‘He entrusted them to me,’ Herr Kretzschmar said.
‘He was wise,’ said Smiley.
Herr Kretzschmar laid a hand on Smiley’s shoulder. ‘If you need anything let me know,’ he said. ‘I have my people. These are violent times.’
From a call box Smiley once more rang Hamburg Airport, this time to re-confirm Standfast’s flight to London Heathrow. This done, he bought stamps and a strong envelope and wrote on it a fictional address in Adelaide, Australia. He put Mr Standfast’s passport inside it and dropped it in a letter-box. Then, travelling as plain Mr George Smiley, profession clerk, he returned to the railway station, passing without incident across the border into Denmark. During the journey, he took himself to the lavatory and there read Ostrakova’s letter, all seven pages of it, the copy made by the General himself on Mikhel’s antiquated liquid copier in the little library next door to the British Museum. What he read, added to what he had that day already seen, filled him with a growing and almost uncontainable alarm. By train, ferry and finally taxi, he hastened to Copenhagen’s Castrup Airport. From Castrup he caught a mid-afternoon plane to Paris and though the flight lasted only an hour, in Smiley’s world it took a lifetime, conveying him across an entire range of his memories, emotions, and anticipation. His anger and revulsion at Leipzig’s murder, till now suppressed, welled over, only to be set aside by his fears for Ostrakova : if they had done so much to Leipzig and the General, what would they not do to her? The dash through Schleswig-Holstein had given him the swiftness of revived youth, but now, in the anti-climax of escape, he was assailed by the incurable indifference of age. With death so close, he thought, so ever-present, what is the point of struggling any longer? He thought of Karla again, and of his absolutism, which at least gave point to the perpetual chaos that was life’s condition; point to violence, and to death; of Karla for whom killing had never been more than the necessary adjunct of a grand design.
How can I win? he asked himself; alone, restrained by doubt and a sense of decency – how can any of us – against this remorseless fusillade?
The plane’s descent – and the promise of the renewed chase restored him. There are two Karlas, he reasoned, remembering again the stoic face, the patient eyes, the wiry body waiting philosophically upon its own destruction. There is Karla the professional, so self-possessed that he could allow, if need be, ten years for an operation to bear fruit in Bill Haydon’s case. twenty; Karla the old spy, the pragmatist, ready to trade a dozen losses for one great win.
And there is this other Karla, Karla of the human heart after all, of the one great love, the Karla flawed by humanity. I should not be deterred if, in order to defend his weakness, he resorts to the methods of his trade.
Reaching in the compartment above him for his straw hat. Smiley happened to remember a cavalier promise he had once made concerning Karla’s eventual downfall. ‘No.’ he had replied, in answer to a question much like the one he had just put to himself. ‘No, Karla is not fireproof. Because he’s a fanatic. And one day, if I have anything to do with it, that lack of moderation will be his downfall.’
Hastening to the cab rank, he recalled that his remark had been made to one Peter Guillam, who at this present moment happened to be much upon his mind.
EIGHTEEN
Lying on the divan, Ostrakova glanced at the twilight and seriously wondered whether it signalled the world’s end.
All day long the same grey gloom had hung over the courtyard, consigning her tiny universe to a perpetual evening. At dawn a sepia glow had thickened it; at midday, soon after the men came, it was a celestial power-cut, deepening to a cavernous black in anticipation of her own end. And now, at evening, fog had further strengthened the grip of darkness upon the retreating forces of light. And so it goes with Ostrakova also, she decided without bitterness : with my bruised, black-and-blue body, and my siege, and my hopes for the second coming of the redeemer; so it goes exactly, an ebbing of my own day.