Smiley’s People by John le Carré

If we’d treated him better, it would never have happened, Smiley thought. The neglected are too easily killed, he thought, in unconscious affinity with Ostrakova. He remembered the day they had brought him here, Smiley the vicar, Toby Esterhase the postman. They had driven to Heathrow to fetch him : Toby the fixer, dyed in all the oceans, as he would say of himself. Toby drove like the wind but they were almost late, even then. The plane had landed. They hurried to the barrier and there he was : silvered and majestic, towering stock-still in the temporary corridor from the arrivals bay, while the common peasants swept past him. He remembered their solemn embrace – ‘Max, my old friend, it is really you?’ ‘It’s me, Vladimir, they’ve put us together again.’ He remembered Toby spiriting them through the large back alleys of the immigration service, because the enraged French police had confiscated the old boy’s papers before throwing him out. He remembered how they had lunched at Scott’s, all three of them, the old boy too animated even to drink but talking grandly of the future they all knew he didn’t have : ‘It will be Moscow allover again, Max. Maybe we even get a chance at the Sandman.’ Next day they went flat-hunting, ‘just to show you a few possibilities, General,’ as Toby Esterhase had explained. It was Christmas time and the resettlement budget for the year was used up. Smiley appealed to Circus Finance. He lobbied Lacon and the Treasury for a supplementary estimate, but in vain. ‘A dose of reality will bring him down to earth,’ Lacon had pronounced. ‘Use your influence with him, George. That’s what you’re there for.’ Their first dose of reality was a tart’s parlour in Kensington, their second overlooked a shunting yard near Waterloo. Westbourne Terrace was their third, and as they squeaked up these same stairs, Toby leading, the old man had suddenly halted, and put back his great mottled head, and wrinkled his nose theatrically:

Ah! So if I get hungry I have only to stand in the corridor and sniff and my hunger is gone! he had announced in his thick French. That way I don’t have to eat for a week!

By then even Vladimir had guessed they were putting him away for good.

Smiley returned to the present. The next landing was musical, he noticed, as he continued his solitary ascent. Through one door came rock music played at full blast, through another Sibelius and the smell of bacon. Peering out of the window he saw two men loitering between the chestnut trees who were not there when he had arrived. A team would do that, he thought. A team would post look-outs while the others went inside. Whose team was another question. Moscow’s? The Superintendent’s? Saul Enderby’s? Farther down the road, the tall motor-cyclist had acquired a tabloid newspaper and was sitting on his bike reading it.

At Smiley’s side a door opened and an old woman in a dressing gown came out holding a cat against her shoulder. He could smell last night’s drink on her breath even before she spoke to him.

‘Are you a burglar, dearie?’ she asked.

‘I’m afraid not,’ Smiley replied with a laugh. ‘Just a visitor.’

‘Still, it’s nice to be fancied, isn’t it, dearie?’ she said.

‘It is indeed,’ said Smiley politely.

The last flight was steep and very narrow and lit by real daylight from a wired skylight on the slant. There were two doors on the top landing, both closed, both very cramped. On one, a typed notice faced him : ‘MR V. MILLER, TRANSLATIONS’. Smiley remembered the argument about Vladimir’s alias now he was to become a Londoner and keep his head down. ‘Miller’ was no problem. For some reason, the old boy found Miller rather grand. ‘Miller, c’est bien,’ he had declared. ‘Miller I like, Max.’ But ‘Mr’ was anything but good. He pressed for General, then offered to settle for Colonel. But Smiley in his role as vicar was on this point unbudgeable : Mr was a lot less trouble than a bogus rank in the wrong army, he had ruled.

He knocked boldly, knowing that a soft knock is more conspicuous than a loud one. He heard the echo, and nothing else. He heard no footfall, no sudden freezing of a sound. He called ‘Vladimir’ through the letter-box as though he were an old friend visiting. He tried one Yale from the bunch and it stuck, he tried another and it turned. He stepped inside and closed the door, waiting for something to hit him on the back of the head but preferring the thought of a broken skull to having his face shot off. He felt dizzy and realized he was holding his breath. The same white paint, he noticed; the same prison emptiness exactly. The same queer hush, like a phone box; the same mix of public smells.

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