Then nothing, of course. ‘The usual game: sit on your thumbs, get on with other work, whistle for a wind.’ She sat on them for three years, until Major Mikhail Fedorovich Komarov, Assistant Military Attaché in the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo, was caught in flagrante taking delivery of six reels of top secret intelligence procured by a senior official in the Japanese Defence Ministry. Komarov was the hero of her second fairy-tale: not a defector but a soldier with the shoulder boards of the artillery.
‘And medals, my dear! Medals galore!’
Komarov himself had to leave Tokyo so fast that his dog got locked in his flat and was later found starved to death, which was something Connie could not forgive him for. Whereas Komarov’s Japanese agent was of course duly interrogated and by a happy chance the Circus was able to buy the report from the Toka.
‘Why, George, come to think of it, it was you who arranged the deal!’
With a quaint moue of professional vanity, Smiley conceded that it might well have been.
The essence of the report was simple. The Japanese defence official was a mole. He had been recruited before the war in the shadow of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, by one Martin Brandt, a German journalist who seemed to be connected with the Comintern. Brandt, said Connie, was one of Karla’s names in the nineteen-thirties. Komarov himself had never been a member of the official Tokyo residency inside the Embassy, he’d worked solo with one legman and a direct line to Karla, whose brother officer he had been in the war. Better still, before he arrived in Tokyo he had attended a special training course at a new school outside Moscow set up specially for Karla’s hand-picked pupils. ‘Conclusion,’ Connie sang. ‘Brother Komarov was our first and alas not very distinguished graduate of the Karla training school. He was shot, poor lamb,’ she added, with a dramatic fall of her voice. ‘They never hang, do they: too impatient, the little horrors.’
Now Connie had felt able to go to town, she said. Knowing what signs to look for, she tracked back through Karla’s file. She spent three weeks in Whitehall with the army’s Moscow-gazers combing Soviet army posting bulletins for disguised entries until, from a host of suspects, she reckoned she had three new, identifiable Karla trainees. All were military men, all were personally acquainted with Karla, all were ten to fifteen years his junior. She gave their names as Bardin, Stokovsky and Viktorov, all colonels.
At the mention of this third name a dullness descended over Smiley’s features, and his eyes turned very tired, as if he were staving off boredom.
‘So what became of them all?’ he asked.
‘Bardin changed to Sokolov then Rusakov. Joined the Soviet Delegation to the United Nations in New York. No overt connection with the local residency, no involvement in bread-and-butter operations, no coat-trailing, no talent-spotting, a good solid cover job. Still there for all I know.’
‘Stokovsky?’
‘Went illegal, set up a photographic business in Paris as Grodescu, French Rumanian. Formed an affiliate in Bonn, believed to be running one of Karla’s West German sources from across the border.’
‘And the third? Viktorov?’
‘Sunk without trace.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Smiley, and his boredom seemed to deepen.
‘Trained and disappeared off the face of the earth. May have died of course. One does tend to forget the natural causes.’
‘Oh indeed,’ Smiley agreed, ‘oh quite.’
He had that art, from miles and miles of secret life, of listening at the front of his mind; of letting the primary incidents unroll directly before him while another, quite separate faculty wrestled with their historical connection. The connection ran through Tarr to Irina, through Irina to her poor lover who was so proud of being called Lapin, and of serving one Colonel Gregor Viktorov ‘whose workname at the Embassy is Polyakov’. In his memory, these things were like part of a childhood; he would never forget them.
‘Were there photographs, Connie?’ he asked glumly. ‘Did you land physical descriptions at all?’
‘Of Bardin at the United Nations, naturally. Of Stokovsky, perhaps. We had an old press picture from his soldiering days but we could never quite nail the verification.’