He’ll come, Guillam thought. He won’t. He may. If this isn’t prayer, he thought, what is it?
‘More coffee, George?’
‘No, thank you, Peter. No, I don’t think so. No.’
‘They seem to have soup of some sort. Unless that was the coffee.’
‘Thank you. I think I’ve consumed about all I can manage,’ said Smiley, in quite a general tone, as if anyone who wished to hear was welcome.
‘Well, maybe I’ll just order something for rent,’ said Guillam.
‘Rent? I’m sorry. Of course. God knows what they must live on.’
Guillam ordered two more coffees and paid for them. He was paying as he went, deliberately, in case they had to leave in a hurry.
Come for George’s sake, he thought; come for mine. Come for all our damn sakes, and be the impossible harvest we have dreamed of for so long.
‘When did you say the baby was due, Peter?’
‘March.’
‘Ah. March. What will you call it?’
‘We haven’t really thought.’
Across the road, by the glow of a furniture shop that sold reproduction wrought iron and brocade and fake muskets and pewter, Guillam made out the muffled figure of Toby Esterhase in his Balkan fur hat, affecting to study the wares. Toby and his team had the street, Sam Collins had the observation pose that was the deal. For the escape cars, Toby had insisted on taxis, and there they stood, three of them, suitably shabby, in the darkness of the station arches, with notices in their windscreens saying ‘OUT OF SERVICE’, and their drivers standing at the Imbiss-stand, eating sausages in sweet sauce out of paper dishes.
The place is a total minefield, Peter, Toby had warned. Turks, Greeks, Yugoslavs, a lot of crooks – even the damn cats are wired, no exaggeration.
Not a whisper anywhere, Smiley had ordered. Not a murmur, Peter. Tell Collins.
Come, thought Guillam urgently. We’re all rooting for you. Come.
From Toby’s back, Guillam lifted his gaze slowly to the topfloor window of the old house where Collins’ observation post was sited. Guillam had done his Berlin stint, he had been part of it a dozen times. The telescopes and cameras, the directional microphones, all the useless hardware that was supposed to make the waiting easier; the crackle of the radios, the stink of coffee and tobacco; the bunk-beds. He imagined the co-opted West German policeman who had no idea why he had been brought here, and would have to stay till the operation was abandoned or successful – the man who knew the bridge by heart and could tell the regulars from the casuals and spot the smallest bad omen the moment it occurred : the silent doubling of the watch, the Vopo sharpshooters easing softly into place.
And if they shoot him? thought Guillam. If they arrest him? If they leave him – which they would surely like to, and had done before to others – bleeding to death, face downward in the bird walk not six feet from the halo?
Come, he thought, less certainly, willing his prayers into the black skyline of the East. Come all the same.
A fine, very bright pin-light flitted across the west-facing upper window of the observation house, bringing Guillam to his feet. He turned round to see Smiley already half-way to the door. Toby Esterhase was waiting for them on the pavement.
‘It’s only a possibility, George,’ he said softly, in the tone of a man preparing them for disappointment. ‘Just a thin chance, but he could be our man.’
They followed him without another word. The cold was ferocious. They passed a tailor’s shop with two dark-haired girls stitching in the window. They passed wall posters offering cheap ski holidays, death to Fascists, and to the Shah. The cold made them breathless. Turning his face from the swirling snow, Guillam glimpsed a children’s adventure playground made of old railway sleepers. They passed between black, dead buildings, then right, across the cobbled road, in pitch-frozen darkness to the river bank, where an old timber bullet-shelter with rifle slits offered them the whole span of the bridge. To their left, black against the hostile river, a tall wooden cross, garnished with barbed wire, bore memory to an unknown man who had not quite escaped.