‘The Alexandra’s a real ramshackle old place, Mr Smiley, off Marble Road, with a stack of wooden balconies. As for the locks, why, sir, they give up when they see you coming.’
In a very short time therefore Tarr was standing inside Boris’s room with his back against the door, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. He was still standing there when a woman spoke to him in Russian drowsily from the bed.
‘It was Boris’s wife,’ Tarr explained. ‘She was crying. Look, I’ll call her Irina, right? Mr Guillam has the details.’
Smiley was already objecting: wife was impossible, he said. Centre would never let them both out of Russia at the same time, they’d keep one and send the other-
‘Common-law marriage,’ Guillam said drily, ‘Unofficial but permanent.’
‘There’s a lot that are the other way round these days,’ said Tarr with a sharp grin at no one, least of all at Smiley, and Guillam shot him another foul look.
CHAPTER SIX
From the outset of this meeting Smiley had assumed for the main a Buddha-like inscrutability from which neither Tarr’s story nor the rare interjections of Lacon and Guillam could rouse him. He sat leaning back with his short legs bent, head forward and plump hands linked across his generous stomach. His hooded eyes had closed behind the thick lenses. His only fidget was to polish his glasses on the silk lining of his tie, and when he did this his eyes had a soaked, naked look which was embarrassing to those who caught him at it. His interjection, however, and the donnish, inane sound which followed Guillam’s explanation, now acted like a signal upon the rest of the gathering, bringing a shuffling of chairs and a clearing of throats.
Lacon was foremost: ‘George, what are your drinking habits? Can I get you a Scotch or anything?’ He offered drink solicitously, like aspirin for a headache. ‘I forgot to say it earlier,’ he explained. ‘George, a bracer: come. It’s winter, after all. A nip of something?’
‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Smiley said.
He would have liked a little coffee from the percolator but somehow he didn’t feel able to ask. Also he remembered it was terrible.
‘Guillam?’ Lacon proceeded. No; Guillam also found it impossible to accept alcohol from Lacon.
He didn’t offer anything to Tarr, who went straight on with his narrative.
Tarr took Irina’s presence calmly, he said. He had worked up his fallback before he entered the building and now he went straight into his act. He didn’t pull a gun or slap his hand over her mouth or any of that tripe, as he put it, but he said he had come to speak to Boris on a private matter, he was sorry and he was damn well going to sit there till Boris showed up. In good Australian, as became an outraged car salesman from down under, he explained that while he didn’t want to barge into anyone’s business he was damned if he was going to have his girl and his money stolen in a single night by a lousy Russian who couldn’t pay for his pleasures. He worked up a lot of outrage but managed to keep his voice down and then he waited to see what she did.
And that, said Tarr, was how it all began.
It was eleven thirty when he made Boris’s room. He left at one thirty with a promise of a meeting next night. By then the situation was all the other way: ‘We weren’t doing anything improper, mind. Just pen friends, right, Mr Smiley?’
For a moment, that bland sneer seemed to lay claim to Smiley’s most precious secrets.
‘Right,’ he assented vapidly.
There was nothing exotic about Irina’s presence in Hong Kong and no reason why Thesiriger should have known of it, Tarr explained. Irina was a member of the delegation in her own right. She was a trained textile buyer: ‘Come to think of it, she was a sight better qualified than her old man, if I can call him that. She was a plain kid, a bit blue-stocking for my taste, but she was young and she had one hell of a pretty smile when she stopped crying.’ Tarr coloured quaintly. ‘She was good company,’ he insisted, as if arguing against a trend. ‘When Mr Thomas from Adelaide came into her life she was at the end of the line from worrying what to do about the demon Boris. She thought I was the Angel Gabriel. Who could she talk to about her husband who wouldn’t turn the dogs on him? She’d no chums on the delegation, she’d no one she trusted even back in Moscow, she said. Nobody who hadn’t been through it would ever know what it was like trying to keep a ruined relationship going while all the time you’re on the move.’ Smiley was once more in a deep trance. ‘Hotel after hotel, city after city, not even allowed to speak to the natives in a natural way or get a smile from a stranger, that’s how she described her life. She reckoned it was a pretty miserable state of affairs, Mr Smiley, and there was a lot of God-thumping and an empty vodka bottle beside the bed to show for it. Why couldn’t she be like normal people? she kept saying. Why couldn’t she enjoy the Lord’s sunshine like the rest of us? She loved sightseeing, she loved foreign kids, why couldn’t she have a kid of her own? A kid born free, not in captivity. She kept saying that: born in captivity, born free. “I’m a jolly person, Thomas. I’m a normal, sociable girl. I like people: why should I deceive them when I like them?” And then she said, the trouble was that long ago she had been chosen for the work that made her frozen like an old woman and cut her off from God. So that’s why she’d had a drink and why she was having a cry. She’d kind of forgotten her husband by then, she was apologising for having a fling, more.’ Again he faltered. ‘I could scent it, Mr Smiley. There was gold in her. I could scent it from the start. Knowledge is power, they say, sir, and Irina had the power, same as she had quality. She was hellbent maybe, but she could still give her all. I can sense generosity in a woman where I meet it, Mr Smiley. I have a talent for it. And this lady was all set to be generous. Jesus, how do you describe a hunch? Some people can smell water under the ground…’