The Secret Pilgrim (16 page)

“In groups? In classes? What sort of photographs?”

“Why?”

“Just tell me, Bella. I need to know.”

“They took photographs of us in our class, and they took photographs for our documents.”

“What documents?”

“For identity. For our passports.”

She did not mean a passport as we understand it. She meant a passport for moving about inside the Soviet Union. No free citizen could cross the road without one.

“A full-face photograph? Not smiling?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do with your old passport, Bella?”

She didn't remember.

“What did you wear for it—for the photograph?” I kissed her breasts. “Not these. What did you wear?”

“A blouse and tie. What nonsense are you talking?”

“Bella, listen to me. Is there anyone you can think of, back at home, a schoolfriend, an old boyfriend, a relation, who would have a photograph of you with your hair back? Someone you could write to, perhaps, who could be contacted?”

She considered for a moment, staring at me. “My aunt,” she said grumpily.

“What's her name?”

She told me.

“Where does she live?”

In Riga, she said. With Uncle Janek. I seized an envelope, sat her still naked at a table and made her write out their full address. Then I put a piece of plain writing paper before her and dictated a letter which she translated as she wrote.

“Bella.” I lifted her to her feet and kissed her tenderly. “Bella, tell me something else. Did you ever go to any school, of any kind, except the schools in your own town?”

She shook her head.

“No holiday schools? Special schools? Language schools?” “No.”

“Did you learn English at school?”

“Of course not. Otherwise I would speak English. What's happening to you, Ned? Why are you asking me these stupid questions?”

“The
Daisy
sailed into trouble,” I said, still face to face with her. “There was shooting. Brandt wasn't hurt but others were. That's all I'm allowed to tell you. We're to fly back to London tomorrow, you and I together. They need to ask us some questions and find out what went wrong.”

She closed her eyes and began shaking. She opened her mouth and made a silent scream.

“I believe in you,” I said. “I want to help you. And Brandt. That's the truth.”

Gradually she came back to me and put her head on my chest while she wept. She was a child again. Perhaps she had always been one. Perhaps, by helping me to grow up, she had increased the distance between us. I had brought a British passport for her. She had no nationality of her own. I made her stay the night with me and she clutched me like a drowning girl. Neither of us slept.

On the plane she held my hand but we were already continents apart. Then she spoke in a voice that I had not heard from her before. A firm, adult voice of sadness and disillusionment that
reminded me of Stefanie's when she had delivered her Sibyl's warning to me on the island.

“Es ist ein reiner Unsinn,”
she said. It is a pure nonsense.

“What is?”

She had taken away her hand. Not in anger, but in a kind of worldly despair. “You tell them to put their feet into the water and you wait to see what happens. If they are not shot, they are heroes. If they are shot, they are martyrs. You gain nothing that is worth having and you encourage my people to kill themselves. What do you want us to do? Rise up and kill the Russian oppressor? Will you come and help us if we try? I don't think so. I think you are doing something because you cannot do nothing. I think you are not useful to us at all.”

I could never forget what Bella said, for it was also a dismissal of my love. And today I think of her each morning as I listen to the news before walking my dog. I wonder what we thought we were promising to those brave Balts in those days, and whether it was the same promise which we are now so diligently breaking.

This time it was Peter Guillam who was waiting at the airport, which was a relief to me, because his good looks and breezy manners seemed to give her confidence. For a chaperone he had brought Nancy from the watchers, and Nancy had made herself motherly for the occasion. Between them they led Bella through immigration to a grey van which belonged to the Sarratt inquisitors. I wished that someone could have thought to send a less formidable vehicle, because when she saw the van she stopped and looked back to me in accusation before Nancy grabbed her by the arm and shoved her in.

In the turbulent life of a case officer, I was learning, there was not always such a thing as an elegant goodbye.

