According to a recently released prisoner from Lubianka, Moscow Centre held a secret execution in the punishment block in July. The victims were three of its own functionaries. One was a woman. All three were shot in the back of the neck.
‘It was stamped “internal”,’ Guillam said dully. They had parked in a layby beside a roadhouse hung with fairy lights. ‘Somebody from London Station had scribbled on it: Can anyone identify the bodies?
By the coloured glow of the lights, Guillam watched Smiley’s face pucker in disgust.
‘Yes,’ he agreed at last. ‘Yes, well now the woman was Irina, wasn’t she? Then there was Ivlov and then there was Boris, her husband, I suppose.’ His voice remained extremely matter of fact. ‘Tarr mustn’t know,’ he continued, as if shaking off lassitude. ‘It is vital that he should have no wind of this. God knows what he would do, or not do, if he knew that Irina was dead.’ For some moments neither moved; perhaps for their different reasons neither had the strength just then, or the heart.
‘I ought to telephone,’ said Smiley, but he made no attempt to leave the car.
‘George?’
‘I have a phone call to make,’ he muttered. ‘Lacon.’
‘Then make it.’
Reaching across him, Guillam pushed open the door. Smiley clambered out, walked a distance over the tarmac, then seemed to change his mind and came back.
‘Come and eat something,’ he said through the window, in the same preoccupied tone. ‘I don’t think even Toby’s people would follow us in here.’
It was once a restaurant, now a transport cafe with trappings of old grandeur. The menu was bound in red leather and stained with grease. The boy who brought it was half asleep.
‘I hear the coq au vin is always reliable,’ said Smiley with a poor effort at humour, as he returned from the telephone booth in the corner. And in a quieter voice, that fell short and echoed nowhere: ‘Tell me, how much do you know about Karla?’
‘About as much as I know about Witchcraft, and Source Merlin, and whatever else it said on the paper I signed for Porteous.’
‘Ah well now that’s a very good answer, as it happens. You meant it as a rebuke, I expect, but, as it happens, the analogy was most apt.’ The boy reappeared, swinging a bottle of Burgundy like an Indian club. ‘Would you please let it breathe a little?’
The boy stared at Smiley as if he were mad.
‘Open it and leave it on the table,’ said Guillam curtly.
It was not the whole story Smiley told. Afterwards Guillam did notice several gaps. But it was enough to lift his spirits from the doldrums where they had strayed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
‘It is the business of agent runners to turn themselves into legends,’ Smiley began, rather as if he were delivering a trainee lecture at the Nursery. ‘They do this first to impress their agents. Later they try it out on their colleagues and in my personal experience make rare asses of themselves in consequence. A few go so far as to try it on themselves. Those are the charlatans and they must be got rid of quickly, there’s no other way.’
Yet legends were made and Karla was one of them. Even his age was a mystery. Most likely Karla was not his real name. Decades of his life were not accounted for, and probably never would be, since the people he worked with had a way of dying off or keeping their mouths shut.
‘There’s a story that his father was in the Okhrana and later reappeared in the Cheka. I don’t think it’s true but it may be. There’s another that he worked as a kitchen boy on an armoured train against Japanese Occupation troops in the East. He is said to have learnt his tradecraft from Berg – to have been his ewe lamb in fact – which is a bit like being taught music by… oh, name a great composer. So far as I am concerned, his career began in Spain in thirty-six, because that at least is documented. He posed as a White Russian journalist in the Franco cause and recruited a stable of German agents. It was a most intricate operation and for a young man remarkable. He popped up next in the Soviet counter-offensive against Smolensk in the autumn of forty-one as an intelligence officer under Konev. He had the job of running networks of partisans behind the German lines. Along the way he discovered that his radio operator had been turned round and was transmitting radio messages to the enemy. He turned him back and from then on played a radio game which had them going in all directions.’