Smiley's People

"Knew him personally at all, did you, sir?" the detective chief superintendent of police asked respectfully in a voice kept deliberately low. "Or perhaps I shouldn't inquire."

The two men had been together for 15 minutes, but this was the superintendent's first question. For a while. Smiley did not seem to hear it, but his silence was not offensive, he had the gift of quiet. Besides, there is a companionship about two men contemplating a corpse. It was an hour before dawn on Hampstead Heath, a dripping, misty, no-man's hour, neither warm nor cold, with a heaven tinted orange by the London glow and the trees glistening like oilskins. They stood side by side in an avenue of beeches and the superintendent was taller by a head: a young giant of a man, prematurely grizzled, a little pompous, perhaps, but with a giant's gentleness that made him naturally befriending. Smiley was clasping his pudgy hands over his belly like a mayor at a cenotaph, and had eyes for nothing but the plastic-covered body lying at his feet in the beam of the superintendent's torch. The walk this far had evidently winded him, for he puffed a little as he stared. From the darkness round them, police receivers crackled on die night air. There were no other lights at all; the superintendent had ordered them extinguished.

"He was just somebody I worked with," Smiley explained after a long delay.

"So I was given to understand, sir," the superintendent said.

He waited hopefully, but nothing more came. "Don't even speak to him," the deputy assistant commissioner (crime and ops) had said to him. "You never saw him and it was two other blokes. Just show him what he wants and drop him down a hole. Fast." Till now, the detective chief superintendent had done exactly that. He had moved, in his own estimation, with the speed of light. The photographer had photographed, the doctor had certified life extinct, the pathologist had inspected the body in situ as a prelude to conducting his autopsy--all with an expedition quite contrary to the proper pace of things, merely in order to clear the way for the visiting irregular, as the deputy assistant commissioner (crime and ops) had liked to call him. The irregular had arrived--with about as much ceremony as a meter reader, the superintendent noted--and the superintendent had led him over the course at a canter. They had looked at footprints, they had tracked the old man's route till here. The superintendent had made a reconstruction of the crime, as well as he was able in the circumstances, and the superintendent was an able man. Now they were in the dip, at the point where the avenue turned, where the rolling mist was thickest. In the torch beam, the dead body was the centerpiece of everything. It lay face downward and spread-eagled, as if it had been crucified to the gravel, and the plastic sheet emphasized its lifelessness. It was the body of an old man, but broad-shouldered still, a body that had battled and endured. The white hair was cut to stubble. One strong, veined hand still grasped a sturdy walking stick. He wore a black overcoat and rubber overshoes. A black beret lay on the ground beside him, and the gravel at his head was black with blood. Some loose change lay about, and a pocket handkerchief, and a small penknife that looked more like a keepsake than a tool. Most likely they had started to search him and given up, sir, the superintendent had said. Most likely they were disturbed, Mr. Smiley, sir; and Smiley had wondered what it must be like to touch a warm body you had just shot.

"If I might possibly take a look at his face, Superintendent," Smiley said.

This time it was the superintendent who caused the delay. "Ah, now, are you sure about that, sir?" He sounded slightly embarrassed. "There'll be better ways of identifying him than that, you know."

"Yes. Yes, I am sure," said Smiley earnestly, as if he really had given the matter great thought.

The superintendent called softly to the trees, where his men stood among their blacked-out cars like a next generation waiting for its turn.

"You there. Hall. Sergeant Pike. Come here at the double and turn him over."

Fast, the deputy assistant commissioner (crime and ops) had said.

Two men slipped forward from the shadows. The elder wore a black beard. Their surgical gloves of elbow length shone ghostly gray. They wore blue overalls and thigh-length rubber boots. Squatting, the bearded man cautiously untucked the plastic sheet while the younger constable laid a hand on the dead man's shoulder as if to wake him up.

"You'll have to try harder than that, lad," the superintendent warned in an altogether crisper tone.

The boy pulled, the bearded sergeant helped him and the body reluctantly rolled over, one arm stiffly waving, the other still clutching the stick.

"Oh, Christ," said the constable. "Oh, bloody hell!"--and clapped a hand over his mouth. The sergeant grabbed his elbow and shoved him away. They heard the sound of retching.

"I don't hold with politics," the superintendent confided to Smiley inconsequentially, staring downward still. "I don't hold with politics and I don't hold with politicians, either. Licensed lunatics most of them, in my view. That's why I joined the force, to be honest." The sinewy mist curled strangely in the steady beam of his torch. "You don't happen to know what did it, do you, sir? I haven't seen a wound like that in fifteen years."

"I'm afraid ballistics are not my province," Smiley replied after another pause for thought.

"No, I don't expect they would be, would they? Seen enough, sir?"

Smiley apparently had not.

"Most people expect to be shot in the chest, really, don't they, sir?" the superintendent remarked brightly. He had learned that small talk sometimes eased the atmosphere on such occasions. "Your neat round bullet that drills a tasteful hole. That's what most people expect. Victim falls gently to his knees to the tune of celestial choirs. It's the telly that does it, I suppose. Whereas your real bullet these days can take off an arm or a leg, so my friends in brown tell me." His voice took on a more practical tone. "Did he have a mustache at all, sir? My sergeant fancied a trace of white whisker on the upper jaw."

