners would have done the job for them. With Liberation the three of them went back to Penang. Ricki tried to read for the law but more often broke it and the father turned some rough preachers loose on him to beat the sin out of his soul. Tarr flew the coop to Borneo. At eighteen he was a fully paid-up gunrunner playing all seven ends against the middle around the Indonesian islands, and that was how Mackelvore stumbled on him.

By the time he had graduated from the Nursery, the Malayan emergency had broken. Tarr was played back into gunrunning. Almost the first people he b.u.mped into were his old Belgian friends. They were too busy supplying guns to the Communists to bother where he had been and they were shorthanded. Tarr ran a few shipments for them in order to blow their contacts, then one night got them drunk, shot four of them including Rose and set fire to their boat. He hung around Malaya and did a couple more jobs before being called back to Brixton and refitted for special operations in Kenya - or, in less sophisticated language, hunting Mau Mau for bounty.

After Kenya, Smiley pretty much lost sight of him, but a couple of incidents stuck in his memory because they might have become scandals and Control had to be informed. In sixty-four Tarr was sent to Brazil to make a crash offer of a bribe to an armaments minister known to be in deep water. Tarr was too rough; the minister panicked and told the press. Tarr had Dutch cover and no one was wiser except Netherlands intelligence, who were furious. In Spain a year later, acting on a tip-off supplied by Bill Haydon, Tarr blackmailed - or burned, as the scalphunters would say - a Polish diplomat who had lost his heart to a dancer. The first yield was good, Tarr won a commendation and a bonus. But when he went back for a second helping the Pole wrote a confession to his amba.s.sador and threw himself, with or without encouragement, out of a high window.

In Brixton, they used to call him accident-p.r.o.ne. Guillam, by the expression on his immature but ageing face, as they sat in their half circle round the meagre fire, called him a lot worse than that.

"Well, I guess I"d better make my pitch," Tarr said pleasantly as he settled his easy body into the chair.

CHAPTER FIVE.

"It happened around six months ago," Tarr began.

"April," Guillam snapped. "Just keep it precise, shall we, all the way along?"

"April, then," Tarr said equably. "Things were pretty quiet in Brixton. I guess there must have been half a dozen of us on stand-by. Pete Sembrini, he was in from Rome, Cy Vanhofer had just made a hit in Budapest" - he gave a mischievous smile - "ping-pong and snooker in the Brixton waiting room. Right, Mr Guillam?"

"It was the silly season."

When out of the blue, said Tarr, came a flash requisition from Hong Kong residency.

"They had a low-grade Soviet trade delegation in town, chasing up electrical goods for the Moscow market. One of the delegates was stepping wide in the nightclubs. Name of Boris, Mr Guillam has the details. No previous record. They"d had the tabs on him for five days, and the delegation was booked in for twelve more. Politically it was too hot for the local boys to handle but they reckoned a crash approach might do the trick. The yield didn"t look that special but so what? Maybe we"d just buy him for stock, right, Mr Guillam?"

Stock meant sale or exchange with another intelligence service: a commerce in small-time defectors handled by the scalphunters.

Ignoring Tarr, Guillam said: "South East Asia was Tarr"s parish. He was sitting around with nothing to do so I ordered him to make a site inspection and report back by cable."

Each time someone else spoke Tarr sank into a dream. His gaze settled upon the speaker, a mistiness entered his eyes and there was a pause like a coming back before he began again.

"So I did what Mr Guillam ordered," he said. "I always do, don"t I, Mr Guillam? I"m a good boy really, even if I am impulsive."

He flew the next night, Sat.u.r.day March 31st, with an Australian pa.s.sport describing him as a car salesman and two virgin Swiss escape pa.s.sports hidden in the lining of his suitcase. These were contingency doc.u.ments to be filled in as circ.u.mstances demanded: one for Boris, one for himself. He made a car rendezvous with the Hong Kong resident not far from his hotel, the Golden Gate on Kowloon.

Here Guillam leaned over to Smiley and murmured: "Tufty Thesinger, buffoon. Ex-major, King"s African Rifles. Percy Alleline"s appointment."