I can only tell you what I next did, and what I later heard. I made for Smiley's office, and spent most of my day trying to catch him between meetings. Circus protocol required me to go first to
Haydon, but I had already exceeded Haydon's brief by the questions I had put to Bella, and suspected Smiley would give me a more sympathetic hearing. He listened to me; he took charge of Bella's letter and examined it.

“If we have it posted in Moscow and give a Finnish safe address for them to write back to, it might just work,” I urged him.

But, as so often with Smiley, I had the impression that he was thinking beyond me into realms from which I was excluded. He dropped the letter in a drawer and closed it.

“I rather think it won't be necessary,” he said. “Let us hope not anyway.”

I asked him what they would do with Bella.

“I suppose much the same as they have done with Brandt,” he replied, waking sufficiently from his absorption to give me a sad smile. “Take her through every detail of her life. Try to trip her up. Wear her down. They won't hurt her. Not physically. They won't tell her what they have against her. They'll just hope to break her cover. It seems that most of the men who looked after her in the forest were rounded up recently. That won't speak well for her, naturally.”

“What will they do with her afterwards?”

“Well, I think we can still prevent the worst, even if we can't prevent much else these days,” he replied, returning to his papers. “Time you went on to Bill, isn't it? He'll be wondering what you're up to.”

And I remember the expression on his face as he dismissed me: the pain and frustration in it, and the anger.

Did Smiley have the letter posted as I suggested? Did the letter produce a photograph and did the photograph turn out to be the very one that Moscow Centre's forgers had dropped into their group photograph? I wish it were so neat, but in reality it never is, though I like to believe that my efforts on Bella's behalf had some influence on her release and resettlement in Canada, which occurred a few months later in circumstances that are a puzzle to me.

For Brandt refused to take her back, let alone go with her. Had Bella told him of our affair? Had someone else? I hardly think it possible, unless Haydon himself did it out of mischief. Bill hated all women and most men too, and liked nothing better than to turn people's affections inside out.

Brandt too was given a clean ticket and, after some resistance from the Fifth Floor, a gratuity to start him in a respectable walk of life. That is to say, he was able to buy a boat and take himself to the West Indies, where he resumed his old trade of smuggling, except that this time he chose arms to Cuba.

And the betrayal? The Brandt network had simply been too efficient for Haydon's stomach, Smiley told me later, so Bill had betrayed it as he had betrayed its predecessor, and tried to fix the blame on Bella. He had arranged for Moscow Centre to fake the evidence against her, which he then presented as coming from his spurious source Merlin, the provider of the Witchcraft material. Hard on the mole's tracks by then, Smiley had voiced his suspicions in high places, only to be sent into exile for being right. It took another two years for him to be brought back to clean the stable.

And there the story stood until our own internal
perestroika
began in earnest—in the winter of '89—when Toby Esterhase, the ubiquitous survivor, conducted a middle-ranking Circus delegation to Moscow Centre as a first step to what our blessed Foreign Office insisted on calling a “normalisation of the relationship between the two services.”

Toby's team was welcomed at Dzerzhinsky Square and shown many of the appointments, though not, one gathers, the torture chambers of the old Lubyanka, or the roof on which certain careless prisoners had occasionally lost their footing. Toby and his men were wined and dined. They were shown, as the Americans say, a time. They bought fur hats and pinned facetious badges on them and had themselves photographed in Dzerzhinsky Square.

And on the last day, as a special gesture of goodwill, they were escorted to the gallery of Centre's huge communications hall, where reports from all sources are received and processed. And it was here, as they were leaving the gallery, says Toby, that he and Peter Guillam in the same moment spotted a tall, flaxen, thickset fellow in half silhouette at the further end of the corridor, emerging from what was apparently the men's lavatory, for there was only one other door in that part of the corridor, and it was marked for women.

He was a man of some age, yet he strode out of the doorway like a bull. He paused, and for a long beat stared straight at them, as if in two minds whether to come towards them and greet them or retreat. Then he lowered his head and, as it seemed to them, with a smile, swung away from them and disappeared into another corridor. But not before they had ample opportunity to remark his seamanly roll and wrestler's shoulders.

