‘I don’t follow you,’ Smiley said with deliberate obtuseness. ‘Vladimir was our agent. He was trying to tell us something.’
‘Our ex-agent, George. How do we know he was trying to tell us something? We gave him no brief. He spoke of urgency – even of Soviet Intelligence – so do a lot of ex-agents when they’re holding out their caps for a subsidy!’
‘Not Vladimir,’ Smiley said.
But sophistry was Lacon’s element. He was born to it, he breathed it, he could fly and swim in it, nobody in Whitehall was better at it.
‘George, we cannot be held responsible for every ex-agent who takes an injudicious nocturnal walk in one of London’s increasingly dangerous open spaces! ‘ He held out his hands in appeal. ‘George. What is it to be? Choose. You choose. On the one hand, Vladimir asked for a chat with you. Retired buddies a chin-wag about old times – why not? And in order to raise a bit of wind, as any of us might, he pretended he had something for you. Some nugget of information. Why not? They all do it. On that basis my Minister will back us. No heads need roll, no tantrums, Cabinet hysteria. He will help us bury the case. Not a cover-up, naturally. But he will use his judgement. If I catch him in the right mood he may even decide that there is no point in troubling the Wise Men with it at all.’
‘Amen,’ Strickland echoed.
‘On the other hand,’ Lacon insisted, mustering all his persuasiveness for the kill, ‘if things were to come unstuck, George, and the Minister got it into his head that we were engaging his good offices in order to clean up the traces of some unlicensed adventure which aborted’ – he was striding again, skirting an imaginary quagmire – ‘and there was a scandal, George, and the Circus were proved to be currently involved – your old service, George, one you still love, I am sure – with a notoriously revanchist émigré outfit – volatile, talkative, violently anti-détente – with all manner of anachronistic fixations – a total hangover from the worst days of the cold war – the very archetype of everything our masters have told us to avoid’ – he had reached his corner again, a little outside the circle of light – ‘and there had been a death, George – and an attempted cover-up, as they would no doubt call it – with all the attendant publicity – well, it could be just one scandal too many. The service is a weak child still, George, a sickly one, and in the hands of these new people desperately delicate. At this stage in its rebirth, it could die of the common cold. If it does, your generation will not be least to blame. You have a duty, as we all do. A loyalty.’
Duty to what? Smiley wondered, with that part of himself which sometimes seemed to be a spectator to the rest. Loyalty to whom? ‘There is no loyalty without betrayal,’ Ann liked to tell him in their youth when he had ventured to protest at her infidelities.
For a time nobody spoke.
‘And the weapon?’ Smiley asked finally, in the tone of someone testing a theory. ‘How do you account for that, Oliver?’
‘What weapon? There was no weapon. He was shot. By his own buddies most likely, knowing their cabals. Not to mention his appetite for other people’s wives.’
‘Yes, he was shot,’ Smiley agreed. ‘In the face. At extremely close range. With a soft-nosed bullet. And cursorily searched. Had his wallet taken. That is the police diagnosis. But our diagnosis would be different, wouldn’t it, Lauder?’
‘No way,’ said Strickland, glowering at him through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘Well mine would.’
‘Then let’s hear it, George,’ said Lacon handsomely.
‘The weapon used to kill Vladimir was a standard Moscow Centre assassination device,’ Smiley said. ‘Concealed in a camera, a briefcase, or whatever. A soft-nosed bullet is fired at point-blank range. To obliterate, to punish, and to discourage others. If I remember rightly they even had one on display at Sarratt in the black museum next to the bar.’