‘Why?’ said Tarr at last.
The jauntiness was all gone. He had a prison pallor, he had lost weight and as he sat on the bed with the gun on the pillow beside him, his eyes sought them out nervously, each in turn, trusting nothing.
Smiley said: ‘Listen. I want to believe your story. Nothing is altered. Once we know, we’ll respect your privacy. But we have to know. It’s terribly important. Your whole future stands by it.’
And a lot more besides, thought Guillam, watching; a whole chunk of devious arithmetic was hanging by a thread, if Guillam knew Smiley at all.
‘I told you, I burned them. I didn’t fancy the numbers. I reckoned they were blown. Might as well put a label round your neck: “Tarr, Ricki Tarr, Wanted”, soon as use those passports.’
Smiley’s questions were terribly slow in coming. Even to Guillam it was painful waiting for them in the deep silence of the night.
‘What did you burn them with?’
‘What the hell does that matter?’
But Smiley apparently did not feel like giving reasons for his enquiries, he preferred to let the silence do its work, and he seemed confident that it would. Guillam had seen whole interrogations conducted that way: a laboured catechism swathed in deep coverings of routine, wearying pauses as each answer was written down in longhand and the suspect’s brain besieged itself with a thousand questions to the interrogator’s one; and his hold on his story weakened from day to day.
‘When you bought your British passport in the name of Poole,’ Smiley asked, after another age, ‘did you buy any other passports from the same source?’
‘Why should I?’
But Smiley did not feel like giving reasons.
‘Why should I?’ Tarr repeated. ‘I’m not a damn collector for Christ’s sake, all I wanted was to get out from under.’
‘And protect your child,’ Smiley suggested, with an understanding smile. ‘And protect her mother too, if you could. I’m sure you gave a lot of thought to that,’ he said in a flattering tone. ‘After all, you could hardly leave them behind to the mercy of that inquisitive Frenchman, could you?’
Waiting, Smiley appeared to examine the lexicon cards, reading off the words longways and sideways. There was nothing to them: they were random words. One was mis-spelt, Guillam noticed ‘epistle’ with the last two letters back to front. What’s he been doing up there, Guillam wondered, in that stinking fleapit of a hotel? What furtive little tracks has his mind been following, locked away with the sauce bottles and the commercial travellers?
‘All right,’ said Tarr sullenly, ‘so I got passports for Danny and her mother. Mrs Poole, Miss Danny Poole. What do we do now; cry out in ecstasy?’
Again it was the silence that accused.
‘Now why didn’t you tell us that before?’ Smiley asked, in the tone of a disappointed father. ‘We’re not monsters. We don’t wish them harm. Why didn’t you tell us? Perhaps we could even have helped you,’ and went back to his examination of the cards. Tarr must have used two or three packs, they lay in rivers over the coconut carpet. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ he repeated. ‘There’s no crime in looking after the people one loves.’
If they’ll let you, thought Guillam, with Camilla in mind.
To help Tarr answer, Smiley was making helpful suggestions: ‘Was it because you dipped into your operational expenses to buy these British passports? Was that the reason you didn’t tell us? Good heavens, no one here is worried about money. You’ve brought us a vital piece of information. Why should we quarrel about a couple of thousand dollars?’ And the time ticked away again without anyone using it.
‘Or was it,’ Smiley suggested, ‘that you were ashamed?’
Guillam stiffened, his own problems forgotten.
‘Rightly ashamed in a way, I suppose. It wasn’t a very gallant act, after all, to leave Danny and her mother with blown passports, at the mercy of that so-called Frenchman who was looking so hard for Mr Poole, was it? While you yourself escaped to all this VIP treatment? It is horrible to think of,’ Smiley agreed, as if Tarr, not he, had made the point. ‘It is horrible to contemplate the lengths Karla would go to in order to obtain your silence. Or your services.’