‘Let me put the question again. How long was the journey? Please describe it precisely as you remember it and let us proceed from there.’
Crestfallen, Grigoriev actually apologized. He would say they drove for four hours at speed, sir; perhaps more. He remembered now that they twice stopped to relieve themselves. After four hours they entered a guarded area – no, sir, I saw no shoulder-boards, the guards wore plain clothes – and drove for at least another half hour into the heart of it. Like a nightmare, sir.
Yet again, Smiley objected, determined to keep the temperature as low as possible. How could it have been a nightmare, he wanted to know, since Grigoriev had only a moment before claimed that he was not frightened?
Well, not a nightmare exactly, sir, more a dream. At this stage, Grigoriev had had an impression he was being taken to the landlord – he used the Russian word, and Toby translated it – while he himself felt increasingly like a poor peasant. Therefore he was not frightened, sir, because he had no control over events, and accordingly nothing for which to reproach himself. But when the car finally stopped, and one of the men put a hand on his arm, and addressed a warning to him : at this point, his attitude changed entirely, sir : ‘You are about to meet a great Soviet fighter and a powerful man,’ the man told him. ‘If you are disrespectful to him, or attempt to tell lies, you may never again see your wife and family.’
‘What is the name of this man?’ Grigoriev had asked.
But the men replied, without smiling, that this great Soviet fighter had no name. Grigoriev asked whether he was Karla himself; knowing that Karla was the code name for the head of the Thirteenth Directorate. The men only repeated that the great fighter had no name.
‘So that was when the dream became a nightmare, sir,’ said Grigoriev humbly. ‘They told me also that I could say goodbye to my weekend of love. Little Evdokia would have to get her fun elsewhere, they said. Then one of them laughed.’
Now a great fear had seized Grigoriev, he said, and by the time he had entered the first room and advanced upon the second door, he was so scared his knees were shaking. He even had time to be scared for his beloved Evdokia. Who could this supernatural person be, he wondered in awe, that he could know almost before Grigoriev himself knew, that he was pledged to meet Evdokia for the weekend?
‘So you knocked on the door,’ said Smiley, as he wrote :
And I was ordered to enter! Grigoriev went on. His enthusiasm for confession was mounting, so was his dependence upon his interrogator. His voice had become louder, his gestures more free. It was as if, says Toby, he was trying physically to coax Smiley out of his posture of reticence; whereas in reality it was Smiley’s feigned indifference which was coaxing Grigoriev into the open. And I found myself not in a large and splendid office at all, sir, as became a senior official and a great Soviet fighter, but in a room so barren it would have done duty for a prison cell, with a bare wood desk at the centre, and a hard chair for a visitor to sit on :
‘Imagine, sir, a great Soviet fighter and a powerful man! And all he had was a bare desk, which was illuminated only by a most inferior light! And behind it sat this priest, sir, a man of no affectation or pretence at all – a man of deep experience, I would say – a man from the very roots of his country – with small, straight eyes, and short grey hair, and a habit of holding his hands together while he smoked.’
‘Smoked what?’ Smiley asked, writing.
‘Please?’
‘What did he smoke? The question is plain enough. A pipe, cigarettes, cigar?’
‘Cigarettes, American, and the room was full of their aroma. It was like Potsdam again, when we were negotiating with the American officers from Berlin. “If this man smokes American all the time,” I thought, “then he is certainly a man of influence.” ‘ Rounding on Toby again in his excitement, Grigoriev put the same point to him in Russian. To smoke American, chain smoke them, he said : imagine the cost, the influence necessary to obtain so many packets!