Smiley’s People by John le Carré

‘I demand to know where I am. I am a senior Soviet diplomat. I demand to speak to my Ambassador immediately.’

The continuing action of his hand upon his injured shoulder took the edge off his indignation.

‘I have been kidnapped! I am here against my will! If you do not immediately return me to my Ambassador there will be a grave international incident!’

Grigoriev had the stage to himself, and he could not quite fill it. Only George will ask questions, Toby had told his team. Only George will answer them. But Smiley sat still as an undertaker; nothing, it seemed, could rouse him.

‘You want ransom?’ Grigoriev called, to all of them. An awful thought appeared to strike him. ‘You are terrorists?’ he whispered. ‘But if you are terrorists, why do you not bind my eyes? Why do you let me see your faces?’ He stared round at de Silsky, then at Skordeno. ‘You must cover your faces. Cover them! I want no knowledge of you!’

Goaded by the continuing silence, Grigoriev drove a plump fist into his open palm and shouted ‘I demand’ twice. At which point Smiley, with an air of official regret, opened a notebook on his lap, much as Kirov might have done, and gave a small, very official sigh : ‘You are Counsellor Grigoriev of the Soviet Embassy in Berne?’ he asked in the dullest possible voice. ‘Grigoriev! I am Grigoriev! Yes, well done, I am Grigoriev! Who are you, please? Al Capone? Who are you? Why do you rumble at me like a commissar?’

Commissar could not have described Smiley’s manner better; it was leaden to the point of indifference.

‘Then, Counsellor, since we cannot afford to delay, I must ask you to study the incriminating photographs on the table behind you,’ Smiley said, with the same studied dullness.

‘Photographs? What photographs? How can you incriminate a diplomat? I demand to telephone my Ambassador immediately!’

‘I would advise the Counsellor to look at the photographs first,’ said Smiley, in a glum, regionless German. ‘When he has looked at the photographs, he is free to telephone whomever he wants. Kindly start at the left,’ he advised. ‘The photographs are arranged from left to right.’

A blackmailed man has the dignity of all our weaknesses, Smiley thought, covertly watching Grigoriev shuffling along the table as if he were inspecting one more diplomatic buffet. A blackmailed man is anyone of us caught in the door as we try to escape the trap. Smiley had arranged the layout of the pictures himself; he had imagined, in Grigoriev’s mind, an orchestrated succession of disasters. The Grigorievs parking their Mercedes outside the bank. Grigorieva, with her perpetual scowl of discontent, waiting alone in the driving seat, clutching the wheel in case anyone tried to take it from her. Grigoriev and little Natasha in long shot, sitting very close to each other on a bench. Grigoriev inside the bank, several pictures, culminating in a superb over-the-shoulder shot of Grigoriev signing a cashier’s receipt, the full name Adolf Glaser clearly typed on the line above his signature. There was Grigoriev looking uncomfortable on his bicycle, about to enter the sanatorium; there was Grigorieva roosting crossly in the car again, this time beside Gertsch’s barn, her own bicycle still strapped to the roof. But the photograph that held Grigoriev longest, Smiley noticed, was the muddy long shot stolen by the Meinertzhagen girls. The quality was not good but the two heads in the car, though they were locked mouth to mouth, were recognizable enough. One was Grigoriev’s. The other, pressed down on him as if she would eat him alive, was little Natasha’s.

‘The telephone is at your disposal, Counsellor,’ Smiley caned to him quietly, when Grigoriev still did not move.

But Grigoriev remained frozen over this last photograph, and to judge by his expression, his desolation was complete. He was not merely a man found out, thought Smiley; he was a man whose very dream of love, till now vested in secrecy, had suddenly become public and ridiculous.

Still using his glum tone of official necessity, Smiley set about explaining what Karla would have called the pressures. Other inquisitors, says Toby, would have offered Grigoriev a choice, thereby inevitably mustering the Russian obstinacy in him, and the Russian penchant for self-destruction : the very impulses, he says, which could have invited catastrophe. Other inquisitors, he insists, would have menaced, raised their voices, resorted to histrionics, even physical abuse. Not George, he says : never. George acted out the low-key official time-server, and Grigoriev, like Grigorievs the world over, accepted him as his unalterable fate. George by-passed choice entirely, says Toby. George calmly made clear to Grigoriev why it was that he had no choice at all : The important thing, Counsellor – said Smiley, as if he were explaining a tax demand – was to consider what impact these photographs would have in the places where they would very soon be studied if nothing was done to prevent their distribution. There were first the Swiss authorities, who would obviously be incensed by the misuse of a Swiss passport on the part of an accredited diplomat, not to mention the grave breach of banking laws, said Smiley. They would register the strongest official protest, and the Grigorievs would be returned to Moscow overnight, all of them, never again to enjoy the fruits of a foreign posting. Back in Moscow, however, Grigoriev would not be well regarded either, Smiley explained. His superiors in the Foreign Ministry would take a dismal view of his behaviour, ‘both in the private and professional spheres’. Grigoriev’s prospects for an official career would be ended. He would be an exile in his own land, said Smiley, and his family with him. All his family. ‘Imagine facing the wrath of Grigorieva twenty-four hours a day in the wastes of outer Siberia,’ he was saying in effect.

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