CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Perhaps she was ill,’ said Smiley stolidly, speaking more to Guillam than anyone else. ‘Perhaps she was in a coma. Perhaps they were real nurses who took her away. By the sound of her she was a pretty good mess, at best.’ He added, with half a glance at Tarr: ‘After all, only twenty-four hours had elapsed between your first telegram and Irina’s departure. You can hardly lay it at London’s door on that timing.’
‘You can just,’ said Guillam, looking at the floor. ‘It’s extremely fast, but it does just work, if somebody in London-‘ They were all waiting. ‘If somebody in London had very good footwork. And in Moscow too, of course.’
‘Now that’s exactly what I told myself, sir,’ said Tarr proudly, taking up Smiley’s point and ignoring Guillam’s. ‘My very words, Mr Smiley. Relax, Ricki, I said, you’ll be shooting at shadows if you’re not damn careful.’
‘Or the Russians tumbled to her,’ Smiley insisted. ‘The security guards found out about your affair and removed her. It would be a wonder if they hadn’t found out, the way you two carried on.’
‘Or she told her husband,’ Tarr suggested. ‘I understand psychology as well as the next man, sir. I know what can happen between a husband and wife when they have fallen out. She wishes to annoy him. To goad him, to obtain a reaction, I thought. “Want to hear what I’ve been doing while you’ve been out boozing and cutting the rug?” – like that. Boris peels off and tells the gorillas, they sandbag her and take her home. I went through all those possibilities, Mr Smiley, believe me. I really worked on them, truth. Same as any man does whose woman walks out on him.’
‘Let’s just have the story, shall we?’ Guillam whispered, furious.
Well now, said Tarr, he would agree that for twenty-four hours he went a bit berserk: ‘Now I don’t often get that way, right, Mr Guillam?’
‘Often enough.’
‘I was feeling pretty physical. Frustrated, you could almost say.’
His conviction that a considerable prize had been brutally snatched away from him drove him to a distracted fury which found expression in a rampage through old haunts. He went to the Cat’s Cradle, then to Angelika’s and by dawn he had taken in half a dozen other places besides, not to mention a few girls along the way. At some point he crossed town and raised a spot of dust around the Alexandra. He was hoping to have a couple of words with those security gorillas. When he sobered down he got thinking about Irina and their time together, and he decided before he flew back to London to go round their dead letter boxes to check whether by any chance she had written to him before she left.
Partly it was something to do. ‘Partly I guess I couldn’t bear to think of a letter of hers kicking around in a hole in the wall while she sweated it out in the hot seat,’ he added, the ever-redeemable boy.
They had two places where they dropped mail for one another. The first was not far from the hotel on a building site.
‘Ever seen that bamboo scaffolding they use? Fantastic. I’ve seen it twenty storeys high and the coolies swarming over it with slabs of precast concrete.’ A bit of discarded piping, he said, handy at shoulder height. It seemed most likely, if Irina was in a hurry, that the piping was the letter box she would use, but when Tarr went there it was empty. The second was back by the church, ‘in under where they stow the pamphlets,’ as he put it. ‘This stand was part of an old wardrobe, see. If you kneel in the back pew and grope around, there’s a loose board. Behind the board there’s a recess full of rubbish and rat’s mess. I tell you, it made a real lovely drop, the best ever.’
There was a short pause, illuminated by the vision of Ricki Tarr and his Moscow Centre mistress kneeling side by side in the rear pew of a Baptist church in Hong Kong.
In this dead letter box, Tarr said, he found not a letter but a whole damn diary. The writing was fine and done on both sides of the paper so that quite often the black ink came through. It was fast urgent writing with no erasures. He knew at a glance that she had maintained it in her lucid periods.