For a few moments Smiley shuffled unhappily from one canvas to another till he stood in front of the girl again.
‘If I could possibly have a word with Mr Benati,’ he said.
‘Oh I’m afraid Signor Benati is fully involved right now. That’s the trouble with being international.’
‘If you could tell him it’s Mr Angel,’ Smiley proposed in the same diffident style. ‘If you could just tell him that. Angel, Alan Angel, he does know me.’
He sat himself on the S-shaped sofa. It was priced at two thousand pounds and covered in protective cellophane which squeaked when he moved. He heard her lift the phone and sigh into it.
‘Got an angel for you,’ she drawled, in her pillow-talk voice. ‘As in Paradise, got it, angel?’
A moment later he was descending a spiral staircase into dark. ness. He reached the bottom and waited. There was a click and half a dozen picture lights sprang on to empty spaces where no pictures hung. A door opened revealing a small and dapper figure, quite motionless. His full white hair was swept back with bravado. He wore a black suit with a broad stripe and shoes with pantomime buckles. The stripe was definitely too big for him. His right fist was in his jacket pocket, but when he saw Smiley he drew it slowly out, and held it at him like a dangerous blade.
‘Why, Mr Angel,’ he declared in a distinctly mid-European accent, with a sharp glance up the staircase as if to see who was listening. ‘What pure pleasure, sir. It has been far too long. Come in, please.’
They shook hands, each keeping his distance.
‘Hullo, Mr Benati,’ Smiley said, and followed him to an inner room and through it to a second, where Mr Benati closed the door and gently leaned his back against it, perhaps as a bulwark against intrusion. For a while after that, neither man spoke at all, each preferring to study the other in a silence bred of mutual respect. Mr Benati’s eyes were brown and swift and they looked nowhere long and nowhere without a purpose. The room had the atmosphere of a sleazy boudoir, with a chaise longue and a pink handbasin in one corner.
‘So how’s trade, Toby?’ Smiley asked.
Toby Esterhase had a special smile for that question and a special way of tilting his little palm.
‘We have been lucky, George. We had a good opening, we had a fantastic summer. Autumn, George’ – the gesture again – ‘autumn I would say is on the slow side. One must live off one’s hump actually. Some coffee, George? My girl can make some.’
‘Vladimir’s dead,’ said Smiley after another longish gap. ‘Shot dead on Hamvstead Heath.’
‘Too bad. That old man, huh? Too bad.’
‘Oliver Lacon has asked me to sweep up the bits. As you were the Group’s postman, I thought I’d have a word with you.’
‘Sure,’ said Toby agreeably.
‘You knew, then? About his death?’
‘Read it in the papers.’
Smiley let his eye wander round the room. There were no newspapers anywhere.
‘Any theories about who did it?’ Smiley asked.
‘At his age, George? After a lifetime of disappointments, you might say? No family, no prospects, the Group all washed up – I assumed he had done it himself. Naturally.’
Cautiously Smiley sat himself on the chaise longue and, watched by Toby, picked up a bronze maquette of a dancer that stood on the table.
‘Shouldn’t this be numbered if it’s a Degas, Toby?’ Smiley asked.
‘Degas, that’s a very grey area, George. You’ve got to know exactly what you are dealing with.’
‘But this one is genuine?’ Smiley asked, with an air of really wishing to know.
‘Totally.’
‘Would you sell it to me?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Just out of academic interest. Is it for sale? If I offered to buy it, would I be out of court?’
Toby shrugged, slightly embarrassed.
‘George, listen, we’re talking thousands, know what I mean? Like a year’s pension or something.’
‘When was the last time you had anything to do with Vladi’s network, actually, Toby?’ Smiley asked, returning the dancer to its table.
Toby digested this question at his leisure.