Smiley’s People by John le Carré

He saw the little photograph again, printed, like the little stranger himself, in his sinking memory. A small man, with a big shadow. He remembered Villem’s description of the little figure on the Hamburg ferry, the horns of flicked-up hair, the grooved face, the warning eyes. General, he thought chaotically, will you not send me your magic friend once more?

Maybe. Everything is maybe.

Hamburg, he thought, and got quickly out of bed and put on his dressing gown. Back at Ann’s desk, he set to work seriously to study the breakdown of Vladimir’s telephone account, rendered in the copperplate script of a post-office clerk. Taking a sheet of paper, he began jottting down dates and notes.

Fact : in early September, Vladimir receives the Paris letter, and removes it from Mikhel’s grasp.

Fact : at about the same date. Vladimir makes a rare and costly trunk-call to Hamburg, operator-dialled, presumably so that he can later claim the cost.

Fact : three days after that again, the eighth, Vladimir accepts a reverse-charge call from Hamburg, at a cost of two pounds eighty, origin, duration and time all given, and the origin is the same number that Vladimir had called three days before.

Hamburg, Smiley thought again, his mind flitting once more to the imp in the photograph. The reversed telephone traffic had continued intermittently till three days ago; nine calls, totalling twenty-one pounds, and all of them from Hamburg to Vladimir. But who was calling him? From Hamburg? Who?

Then suddenly he remembered.

The looming figure in the hotel room, the imp’s vast shadow, was Vladimir himself. He saw them standing side by side, both in black coats, the giant and the midget. The vile hotel with Muzak and tartan wallpaper was near Heathrow Airport, where the two men, so ill-matched, had flown in for a conference at the very moment of Smiley’s life when his professional identity was crashing round his ears. Max, we need you. Max, give us the chance.

Picking up the telephone, Smiley dialled the number in Hamburg, and heard a man’s voice the other end : the one word ‘Yes’, spoken softly in German, followed by a silence.

‘I should like to speak to Herr Dieter Fassbender,’ Smiley said, selecting a name at random. German was Smiley’s second language, and sometimes his first.

‘We have no Fassbender,’ said the same voice coolly after a moment’s pause, as if the speaker had consulted something in the meantime. Smiley could hear faint music in the background.

‘This is Leber,’ Smiley persisted. ‘I want to speak to Herr Fassbender urgently. I’m his partner.’

There was yet another delay.

‘Not possible,’ said the man’s voice flatly after another pause – and rang off.

Not a private house, thought Smiley, hastily jotting down his impressions – the speaker had too many choices. Not an office, for what kind of office plays soft background music and is open at midnight on a Saturday? A hotel? Possibly, but a hotel, if it was of any size, would have put him through to reception, and displayed a modicum of civility. A restaurant? Too furtive, too guarded – and surely they would have announced themselves as they picked up the phone?

Don’t force the pieces, he warned himself. Store them away. Patience. But how to be patient when he had so little time?

Returning to bed, he opened a copy of Cobbett’s Rural Rides and tried to read it while he loosely pondered, among other weighty matters, his sense of civitas and how much, or how little, he owed to Oliver Lacon : ‘Your duty, George.’ Yet who could seriously be Lacon’s man? he asked himself. Who could regard Lacon’s fragile arguments as Caesar’s due?

‘Émigrés in, émigrés out. Two legs good, two legs bad,’ he muttered aloud.

All his professional life, it seemed to Smiley, he had listened to similar verbal antics signalling supposedly great changes in Whitehall doctrine; signalling restraint, self-denial, always another reason for doing nothing. He had watched Whitehall’s skirts go up, and come down again, her belts being tightened, loosened, tightened. He had been the witness, or victim – or even reluctant prophet – of such spurious cults as lateralism, parallelism, separatism, operational devolution, and now, if he remembered Lacon’s most recent meanderings correctly, of integration. Each new fashion had been hailed as a panacea : ‘Now we shall vanquish, now the machine will work!’ Each had gone out with a whimper, leaving behind it the familiar English muddle, of which, more and more, in retrospect, he saw himself as a lifelong moderator. He had forborne, hoping others would forbear, and they had not. He had toiled in back rooms while shallower men held the stage. They held it still. Even five years ago he would never have admitted to such sentiments. But today, peering calmly into his own heart, Smiley knew that he was unled, and perhaps unleadable; that the only restraints upon him were those of his own reason, and his own humanity. As with his marriage, so with his sense of public setvice. I invested my life in institutions – he thought without rancour – and all I am left with is myself.