Part 25 (2/2)

To this question also there seemed no immediate answer. Returning to Bywater Street, he again had the impression of being followed, and tried to telephone Mendel with the number of a cab which had twice caught his eye, asking him to make immediate enquiries. For once, Mendel was out till after midnight: Smiley slept uneasily and woke at five. By eight he was back at Sarratt, to find Haydon in festive mood. The inquisitors had not bothered him; he had been told by Craddox that the exchanges had been agreed and he should expect to travel tomorrow or the next day. His requests had a valedictory ring; the balance of his salary and the proceeds of any odd sales made on his behalf should be forwarded to him care of the Moscow Narodny Bank, who would also handle his mail. The Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol had a few pictures of his, including some early watercolours of Damascus, which he coveted. Could Smiley please arrange? Then, the cover for his disappearance.

'Play it long,' he advised. 'Say I've been posted, lay on the mystery, give it a couple of years then run me down...'

'Oh I think we can manage something, thank you,' Smiley said.

For the first time since Smiley had known him, Haydon was worried about clothes. He wanted to arrive looking like someone, he said: first impressions were so important. 'Those Moscow tailors are unspeakable. Dress you up like a b.l.o.o.d.y beadle.'

'Quite,' said Smiley, whose opinion of London tailors was no better.

Oh and there was a boy, he added carelessly, a sailor friend, lived in Notting Hill. 'Better give him a couple of hundred to shut him up. Can you do that out of the reptile fund?'

'I'm sure.'

He wrote out an address. In the same spirit of good fellows.h.i.+p, Haydon then entered into what Smiley had called the details.

He declined to discuss any part of his recruitment nor of his lifelong relations.h.i.+p with Karla. 'Lifelong?' Smiley repeated quickly. 'When did you meet?' The a.s.sertions of yesterday appeared suddenly nonsensical, but Haydon would not elaborate.

From about nineteen fifty onwards, if he was to be believed, Haydon had made Karla occasional selected gifts of intelligence. These early efforts were confined to what he hoped would discreetly advance the Russian cause over the American; he was 'scrupulous not to give them anything harmful to ourselves' as he put it, or harmful to our agents in the field.

The Suez adventure in fifty-six finally persuaded him of the inanity of the British situation and of the British capacity to spike the advance of history while not being able to offer anything by way of contribution. The sight of the Americans sabotaging the British action in Egypt was, paradoxically, an additional incentive. He would say therefore that from fifty-six on, he was a committed, full-time Soviet mole with no holds barred. In sixty-one he formally received Soviet citizens.h.i.+p, and over the next ten years two Soviet medals - quaintly, he would not say which, though he insisted that they were 'top stuff'. Unfortunately, overseas postings during this period limited his access; and since he insisted on his information being acted upon wherever possible - 'rather than being chucked into some daft Soviet archive' - his work was dangerous as well as uneven. With his return to London, Karla sent him Polly (which was evidently the house name for Polyakov) as a helpmate, but Haydon found the constant pressure of clandestine meetings difficult to sustain, particularly in view of the quant.i.ty of stuff he was photographing.

He declined to discuss cameras, equipment, pay or trade-craft during this pre-Merlin period in London, and Smiley was conscious all the while that even the little Haydon was telling him was selected with meticulous care from a greater, and perhaps somewhat different truth.

Meanwhile both Karla and Haydon were receiving signals that Control was smelling a rat. Control was ill, of course, but clearly he would never willingly give up the reins while there was a chance that he was making Karla a present of the service. It was a race between Control's researches and his health. Twice, he had very nearly struck gold - again, Haydon declined to say how - and if Karla had not been quick on his feet, the mole Gerald would have been trapped. It was out of this nervy situation that first Merlin, and finally Operation Testify, were born. Witchcraft was conceived primarily to take care of the succession: to put Alleline next to the throne, and hasten Control's demise. Secondly, of course, Witchcraft gave Centre absolute autonomy over the product flowing into Whitehall. Thirdly - and in the long run most important, Haydon insisted - it brought the Circus into position as a major weapon against the American target.

'How much of the material was genuine?' Smiley asked.

Obviously the standard varied according to what one wanted to achieve, said Haydon. In theory, fabrication was very easy: Haydon had only to advise Karla of Whitehall's areas of ignorance and the fabricators would write for them. Once or twice, for the h.e.l.l of it, said Haydon, he had written the odd report himself. It was an amusing exercise to receive, evaluate and distribute one's own work. The advantages of Witchcraft in terms of tradecraft were of course inestimable. It placed Haydon virtually out of Control's reach, and gave him a cast-iron cover story for meeting Polly whenever he wished. Often months would pa.s.s without their meeting at all. Haydon would photograph Circus doc.u.ments in the seclusion of his room - under cover of preparing Polly's chickenfeed - hand it over to Esterhase with a lot of other rubbish and let him cart it down to the safe house in Lock Gardens.

