Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

Her brothers were dons, Smiley remembered; her father was a professor of something. Control had met her at bridge and invented a job for her.

She began her story like a fairy-tale: ‘Once upon a time there was a defector called Stanley, way back in sixty-three,’ and she applied to it the same spurious logic, part inspiration, part intellectual opportunism, born of a wonderful mind which had never grown up. Her formless white face took on the grandmother’s glow of enchanted reminiscence. Her memory was as compendious as her body and surely she loved it more, for she had put everything aside to listen to it: her drink, her cigarette, even for a while Smiley’s passive hand. She sat no longer slouched but strictly, her big head to one side as she dreamily plucked the white wool of her hair. He had assumed she would begin at once with Polyakov, but she began with Stanley; he had forgotten her passion for family trees. Stanley, she said; the inquisitors’ covername for a fifth-rate defector from Moscow Centre. March sixty-three. The scalphunters bought him secondhand from the Dutch and shipped him to Sarratt and probably if it hadn’t been the silly season and if the inquisitors hadn’t happened to have time on their hands, well who knows whether any of it would ever have come to light? As it was, Brother Stanley had a speck of gold on him, one teeny speck, and they found it. The Dutch missed it but the inquisitors found it and a copy of their report came to Connie: ‘Which was a whole other miracle in itself,’ Connie bellowed huffily, ‘considering that everyone, and specially Sarratt, made an absolute principle of leaving research off their distribution lists.’

Patiently Smiley waited for the speck of gold, for Connie was of an age where the only thing a man could give her was time.

Now Stanley had defected while he was on a mailfist job in the Hague, she explained. He was by profession an assassin of some sort and had been sent to Holland to murder a Russian émigré who was getting on Centre’s nerves. Instead, he decided to give himself up. ‘Some girl had made a fool of him,’ said Connie with great contempt. ‘The Dutch set him a honey-trap, my dear, and he barged in with his eyes wide shut.’

To prepare him for the mission Centre had posted him to one of their training camps outside Moscow for a brush-up in the black arts: sabotage and silent killing. The Dutch, when they had him, were shocked by this and made it the focal point of their interrogation. They put his picture in the newspapers and had him drawing pictures of cyanide bullets and all the other dreary weaponry which Centre so adored. But at the Nursery the inquisitors knew that stuff by heart so they concentrated on the camp itself, which was a new one, not much known. ‘Sort of millionaires’ Sarratt,’ she explained. They made a sketch-plan of the compound, which covered several hundred acres of forest and lakeland, and put in all the buildings Stanley could remember: laundries, canteens, lecture huts, ranges, all the dross. Stanley had been there several times and remembered a lot. They thought they were about finished when Stanley went very quiet. He took a pencil and in the north-west corner he drew five more huts and a double fence round them for the guard dogs, bless him. These huts were new, said Stanley, built in the last few months. You reached them by a private road; he had seen them from a hilltop when he was out walking with his instructor, Milos. According to Milos (who was Stanley’s friend, said Connie with much innuendo) they housed a special school recently founded by Karla for training military officers in conspiracy.

‘So, my dear, there we were,’ Connie cried. ‘For years we’d been hearing rumours that Karla was trying to build a private army of his own inside Moscow Centre but, poor lamb, he hadn’t the power. We knew he had agents scattered round the globe and naturally he was worried that as he grew older and more senior he wouldn’t be able to manage them alone. We knew that like everyone else he was dreadfully jealous of them and couldn’t bear the idea of handing them over to the legal residencies in the target countries. Well naturally he wouldn’t: you know how he hated residencies: overstaffed, insecure. Same as he hated the old guard. Flat-earthers, he called them. Quite right. Well now he had the power and he was doing something about it, as any real man would. March sixty-three,’ she repeated in case Smiley had missed the date.

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