Smiley’s People by John le Carré

Smiley gave a small nod of sympathy.

‘If your departure abroad strikes me as hasty or mysterious, I shall report it. I also need a cover story for your visits to the Circus Registry. You’ll go at night but you may be recognized and I’m not having that catch up with me, either.’

‘There was a project once to commission an in-house history of the service,’ Smiley said helpfully. ‘Nothing for publication, obviously, but some sort of continuing record which could be available to new entrants and certain liaison services.’

‘I’ll send you a formal letter,’ Enderby said. ‘I’ll bloody well backdate it too. If you happen to misuse your licence while you’re inside the building, it’s no fault of mine. That chap in Berne whom Kirov mentioned. Grigoriev, Commercial Counsellor. The chap who’s been getting the cash?’

Smiley seemed lost in thought. ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Grigoriev?’

‘I suppose he’s your next stop, is he?’

A shooting star ran across the sky and for a second they both watched it.

Enderby pulled a plain piece of folded paper from his inside pocket. ‘Well, that’s Grigoriev’s pedigree, far as we know it. He’s clean as a whistle. One of the very rare ones. Used to be an economics don at some Bolshie university. Wife’s a harridan.’

‘Thank you,’ said Smiley politely. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘Meanwhile, you have my totally deniable blessing,’ said Enderby as they started back towards the house.

‘Thank you,’ said Smiley again.

‘Sorry you’ve become an instrument of the imperial hypocrisy, but there’s rather a lot of it about.’

‘Not at all,’ said Smiley.

Enderby stopped to let Smiley draw up beside him.

‘How’s Ann?’

‘Well, thank you.’

‘How much-‘ He was sufficiently off his stroke. ‘Put it this way, George,’ he suggested, when he had savoured the night air for a moment. ‘You travelling on business, or for pleasure in this thing? Which is it?’

Smiley’s reply was also slow in coming, and as indirect : ‘I was never conscious of pleasure,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps I mean : of the distinction.’

‘Karla still got that cigarette-lighter she gave you? It’s true, isn’t it? That time you interviewed him in Delhi – tried to get him to defect – they say he pinched your cigarette-lighter. Still got it, has he? Still using it? Pretty grating, I’d find that, if it was mine.’

‘It was just an ordinary Ronson,’ Smiley said. ‘Still, they’re made to last, aren’t they?’

They parted without saying goodbye.

TWENTY

In the weeks that followed this encounter with Enderby, George Smiley found himself in a complex and variable mood to accompany his many tasks of preparation. He was not at peace; he was not, in a single phrase, definable as a single person, beyond the one constant thrust of his determination. Hunter, recluse, lover, solitary man in search of completion, shrewd player of the Great Game, avenger, doubter in search of reassurance – Smiley was by turns each one of them, and sometimes more than one. Among those who remembered him later – old Mendel, the retired policeman, one of his few confidants; a Mrs Gray, the landlady of the humble bed-and-breakfast house for gentlemen only, in Pimlico, which for security reasons he made his temporary headquarters; or Toby Esterhase, alias Benati, the distinguished dealer in Arab art – most, in their various ways, spoke of an ominous going in, a quietness, an economy of word and glance, and they described it according to their knowledge of him, and their station in life.

Mendel, a loping, dourly observant man with a taste for keeping bees, said outright that George was pacing himself before his big fight. Mendel had been in the amateur ring in his time, he had boxed middleweight for the Division, and he claimed to recognize the eve-of-match signs : a sobriety, a clarifying loneliness, and what he called a staring sort of look, which showed that Smiley was ‘thinking about his hands’. Mendel seems to have taken him in occasionally, and fed him meals. But Mendel was too perceptive not to observe the other sides of him also : the perplexity, often cloaked as social inhibition; his habit of slipping away, on a frail excuse, as if the sitting-still had suddenly become too long for him; as if he needed movement in order to escape himself.

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