The Secret Pilgrim (15 page)

Toby Esterhase added his own kind of sneer, in his own kind of Austro-Hungarian English. “And Tadeo is most conveniently dead, of course, Ned. Being a witness in Bella's story is actually quite a risk business, I would say.”

“He was shot by a frontier guard,” I said. “He wasn't ever trying to cross. He was making a reconnaissance. She has the feeling everyone she touches dies,” I added, thinking involuntarily of Ben.

“She could be right, at that,” said Haydon.

Perversely, it seemed to me, Roy Bland now joined in my defence—for increasingly I had the feeling I was in the dock. “Mind you, Tadeo could be kosher
and
wrong about Feliks's death. Maybe the police faked his death. After all, he did go into the truck last. He'd have been covered with blood anyway in that slaughterhouse. They wouldn't have needed to splash the tomato ketchup on him, would they? It would have been done for them already.”

Smiley took up Bland's cudgels. I was beginning to regret I had lobbied so hard to be posted out of his care.

“Is the father
really
so important to us, Bill?” he objected. “Feliks can be the Judas of all time, and still have a perfectly honest daughter, can't he?”

“I believe that too,” I said. “She admires her father. She has no problem talking about him. She honours him. She's still in mourning for him.”

I was remembering how she had looked down into the graveyard. I was remembering her determination to celebrate the gift of life. I refused to believe she had been pretending.

“All right,” said Haydon impatiently, shoving a full-plate photograph at me across the desk. “We'll stretch a point and trust you. What the hell are we supposed to make of this lot?”

It was a much enlarged photograph and out of register. I guessed it was a photograph of a photograph. It was stamped in red along the top left corner with the one word “Witchcraft,” which I had heard on the grapevine was London Station's most secret source.

Toby Esterhase's warning to me confirmed this: “You never saw this photograph actually, Ned,” he told me over Haydon's shoulder, with the kind of smarminess people reserve for the young. “Also you never saw the word ‘Witchcraft.' When you leave this room, your mind will be a blank, totally.”

It was a group photograph of young men and women arranged against a background of what could have been a barracks, or the
campus of a university. They were about sixty strong, and in civilian uniform, the men in suits and ties, the women in high white blouses and long skirts. A group of older men and an evil-looking woman stood to one side of them. The mood, like the clothes and the building and the background, was sullen.

“Second row of the chorus, third from the right,” said Haydon, handing me a magnifying glass. “Good tits, same as the young man said.”

It was Bella, there was no doubt of it. Bella three or four years younger it was true, and Bella with her hair swept back in what I guessed to be a bun. But Bella's broad, fair eyes and Bella's irrepressible smile, and the high, firm cheeks I adored.

“Did Bella ever whisper in your tiny shell-like ear that she'd been at language school in Kiev?” Haydon asked me.

“No.”

“Did she give any account of her education at all, apart from how she'd had it off with Tadeo in the hay?”

“No.”

“Of course Kiev
is
more of a holiday school than a school. Not a place many chaps talk about afterwards much. Unless they're confessing. Theoretically it's a school for tomorrow's interpreters but I'm afraid that in practice it's more a spawning ground for Moscow Centre hopefuls. Centre owns it, Centre staffs it, Centre skims the cream. The slops go to their Foreign Office, same as here.”

“Has Brandt seen this?” I asked.

His levity fell from him “You're joking, aren't you? Brandt's a hostile witness, so are they all.”

“Can I see Brandt?”

“I wouldn't recommend it.”

“Does that mean no?”

“Yes. It means no.”

“Was Witchcraft also the source of the report against Bella's father?”

“Mind your own bloody business,” he said, but I had caught Toby's startled eye and sensed that I was right.

“Does Moscow Centre always take class photographs of its white hopes?” I asked, emboldened as Smiley's head lifted to me in what I again took to be support.

“We take 'em at Sarratt,” Haydon retorted. “Why shouldn't Moscow Centre?”

