He had used the identical form of words, Smiley noticed, in a top secret and personal letter to a fan at the Treasury, requesting for himself greater discretion in ad hoc payments to agents.
‘He’ll be saying he won him at the football pool next,’ Control warned, who despite his second youth had an old man’s inaccuracy when it came to popular idiom. ‘Now get him to tell you why he won’t tell you.’
Alleline was undeterred. He too was flushed, but with triumph, not disease. He filled his big chest for a long speech, which he delivered entirely to Smiley, tonelessly, rather as a Scottish police sergeant might give evidence before the courts.
‘The identity of Source Merlin is a secret which is not mine to divulge. He’s the fruit of a long cultivation by certain people in this service. People who are bound to me, as I am to them. People who are not at all entertained, either, by the failure rate around this place. There’s been too much blown. Too much lost, wasted, too many scandals. I’ve said so many times but I might as well have spoken to the wind for all the damn care he paid me.’
‘He’s referring to me,’ Control explained from the sidelines. ‘I am he in this speech, you follow, George?’
‘The ordinary principles of tradecraft and security have gone to the wall in this service. Need to know: where is it? Compartmentation at all levels: where is it, George? There’s too much regional back-biting, stimulated from the top.’
‘Another reference to myself,’ Control put in.
‘Divide and rule, that’s the principle at work these days. Personalities who should be helping to fight Communism are all at one another’s throats. We’re losing our top partners.’
‘He means the Americans,’ Control explained.
‘We’re losing our livelihood. Our self-respect. We’ve had enough.’ He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. ‘We’ve had a bellyful, in fact.’
‘And like everyone who’s had enough,’ said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, ‘he wants more.’
Now for a while Lacon’s files, instead of Smiley’s memory, once more took up the story. It was typical of the atmosphere of those last months that, having been brought in on the affair at the beginning, Smiley should have received no subsequent word of how it had developed. Control detested failure, as he detested illness, and his own failures most. He knew that to recognise failure was to live with it; that a service that did not struggle did not survive. He detested the silk-shirt agents, who hogged large chunks of the budget to the detriment of the bread-and-butter networks in which he put his faith. He loved success, but he detested miracles if they put the rest of his endeavour out of focus. He detested weakness as he detested sentiment and religion, and he detested Percy Alleline who had a dash of most of them. His way of dealing with them was literally to close the door: to withdraw into the dingy solitude of his upper rooms, receive no visitors and have all his phone calls fed to him by the mothers. The same quiet ladies fed him jasmine tea and the countless office files which he sent for and returned in heaps. Smiley would see them piled before the door as he went about his own business of trying to keep the rest of the Circus afloat. Many were old, from the days before Control led the pack. Some were personal, the biographies of past and present members of the service.
Control never said what he was doing. If Smiley asked the mothers, or if Bill Haydon sauntered in, favourite boy, and made the same enquiry, they only shook their heads or silently raised their eyebrows towards paradise: ‘A terminal case,’ said these gentle glances. ‘We are humouring a great man at the end of his career.’ But Smiley – as he now patiently leafed through file after file, and in a corner of his complex mind rehearsed Irina’s letter to Ricki Tarr – Smiley knew, and in a quite real way took comfort from the knowledge, that he was not after all the first to make this journey of exploration; that Control’s ghost was his companion into all but the furthest reaches; and might even have stayed the whole distance if Operation Testify, at the eleventh hour, had not stopped him dead.