‘Three up,’ said a gravel voice. Smiley guessed it belonged to the chipped man with blood pressure.
‘Then he’s got eight to lose,’ said Sam blandly. ‘Keep him at the table, that’s all. Make a hero of him.’ He switched off and grinned. Smiley grinned back.
‘Really, it’s a great life,’ Sam assured him. ‘Better than selling washing machines, anyway. Bit odd, of course, putting on the dinner jacket at ten in the morning. Reminds me of diplomatic cover.’ Smiley laughed. ‘Straight, too, believe it or not,’ Sam added with no change to his expression. ‘We get all the help we need from the arithmetic.’
‘I’m sure you do,’ said Smiley, once more with great politeness.
‘Care for some music?’
It was canned and came out of the ceiling. Sam turned it up as loud as they could bear.
‘So what can I do for you?’ Sam asked, the smile broadening.
‘I want to talk to you about the night Jim Prideaux was shot. You were duty officer.’
Sam smoked brown cigarettes that smelt of cigar. Lighting one, he let the end catch fire, then watched it die to an ember. ‘Writing your memoirs, old boy?’ he enquired.
‘We’re reopening the case.’
‘What’s this we, old boy?’
‘I, myself and me, with Lacon pushing and the Minister pulling.’
‘All power corrupts but some must govern and in that case Brother Lacon will reluctantly scramble to the top of the heap.’
‘It hasn’t changed,’ said Smiley.
Sam drew ruminatively on his cigarette. The music switched to phrases of Noel Coward.
‘It’s a dream of mine, actually,’ said Sam Collins through the noise. ‘One of these days Percy Alleline walks through that door with a shabby brown suitcase and asks for a flutter. He puts the whole of the secret vote on red and loses.’
‘The record’s been filleted,’ said Smiley. ‘It’s a matter of going to people and asking what they remember. There’s almost nothing on the file at all.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Sam. Over the phone he ordered sandwiches. ‘Live on them,’ he explained. ‘Sandwiches and canapés. One of the perks.’
He was pouring coffee when the red pinlight glowed between them on the desk.
‘Chummy’s even,’ said the gravel voice.
‘Then start counting,’ said Sam and closed the switch.
He told it plainly but precisely, the way a good soldier recalls a battle, not to win or lose any more, but simply to remember. He had just come back from abroad, he said, a three-year stint in Vientiane. He’d checked in with personnel and cleared himself with the Dolphin; no one seemed to have any plans for him so he was thinking of taking off for the South of France for a month’s leave when MacFadean, that old janitor who was practically Control’s valet, scooped him up in the corridor and marched him to Control’s room.
‘This was which day exactly?’ said Smiley.
‘October 19th.’
‘The Thursday.’
‘The Thursday. I was thinking of flying to Nice on Monday. You were in Berlin. I wanted to buy you a drink but the mothers said you were occupé and when I checked with Movements they told me you’d gone to Berlin.’
‘Yes, that’s true,’ Smiley said simply. ‘Control sent me there.’
To get me out of the way, he might have added; it was a feeling he had had even at the time.
‘I hunted round for Bill but Bill was also in baulk. Control had packed him up-country somewhere,’ said Sam, avoiding Smiley’s eye.
‘On a wild goose chase,’ Smiley murmured. ‘But he came back.’
Here Sam tipped a sharp, quizzical glance in Smiley’s direction, but he added nothing on the subject of Bill Haydon’s journey.
‘The whole place seemed dead. Damn nearly caught the first plane back to Vientiane.’
‘It pretty much was dead,’ Smiley confessed, and thought: except for Witchcraft.
And Control, said Sam, looked as though he’d had a five-day fever. He was surrounded by a sea of files, his skin was yellow and as he talked he kept breaking off to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief. He scarcely bothered with the usual fan-dance at all, said Sam. He didn’t congratulate him on three good years in the field, or make some snide reference to his private life which was at that time messy; he simply said he wanted Sam to do weekend duty instead of Mary Masterman, could Sam swing it?