I could feel the sweat running down my back, and I knew my voice was slipping. But I floundered on. “Has anyone else in this photograph been identified?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“What as?”

“Never mind.”

“What languages did she learn?”

Haydon had had enough of me. He lifted his eyes to Heaven as if appealing for the gift of patience. “Well, they
all
learn English, darling, if
that's
what you're asking,” he drawled and, putting his chin in his hand, gave Smiley a long look.

I am not clairvoyant and I had no way of knowing what was passing between the two men, or what had passed already. But even allowing for the advantages of hindsight, I am sure I had the sensation of being caught between hostile camps. Even somebody as remote from Head Office politics as I was could not help hearing the rumble of the battle that was raging: how the great X had walked clean past the great Y in the corridor without so much as a “Good morning”; how A had refused to sit at the same table with B in the canteen. And how Haydon's London Station was becoming a service within a service, gobbling up the regional directorates, taking over the special sections, the watchers, the listeners, right the way down to such humble beings as our postmen, who sat in dripping sorting offices, loyally steaming open mail with gas kettles permanently on the boil. It was even hinted that the true clash of Titans was between Bill Haydon and the reigning Chief, the last to call
himself Control, and that Smiley as Control's cupbearer was more on his master's side than Haydon's.

But then it was also hinted that Smiley himself was under sentence—or, put more tactfully—contemplating an academic appointment so that he could take more care of his marriage.

Haydon looked jauntily at Smiley, but the jaunty look became a chill stare as he waited for Smiley to return it. The rest of us waited too. The embarrassment was that Smiley didn't return it. He was like a man declining to acknowledge a salute. He sat on the chaise longue with his eyebrows lifted, and his long eyelids turned down, and his round head tilted, seeming to study the Persian prayer mat that was another eccentric feature of Bill's room. And he simply went on studying it as if he were unaware of Haydon's interest in him, though we all knew—even I knew—that he wasn't. Then he puffed out his cheeks and pulled a frown of disapproval. And finally he stood—not dramatically, for George never had that far to go— and gathered up his papers.

“Well, I think we've had the meat of this, don't you, Bill?” he said. “Control will see indoctrinated officers in one hour, please, if that's convenient, and we'll try to take a view. Ned, you and I have a small piece of Zurich history to clear up. Perhaps you'd drop by when Bill has done with you.”

Twenty minutes later I was sitting in Smiley's office.

“Do you believe that photograph?” he asked, with no pretense of talking about Zurich.

“I suppose I have to.”

“Why do you suppose that? Photographs can be faked. There is such a thing as disinformation. Moscow Centre has been known to go in for it now and then. They've even stooped to discrediting innocent people, I'm told. They have an entire department, as a matter of fact, devoted to little else. It runs to about five hundred officers.”

“Then why frame Bella? Why not go for Brandt or one of the crew?”

“What's Bill told you to do?”

“Nothing. He says I'll get my orders in due course.”

“You never answered his question. Do you think we should abort the network?”

“It's hard for me to say. I'm just the local link. The network's run direct from London Station.”

“Nevertheless.”

“We can't exfiltrate thirty agents. We'd start a war. If the supply lines are blown and the escape routes are closed, I don't see there's anything we can do for them at all.”

“So they're dead anyway,” he suggested, more in confirmation than question. A phone was ringing on his desk but he didn't pick it up. He continued to look at me with a merciful concern. “Well, if they
are
dead, will you please remember it's not your fault, Ned?” he added kindly. “Nobody expects you to take on Moscow Centre single-handed. It may be the Fifth Floor's fault, it may be mine. It certainly isn't yours.”

He nodded me to the door. I closed it after me and heard his phone stop ringing.

I returned to Hamburg the same night. Bella sounded excited when I rang, and sad that I wasn't rushing round to her at once.