Thesinger produced a report on Boris"s movements based on one week"s surveillance.

"Boris was a real oddball," Tarr said, "I couldn"t make him out. He"d been boozing every night without a break. He hadn"t slept for a week and Thesinger"s watchers were folding at the knees. All day he trailed round after the delegation, inspecting factories, chiming in at discussions and being the bright young Soviet official."

"How young?" Smiley asked.

Guillam threw in: "His visa application gave him born Minsk forty-six."

"Evening time, he"d go back to the Alexandra Lodge, an old shanty house out in North Point where the delegation had holed out. He"d eat with the crew, then around nine he"d ease out the side entrance, grab a taxi and belt over to the mainline night spots on Kowloon side. His favourite haunt was the Cat"s Cradle in Queen"s Road, where he bought drinks for local businessmen and acted like Mr Personality. He might stay there till midnight. From the Cradle he cut back through the tunnel to Wanchai, to a place called Angelika"s where the drink was cheaper. Alone. Angelika"s is a cafe with a h.e.l.l-hole in the bas.e.m.e.nt where the sailors and the tourists go, and Boris seemed to like that. He"d have three or four drinks and keep the receipts. Mainly he drank brandy but now and then he"d have a vodka to vary his diet. He"d had one tangle with a Eurasian girl along the way and Thesinger"s watchers got after her and bought the story. She said he was lonely and sat on the bed moaning about his wife for not appreciating his genius. That was a real breakthrough," he added sarcastically as Lacon noisily swooped on the little fire and stirred it, one coal against the other, into life. "That night I went down to the Cradle and took a look at him. Thesinger"s watchers had been sent to bed with a gla.s.s of milk. They didn"t want to know."

Sometimes as Tarr spoke an extraordinary stillness came over his body as if he were hearing his own voice played back to him.

"He arrived ten minutes after me and he brought his own company, a big blond Swede with a Chinese broad in tow. It was dark so I moved into a table nearby. They ordered Scotch, Boris paid and I sat six feet away watching the lousy band and listening to their conversation. The Chinese kid kept her mouth shut and the Swede was doing most of the running. They talked English. The Swede asked Boris where he was staying, and Boris said the Excelsior which was a d.a.m.n lie because he was staying at the Alexandra Lodge with the rest of the church outing. All right, the Alexandra is down the list: the Excelsior sounds better. About midnight the party breaks up. Boris says he"s got to go home and tomorrow"s a busy day. That was the second lie because he was no more going home than - what"s the one, Jekyll and Hyde, right! - the regular doctor who dressed up and went on the razzle. So Boris was who?"

For a moment no one helped him.

"Hyde," said Lacon to his scrubbed red hands. Sitting again, he had clasped them on his lap.

"Hyde," Tarr repeated. "Thank you, Mr Lacon; I always saw you as a literary man. So they settle the bill and I traipse over to Wanchai to be there ahead of him when he hits Angelika"s. By this time I"m pretty sure I"m in the wrong ball game."

On dry long fingers, Tarr studiously counted off the reasons: first, he never knew a Soviet delegation that didn"t carry a couple of security gorillas whose job it was to keep the boys out of the fleshpots. So how did Boris slip the leash night after night? Second, he didn"t like the way Boris pushed his foreign currency around. For a Soviet official that was against nature, he insisted: "He just doesn"t have any d.a.m.n currency. If he does, he buys beads for his squaw. And three, I didn"t like the way he lied. He was a sight too glib for decency."

So Tarr waited at Angelika"s, and sure enough half an hour later his Mr Hyde turned up all on his own. "He sits down and calls for a drink. That"s all he does. Sits and drinks like a d.a.m.n wallflower!"

