Smiley’s People by John le Carré

‘Wish I had an enemy, I must say,’ Enderby remarked, turning a few pages. ‘Been looking for one for donkey’s years. Haven’t I, Sam?’

‘Night and day, Chief,’ Sam Collins agreed heartily, and sent his master a confiding grin.

Ben’s Place was the back room of a dark hotel in Knightsbridge and the three men had met there an hour ago. A notice on the door said ‘MANAGEMENT STRICTLY PRIVATE’ and inside was an ante-room for coats and hats and privacy, and beyond it lay this oak-panelled sanctum full of books and musk, which in turn gave on to its own rectangle of walled garden stolen from the park, with a fish-pond and a marble angel and a path for contemplative walks. Ben’s identity, if he ever had one, was lost in the unwritten archives of Circus mythology. But this place of his remained, as an unrecorded perquisite of Enderby’s appointment, and of George Smiley’s before him – and as a trysting ground for meetings that afterwards have not occurred.

‘I’ll read it again, if you don’t mind,’ Enderby said. ‘I’m a bit slow on the uptake this time of day.’

‘I think that would be jolly helpful, actually, Chief,’ said Collins.

Enderby shifted his half-lens spectacles, but only by way of peering over the top of them, and it was Smiley’s secret theory that they were plain glass anyway.

‘Kirov is doing the talking. This is after Leipzig has put the bite on him, right, George?’ Smiley gave a distant nod. ‘They’re still sitting in the cat house with their pants down, but it’s five in the morning and the girls have been sent home. First we get Kirov’s tearful how-could-you-do-this-to-me? “I thought you were my friend, Otto!” he says. Christ, he picked a wrong ‘un there! Then comes his statement, put into bad English by the translators. They’ve made a concordance – that the word, George? Um’s and ah’s omitted.’

Whether it was the word or not, Smiley offered no answer. Perhaps he was not expected to. He sat very still in a leather armchair leaning forward over his clasped hands, and he had not taken off his brown tweed overcoat. A set of the Kirov typescripts lay at his elbow. He looked drawn, and Enderby remarked later that he seemed to have been on a diet. Sam Collins, Head of Operations, sat literally in Enderby’s shadow, a dapper man with a dark moustache and a flashy, ever-ready smile. There had been a time when Collins was the Circus hard-man, whose years in the field had taught him to despise the cant of the fifth floor. Now he was the poacher turned gamekeeper, nurturing his own pension and security in the way he had once nurtured his networks. A wilful blankness had overcome him; he was smoking brown cigarettes down to the half-way mark, then stubbing them into a cracked sea shell, while his doglike gaze rested faithfully on Enderby, his master. Enderby himself stood propped against the pillar of French windows, silhouetted by the light outside, and he was using a bit of matchstick to pick his teeth. A silk handkerchief peeked from his left sleeve and he stood with one knee forward and slightly bent as if he were in the members’ enclosure at Ascot. In the garden, shreds of mist lay stretched like fine gauze across the lawn. Enderby put back his head and held the document away from him like a menu.

‘Here we go. I’m Kirov. “As a finance officer working in Moscow Centre from 1970 to 1974 it was my duty to unearth irregularities in the accounts of overseas residencies and bring the culprits to book.” ‘ He broke off and peered over his glasses again. ‘This is all before Kirov was posted to Paris, right?’

‘Dead right,’ said Collins keenly and glanced at Smiley for support, but got none.

‘Just working it out, you see, George,’ Enderby explained. ‘Just getting my ducks in a row. Haven’t got your little grey cells.’

Sam Collins smiled brightly at his chief’s show of modesty.

Enderby continued : ‘ “As a result of conducting these extremely delicate and confidential enquiries, which in some cases led to the punishment of senior officers of Moscow Centre, I made the acquaintance of the head of the independent Thirteenth Intelligence Directorate, subordinated to the Party’s Central Committee, who is known throughout Centre only by his workname Karla. This is a woman’s name and is said to belong to the first network he controlled.” That right, George?’

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