“Where's Brandt?” she asked. She had no notion of telephone security. I said Brandt was fine, just fine. I felt guilty talking to her when I knew so much and she so little. I was to be natural towards her, Haydon had said: “Whatever you did before, keep doing it or do it better. I don't want her guessing anything.” I should tell her that Brandt loved her, which he was apparently insisting on. I guessed that in his travail he was asking to see me. I hoped so, because I trusted him and he was my responsibility.

I tried not to feel upset for myself when there were so many larger tragedies round me, but it was hard. Until a few days ago, Brandt and the crew had been mine to care for. I had been their spokesman and champion. Now one of them was dead or worse,
and the rest had been taken out of my hands. The network, though it had worked to London, had been my proxy family. Now it was like the remnants of a ghostly army, out of touch, floating between life and death.

Worst of all was my sense of dislocation, of holding a dozen conflicting theories in my head at once, and favouring each in turn. One minute I was insisting to myself that Bella was innocent, just as I had maintained to Haydon. The next I was asking myself how she could have communicated with her masters. The answer was, only too easily. She shopped, she went to cinemas, she went to school. She could meet couriers, fill and empty dead-letter boxes to her heart's content.

But no sooner had I gone this far than I ran to her defence. Bella was not
bad.
The photograph was a plant and the story about her father amounted to nothing. Smiley had said as much. There were a hundred ways in which the mission could have been blown without Bella having the least thing to do with it. Our operational security was tight, but not as tight as I would have wished. My predecessor had turned out to be corrupt. Might he not, in addition to inventing agents, have sold a few as well? And even if he hadn't, was it really so unreasonable of Brandt to suggest that the leak could have come from our side of the fence, not his?

Now I would not have you think that, alone in his cot that night, the young Ned unravelled single-handed the skein of treachery that later took all George Smiley's powers to expose. A source can be a plant, a plant can be ignored, an experienced intelligence officer can take a wrong decision—all without the assistance of a traitor within the Fifth Floor's gates. I knew that. I was not a child, and not one of your grey-cheeked Circus conspiracy-theorists either.

Nevertheless I did ponder, as any of us might when he is stretched to the limits of his allegiance to his Service. I pieced together from my worm's-eye view all the rumours that had
reached me on the Circus grapevine. Stories of unaccountable failure and repeated scandal, of the mounting anger of our American Cousins. Of meaningless reorganisations, wasteful rivalries between men who were today immortals and tomorrow had resigned. Horror stories of incompetence being taken as proof of grand betrayal—and unnerving evidence of betrayal dismissed as incompetence.

If there is such a thing as growing up, you may say that sometime that night I made one of those leaps into maturity. I realised that the Circus was much the same as any other British institution, except that it was more so, since it played its games in the safety of sealed rooms, with other people's lives for counters. Yet I was pleased to have made my recognition. It gave me back the responsibility for my actions, which hitherto I had been a little too willing to lay at other people's feet. If my career till now had been a constant battle between submission and identity, then you might say that submission had maintained the upper hand. But that night I crossed some sort of border. I decided that from then on, I would pay more heed to my own instincts and desires, and less to the harness that I seemed unable to dispense with.

We met at the safe flat. If there was neutral ground to be found anywhere, it was there. She still knew nothing of the catastrophe. I had told her only that Brandt had been summoned to England. We made love at once, blindly and hungrily; then I waited for the clarity of after-love to begin my interrogation.

I began playfully stroking her hair, smoothing it against her head. Then I swept it back with both my hands, and scooped it into a rough bun.

“This way you look
very
stern,” I said, and kissed her, still holding it in place. “Have you ever worn it like this?” I kissed her again.

“When I was a girl.”

“When was that?” I said, between our joined lips. “You mean before Tadeo? When?”

“Until I went to the forest. Then I cut it off. Another woman did it with a knife.”

“Have you got a photograph of yourself like this?”

“In the forest we did not take photographs.”

“I mean before. When you wore it like a stern lady.”

She sat up. “Why?”

“Just tell me.”

She was watching me with her almost colourless eyes. “At school, they took our photographs. Why?”