Smiley’s People by John le Carré

‘I’m sorry,’ Smiley repeated.

Enemies I do not fear, Villem, thought Smiley. But friends I fear greatly.

They were in Mikhel’s private alcove that he called his office. An old-fashioned telephone lay on the table beside a Remington upright typewriter like the one in Vladimir’s flat. Somebody must once have bought lots of them, thought Smiley. But the focus was a high hand-carved chair with barley-twist legs and a monarchic crest embroidered on the back. Mikhel sat on it primly, knees and boots together, a proxy king too small for his throne. He had lit a cigarette, which he held vertically from below. Above him a pall of tobacco smoke hung exactly where Smiley remembered it. In the waste-paper basket, Smiley noticed several discarded copies of Sporting Life.

‘He was a leader, Max, he was a hero,’ Mikhel declared. ‘We must try to profit from his courage and example.’ He paused as if expecting Smiley to write this down for publication. ‘In such cases it is natural to ask oneself how one can possibly carry on. Who is worthy to follow him? Who has his stature, his honour, his sense of destiny? Fortunately our movement is a continuing process. It is greater than anyone individual, even than anyone group.’

Listening to Mikhel’s polished phrases, staring at his polished boots, Smiley found himself marvelling at the man’s age. The Russians occupied Estonia in 1940, he recalled. To have been a cavalry officer, Mikhel would have to be sixty if a day. He tried to assemble the rest of Mikhel’s turbulent biography – the long road through foreign wars and untrusted ethnic brigades, all the chapters of history contained in this one little body. He wondered how old the boots were.

‘Tell me about his last days, Mikhel,’ Smiley suggested. ‘Was he active to the very end?’

‘Completely active, Max, active in all respects. As a patriot. As a man. As a leader.’

Her expression as contemptuous as before, Elvira put the tea before them, two cups with lemon, and small marzipan cakes. In motion she was insinuating, with fluid haunches and a sullen hint of challenge. Smiley tried to remember her background also, but it eluded him or perhaps he had never known it. He was a brother to her, he thought. He instructed her. But something from his own life had long ago warned him to mistrust explanations, particularly of love.

‘And as a member of the Group?’ Smiley asked when she had left them. ‘Also active?’

‘Always,’ said Mikhel gravely.

There was a small pause while each man politely waited for the other to continue.

‘Who do you think did it, Mikhel? Was he betrayed?’

‘Max, you know as well as I do who did it. We are all of us at risk. All of us. The call can come any time. Important is, we must be ready for it. Myself I am a soldier, I am prepared, I am ready. If I go, Elvira has her security. That is all. For the Bolshevites we exiles remain enemy number one. Anathema. Where they can, they destroy us. Still. As once they destroyed our churches and our villages and our schools and our culture. And they are right, Max. They are right to be afraid of us. Because one day we shall defeat them.’

‘But why did they choose this particular moment?’ Smiley objected gently after this somewhat ritualistic pronouncement. ‘They could have killed Vladimir years ago.’

Mikhel had produced a flat tin box with two tiny rollers on it like a mangle, and a packet of coarse yellow cigarette-papers. Having licked a paper, he laid it on the rollers and poured in black tobacco. A snap, the mangle turned, and there on the silvered surface lay one fat, loosely packed cigarette. He was about to help himself to it when Elvira came over and took it. He rolled another and returned the box to his pocket.

‘Unless Vladi was up to something, I suppose,’ Smiley continued after these staged manoeuvres. ‘Unless he provoked them in some way – which he might have done, knowing him.’

‘Who can tell?’ Mikhel said and blew some more smoke carefully into the air above them.

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