Part 16 (1/2)

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?

' ”Sure I can swing it,” I said. ”If you want me to do duty officer, I'll do it.” He said he'd give me the rest of the story on Sat.u.r.day. Meanwhile I must tell no one. I mustn't give a hint anywhere in the building, even that he'd asked me this one thing. He needed someone good to man the switchboard in case there was a crisis, but it had to be someone from an outstation or someone like me who'd been away from head office for a long time. And it had to be an old hand.'

So Sam went to Mary Masterman and sold her a hard-luck story about not being able to get the tenant out of his flat before he went on leave on Monday; how would it be if he did her duty for her and saved himself the hotel? He took over at nine on Sat.u.r.day morning with his toothbrush and six cans of beer in a briefcase which still had palm tree stickers on the side. Geoff Agate was slated to relieve him on Sunday evening.

Once again Sam dwelt on how dead the place was. Back in the old days, Sat.u.r.days were much like any other day, he said. Most regional sections had a deskman working weekends, some even had night staff, and when you took a tour of the building you had the feeling that, warts and all, this was an outfit that had a lot going. But that Sat.u.r.day morning the building might have been evacuated, said Sam; which in a way, from what he heard later, it had been - on orders from Control. A couple of wranglers toiled on the second floor, the radio and code rooms were going strong but those boys worked all the hours anyway. Otherwise, said Sam, it was the big silence. He sat around waiting for Control to ring but nothing happened. He fleshed out another hour teasing the janitors whom he reckoned the idlest lot of so-and-so's in the Circus. He checked their attendance lists and found two typists and one desk officer marked in but absent, so he put the head janitor, a new boy called Mellows, on report. Finally he went upstairs to see if Control was in.

'He was sitting all alone, except for MacFadean. No mothers, no you, just old Mac peeking around with jasmine tea and sympathy. Too much?'

'No, just go on please. As much detail as you can remember.'

'So then Control peeled off another veil. Half a veil. Someone was doing a special job for him, he said. It was of great importance to the Service. He kept saying that: to the Service. Not Whitehall or sterling or the price of fish, but us. Even when it was all over I must never breathe a word about it. Not even to you. Or Bill or Bland or anyone.'

'Nor Alleline?'

'He never mentioned Percy once.'

'No,' Smiley agreed. 'He scarcely could at the end.'

'I should regard him for the night as Director of Operations. I should see myself as cut-out between Control and whatever was going on in the rest of the building. If anything came in, a signal, a phone call, however trivial it seemed, I should wait till the coast was clear, then whip upstairs and hand it to Control. No one was to know, now or later, that Control was the man behind the gun. In no case should I phone him or minute him; even the internal lines were taboo. Truth, George,' said Sam, helping himself to a sandwich.

'Oh I do believe you,' said Smiley with feeling.

If outgoing telegrams had to be sent, Sam should once more act as Control's cut-out. He need not expect much to happen till this evening; even then it was most unlikely anything would happen. As to the janitors and people like that, as Control put it, Sam should do his d.a.m.nedest to act natural and look busy.

The seance over, Sam returned to the duty room, sent out for an evening paper, opened a can of beer, selected an outside telephone line and set about losing his s.h.i.+rt. There was steeplechasing at Kempton, which he hadn't watched for years. Early evening, he took another walk around the lines and tested the alarm pads on the floor of the general registry. Three out of the fifteen didn't work and by this time the janitors were really loving him. He cooked himself an egg and when he'd eaten it he trotted upstairs to take a pound off old Mac and give him a beer.

'He'd asked me to put him a quid on some nag with three left feet. I chatted with him for ten minutes, went back to my lair, wrote some letters, watched a rotten movie on the telly, then turned in. The first call came just as I was getting to sleep. Eleven twenty exactly. The phones didn't stop ringing for the next ten hours. I thought the switchboard was going to blow up in my face.'

'Arcadi's five down,' said a voice over the box.

'Excuse me,' said Sam, with his habitual grin, and leaving Smiley to the music slipped upstairs to cope.

Sitting alone, Smiley watched Sam's brown cigarette slowly burning away in the ashtray. He waited, Sam didn't return, he wondered whether he should stub it out. Not allowed to smoke on duty, he thought; house rules.

'All done,' said Sam.

The first call came from the Foreign Office resident clerk on the direct line, said Sam. In the Whitehall stakes, you might say, the Foreign Office won by a curled lip.

'The Reuters headman in London had just called him with a story of a shooting in Prague. A British spy had been shot dead by Russian security forces, there was a hunt out for his accomplices and was the FO interested? The duty clerk was pa.s.sing it to us for information. I said it sounded bunk.u.m, and rang off just as Mike Meakin of wranglers came through to say that all h.e.l.l had broken out on the Czech air: half of it was coded, but the other half was en clair. He kept getting garbled accounts of a shooting near Brno. Prague or Brno? I asked. Or both? Just Brno. I said keep listening and by then all five buzzers were going. Just as I was leaving the room, the resident clerk came back on the direct. The Reuters man had corrected his story, he said: for Prague read Brno. I closed the door and it was like leaving a wasps' nest in your drawing room. Control was standing at his desk as I came in. He'd heard me coming up the stairs. Has Alleline put a carpet on those stairs, by the way?'

