CHAPTER NINE
Before Tarr left, Smiley asked a number of questions of him. He was gazing not at Tarr but myopically into the middle distance, his pouchy face despondent from the tragedy.
‘Where is the original of that diary?’
‘I put it straight back in the dead letter box. Figure it this way, Mr Smiley: by the time I found the diary Irina had been in Moscow twenty-four hours. I guessed she wouldn’t have a lot of breath when it came to the interrogation. Most likely they’d sweated her on the plane, then a second going over when she touched down, then question one as soon as the big boys had finished their breakfast. That’s the way they do it to the timid ones: the arm first and the questions after, right? So it might be only a matter of a day or two before Centre sent along a footpad to take a peek round the back of the church, okay?’ Primly again: ‘Also I had my own welfare to consider.’
‘He means that Moscow Centre would be less interested in cutting his throat if they thought he hadn’t read the diary,’ said Guillam.
‘Did you photograph it?’
‘I don’t carry a camera. I bought a dollar notebook. I copied the diary into the notebook. The original I put back. The whole job took me four hours flat.’ He glanced at Guillam, then away from him. In the fresh daylight, a deep inner fear was suddenly apparent in Tarr’s face. ‘When I got back to the hotel, my room was a wreck; they’d even stripped the paper off the walls. The manager told me, “Get the hell out”. He didn’t want to know.’
‘He’s carrying a gun,’ said Guillam. ‘He won’t part with it.’
‘You’re damn right I won’t.’
Smiley offered a dyspeptic grunt of sympathy: ‘These meetings you had with Irina: the dead letter boxes, the safety signals and fallbacks. Who proposed the tradecraft: you or she?’
‘She did.’
‘What were the safety signals?’
‘Body talk. If I wore my collar open she knew I’d had a look around and I reckoned the coast was clear. If I wore it closed, scrub the meeting till the fallback.’
‘And Irina?’
‘Handbag. Left hand, right hand. I got there first and waited up somewhere she could see me. That gave her the choice: whether to go ahead or split.’
‘All this happened more than six months ago. What have you been doing since?’
‘Resting,’ said Tarr rudely.
Guillam said: ‘He panicked and went native. He bolted to Kuala Lumpur, then lay up in one of the hill villages. That’s his story. He has a daughter called Danny.’
‘Danny’s my little kid.’
‘He shacked up with Danny and her mother,’ said Guillam, talking, as was his habit, clean across anything Tarr said. ‘He’s got wives scattered across the globe but she seems to lead the pack just now.’
‘Why did you choose this particular moment to come to us?’
Tarr said nothing.
‘Don’t you want to spend Christmas with Danny?’
‘Sure.’
‘So what happened? Did something scare you?’
‘There was rumours,’ said Tarr sullenly.
‘What sort of rumours?’
‘Some Frenchman turned up in KL telling them all I owed him money. Wanted to get some lawyer hounding me. I don’t owe anybody money.’
Smiley returned to Guillam. ‘At the Circus he’s still posted as a defector?’
‘Presumed.’
‘What have they done about it so far?’
‘It’s out of my hands. I heard on the grapevine that London Station held a couple of war parties over him a while back but they didn’t invite me and I don’t know what came of them. Nothing, I should think, as usual.’
‘What passport’s he been using?’
Tarr had his answer ready: ‘I threw away Thomas the day I hit Malaya. I reckoned Thomas wasn’t exactly the flavour of the month in Moscow and I’d do better to kill him off right there. In KL I had them run me up a British passport, name of Poole.’ He handed it to Smiley. ‘It’s not bad for the money.’
‘Why didn’t you use one of your Swiss escapes?’
Another wary pause.
‘Or did you lose them when your hotel room was searched?’