"A military one," said Smiley after a long gap, and with his thumb and forefinger absently described the shape upon his own lip while his gaze remained locked upon the old man's body. "I wonder, Superintendent, whether I might just examine the contents of his pockets, possibly?"

"Sergeant Pike."

"Sir!"

"Put that sheet back and tell Mr. Murgotroyd to have his pockets ready for me in the van, will you, what they've left of them? At the double," the superintendent added, as a matter of routine.

"Sir!"

"And come here." The superintendent had taken the sergeant softly by the upper arm. "You tell that young Constable Hall that I can't stop him sicking up, but I won't have his irreverent language." For the superintendent on his home territory was a devoutly Christian man and did not care who knew it. "This way, Mr. Smiley, sir," he added, recovering his gentler tone.

As they moved higher up the avenue, the chatter of the radios faded and they heard instead the angry wheeling of rooks and the growl of the city. The superintendent marched briskly, keeping to the left of the roped-off area. Smiley hurried after him. A windowless van was parked between the trees, its back doors open and a dim light burning inside. Entering, they sat on hard benches. Mr. Murgotroyd had gray hair and wore a gray suit. He crouched before them with a plastic sack like a transparent pillowcase. The sack had a knot at the throat, which he untied. Inside, smaller packages floated. As Mr. Murgotroyd lifted them out, the superintendent read the labels by his torch before handing them to Smiley to consider.

"One scuffed leather coin purse, Continental appearance. Half inside his pocket, half out, left-side jacket. You saw the coins by his body--seventy-two pence. That's all the money on him. Carry a wallet at all, did he, sir?"

"I don't know."

"Our guess is they helped themselves to the wallet, started on the purse, then ran. One bunch keys domestic and various, right-hand trousers... ." He ran on, but Smiley's scrutiny did not relax. Some people act a memory, the superintendent thought, noticing his concentration, others have one. In the superintendent's book, memory was the better half of intelligence, he prized it highest of all (continued on page 290)Smile's People(continued from page 208) mental accomplishments; and Smiley, he knew, possessed it. "One Paddington Borough Library Card in the name of V. Miller, one box Swan Vesta matches partly used, overcoat left. One aliens' registration card, number as reported, also in the name of Vladimir Miller. One bottle tablets, overcoat left. What would the tablets be for, sir, any views on that at all? Name of Sustac, whatever that is, to be taken two or three times a day?"

"Heart," said Smiley.

"And one receipt for the sum of thirteen pounds from the Straight and Steady Minicab Service of Islington, North One."

"May I look?" said Smiley, and the superintendent held it out so that Smiley could read the date and the driver's signature, J. Lamb, in a copybook hand wildly underlined.

The next bag contained a stick of school chalk, yellow and miraculously unbroken. The narrow end was smeared brown as if by a single stroke, but the thick end was unused.

"There's yellow chalk powder on his left hand, too," Mr. Murgotroyd said, speaking for the first time. His complexion was like gray stone. His voice, too, was gray, and mournful as an undertaker's. "We did wonder whether he might be in the teaching line, actually," Mr. Murgotroyd added, but Smiley, either by design or by oversight, did not answer Mr. Murgotroyd's implicit question, and the superintendent did not pursue it.

And a second cotton handkerchief, proffered this time by Mr. Murgotroyd, part blooded, part clean, and carefully ironed into a sharp triangle for the top pocket.

"On his way to a party, we wondered," Mr. Murgotroyd said, this time with no hope at all.

"Crime and ops on the air, sir," a voice called from the front of the van.

Without a word, the superintendent vanished into the darkness, leaving Smiley to the depressed gaze of Mr. Murgotroyd.

"You a specialist of some sort, sir?" Mr. Murgotroyd asked after a long, sad scrutiny of his guest.

"No. No, I'm afraid not," said Smiley.

"Home Office, sir?"

"Alas, not Home Office, either," said Smiley with a benign shake of his head, which somehow made him party to Mr. Murgotroyd's bewilderment.

"My superiors are a little worried about the press, Mr. Smiley," the superintendent said, poking his head into the van again. "Seems they're heading this way, sir."

Smiley clambered quickly out. The two men stood face to face in the avenue.

"You've been very kind," Smiley said. "Thank you."

"Privilege," said the superintendent.

"You don't happen to remember which pocket the chalk was in, do you?" Smiley asked.

"Overcoat left," the superintendent replied in some surprise.

"And the searching of him--could you tell me again how you see that, exactly?"

"They hadn't time or didn't care to turn him over. Knelt by him, fished for his wallet, pulled at his purse. Scattered a few objects as they did so. By then they'd had enough."

"Thank you," said Smiley again.

And a moment later, with more ease than his portly figure might have suggested him capable of, he had vanished among the trees. But not before the superintendent had shone the torch full upon his face, a thing he hadn't done till now for reasons of discretion. And taken an intense professional look at the legendary features, if only to tell his grandchildren in his old age: how George Smiley, sometime chief of the Secret Service, by then retired, had one night come out of the woodwork to peer at some dead foreigner of his who had died in highly nasty circumstances.