Once more it was Smiley"s turn to receive the heat of Tarr"s charm: "So what"s it all about, Mr Smiley? See what I mean? It"s little things I"m noticing," he confided, still to Smiley. "Just take the way he sat. Believe me, sir, if we"d been in that place ourselves we couldn"t have sat better than Boris. He had the pick of the exits and the stairway, he had a fine view of the main entrance and the action, he was right-handed and he was covered by a left-hand wall. Boris was a professional, Mr Smiley, there was no doubt of it whatsoever. He was waiting for a connect, working a letter box maybe, or trailing his coat and looking for a pa.s.s from a mug like me. Well, now listen: it"s one thing to burn a small-time trade delegate. It"s quite a different ball game to swing your legs at a Centre-trained hood, right, Mr Guillam?"

Guillam said: "Since the reorganisation scalphunters have no brief to trawl for double agents. They must be turned over to London Station on sight. The boys have a standing order over Bill Haydon"s own signature. If there"s even a smell of the opposition, abandon." He added, for Smiley"s special ear: "Under lateralism our autonomy is cut to the bone."

"And I"ve been in double-double games before," Tarr confessed in a tone of injured virtue. "Believe me, Mr Smiley, they are a can of worms."

"I"m sure they are," said Smiley and gave a prim tug at his spectacles.

Tarr cabled Guillam "no sale", booked a flight home and went shopping. However, since his flight didn"t leave till Thursday he thought that before he left, just to pay his fare, he might as well burgle Boris"s room.

"The Alexandra"s a real ramshackle old place, Mr Smiley, off Marble Road, with a stack of wooden balconies. As for the locks, why, sir, they give up when they see you coming."

In a very short time therefore Tarr was standing inside Boris"s room with his back against the door, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. He was still standing there when a woman spoke to him in Russian drowsily from the bed.

"It was Boris"s wife," Tarr explained. "She was crying. Look, I"ll call her Irina, right? Mr Guillam has the details."

Smiley was already objecting: wife was impossible, he said. Centre would never let them both out of Russia at the same time, they"d keep one and send the other- "Common-law marriage," Guillam said drily, "Unofficial but permanent."

"There"s a lot that are the other way round these days," said Tarr with a sharp grin at no one, least of all at Smiley, and Guillam shot him another foul look.

CHAPTER SIX.

From the outset of this meeting Smiley had a.s.sumed for the main a Buddha-like inscrutability from which neither Tarr"s story nor the rare interjections of Lacon and Guillam could rouse him. He sat leaning back with his short legs bent, head forward and plump hands linked across his generous stomach. His hooded eyes had closed behind the thick lenses. His only fidget was to polish his gla.s.ses on the silk lining of his tie, and when he did this his eyes had a soaked, naked look which was embarra.s.sing to those who caught him at it. His interjection, however, and the donnish, inane sound which followed Guillam"s explanation, now acted like a signal upon the rest of the gathering, bringing a shuffling of chairs and a clearing of throats.

Lacon was foremost: "George, what are your drinking habits? Can I get you a Scotch or anything?" He offered drink solicitously, like aspirin for a headache. "I forgot to say it earlier," he explained. "George, a bracer: come. It"s winter, after all. A nip of something?"

"I"m fine, thank you," Smiley said.

He would have liked a little coffee from the percolator but somehow he didn"t feel able to ask. Also he remembered it was terrible.

"Guillam?" Lacon proceeded. No; Guillam also found it impossible to accept alcohol from Lacon.

He didn"t offer anything to Tarr, who went straight on with his narrative.

Tarr took Irina"s presence calmly, he said. He had worked up his fallback before he entered the building and now he went straight into his act. He didn"t pull a gun or slap his hand over her mouth or any of that tripe, as he put it, but he said he had come to speak to Boris on a private matter, he was sorry and he was d.a.m.n well going to sit there till Boris showed up. In good Australian, as became an outraged car salesman from down under, he explained that while he didn"t want to barge into anyone"s business he was d.a.m.ned if he was going to have his girl and his money stolen in a single night by a lousy Russian who couldn"t pay for his pleasures. He worked up a lot of outrage but managed to keep his voice down and then he waited to see what she did.

And that, said Tarr, was how it all began.

It was eleven thirty when he made Boris"s room. He left at one thirty with a promise of a meeting next night. By then the situation was all the other way: "We weren"t doing anything improper, mind. Just pen friends, right, Mr Smiley?"

