That was another part of the legend, said Smiley: at Yelnya, thanks to Karla, the Germans shelled their own forward line.
‘And between these two sightings,’ he continued, ‘in thirty-six and forty-one, Karla visited Britain, we think he was here six months. But even today we don’t know – that’s to say I don’t know – under what name or cover. Which isn’t to say Gerald doesn’t. But Gerald isn’t likely to tell us, at least not on purpose.’
Smiley had never talked to Guillam this way. He was not given to confidences or long lectures; Guillam knew him as a shy man, for all his vanities, and one who expected very little communication.
‘In forty-eight-odd, having served his country loyally, Karla did a spell in prison and later in Siberia. There was nothing personal about it. He simply happened to be in one of those sections of Red Army intelligence which in some purge or other ceased to exist.’
And certainly, Smiley went on, after his post-Stalin reinstatement, he went to America; because when the Indian authorities in the summer of fifty-five arrested him in Delhi on vague immigration charges, he had just flown in from California. Circus gossip later linked him with the big treason scandals in Britain and the States.
Smiley knew better: ‘Karla was in disgrace again. Moscow was out for his blood, and we thought we might persuade him to defect. That was why I flew to Delhi. To have a chat with him.’
There was a pause while the weary boy slouched over and enquired whether everything was to their satisfaction. Smiley with great solicitude assured him that it was.
‘The story of my meeting with Karla,’ he resumed, ‘belonged very much to the mood of the period. In the mid-fifties Moscow Centre was in pieces on the floor. Senior officers were being shot or purged wholesale and its lower ranks were seized with a collective paranoia. As a first result, there was a crop of defections among Centre officers stationed overseas. All over the place, Singapore, Nairobi, Stockholm, Canberra, Washington, I don’t know where, we got this same steady trickle from the residencies: not just the big fish but the legmen, drivers, cypher clerks, typists. Somehow we had to respond – I don’t think it’s ever realised how much the industry stimulates its own inflation – and in no time I became a kind of commercial traveller, flying off one day to a capital city, the next to a dingy border outpost – once even to a ship at sea – to sign up defecting Russians. To seed, to stream, to fix the terms, to attend to debriefing and eventual disposal.’
Guillam was watching him all the while but even in that cruel neon glow Smiley’s expression revealed nothing but a slightly anxious concentration.
‘We evolved, you might say, three kinds of contract for those whose stories held together. If the client’s access wasn’t interesting we might trade him to another country and forget him. Buy him for stock, as you would say, much as the scalp-hunters do today. Or we might play him back into Russia: that’s assuming his defection had not already been noticed there. Or if he was lucky we took him; cleaned him of whatever he knew and resettled him in the West. London decided usually. Not me. But remember this. At that time Karla, or Gerstmann as he called himself, was just another client. I’ve told his story back to front; I didn’t want to be coy with you, but you have to bear in mind now, through anything that happened between us, or didn’t happen which is more to the point, that all I or anyone in the Circus knew when I flew to Delhi was that a man calling himself Gerstmann had been setting up a radio link between Rudnev, head of illegal networks at Moscow Centre, and a Centre-run apparatus in California that was lying fallow for want of a means of communication. That’s all. Gerstmann had smuggled a transmitter across the Canadian border and lain up for three weeks in San Francisco breaking in the new operator. That was the assumption, and there was a batch of test transmissions to back it up.’