Nothing goes away in the secret world; nothing goes away in the real one. If Toby and Peter are right—and there are those who still maintain that Russian hospitality had got the better of them— then Haydon had an even stronger reason to point the finger of suspicion at Bella, and away from Sea Captain Brandt.

Was Brandt bad from the beginning? If so, I had unwittingly furthered his recruitment and our agents' deaths. It is a dreadful thought and sometimes in the cold grey hours as I lie at Mabel's side, it comes home to haunt me.

And Bella? I think of her as my last love, as the right turning I never took. If Stefanie had unlocked the door of doubt in me, Bella pointed me towards the open world while there was still time. When I think of my women since, they are aftercare. And when I think of Mabel, I can only explain her as the lure of domesticity to a man returned from the front line. But the memory of Bella remains as fresh for me as on our first night in the safe flat overlooking the cemetery—though in my dreams she is always walking away from me, and there is reproach even in her back.

5

“Are you saying we could be housing another Haydon
now
?” a student named Maggs called out amid the groans of his colleagues. “What's his motivation, Mr. Smiley? Who's paying him? What's his bag?”

I had had my doubts about Maggs ever since he had joined. He was earmarked for a cover career in journalism, and already had the worst characteristics of his future trade. But Smiley was unruffled.

“Oh well, I'm sure that in retrospect we owe Bill a great debt of thanks,” he replied calmly. “He administered the needle to a Service that had been far too long a-dying.” He made a fussy little frown of perplexity. “As to
new
traitors, I'm sure our present leader will have sown her discontents, won't she? Perhaps I'm one. I do find I become a great deal more radical in my old age.”

But believe me, we didn't thank Bill at the time.

There was Before the Fall and there was After the Fall and the Fall was Haydon, and suddenly there was not a man or woman in the Circus who could not tell you where he was and what he was doing when he heard the dreadful news. Old hands tell each other to this day of the silence in the corridors, the numbed, averted faces in the canteen, the unanswered telephones.

The greatest casualty was trust. Only gradually, like dazed people after an air attack, did we step shyly, one by one, from our shattered houses, and set to work to reconstruct the citadel. A fundamental reform was deemed necessary, so the Circus abandoned its ancient
nickname and the warren of Dickensian corridors and crooked staircases in Cambridge Circus that had housed its shame, and built itself instead a vile steel-and-glass affair not far from Victoria, where the windows still blow out in a gale and the corridors reek of stale cabbage from the canteen, and typewriter-cleaning fluid. Only the English punish themselves with quite such dreadful prisons. Overnight we became, in formal parlance, the Service, though the name “Circus” still occasionally crosses our lips in the same way as we speak of pounds, shillings and pence long after decimalisation.

The trust was broken because Haydon had been part of it. Bill was no upstart with a chip on his shoulder and a pistol in his pocket. He was exactly who he had always sneeringly described himself to be: Church and Spy Establishment, with uncles who sat on Tory Party committees, and a rundown estate in Norfolk with tenant farmers who called him “Mr. William.” He was a strand of the finely spun web of English influence of which we had perceived ourselves the centre. And he had caught us in it.

In my own case—I still claim a certain distinction for this—I actually succeeded in hearing the news of Bill's arrest twenty-four hours after it had reached the rest of the Circus, for I was incarcerated in a windowless mediaeval cell at the back of a run of grand apartments in the Vatican. I was commanding a team of Circus eavesdroppers under the guidance of a hollow-eyed friar supplied to us by the Vatican's own secret service, who would rather have gone to the Russians themselves than seek the assistance of their secular colleagues a mile up the road in Rome. And our mission was to winkle a probe microphone into the audience room of a corrupt Catholic bishop who had got himself involved in a drugs-for-arms deal with one of our disintegrating colonies—well, why be coy? It was Malta.