For a moment, that bland sneer seemed to lay claim to Smiley"s most precious secrets.

"Right," he a.s.sented vapidly.

There was nothing exotic about Irina"s presence in Hong Kong and no reason why Thesiriger should have known of it, Tarr explained. Irina was a member of the delegation in her own right. She was a trained textile buyer: "Come to think of it, she was a sight better qualified than her old man, if I can call him that. She was a plain kid, a bit blue-stocking for my taste, but she was young and she had one h.e.l.l of a pretty smile when she stopped crying." Tarr coloured quaintly. "She was good company," he insisted, as if arguing against a trend. "When Mr Thomas from Adelaide came into her life she was at the end of the line from worrying what to do about the demon Boris. She thought I was the Angel Gabriel. Who could she talk to about her husband who wouldn"t turn the dogs on him? She"d no chums on the delegation, she"d no one she trusted even back in Moscow, she said. n.o.body who hadn"t been through it would ever know what it was like trying to keep a ruined relationship going while all the time you"re on the move." Smiley was once more in a deep trance. "Hotel after hotel, city after city, not even allowed to speak to the natives in a natural way or get a smile from a stranger, that"s how she described her life. She reckoned it was a pretty miserable state of affairs, Mr Smiley, and there was a lot of G.o.d-thumping and an empty vodka bottle beside the bed to show for it. Why couldn"t she be like normal people? she kept saying. Why couldn"t she enjoy the Lord"s sunshine like the rest of us? She loved sightseeing, she loved foreign kids, why couldn"t she have a kid of her own? A kid born free, not in captivity. She kept saying that: born in captivity, born free. "I"m a jolly person, Thomas. I"m a normal, sociable girl. I like people: why should I deceive them when I like them?" And then she said, the trouble was that long ago she had been chosen for the work that made her frozen like an old woman and cut her off from G.o.d. So that"s why she"d had a drink and why she was having a cry. She"d kind of forgotten her husband by then, she was apologising for having a fling, more." Again he faltered. "I could scent it, Mr Smiley. There was gold in her. I could scent it from the start. Knowledge is power, they say, sir, and Irina had the power, same as she had quality. She was h.e.l.lbent maybe, but she could still give her all. I can sense generosity in a woman where I meet it, Mr Smiley. I have a talent for it. And this lady was all set to be generous. Jesus, how do you describe a hunch? Some people can smell water under the ground..."

He seemed to expect some show of sympathy so Smiley said, "I understand," and plucked at the lobe of his ear.

Watching Smiley with a strange dependence in his expression, Tarr kept silent a stretch longer. "First thing next morning I cancelled my flight and changed my hotel," he said finally.

Abruptly Smiley opened his eyes wide. "What did you tell London?"

"Nothing."

"Why not?"

"Because he"s a devious fool," said Guillam.

"Maybe I thought Mr Guillam would say "Come home Tarr"," he replied, with a knowing glance at Guillam that was not returned. "You see, long ago when I was a little boy I made a mistake and walked into a honey-trap."

"He made an a.s.s of himself with a Polish girl," said Guillam. "He sensed her generosity too."

"I knew Irina was no honey-trap but how could I expect Mr Guillam to believe me? No way."

"Did you tell Thesinger?"

"h.e.l.l, no."

"What reason did you give London for postponing your flight?"

"I was due to fly Thursday. I reckoned no one back home would miss me till Tuesday. Specially with Boris being a dead duck."

"He didn"t give a reason and the housekeepers posted him absent without leave on the Monday," said Guillam. "He broke every rule in the book. And some that aren"t. By the middle of that week even Bill Haydon was beating his war-drums. And I was having to listen," he added tartly.

However that was, Tarr and Irina met next evening. They met again the evening after that. The first meeting was in a cafe and it limped. They took a lot of care not to be seen because Irina was frightened stiff, not just of her husband but of the security guards attached to the delegation, the gorillas as Tarr called them. She refused a drink and she was shaking. The second evening Tarr was still waiting on her generosity. They took the tram up to Victoria Peak, jammed between American matrons in white socks and eyeshades. The third he hired a car and drove her round the New Territories till she suddenly got the heebies about being so close to the Chinese border, so they had to run for harbour. Nevertheless she loved that trip and often spoke of the tidy beauty of it, the fish ponds and the paddy fields. Tarr also liked the trip because it proved to both of them that they weren"t being watched. But Irina still had not unpacked, as he put it.

