For a couple of days they let him alone. Head was muzzy. He kept hearing the shooting in the forest and he saw the tattoo again, and when finally the big session started, the one he remembered as the marathon, he had the disadvantage of feeling half defeated when he went in.
‘Matter of health much as anything,’ he explained, very tense now.
‘We could make a break if you wanted,’ Smiley said, but where Jim was, there were no breaks, and what he wanted was irrelevant.
That was the long one, Jim said. Sometime in the course of it, he told them about Control’s notes and his charts and the coloured inks and crayons. They were going at him like the devil and he remembered an all-male audience, at one end of the room, peering like a lot of damn medicos and muttering to one another, and he told them about the crayons just to keep the talk alive, to make them stop and listen. They listened but they didn’t stop.
‘Once they had the colours they wanted to know what the colours meant. “What did blue mean?” “Control didn’t have blue.” “What did red mean? What did red stand for? Give us an example of red on the chart. What did red mean? What did red mean? What did red mean?” Then everybody clears out except a couple of guards and one little frosty fellow, stiff back, seemed to be head boy. The guards take me over to a table and this little fellow sits beside me like a bloody gnome with his hands folded. He’s got two crayons in front of him, red and green, and a chart of Stevcek’s career.’
It wasn’t that Jim broke exactly, he just ran out of invention. He couldn’t think up any more stories. The truths which he had locked away so deeply were the only things that suggested themselves.
‘So you told him about the rotten apple,’ Smiley suggested. ‘And you told him about Tinker, Tailor.’
Yes, Jim agreed, he did. He told him that Control believed Stevcek could identify a mole inside the Circus. He told him about the Tinker, Tailor code and who each of them was, name by name.
‘What was his reaction?’
‘Thought for a bit then offered me a cigarette. Hated the damn thing.’
‘Why?’
‘Tasted American. Camel, one of those.’
‘Did he smoke one himself?’
Jim gave a short nod. ‘Bloody chimney,’ he said.
Time, after that, began once more to flow, said Jim. He was taken to a camp, he guessed outside a town, and lived in a compound of huts with a double perimeter of wire. With the help of a guard he was soon able to walk; one day they even went for a stroll in the forest. The camp was very big: his own compound was only a part of it. At night he could see the glow of a city to the east. The guards wore denims and didn’t speak so he still had no way of telling whether he was in Czecho or in Russia, but his money was heavily on Russia, and when the surgeon came to take a look at his back he used a Russian-English interpreter to express his contempt for his predecessor’s handiwork. The interrogation continued sporadically, but without hostility. They put a fresh team on him but it was a leisurely crowd by comparison with the first eleven. One night he was taken to a military airport and flown by RAF fighter to Inverness. From there he went by small plane to Elstree, then by van to Sarratt; both were night journeys.
Jim was winding up fast. He was already launched on his experiences at the Nursery, in fact, when Smiley asked: ‘And the head man, the little frosty one: you never saw him again?’
Once, Jim conceded; just before he left.
‘What for?’
‘Gossip.’ Much louder. ‘Lot of damned tripe about Circus personalities, matter of fact.’
‘Which personalities?’
Jim ducked that question. Tripe about who was on the up staircase, he said, who was on the down. Who was next in line for Chief: ‘ “How should I know?” I said. “Bloody janitors hear it before Brixton does.” ‘