Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman, he thought.
Mikhel smiled his regrets.
‘Did Vladimir mention Hector recently, Mikhel?’
‘Hector was no good for him.’
‘Did Vladimir say that?’
‘Please, Max. I have nothing against Hector personally. Hector is Hector, he is not a gentleman, but in our work we must use many varieties of mankind. This was the General speaking. Our leader was an old man. “Hector,” Vladimir says to me. “Hector is no good. Our good postman Hector is like the City banks. When it rains, they say, the banks take away your umbrella. Our postman Hector is the same.” Please. This is Vladimir speaking. Not Mikhel. “Hector is no good.” ‘
‘When did he say this?’
‘He said it several times.’
‘Recently?’
‘Yes.’
‘How recently?’
‘Maybe two months. Maybe less.’
‘After he received the Paris letter, or before?’
‘After. No question.’
Mikhel escorted him to the door, a gentleman even if Toby Esterhase was not. At her place again beside the samovar, Elvira sat smoking before the same photograph of birch trees. And as he passed her, Smiley heard a sort of hiss, made through the nose or mouth, or both at once, as a last statement of her contempt.
‘What will you do now?’ he asked of Mikhel in the way one asks such things of the bereaved. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her head lift at his question and her fingers spread across the page.
A last thought struck him : ‘And you didn’t recognize the handwriting?’ Srniley started to ask.
‘What handwriting is this, Max?’
‘On the envelope from Paris?’
Suddenly he had no time to wait for an answer; suddenly he was sick of evasion.
‘Goodbye, Mikhel.’
‘Go well, Max.’
Elvira’s head sank again to the birch trees.
I’ll never know, Smiley thought, as be made his way quickly down tbe wooden staircase. None of us will. Was be Mikhel the traitor who resented the old man sharing his woman, and thirsted for the crown that had been denied him for too long? Or was be Mikhel the selfless officer and gentleman, Mikhel the ever-loyal servant? Or was he perhaps, like many loyal servants, both?
He thought of Mikhel’s cavalry pride, as terribly tender as any other hero’s manhood. His pride in being the General’s keeper, his pride in being his satrap. His sense of injury at being excluded. His pride again – how it split so many ways! But how far did it extend? To a pride in giving nobly to each master, for instance? Gentlemen, I have served you both well, says the perfect double agent in the twilight of his life. And says it with pride, too, thought Smiley, who had known a number of them.
He thought of the seven-page letter from Paris. He thought of second proofs. He wondered who the photocopy had gone to – maybe Esterhase? He wondered where the original was. So who went to Paris? he wondered. If Villem went to Hamburg, who was the little magician? He was bone tired. His tiredness hit him like a sudden virus. He felt it in the knees, the bips, his whole subsiding body. But be kept walking, for his mind refused to rest.
ELEVEN
To walk was just possible for Ostrakova, and to walk was all she asked. To walk and wait for the magician. Nothing was broken. Though her dumpy little body, when they had given her a bath, was shaping up to become as blackened and patchy as a map of the Siberian coalfields, nothing was broken. And her poor rump, which had given her that bit of trouble at the warehouse, looked already as though the assembled secret armies of Soviet Russia had rooted her from one end of Paris to the other : still, nothing was broken. They had X-rayed every part of her, they bad prodded her like questionable meat for signs of internal bleeding. But in the end, they had gloomily declared her to be the victim of a miracle.
They had wanted to keep her, for all that. They had wanted to treat her for shock, sedate her – at least for one night! The police, who had found six witnesses with seven conflicting accounts of what had happened (The car was grey or was it blue? The registration number was from Marseilles or was it foreign?), the police had take one long statement from her, and threatened to come back and take another.