"Now I"ll tell you a d.a.m.n odd thing about this stage of the game. At the start, I worked Thomas the Aussie to death. I fed her a lot of smoke about a sheep station outside Adelaide and a big property in the high street with a gla.s.s front and "Thomas" in lights. She didn"t believe me. She nodded and fooled around and waited till I"d said my piece, then she said "Yes, Thomas," "No, Thomas" and changed the subject."

On the fourth evening he drove her into the hills overlooking North Sh.o.r.e and Irina told Tarr that she had fallen in love with him and that she was employed by Moscow Centre, she and her husband both, and that she knew Tarr was in the trade, too; she could tell by his alertness and the way he listened with his eyes.

"She"d decided I was an English colonel of intelligence," said Tarr with no smile at all. "She was crying one minute and laughing the next and in my opinion she was three-quarters of the way to being a basket case. Half, she talked like a pocket-book loony heroine, half like a nice up-and-down suburban kid. The English were her favourite people. Gentlemen, she kept saying. I"d brought her a bottle of vodka and she drank half of it in about fifteen seconds flat. Hooray for English gentlemen. Boris was the lead and Irina was the back-up girl. It was a his-and-hers act, and one day she"d talk to Percy Alleline and tell him a great secret all for himself. Boris was on a trawl for Hong Kong businessmen and had a postbox job on the side for the local Soviet residency. Irina ran courier, boiled down the microdots and played radio for him on a high-speed squirt to beat the listeners. That was how it read on paper, see? The two nightclubs were rendezvous and fallback for his local connect, in that order. But all Boris really wanted to do was drink and chase the dancing girls and have depressions. Or else go for five-hour walks because he couldn"t stand being in the same room with his wife. All Irina did was wait around crying and getting plastered and fancy herself sitting alone at Percy"s fireside telling him all she knew. I kept her there talking, up on the hill, sitting in the car. I didn"t move because I didn"t want to break the spell. We watched the dusk fall on the harbour and the lovely moon come up there, and the peasants slipping by with their long poles and kerosene lamps. All we needed was Humphrey Bogart in a tuxedo. I kept my foot on the vodka bottle and let her talk. I didn"t move a muscle. Fact, Mr Smiley. Fact," he declared, with the defencelessness of a man longing to be believed, but Smiley"s eyes were closed and he was deaf to all appeal.

"She just completely let go," Tarr explained, as if it were suddenly an accident, a thing he had had no part in. "She told me her whole life-story from birth to Colonel Thomas; that"s me. Mummy, Daddy, early loves, recruitment, training, her lousy half marriage, the lot. How her and Boris were teamed at training and had been together ever since: one of the great unbreakable relationships. She told me her real name, her workname and the covernames she"d travelled and transmitted by, then she hauled out her handbag and started showing me her conjuring set: recessed fountain pen, signal plan folded up inside; concealed camera, the works. "Wait till Percy sees that," I tell her - playing her along, like. It was production-line stuff, mind, nothing coach-built, but grade one material all the same. To round it off she starts barking the dirt about the Soviet Hong Kong set up: legmen, safe houses, letter boxes, the lot. I was going crazy to remember it all."

"But you did," said Guillam shortly.

Yes, Tarr agreed; near on, he did. He knew she hadn"t told him the whole truth, but he knew truth came hard to a girl who"d been a hood since p.u.b.erty and he reckoned that for a beginner she was doing pretty nice.

"I kind of felt for her," he said with another flash of that false confessiveness. "I felt we were on the same wavelength, no messing."

"Quite so," said Lacon in a rare interjection. He was very pale, but whether that was anger or the effect of the grey light of early morning creeping through the shutters, there was no way to tell.

CHAPTER SEVEN.