Not one face at all, actually, the superintendent reflected. Not when it was lit by the torch like that, indirectly from below. More your whole range of faces. More your patchwork of different ages, people and endeavors. Even--thought the superintendent--of different faiths.

"The best I ever met," old Mendel, the superintendent's onetime superior, had told him over a friendly pint not long ago. Mendel was retired now, like Smiley. But Mendel knew what he was talking about and didn't like funnies any better than the superintendent did--interfering la-di-da amateurs most of them, and devious with it. But not Smiley. Smiley was different, Mendel had said. Smiley was the best--simply the best case man Mendel had ever met--and old Mendel knew what he was talking about.

An abbey, the superintendent decided. That's what he was, an abbey. He would work that into his sermon the next time his turn came around. An abbey, made up of all sorts of conflicting ages and styles and convictions. The superintendent liked that metaphor the more he dwelt on it. He would try it out on his wife when he got home: man as God's architecture, my dear, molded by the hand of ages, infinite in his striving and diversity.... But at that point, the superintendent laid a restraining hand upon his own rhetorical imagination. Maybe not, after all, he thought. Maybe we're flying a mite too high for the course, my friend.

There was another thing about that face the superintendent wouldn't easily forget, either. Later, he talked to old Mendel about it, as he talked to him later about lots of things. The moisture. He'd taken it for dew at first--yet if it was dew, why was the superintendent's own face bone-dry? It wasn't dew and it wasn't grief, either, if his hunch was right. It was a thing that happened to the superintendent himself occasionally and happened to the lads, too, even the hardest; it crept up on them and the superintendent watched for it like a hawk. Usually in kids' cases, where the pointlessness suddenly got through to you--your child batterings, your criminal assaults, your infant rapes. You didn't break down or beat your chest or any of those histrionics. No. You just happened to put your hand to your face and find it damp and you wondered what the hell Christ bothered to die for, if he ever died at all.

And when you had that mood on you, the superintendent told himself with a slight shiver, the best thing you could do was give yourself a couple of days off and take the wife to Margate, or before you knew where you were, you found yourself getting a little too rough with people for your own good health.

"Sergeant!" the superintendent yelled.

The bearded figure loomed before him.

"Switch the lights on and get it back to normal," the superintendent ordered. "And ask Inspector Hallowes to slip up here and oblige. At the double."

•

They had unchained the door to him, they had questioned him even before they took his coat: tersely and intently. Were there any compromising materials on the body, George? Any that would link him with us? My God, you've been a time! They had shown him where to wash, forgetting that he knew already. They had sat him in an armchair and there Smiley remained, humble and discarded, while Oliver Lacon, Whitehall's head prefect to the intelligence services, prowled the threadbare carpet like a man made restless by his conscience, and Lauder Strickland said it all again in 15 different ways to 15 different people, over the old upright telephone in the far corner of the room--"Then get me back to police liaison, woman, at once"--either bullying or fawning, depending on rank and clout. The superintendent was a life ago, but in time ten minutes. The flat smelled of old nappies and stale cigarettes and was on the top floor of a scrolled Edwardian apartment house not 200 yards from Hampstead Heath. In Smiley's mind, visions of Vladimir's burst face mingled with these pale faces of the living, yet death was not a shock to him just now but merely an affirmation that his own existence, too, was dwindling; that he was living against the odds. He sat without expectation. He sat like an old man at a country railway station, watching the express go by. But watching all the same. And remembering old journeys.

This is how crises always were, he thought; ragtag conversations with no center. One man on the telephone, another dead, a third prowling. The nervous idleness of slow motion.

He peered around, trying to fix his mind on the decaying things outside himself. Chipped fire extinguishers, Ministry of Works issue. Prickly brown sofas--the stains a little worse. But safe flats, unlike old generals, never die, he thought. They don't even fade away.

On the table before him lay the cumbersome apparatus of agent hospitality, there to revive the unrevivable guest. Smiley took the inventory. In a bucket of melted ice, one bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, Vladimir's recorded favorite brand. Salted herrings, still in their tin. Pickled cucumber, bought loose and already drying. One mandatory loaf of black bread. Like every Russian Smiley had known, the old boy could scarcely drink his vodka without it. Two Marks & Spencer vodka glasses, could be cleaner. One packet of French cigarettes, unopened: If he had come, he would have smoked the lot; he had none with him when he died.

Vladimir had none with him when he died, he repeated to himself, and made a little mental stammer of it, a knot in his handkerchief. What am I doing here? he wondered yet again. What ceremony am I supposed to be attending? In his memory, Smiley secretly replayed Lacon's fervid phone call of two hours before.

It's an emergency, George. You remember Vladimir? George, are you awake? You remember the old general, George? Used to live in Paris?

Yes, I remember the general, he had replied. Yes, Oliver, I remember Vladimir.

We need someone from his past, George. Someone who knew Ins little ways, can identify him, damp down potential scandal. We need you, George. Now. George, wake up.

He had been trying to. Just as he had been trying to transfer the receiver to his better ear and sit upright in a bed too large for him. He was sprawling in the cold space deserted by his wife, because that was the side where the telephone was.

You mean he's been shot? Smiley had repeated.

