‘Do you know what Vladimir meant by that? Keep your voice down.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Nothing on the card?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Do they know what he meant?’ Smiley asked, tilting his head swiftly towards Strickland and Lacon.
‘I think Strickland may. I’m not sure.’
‘Did Vladimir really not ask for Esterhase?’
‘No, sir.’
Lacon was finishing on the phone. Strickland took back the receiver from him and spoke into it himself. Seeing Smiley at the door, Lacon bounded down the room to him.
‘George! Good man! Fare you well! Listen, I want to talk to you about marriage some time. A seminar with no holds barred. I’m counting on you to tell me the art of it, George!’
‘Yes. We must get together,’ Smiley said.
Looking down, he saw that Lacon was shaking his hand.
A bizarre postscript to this meeting confounds its conspiratorial purpose. Standard Circus tradecraft requires that hidden microphones be installed in safe houses. Agents in their strange way accept this, even though they are not informed of it, even though their case officers go through motions of taking notes. For his rendezvous with Vladimir, Mostyn had quite properly switched on the system in anticipation of the old man’s arrival, and nobody, in the subsequent panic, thought to turn it off. Routine procedures brought the tapes to transcriber section, who in good faith put out several texts for the general Circus reader. The luckless head of Oddbins got a copy, so did the Secretariat, so did the heads of Personnel, Operations and Finance. It was not till a copy landed in Lauder Strickland’s in-tray that the explosion occurred and me innocent recipients were sworn to secrecy under all manner of dreadful threats. The tape is perfect. Lacon’s restless pacing is there, so are Strickland’s sotto voce asides, some of them obscene. Orily Mostyn’s flustered confessions in the hall escaped.
As to Mostyn himself, he played no further part in the affair. He resigned of his own accord a few months later, part of the wastage rate that gets everyone so worried these days.
SIX
The same uncertain light that greeted Smiley as he stepped gratefully out of the safe flat into the fresh air of that Hampstead morning, greeted Ostrakova also, though the Paris autumn was further on, and only a last few leaves clung like old dusters to the plane trees. Like Smiley’s too, her night had not been restful. She had risen in the dark and dressed with care, and she had deliberated, since the morning looked colder, whether this was the day on which to get out her winter boots, because the draught in the warehouse would be cruel and affected her legs the most. Still undecided, she had fished them out of the cupboard and wiped them down, and even polished them, but she still had not been able to make up her mind whether to wear them or not. Which was how it always went with her when she had one big problem to grapple with : the small ones became impossible. She knew all the signs, she could feel them coming on, but there was nothing she could do. She would mislay her purse, botch her book-keeping at the warehouse, lock herself out of the fiat and have to fetch the old fool of a concierge, Madame la Pierre, who pecked and snuffled like a goat in a nettle patch. She could quite easily, when the mood was on her, after fifteen years of taking the same route, catch the wrong bus and finish up, furious, in a strange neighbourhood. Pulling on the boots, finally – muttering to herself ‘old fool, cretin,’ and the like – and, carrying the heavy shopping bag that she had prepared the previous night, she set off along her usual route, passing her three usual shops and neglecting to enter any of them, while she tried to work out whether or not she was going off her head.
I am mad. I am not mad. Somebody is trying to kill me, somebody is trying to protect me. I am safe. I am in mortal danger. Back and forth.
In the four weeks since she had received her little Estonian confessor, Ostrakova had been aware of many changes in herself and for most of them she was not at all ungrateful. Whether she had fallen in love with him was neither here nor there : his appearance was timely, and the piracy in him had revived her sense of opposition at a moment when it was in danger of going out. He had rekindled her, and there was enough of the alley cat in him to remind her of Glikman and other men as well; she had never been particularly continent. And since, on top of this, she thought, the magician is a man of looks, and knows women, and steps into my life armed with a picture of my oppressor and the determination, apparently, to eliminate him – why then, it would be positively indecent, lonely old fool that I am, if I did not fall in love with him on the spot!