Jerry Westerby was that extremely rare person, the perfect witness. He had no fantasy, no malice, no personal opinion. Merely: the thing was rum. He couldn’t get it off his mind and come to think of it, he hadn’t spoken to Toby since.
‘Just this card, you see, “Happy Christmas, Toby,” – picture of Leadenhall Street in the snow.’ He gazed in great perplexity at the electric fan. ‘Nothing special about Leadenhall Street, is there, old boy? Not a spy house or a meeting place or something, is it?’
‘Not that I know of,’ said Smiley with a laugh.
‘Couldn’t think why he chose Leadenhall Street for a Christmas card. Damned odd, don’t you think?’
Perhaps he just wanted a snowy picture of London, Smiley suggested; Toby after all was quite foreign in lots of ways.
‘Rum way to keep in touch, I must say. Used to send me a crate of Scotch regular as clockwork.’ Jerry frowned and drank from his krug. ‘It’s not the Scotch I mind,’ he explained with that puzzlement that often clouded the greater visions of his life, ‘buy my own Scotch any time. It’s just that when you’re on the outside, you think everything has a meaning so presents are important, see what I’m getting at?’
It was a year ago, well, December. The Restaurant Sport in Prague, said Jerry Westerby, was a bit off the track of your average Western journalist. Most of them hung around the Cosmo or the International, talking in low murmurs and keeping together because they were jumpy. But Jerry’s local was the Sport and ever since he had taken Holotek the goalie along after winning the match against the Tartars, Jerry had had the big hand from the barman, whose name was Stanislaus or Stan.
‘Stan’s a perfect prince. Does just what he damn well pleases. Makes you suddenly think Czecho’s a free country.’
Restaurant, he explained, meant bar. Whereas bar in Czecho meant nightclub, which was rum. Smiley agreed that it must be confusing.
All the same, Jerry always kept an ear to the ground when he went there, after all it was Czecho and once or twice he’d been able to bring back the odd snippet for Toby or put him on to the track of someone.
‘Even if it was just currency dealing, black-market stuff. All grist to the mill, according to Tobe. These little scraps add up – that’s what Tobe said, anyway.’
Quite right, Smiley agreed. That was the way it worked.
‘Tobe was the owl, what?’
‘Sure.’
‘I used to work straight to Roy Bland, you see. Then Roy got kicked upstairs so Tobe took me over. Bit unsettling actually, changes. Cheers.’
‘How long had you been working to Toby when this trip took place?’
‘Couple of years, not more.’
There was a pause while food came and krugs were refilled and Jerry Westerby with his enormous hands shattered a popadam on to the hottest curry on the menu, then spread a crimson sauce over the top. The sauce, he said, was to give it bite. ‘Old Khan runs it up for me specially,’ he explained aside. ‘Keeps it in a deep shelter.’
So anyway, he resumed, that night in Stan’s bar there was this young boy with the pudding-bowl haircut and the pretty girl on his arm.
‘And I thought: “Watch out, Jerry boy, that’s an army haircut.” Right?’
‘Right,’ Smiley echoed, thinking that in some ways Jerry was a bit of an owl himself.
It turned out the boy was Stan’s nephew and very proud of his English: ‘Amazing what people will tell you if it gives them a chance of showing off their languages.’ He was on leave from the army and he’d fallen in love with this girl, he’d eight days to go and the whole world was his friend, Jerry included. Jerry particularly, in fact, because Jerry was paying for the booze.
‘So we’re all sitting hugger-mugger at the big table in the corner, students, pretty girls, all sorts. Old Stan had come round from behind the bar and some laddie was doing a fair job with a squeeze box. Bags of Gemutlichkeit, bags of booze, bags of noise.’