George, why can't you listen? Shot dead. This evening. George, for heaven's sake, wake up; we need you!

"Oliver, what's going on?" Smiley asked. "Why did you need me?"

"Only one who knew him, for a start. Strickland, are you nearly done? He's like one of those airport announcers," he told Smiley with a stupid grin. "Never done."

You could break, Oliver, thought Smiley, noticing the estrangement of Lacon's eyes as he came under the light. You've had too much, he thought in unexpected sympathy. We both have.

From the kitchen, the mysterious Mostyn appeared with tea: an earnest, contemporary-looking child with flared trousers and a mane of brown hair. Seeing him set down the tray, Smiley finally placed him in the terms of his own past. Ann had had a lover like him once, an ordinand from Wells Theological College. She gave him a lift down the M4 and later claimed to have saved him from going queer.

"What section are you in, Mostyn?" Smiley asked him quietly.

"Oddbins, sir." He crouched, level to the table, displaying an Asian suppleness. "Since your day, actually, sir. It's a sort of operational pool. Mainly probationers waiting for overseas postings."

"I see."

"I heard you lecture at the Nursery at Sarratt, sir. On the new entrants' course. 'Agent Handling in the Field.' It was the best thing of the whole two years."

"Thank you."

But Mostyn's calf eyes stayed on him intently.

"Thank you," said Smiley again.

"Milk, sir, or lemon, sir? The lemon was for him," Mostyn added in a low aside, as if that were a recommendation for the lemon.

Strickland had rung off and was fiddling with the waistband of his trousers, making it looser or tighter.

"Yes, well, we have to temper truth, George!" Lacon bellowed suddenly, in what seemed to be a declaration of personal faith. "Sometimes people are innocent, but the circumstances can make them appear quite otherwise. There was never a golden age. There's only a golden mean. We have to remember that. Chalk it on our shaving mirrors."

Strickland was waddling down the room: "You. Mostyn. Young Nigel. You, sir!"

Mostyn lifted his grave brown eyes in reply.

"Commit nothing to paper whatever," Strickland warned him, wiping the back of his hand on his mustache as if one or the other were wet. "Hear me? That's an order from on high. There was no encounter, so you've no call to fill in the usual encounter sheet or any of that stuff. You've nothing to do but keep your mouth shut. Understand? You'll account for your expenses as general petty-cash disbursements. To me, direct. No file reference. Understand?"

"I understand," said Mostyn.

"And no whispered confidences to those little tarts in Registry, or I'll know. Hear me? Give us some tea."

Something happened inside George Smiley when he heard this conversation. Out of the formless indirection of these dialogs, out of the horror of the scene upon the heath, a single shocking truth struck him. He felt a pull in his chest somewhere and he had the sensation of momentary disconnection from the room and the three haunted people he had found in it. Encounter sheet? No encounter? Encounter between Mostyn and Vladimir? God in heaven, he thought, squaring the mad circle. The Lord preserve, cosset and protect us. Mostyn was Vladimir's case officer! That old man, a general, once our glory, and they farmed him out to this uncut boy! Then another lurch, more violent still, as his surprise was swept aside in an explosion of internal fury. He felt his lips tremble, he felt his throat seize up in indignation, blocking his words, and when he turned to Lacon, his spectacles seemed to be misting over from the heat.

"Oliver, I wonder if you'd mind finally telling me why you brought me here," he heard himself suggesting, hardly above a murmur.

Reaching out an arm, he removed the vodka bottle from its bucket. Still unbidden, he broke the cap and poured himself a rather large tot.

"All right, Mostyn, tell him!" Lacon boomed suddenly. "Tell him in your own words."

•

Mostyn sat with a quite particular stillness. He spoke softly. To hear him, Lacon had withdrawn to a corner and bunched his hands judicially under his nose. But Strickland had sat himself bolt upright and seemed, like Mostyn himself, to be patrolling the boy's words for lapses.

"Vladimir telephoned the Circus at lunchtime today, sir," Mostyn began, leaving some unclarity as to which "sir" he was addressing. "I happened to be Oddbins duty officer and took the call."

Strickland corrected him with unpleasant haste: "You mean yesterday. Be precise, can't you?"

"I'm sorry, sir. Yesterday," said Mostyn.

"Well, get it right," Strickland warned.

To be Oddbins duty officer, Mostyn explained, meant little more than covering the lunch-hour gap and checking desks and waste bins at closing time. Oddbins personnel were too junior for night duty, so there was just this roster for lunchtimes and evenings.

And Vladimir, he repeated, came through in the lunch hour, using the lifeline.

"Lifeline?" Smiley repeated in bewilderment. "I don't think I quite know what you mean."

"It's the system we have for keeping in touch with dead agents, sir," said Mostyn, then put his fingers to his temple and muttered, "Oh, my Lord." He started again: "I mean agents who have run their course but are still on the welfare roll, sir," said Mostyn unhappily.

"So he rang and you took the call," said Smiley kindly. "What time was that?"

"One-fifteen exactly, sir. Oddbins is like a sort of Fleet Street newsroom, you see. There are these twelve desks and there's the section head's hen coop at the end, with a glass partition between us and him. The lifeline's in a locked box and normally it's the section head who keeps the key. But in the lunch hour, he gives it to the duty dog. I unlocked the box and heard this foreign voice saying, 'Hullo.' "

"Get on with it, Mostyn," Strickland growled.

