‘Why?’ asked Smiley, and stopped the engine. ‘Why is he twice lucky?’
The girl shrugged. The blanket was slipping from her shoulders and the blanket was all she wore. Her man put an arm round her and pulled it up again for decency.
‘Last week the unexpected visit from the East,’ she said, ‘And today the money.’ She opened her hands. ‘Otto is Sunday’s child for once. That’s all.’
Then she saw Smiley’s face, and the laughter went clean out of her voice.
‘Visitor?’ Smiley repeated. ‘Who was the visitor?’
‘From the East,’ she said.
Seeing her dismay, terrified she might disappear altogether, Smiley with difficulty resurrected his appearance of good humour.
‘Not his brother, was it?’ he asked gaily, all enthusiasm. He held out one hand, cupping it over the mythical brother’s head. ‘A small chap? Spectacles like mine?’
‘No, no! A big fellow. With a chauffeur. Rich.’
Smiley shook his head, affecting light-hearted disappointment. ‘Then I don’t know him,’ he said. ‘Otto’s brother was certainly never rich.’ He succeeded in laughing outright. ‘Unless he was the chauffeur, of course,’ he added.
He followed her directions exactly, with the secret calmness of emergency. To be conveyed. To have no will of his own. To be conveyed, to pray, to make deals with your Maker. Oh God, don’t make it happen, not another Vladimir. In the sunlight the brown fields had turned to gold, but the sweat on Smiley’s back was like a cold hand stinging his skin. He followed her directions seeing everything as if it were his last day, knowing the big fellow with the chauffeur had gone ahead of him. He saw the farmhouse with the old horse-plough in the barn, the faulty beer sign with its neon blinking, the window-boxes of geraniums like blood. He saw the windmill like a giant pepper-mill and the field full of white geese all running with the gusty wind. He saw the herons skimming like sails over the fens. He was driving too fast. I should drive more often, he thought; I’m out of practice, out of control. The road changed from tarmac to gravel, gravel to dust and the dust blew up round the car like a sandstorm. He entered some pine trees and on the other side of them saw a sign saying ‘HOLIDAY HOUSES TO LET’, and a row of shuttered asbestos bungalows waiting for their summer paint. He kept going and in the distance saw a coppice of masts, and brown water low in its basin. He headed for the masts, bumped over a pot-hole and heard a frightful crack from under the car. He supposed it was the exhaust, because the noise of his engine was suddenly much louder, and half the water birds in Schleswig-Holstein had taken fright at his arrival.
He passed a farm and entered the protective darkness of trees, then emerged in a stark and brilliant frame of whiteness of which a broken jetty and a few faint olive-coloured reeds made up the foreground, and an enormous sky the rest. The boats lay to his right, beside an inlet. Shabby caravans were parked along the track that led to them, grubby washing hung between the television aerials. He passed a tent in its own vegetable patch and a couple of broken huts that had once been military. On one, a psychedelic sunrise had been painted, and it was peeling. Three old cars and some heaped rubbish stood beside it. He parked and followed a mud path through the reeds to the shore. In the grass harbour lay a cluster of improvised houseboats, some of them converted landing-craft from the war. It was colder here, and for some reason darker. The boats he had seen were day boats, moored in a huddle apart, mostly under tarpaulins. A couple of radios played, but at first he saw nobody. Then he noticed a backwater and a blue dinghy made fast in it. And, in the dinghy, one gnarled old man in a sailcloth jacket and a black peaked cap, massaging his neck as if he had just woken up.
‘Are you Walther?’ Smiley asked.
Still rubbing his neck the old man seemed to nod.
‘I’m looking for Otto Leipzig. They told me at the wharf I might find him here.’