Walther’s eyes were cut almond-shaped into the crumpled brown paper of his skin.
‘Isadora,’ he said.
He pointed at a rickety jetty farther down the shore. The Isadora lay at the end of it, a forty-foot motor launch down on her luck, a Grand Hotel awaiting demolition. The portholes were curtained, one of them was smashed, another was repaired with Scotch tape. The planks of the jetty yielded alarmingly to Smiley’s tread. Once he nearly fell, and twice, to bridge the gaps, he had to stride much wider than seemed safe to his short legs. At the end of the jetty, he realized that the Isadora was adrift. She had slipped her moorings at the stern and shifted twelve feet out to sea, which was probably the longest journey she would ever make. The cabin doors were closed, their windows curtained. There was no small boat.
The old man sat sixty yards off, resting on his oars. He had rowed out of the backwater to watch. Smiley cupped his hands and yelled : ‘How do I get to him?’
‘If you want him, call him,’ the old man replied, not seeming to lift his voice at all.
Turning to the old launch, Smiley called, ‘Otto.’ He called softly, then more loudly, but inside the Isadora nothing stirred. He watched the curtains. He watched the oily water tossing against the rotting hull. He listened and thought he heard music like the music in Herr Kretzschmar’s club, but it might have been an echo from another boat. From the dinghy, Walther’s brown face still watched him.
‘Call again,’ he growled. ‘Keep calling, if you want him.’
But Smiley had an instinct against being commanded by the old man. He could feel his authority and his contempt and he resented both.
‘Is he in here or not?’ Smiley called. ‘I said, “Is he in here?” ‘
The old man did not budge.
‘Did you see him come aboard?’ Smiley insisted.
He saw the brown head turn and knew the old man was spitting into the water.
‘The wild pig comes and goes,’ Smiley heard him say. ‘What the hell do I care?’
‘So when did he come last?’
At the sound of their voices a couple of heads had lifted out of other boats. They stared at Smiley without expression : the little fat stranger standing at the end of the broken jetty. On the shore a ragtag group had formed : a girl in shorts, an old woman; two blond teen-aged boys dressed alike. There was something that linked them in their disparity : a prison look; submission to the same bad laws.
‘I’m looking for Otto Leipzig,’ Smiley called to all of them. ‘Can anyone tell me, please, whether he’s around?’ On a houseboat not too far away, a bearded man was lowering a bucket into the water. Smiley’s eye selected him. ‘Is there anyone aboard the Isadora?’ he asked.
The bucket gurgled and filled. The bearded man pulled it out, but didn’t speak.
‘You should see his car,’ a woman shouted shrilly from the shore, or perhaps it was a child. ‘They took it to the wood.’
The wood lay a hundred yards back from the water, mostly saplings and birch trees.
‘Who did?’ Smiley asked. ‘Who took it there?’
Whoever had spoken chose not to speak again. The old man was rowing himself towards the jetty. Smiley watched him approach, watched him back the stern towards the jetty steps. Without hesitating, Smiley. clambered aboard. The old man pulled him the few strokes to the Isadora’s side. A cigarette was jammed between his cracked old lips and, like his eyes, it shone unnaturally against the evil gloom of his weathered face.
‘Come far?’ the old man asked.
‘I’m a friend of his,’ Smiley said.
There was rust and weed on the Isadora’s ladder, and as Smiley reached the deck it was slippery with dew. He looked for signs of life and saw none. He looked for footprints in the dew, in vain. A couple of fixed fishing-lines hung into the water, made fast to the rusted balustrade, but they could have been there for weeks. He listened, and heard again, very faintly, the strains of slow band music. From the shore? Or from farther out? From neither. The sound came from under his feet, and it was as if someone were playing a seventy-eight record on thirty-three.