"I said 'Hullo' back, Mr. Smiley. That's all we do. We don't give the number. He said, 'This is Gregory calling for Max. I have something very urgent for him. Please get me Max immediately.' I asked him where he was calling from, which is routine, but he just said he had plenty of change. We have no brief to trace incoming calls and, anyway, it takes too long. There's an electric card selector by the lifeline, it's got all the work names on it. I told him to hold on and typed out 'Gregory.' That's the next thing we do after asking where they're calling from. Up it came on the selector. 'Gregory equals Vladimir, ex-agent, ex-Soviet general, ex-leader of the Riga Group.' Then the file reference. I typed out 'Max' and found you, sir." Smiley gave a small nod. "'Max equals Smiley.' Then I typed out 'Riga Group' and realized you were their last vicar."

"Their vicar?" said Lacon, as if he had detected heresy. "Smiley their last vicar, Mostyn? What on earth--"

"I thought you had heard all this, Oliver," Smiley said, to cut him off.

"Only the essence," Lacon retorted. "In a crisis, one deals only with essentials."

In his pressed-down Scottish, without letting Mostyn from his sight, Strickland provided Lacon with the required explanation: "Organizations such as the group had by tradition two case officers. The postman, who did the nuts and bolts for them, and the vicar, who stood above the fight. Their father figure," he said, and nodded perfunctorily toward Smiley.

"And who was carded as his most recent postman, Mostyn?" Smiley asked, ignoring Strickland entirely.

"Esterhase, sir. Work name Hector."

"And he didn't ask for him?" said Smiley to Mostyn, speaking straight past Strickland yet again.

"I'm sorry, sir?"

"Vladimir didn't ask for Hector? His postman? He asked for me. Max. Only Max. You're sure of that?"

"He wanted you and nobody else, sir," said Mostyn earnestly.

"Did you make notes?"

"The lifeline is taped automatically, sir. It's also linked to a speaking clock, so that we get the exact timing as well."

"Damn you, Mostyn, that's a confidential matter," Strickland snapped. "Mr. Smiley may be a distinguished ex-member, but he's no longer family."

"So what did you do next, Mostyn?" Smiley asked.

"Standing instructions gave me very little latitude, sir," Mostyn replied, showing once again, like Smiley, a studied disregard for Strickland. "Both 'Smiley' and 'Esterhase' were wait-listed, which meant that they could be contacted only through the fifth floor. My section head was out to lunch and not due back till two-fifteen." He gave a shrug. "I stalled. I told him to try again at two-thirty."

Smiley turned to Strickland. "I thought all the émigré files had been consigned to special keeping?"

"Correct."

"Shouldn't there have been something on the selector card to that effect?"

"There should and there wasn't," Strickland said.

"That is just the point, sir," Mostyn agreed, talking only to Smiley. "At that stage, there was no suggestion that Vladimir or his group was out of bounds. From the card, he looked just like any other pensioned-off agent raising a wind. I assumed he wanted a bit of money, or company, or something. We get quite a few of those. Leave him to the section head, I thought."

"Who shall remain nameless, Mostyn," Strickland said. "Remember that."

It crossed Smiley's mind at this point that the reticence in Mostyn--his air of distastefully stepping round some dangerous secret all the time he spoke--might have something to do with protecting a negligent superior. But Mostyn's next words dispelled this notion, for he went out of his way to imply that his superior was at fault.

"The trouble was, my section head didn't get back from lunch till three-fifteen, so that when Vladimir rang in at two-thirty, I had to put him off again. He was furious," said Mostyn. "Vladimir was, I mean. I asked whether there was anything I could do in the meantime and he said, 'Find Max. Just find me Max. Tell Max I have been in touch with certain friends, also through friends with neighbors.' There were a couple of notes on the card about his word code and I saw that neighbor meant Soviet Intelligence."

A mandarin impassivity had descended over Smiley's face. The earlier emotion was quite gone.

"All of which you duly reported to your section head at three-fifteen?"

"Yes, sir."

"Did you play him the tape?"

"He hadn't time to hear it," said Mostyn mercilessly. "He had to leave straight away for a long weekend."

The stubborn brevity of Mostyn's speech was now so evident that Strickland felt obliged to fill in the gaps.

"Yes, well, there's no question but that if we're looking for scapegoats, George, that section head of Mostyn's made a monumental fool of himself, no question at all," Strickland declared brightly. "He omitted to send for Vladimir's papers--which would not, of course, have been forthcoming. He omitted to acquaint himself with standing orders on the handling of émigrés. He also appears to have succumbed to a severe dose of weekend fever, leaving no word of his whereabouts. God help him on Monday morning, says I. Oh, yes. Come, Mostyn, we're waiting, boy."

Mostyn obediently took back the story. "Vladimir rang for the third and last time at three-forty-three, sir," he said, speaking even more slowly than before. "It should have been quarter to four, but he jumped the gun by two minutes." Mostyn by this time had a rudimentary brief from his section head, which he now repeated to Smiley: "He called it a bromide job. I was to find out what, if anything, the old boy really wanted and, if all else failed, make a rendezvous with him to cool him down. I was to give him a drink, sir, pat him on the back and promise nothing except to pass on whatever message he brought me."

