‘So you brought the yellow envelope back, and yesterday when the General came down with Beckie’s duck, you handed him the envelope,’ he suggested, as mildly as he knew how, but it was still some while before a plain narrative emerged.
It was Villem’s habit, he said, before driving home on Fridays, to sleep at the depot for a few hours in the cab, then shave and drink a cup of tea with the boys so that he arrived home feeling steady, rather than nervous and bad-tempered. It was a trick he had learned from the older hands, he said : not to rush home, you only regret it. But yesterday was different, he said, and besides – lapsing suddenly into monosyllabic nicknames – Stell had taken Beck to Staines to see her mum. So he for once came straight home, rang Vladimir and gave him the code word which they had agreed on in advance.
‘Rang him where?’ Smiley asked, softly interruping.
‘At flat. He told me : “Phone me only at flat. Never at library. Mikhel is good man, but he is not informed.” ‘
And, Villem continued, within a short time – he forgot how long -Vladimir had arrived at the house by minicab, a thing he had never done before, bringing the duck for Beck. Villem handed him the yellow envelope of snapshots and Vladimir took them to the window and very slowly, ‘like they were sacred from a church, Max,’ with his back to Villem, Vladimir held the negatives one after the other to the light till he apparently found the one he was looking for, and after that he went on gazing at it for a long time.
‘Just one?’ Smiley asked swiftly – his mind upon the two proofs again – ‘One negative?’
‘Sure.’
‘One frame, or one strip?’
Frame : Villem was certain. One small frame. Yes, thirty-five millimetre, like his own Agfa automatic. No, Villem had not been able to see what it contained, whether writing or what. He had seen Vladimir, that was all.
‘Vladi was red, Max. Wild in the face, Max, bright with his eyes. He was old man.’
‘And on your journey,’ Smiley said, interrupting Villem’s story to ask this crucial question. ‘All the way home from Hamburg, you never once thought to look?’
‘Was secret, Max. Was military secret.’
Smiley glanced at Stella.
‘He wouldn’t,’ she said in answer to his unspoken question. ‘He’s too straight.’
Smiley believed her.
Villem took up his story again. Having put the yellow envelope in his pocket, Vladimir took Villem into the garden and thanked him, holding Villem’s hand in both of his, telling him that it was a great thing he had done, the best; that Villem was his father’s son, a finer soldier even than his father – the best Estonian stock, steady, conscientious and reliable; that with this photograph they could repay many debts and do great damage to the Bolsheviks; that the photograph was a proof, a proof impossible to ignore. But of what, he did not say – only that Max would see it, and believe, and remember. Villem didn’t quite know why they had to go into the garden but he supposed that the old man in his excitement had become scared of microphones, for he was already talking a lot about security.
‘I take him to gate but not to taxi. He tell me I must not come to taxi. “Villem, I am old man,” he say to me. We speak Russian. “Next week maybe I fall dead. Who cares? Today we have won great battle. Max will be greatly proud of us.” ‘
Struck by the aptness of the General’s last words to him, Villem again bounded to his feet in fury, his brown eyes smouldering. ‘Was Soviets! ‘ he shouted. ‘Was Soviet spies, Max, they kill Vladimir ! He know too much!’
‘So do you,’ said Stella, and there was a long and awkward silence. ‘So do we all,’ she added, with a glance at Smiley.
‘That’s all he said?’ Smiley asked. ‘Nothing else, about the value of what you had done, for instance? Just that Max would believe?’
Villem shook his head.