'No,' said Smiley. He was quite impa.s.sive. 'George is like a swift,' Ann had once told Haydon in his hearing. 'He cuts down his body temperature till it's the same as the environment. Then he doesn't lose energy adjusting.'

'You know how quick he was when he looked at you. He checked my hands to see whether I had a telegram for him and I wished I'd been carrying something but they were empty. ”I'm afraid there's a bit of a panic,” I said. I gave him the gist, he looked at his watch, I suppose he was trying to work out what should have been happening if everything had been plain sailing. I said ”Can I have a brief, please?” He sat down, I couldn't see him too well, he had that low green light on his desk. I said again, ”I'll need a brief. Do you want me to deny it? Why don't I get someone in?” No answer. Mind you, there wasn't anyone to get, but I didn't know that yet. ”I must have a brief.” We could hear footsteps downstairs and I knew the radio boys were trying to find me. ”Do you want to come down and handle it yourself?” I said. I went round to the other side of the desk, stepping over these files, all open at different places; you'd think he was compiling an encyclopaedia. Some of them must have been pre-war. He was sitting like this.'

Sam bunched his fingers, laid the tips to his forehead and stared at the desk. His other hand was laid flat, holding Control's imaginary fob watch. ' ”Tell MacFadean to get me a cab then find Smiley.” ”What about the operation?” I asked. I had to wait all night for an answer. ”It's deniable,” he says. ”Both men had foreign doc.u.ments. No one could know they were British at this stage.” ”They're only talking about one man,” I said. Then I said, ”Smiley's in Berlin.” That's what I think I said anyway. So we have another two-minute silence. ”Anyone will do. It makes no difference.” I should have been sorry for him I suppose but just then I couldn't raise much sympathy. I was having to hold the baby and I didn't know a d.a.m.n thing. MacFadean wasn't around so I reckoned Control could find his own cab and by the time I got to the bottom of the steps I must have looked like Gordon at Khartoum. The duty harridan from monitoring was waving bulletins at me like flags, a couple of janitors were yelling at me, the radio boy was clutching a bunch of signals, the phones were going, not just my own, but half a dozen of the direct lines on the fourth floor. I went straight to the duty room and switched off all the lines while I tried to get my bearings. The monitor - what's that woman's name for G.o.d's sake, used to play bridge with the Dolphin?'

'Purcell. Molly Purcell.'

'That's the one. Her story was at least straightforward. Prague radio was promising an emergency bulletin in half an hour's time. That was a quarter of an hour ago. The bulletin would concern an act of gross provocation by a Western power, an infringement of Czechoslovakia's sovereignty, and an outrage against freedom-loving people of all nations. Apart from that,' said Sam drily, 'it was going to be laughs all the way. I rang Bywater Street of course, then I made a signal to Berlin telling them to find you and fly you back by yesterday. I gave Mellows the main phone numbers and sent him off to find an outside line and get hold of whoever was around of the top bra.s.s. Percy was in Scotland for the weekend and out to dinner. His cook gave Mellows a number, he rang it, spoke to his host Percy had just left.'

'I'm sorry,' Smiley interrupted. 'Rang Bywater Street, what for?' He was holding his upper lip between his finger and thumb, pulling it out like a deformity, while he stared into the middle distance.

'In case you'd come back early from Berlin,' said Sam.

'And had I?'

'No.'

'So who did you speak to?'

'Ann.'

Smiley said: 'Ann's away just now. Could you remind me how it went, that conversation?'

'I asked for you and she said you were in Berlin.'

'And that was all?'

'It was a crisis, George,' Sam said in a warning tone.

'So?'

'I asked her whether by any chance she knew where Bill Haydon was. It was urgent. I gathered he was on leave but might be around. Somebody once told me they were cousins.' He added: 'Besides, he's a friend of the family, I understood.'

'Yes. He is. What did she say?'

'Gave me a s.h.i.+rty ”no” and rang off. Sorry about that, George. War's war.'

'How did she sound?' Smiley asked after letting the aphorism lie between them for some while.

'I told you: s.h.i.+rty.'

Roy was at Leeds University talent-spotting, said Sam, and not available.

Between calls, Sam was getting the whole book thrown at him. He might as well have invaded Cuba: 'The military were yelling about Czech tank movements along the Austrian border, the wranglers couldn't hear themselves think for the radio traffic round Brno, and as for the Foreign Office, the resident clerk was having the vapours and yellow fever all in one. First Lacon then the Minister were baying at the doors and at half past twelve we had the promised Czech news bulletin, twenty minutes late but none the worse for that. A British spy named Jim Ellis, travelling on false Czech papers and a.s.sisted by Czech counter-revolutionaries, had attempted to kidnap an unnamed Czech general in the forest near Brno, and smuggle him over the Austrian border. Ellis had been shot but they didn't say killed, other arrests were imminent. I looked Ellis up in the workname index and found Jim Prideaux. And I thought, just as Control must have thought: If Jim is shot and has Czech papers, how the h.e.l.l do they know his workname, and how do they know he's British? Then Bill Haydon arrived, white as a sheet. Picked up the story on the tickertape at his club. He turned straight round and came to the Circus.'

'At what time was that exactly?' Smiley asked, with a vague frown. 'It must have been rather late.'

Sam looked as if he wished he could make it easier. 'One fifteen,' he said.

'Which is late, isn't it, for reading club tickertapes?'