"And the 'neighbors'?" Smiley asked. "They were not an issue to your section head?"

"He rather thought that was just a bit of agent's histrionics, sir."

"I see. Yes, I see." Yet his eyes, in contradiction, closed completely for a moment. "So how did the dialog with Vladimir go this third time?"

"According to Vladimir, it was to be an immediate meeting or nothing, sir. I tried out the alternatives on him as instructed--'Write us a letter; is it money you want? Surely it can wait till Monday'--but by then, he was shouting at me down the phone. 'A meeting or nothing. Tonight or nothing. Moscow rules. I insist, Moscow rules. Tell this to Max. Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me. Then perhaps he will see me.'"

Lacon, who had stayed uncharacteristically quiet these last minutes, now chimed in: "There's an important point here, George. The Circus were not the suitors here. He was. The ex-agent. He was doing all the pressing, making all the running. If he'd accepted our suggestion, written out his information, none of this need ever have happened. He brought it on himself entirely. George, I insist you take the point!"

Strickland was lighting himself a fresh cigarette.

"Whoever heard of Moscow rules in the middle of bloody Hampstead, anyway?" Strickland asked, waving out the match.

"Bloody Hampstead is right," Smiley said quietly.

"Mostyn, wrap the story up," Lacon commanded, blushing scarlet.

They had agreed a time, Mostyn resumed woodenly, now staring at his left palm as if he were reading his own fortune in it: "Ten-twenty, sir."

They had agreed Moscow rules, he said, and the usual contact procedures, which Mostyn had established earlier in the afternoon by consulting the Oddbins encounter index.

"And what were the contact procedures, exactly?" Smiley asked.

"A copybook rendezvous, sir," Mostyn replied. "The Sarratt training course all over again, sir."

Smiley felt suddenly crowded by the intimacy of Mostyn's respectfulness. He did not wish to be this boy's hero, or to be caressed by his voice, his gaze, his "sir"s. He was not prepared for the claustrophobic admiration of this stranger.

"There's a tin pavilion on Hampstead Heath, ten minutes' walk from East Heath Road, overlooking a games field on the south side of the avenue, sir. The safety signal was one new drawing pin shoved high in the first wood support on the left as you entered."

"And the countersignal?" Smiley asked.

But he knew the answer already.

"A yellow chalk mark," said Mostyn. "I gather yellow was the sort of Group trademark from the old days." He had adopted a tone of ending. "I put up the pin and came back here and waited. When he didn't show up, I thought, If he's secrecy mad, I'll have to go up to the hut again and check out his counter-signal, then I'll know whether he's around and proposes to try the fallback."

"Which was what?"

"A car pickup near Swiss Cottage underground at eleven-forty, sir. I was about to go out and take a look when Mr. Strickland rang through and ordered me to sit tight until further orders." Smiley assumed he had finished, but this was not quite true. Seeming to forget everyone but himself, Mostyn slowly shook his pale, handsome head. "I never met him," he said, in slow amazement. "He was my first agent, I never met him, I'll never know what he was trying to tell me," he said. "My first agent, and he's dead. It's incredible. I feel like a complete Jonah." His head continued shaking long after he had finished.

Lacon added a brisk postscript: "Yes, well, Scotland Yard has a computer these days, George. The Heath Patrol found the body and cordoned off the area and the moment the name was fed into the computer, a light came up or a lot of digits or something, and immediately they knew he was on our special-watch list. From then on, it went like clockwork. The commissioner phoned the Home Office, the Home Office phoned the Circus--"

"And you phoned me," said Smiley.

•

Smiley stood at the mouth of the avenue, gazing into the tunnel of beech trees as they sank away from him like are treating army into the mist. The darkness had departed reluctantly, leaving an indoor gloom. It could have been dusk already: teatime in an old country house. The streetlights either side of him were poor candles, illuminating nothing. The air felt warm and heavy. He had expected police still, and a roped-off area. He had expected journalists or curious bystanders. It never happened, he told himself, as he started slowly down the slope. No sooner had I left the scene than Vladimir clambered merrily to his feet, stick in hand, wiped off the gruesome make-up and skipped away with his fellow actors for a pot of beer at the police station.

Stick in hand, he repeated to himself, remembering something the superintendent had said to him. Left hand or right hand? "There's yellow chalk powder on his left hand, too," Mr. Murgotroyd had said inside the van. "Thumb and first two fingers."

He advanced and the avenue darkened round him, the mist thickened. His footsteps echoed tinnily ahead of him. Twenty yards higher, brown sunlight burned like a slow bonfire in its own smoke. But down here in the dip, the mist had collected in a cold fog, and Vladimir was very dead after all. He saw tire marks where the police cars had parked. He noticed the absence of leaves and the unnatural cleanness of the gravel. What do they do? he wondered. Hose the gravel down? Sweep the leaves into more plastic pillowcases?

