Yet the more Smiley implored him, the more dogmatic Gerstmann’s silence became. Smiley pressed answers on him, but Gerstmann had no questions to support them. Gradually Gerstmann’s completeness was awesome. He was a man who had prepared himself for the gallows; who would rather die at the hands of his friends than live at the hands of his enemies. Next morning, they parted, each to his appointed fate : Gerstmann, against all odds, flew back to Moscow to survive the purge and prosper. Smiley, with a high fever, returned to his Ann and not quite all her love; and to the later knowledge that Gerstmann was none other than Karla himself, Bill Haydon’s recruiter, case officer, mentor; and the man who had spirited Bill into Ann’s bed – this very bed where he now lay – in order to cloud Smiley’s hardening vision of Bill’s greater treason, against the service and its agents.
Karla, he thought, as his eyes bored into the darkness, what do you want with me now? Tell Max it concerns the Sandman.
Sandman, he thought : why do you wake me up when you are supposed to put me back to sleep?
Still incarcerated in her little Paris apartment, tormented equally in spirit and body, Ostrakova could not have slept even if she had wanted. Not all the Sandman’s magic would have helped her. She turned on her side and her squeezed ribs screamed as if the assassin’s arms were still flung round them while he prepared to sling her under the car. She tried her back and the pain in her rump was enough to make her vomit. And when she lay on her belly, her breasts became as sore as when she had tried to feed Alexandra in the months before she abandoned her, and she hated them.
It is God’s punishment, she told herself, without too much conviction. Not till morning came, and she was back in Ostrakov’s armchair, with his pistol across her knees, did the waking world, for an hour or two, release her from her thoughts.
THIRTEEN
The gallery was situated in what the art trade calls the naughty end of Bond Street, and Smiley arrived on its doorstep that Monday morning long before any respectable art dealer was out of bed.
His Sunday had passed in mysterious tranquillity. Bywater Street had woken late, and so had Smiley. His memory had served him while he slept, and it continued to serve him in modest spasms of enlightenment throughout the day. In terms of memory at least, his black Grail had drawn a little nearer. His telephone had not rung once, a slight but persistent hangover had kept him in the contemplative mood. There was a club he belonged to, against his beter judgement, near Pall Mall, and he lunched there in imperial solitude on warmed-up steak-andkidney pie. Afterwards, from the head porter, he had requested his box from the club safe and discreetly abstracted a few illicit possessions, including a British passport in his former work name of Standfast, which he had never quite managed to return to Circus Housekeepers; an international driving licence to match; a sizeable sum of Swiss francs, his own certainly, but equally certainly retained in defiance of the Exchange Control Act. He had them in his pocket now.
The gallery had a dazzling whiteness and the canvases in its armoured glass window were much the same : white upon white, with just the faintest outline of a mosque or St Paul’s Cathedral – or was it Washington? – drawn with a finger in the thick pigment. Six months ago the sign hanging over the pavement had proclaimed The Wandering Snail Coffee Shop. Today it read ‘ATELIER BENATI, GOÛT ARABE, PARIS, NEW YORK, MONACO,’ and a discreet menu on the door proclaimed the new chef’s specialities; ‘Islam classique-moderne. Conceptual Interior Design. Contracts catered. Sonnez.’
Smiley did as he was bidden, a buzzer screamed, the glass door yielded. A shop-worn girl, ash blonde and half-awake, eyed him warily over a white desk.
‘If I could just look round,’ said Smiley.
Her eyes lifted slightly towards an Islamic heaven. ‘The little red spots mean sold,’ she drawled, and, having handed him a typed price-list, sighed and went back to her cigarette and her horoscope.