'It was a cla.s.sic,' Haydon said simply. 'Percy made the running, I slipstreamed behind him, Roy and Toby did the legwork.'

Here Smiley asked politely whether Karla had ever thought of having Haydon actually take over the Circus himself: why bother with a stalking horse at all? Haydon stalled and it occurred to Smiley that Karla, like Control, might well have considered Haydon better cast as a subordinate.

Operation Testify, said Haydon, was rather a desperate throw. Haydon was certain that Control was getting very warm indeed. An a.n.a.lysis of the files he was drawing produced an uncomfortably complete inventory of the operations which Haydon had blown, or otherwise caused to abort. He had also succeeded in narrowing the field to officers of a certain age and rank...

'Was Stevcek's original offer genuine, by the way?' Smiley asked.

'Good Lord no,' said Haydon, actually shocked. 'It was a fix from the start. Stevcek existed, of course. He was a distinguished Czech general. But he never made an offer to anyone.'

Here Smiley sensed Haydon falter. For the first time, he actually seemed uneasy about the morality of his behaviour. His manner became noticeably defensive.

'Obviously, we needed to be certain Control would rise, and how he would rise... and who he would send. We couldn't have him picking some half-a.r.s.ed little pavement artist: it had to be a big gun to make the story stick. We knew he'd only settle for someone outside the mainstream and someone who wasn't Witchcraft cleared. If we made it a Czech, he'd have to choose a Czech speaker, naturally.'

'Naturally.'

'We wanted old Circus: someone who could bring down the temple a bit.'

'Yes,' said Smiley, remembering that heaving, sweating figure on the hilltop: 'Yes, I see the logic of that.'

'Well, d.a.m.n it, I got him back,' Haydon snapped.

'Yes, that was good of you. Tell me, did Jim come to see you before he left on that Testify mission?'

'Yes, he did, as a matter of fact.'

'To say what?'

For a long, long while Haydon hesitated, then did not answer. But the answer was written there all the same, in the sudden emptying of his eyes, in the shadow of guilt that crossed his thin face. He came to warn you, Smiley thought; because he loved you. To warn you; just as he came to tell me that Control was mad, but couldn't find me because I was in Berlin. Jim was watching your back for you right till the end.

Also, Haydon resumed, it had to be a country with a recent history of counter-revolution: Czecho was honestly the only place.

Smiley appeared not quite to be listening.

'Why did you bring him back?' he asked. 'For friends.h.i.+p's sake? Because he was harmless and you held all the cards?'

It wasn't just that, Haydon explained. As long as Jim was in a Czech prison (he didn't say Russian) people would agitate for him, and see him as some sort of key. But once he was back, everyone in Whitehall would conspire to keep him quiet: that was the way of it with repatriations.

'I'm surprised Karla didn't just shoot him. Or did he hold back out of delicacy towards you?'

But Haydon had drifted away again into half-baked political a.s.sertions.

Then he began speaking about himself, and already, to Smiley's eye, he seemed quite visibly to be shrinking to something quite small and mean. He was touched to hear that Ionesco had recently promised us a play in which the hero kept silent and everyone round him spoke incessantly. When the psychologists and fas.h.i.+onable historians came to write their apologias for him, he hoped they would remember that that was how he saw himself. As an artist, he had said all he had to say at the age of seventeen, and one had to do something with one's later years. He was awfully sorry he couldn't take some of his friends with him. He hoped Smiley would remember him with affection.

Smiley wanted at that point to tell him that he would not remember him in those terms at all, and a good deal more besides, but there seemed no point and Haydon was having another nose bleed.

'Oh, I'm to ask you to avoid publicity by the way. Miles Sercombe made quite a thing of it.'

Here Haydon managed a laugh. Having messed up the Circus in private, he said, he had no wish to repeat the process in public.

Before he left, Smiley asked the one question he still cared about.

'I'll have to break it to Ann. Is there anything particular you want me to pa.s.s on to her?'

It required discussion for the implication of Smiley's question to get through to him. At first, he thought Smiley had said 'Jan', and couldn't understand why he had not yet called on her.

'Oh your Ann,' he said, as if there were a lot of Anns around. It was Karla's idea, he explained. Karla had long recognised that Smiley represented the biggest threat to the mole Gerald. 'He said you were quite good.'

'Thank you.'

'But you had this one price: Ann. The last illusion of the illusionless man. He reckoned that if I was known to be Ann's lover around the place you wouldn't see me very straight when it came to other things.' His eyes, Smiley noticed, had become very fixed. Pewtery, Ann called them. 'Not to strain it or anything but if it was possible, join the queue. Point?'

'Point,' said Smiley.

For instance, on the night of Testify, Karla was adamant that if possible Haydon should be dallying with Ann. As a form of insurance.

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