His tiredness had given way to a new and mysterious clarity. He continued up the avenue wishing Vladimir good morning and good night and not feeling a fool for doing so, thinking intently about drawing pins and chalk and French cigarettes and Moscow rules, looking for a tin pavilion by a playing field. Take it in sequence, he told himself. Take it from the beginning. He reached an intersection of paths and crossed it, still climbing. To his right, goal posts appeared, and beyond them a green pavilion, apparently empty. He started across the field, rain water seeping into his shoes. Behind the hut ran a steep mudbank scoured with children's slides. He climbed the bank, entered a coppice and kept climbing. The fog had not penetrated the trees and by the time he reached the brow, it had cleared. There was still no one in sight. Returning, he approached the pavilion through the trees. It was a tin box, no more, with one side open to the field. The only furniture was a rough wood bench slashed and written on with knives, the only occupant a prone figure stretched on it, with a blanket pulled over his head and brown boots protruding. For an undisciplined moment, Smiley wondered whether he, too, had had his face blown off. Girders held up the roof; earnest moral statements enlivened the flaking green paint. "Punk is destructive. Society does not need it." The assertion caused him a moment's indecision. "Oh, but society does," he wanted to reply; "society is an association of minorities." The drawing pin was where Mostyn said it was, at head height exactly, in the best Sarratt tradition of regularity, its Circus issue brass head as new and as unmarked as the boy who had put it there.

Proceed to the rendezvous, it said; no danger sighted.

Moscow rules, thought Smiley yet again. Moscow, where it could take a fieldman three days to post a letter to a safe address. Moscow, where all minorities are punk.

Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me... .

Vladimir's chalked acknowledgment ran close beside the pin, a wavering yellow worm of a message scrawled all down the post. Perhaps the old man was worried about rain, thought Smiley. Perhaps he was afraid it could wash his mark away. Or perhaps in his emotional state he just leaned too heavily on the chalk. A meeting or nothing, he had told Mostyn. Tonight or nothing.... Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me... . Nevertheless, only the vigilant would ever have noticed that mark, heavy though it was, or the shiny drawing pin, either, and not even the vigilant would have found them odd, for on Hampstead Heath, people post bills and messages to each other ceaselessly, and not all of them are spies, by any means. Some are children, some are tramps, some are believers in God and organizers of charitable walks, some have lost pets and some are looking for variations of love and having to proclaim their needs from a hilltop. Not all of them, by any means, get their faces blown off at point-blank range by a Moscow Center weapon.

And the purpose of this acknowledgment? In Moscow, when Smiley from his desk in London had had the ultimate responsibility for Vladimir's case--in Moscow, these signs were devised for agents who might disappear from hour to hour; they were the broken twigs along a path that could always be their last. I see no danger and am proceeding as instructed to the agreed rendezvous, read Vladimir's last--and fatally mistaken--message to the living world.

Leaving the hut, Smiley moved a short distance back along the route he had just come. And as he walked, he meticulously called to mind the superintendent's reconstruction of Vladimir's last journey, drawing upon his memory as if it were an archive.

"Those rubber overshoes are a godsend, Mr. Smiley," the superintendent had declared piously: "North British Century, diamond-pattern soles, sir, and barely walked on--why, you could follow him through a football crowd if you had to!

"I'll give you the authorized version," the superintendent had said, speaking fast because they were short of time. "Ready, Mr. Smiley?"

"Ready," Smiley had said.

The superintendent changed his tone of voice. Conversation was one thing, evidence another. As he spoke, he shone his torch in phases onto the wet gravel of the roped-off area. A lecture with magic lantern, Smiley had thought; for two pins, I'd have taken notes. "Here he is, coming down the hill now, sir. See him there? Normal pace, nice heel and toe movement, normal progress, everything aboveboard. See, Mr. Smiley?"

Mr. Smiley had seen.

"And the stick mark there, do you, in his right hand, sir?"

Smiley had seen that, too, how the rubber-ferruled walking stick had left a deep rip with every second footprint.

"Whereas, of course, he had the stick in his left when he was shot, right? You saw that, too, sir, I noticed. Happen to know which side his bad leg was at all, sir, if he had one?"

"The right," Smiley had said.

"Ah. Then, most likely, the right was the side he normally held the stick, as well. Down here, please, sir, that's the way! Walking normal still, please note," the superintendent had added, making a rare slip of grammar in his distraction.

For five more paces, the regular diamond imprint, heel and toe, had continued undisturbed in the beam of the superintendent's torch. Now, by daylight, Smiley saw only the ghost of them. The rain, other feet and the tire tracks of illicit cyclists had caused large parts to disappear. But by night, at the superintendent's lantern show, he had seen them vividly, as vividly as he saw the plastic-covered corpse in the dip below them, where the trail had ended.

"Now," the superintendent had declared with satisfaction, and halted, the cone of his torch beam resting on a single scuffed area of ground.

"How old did you say he was, sir?" the superintendent asked.

"I didn't, but he owned to sixty-nine."

"Plus your recent heart attack, I gather. Now, sir. First he stops. In sharp order. Don't ask me why; perhaps he was spoken to. My guess is he heard something. Behind him. Notice the way the pace shortens, notice the position of the feet as he makes the half-turn, looks over his shoulder or whatever? Anyway, he turns, and that's why I say 'behind him.' And whatever he saw or didn't see--or heard or didn't hear--he decides to run. Off he goes, look!" the superintendent urged, with the sudden enthusiasm of the sportsman. "Wider stride, heels not hardly on the ground. A new print entirely, and going for all he's worth. You can even see where he shoved himself off with his stick for the extra purchase."

