The sweat on Tarr’s face was suddenly unbearable. There was too much of it, it was like tears all over. The cards no longer interested Smiley, his eye had settled on a different game. It was a toy, made of two steel rods like the shafts of a pair of tongs. The trick was to roll a steel ball along them. The further you rolled it the more points you won when it fell into one of the holes underneath.
‘The other reason you might not have told us, I suppose, is that you burnt them. You burnt the British passports, I mean, not the Swiss ones.’
Go easy, George, thought Guillam, and softly moved a pace nearer to cover the gap between them. Just go easy.
‘You knew that Poole was blown, so you burnt the Poole passports you had bought for Danny and her mother, but you kept your own because there was no alternative. Then you made travel bookings for the two of them in the name of Poole in order to convince everybody that you still believed in the Poole passports. By everybody, I think I mean Karla’s footpads, don’t I? You doctored the Swiss escapes, one for Danny, one for her mother, took a chance that the numbers wouldn’t be noticed, and you made a different set of arrangements which you didn’t advertise. Arrangements which matured earlier than those you made for the Pooles. How would that be? Such as staying out East but somewhere else, like Djakarta: somewhere you have friends.’
Even from where he stood, Guillam was too slow. Tarr’s hands were at Smiley’s throat, the chair toppled and Tarr fell with him. From the heap, Guillam selected Tarr’s right arm and flung it into a lock against his back, bringing it very near to breaking as he did so. From nowhere Fawn appeared, took the gun from the pillow and walked back to Tarr as if to give him a hand. Then Smiley was straightening his suit and Tarr was back on the bed, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief.
Smiley said: ‘I don’t know where they are. As far as I know, no harm has come to them. You believe that, do you?’
Tarr was staring at him, waiting. His eyes were furious, but over Smiley a kind of calm had settled, and Guillam guessed it was the reassurance he had been hoping for.
‘Maybe you should keep a better eye on your own damn woman and leave mine alone,’ Tarr whispered, his hand across his mouth. With an exclamation, Guillam sprang forward but Smiley restrained him.
‘As long as you don’t try to communicate with them,’ Smiley continued, ‘it’s probably better that I shouldn’t know. Unless you want me to do something about them. Money or protection or comfort of some sort?’
Tarr shook his head. There was blood in his mouth, a lot of it, and Guillam realised Fawn must have hit him but he couldn’t work out when.
‘It won’t be long now,’ Smiley said. ‘Perhaps a week. Less if I can manage it. Try not to think too much.’
By the time they left, Tarr was grinning again, so Guillam guessed that the visit, or the insult to Smiley or the smash in the face, had done him good.
‘Those football pool coupons,’ Smiley said quietly to Fawn as they climbed into the car: ‘You don’t post them anywhere, do you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well, let’s hope to God he doesn’t have a win,’ Smiley remarked in a most unusual fit of jocularity, and there was laughter all round.
The memory plays strange tricks on an exhausted, overladen brain. As Guillam drove, one part of his conscious mind upon the road and another still wretchedly grappling with even more gothic suspicions of Camilla, odd images of this and other long days drifted freely through his memory. Days of plain terror in Morocco as one by one his agent lines went dead on him, and every footfall on the stair had him scurrying to the window to check the street; days of idleness in Brixton when he watched that poor world slip by and wondered how long before he joined it. And suddenly the written report was there before him on his desk: cyclostyled on blue flimsy because it was traded, source unknown and probably unreliable, and every word of it came back to him in letters a foot high.