Peering now by daylight, Smiley no longer with any certainty could see, but he had seen last night--and in his memory saw again this morning--the sudden desperate gashes of the ferrule thrust downward, then thrust at an angle.

"Trouble was," the superintendent commented quietly, "whatever killed him was out in front, wasn't it? Not behind him at all."

It was both, thought Smiley now, with the advantage of the intervening hours. They drove him, he thought, trying without success to recall the Sarratt jargon for this particular technique. They knew his route and they drove him. The frightener behind the target drives him forward, the finger man loiters ahead undetected till the target blunders into him. For it was a truth known also to Moscow Center murder teams that even the oldest hands will spend hours worrying about their backs, their flanks, the cars that pass and the cars that don't, the streets they cross and the houses that they enter. Yet still fail, when the moment is upon them, to recognize the danger that greets them face to face. And if the quarry changes direction--turns and runs back? Then the frightener turns finger man and does the job himself.

"Still running," the superintendent said, moving steadily nearer the body down the hill. "Notice how his pace gets a little longer because of the steeper gradient now? Erratic, too, see that? Feet flying all over the shop. Running for dear life. Literally. And the walking stick still in his right hand. See him veering now, moving toward the verge? Lost his bearings, I wouldn't wonder. Here we go. Explain that, if you can!"

The torch beam rested on a patch of footprints close together, five or six of them, all in a very small space at the edge of the grass between two high trees.

"Stopped again," the superintendent announced. "Not so much a total stop, perhaps, more your stammer. Don't ask me why. Maybe he just wrong-footed himself. Maybe he was worried to find himself so close to the trees. Maybe his heart got him, if you tell me it was dickey. Then off he goes, same as before."

"With the stick in his left hand," Smiley had said quietly.

"Why? That's what I ask myself, sir, but perhaps you people know the answer. Why? Did he hear something again? Remember something? Why--when you're running for your life--why pause, do a duck-shuffle, change hands, and then run on again? Straight into the arms of whoever shot him? Unless, of course, whatever was behind him overtook him there, came round through the trees, perhaps, made an arc, as it were? Any explanation from your side of the street, Mr. Smiley?"

And with that question still ringing in Smiley's ears, they had arrived at last at the body, floating like an embryo under its plastic film.

But Smiley, on this morning after, stopped short of the dip. Instead, by placing his sodden shoes as best he could upon each spot exactly, he set about trying to imitate the movements the old man might have made. And since Smiley did all this in slow motion, and with every appearance of concentration, under the eye of two trousered ladies walking their Alsatians, he was taken for an adherent of the new fad in Chinese martial exercises and accounted mad.

First he put his feet side by side and pointed them down the hill. Then he put his left foot forward and moved his right foot round until the toe pointed directly toward a spinney of young saplings. As he did so, his right shoulder followed naturally, and his instinct told him that this would be the likely moment for Vladimir to transfer the stick to his left hand. But why? As the superintendent had also asked, why transfer the stick at all? Why, in this most extreme moment of his life, why solemnly move a walking stick from the right hand to the left? Certainly not to defend himself--since, as Smiley remembered, he was right-handed! To defend himself, he would only have seized the stick more firmly. Or clasped it with both of his hands, like a club.

Was it in order to leave his right hand free? But free for what?

Aware this time of being observed, Smiley peered sharply behind him and saw two small boys in blazers who had paused to watch this round little man in spectacles performing strange antics with his feet. He glowered at them in his most schoolmasterly manner and they moved hastily on.

To leave his right hand free for what? Smiley repeated to himself. And why start running again a moment later?

Vladimir turned to the right, thought Smiley, once again matching his action to the thought. Vladimir turned to the right. He faced the spinney, he put his stick in his left hand. For a moment, according to the superintendent, he stood still. Then he ran on.

Moscow rules. Smiley thought, staring at his own right hand. Slowly he lowered it into his raincoat pocket. Which was empty, as Vladimir's right-hand coat pocket was also empty.

Had he meant to write a message, perhaps? Smiley was teasing himself with the theory he was determined to hold at bay. To write a message with the chalk, for instance? Had he recognized his pursuer and wished to chalk a name somewhere, or a sign? But what on? Not on these wet tree trunks, for sure. Not on the clay, the dead leaves, the gravel! Looking round him, Smiley became aware of a peculiar feature of his location. Here, almost between two trees, at the very edge of the avenue, at the point the fog was approaching its thickest, he was as good as out of sight. The avenue descended, yes, and lifted ahead of him. But it also curved, and from where he stood, the upward line of sight in both directions was masked by tree trunks and a dense thicket of saplings. Along the whole path of Vladimir's last frantic journey--a path he knew well, had used for similar meetings--this was the one point, Smiley realized with increasing satisfaction, where the fleeing man was out of sight from both ahead of him and behind him.

And had stopped.

Had freed his right hand.

Had put it--let us say--in his pocket.

For his heart tablets? No. Like the yellow chalk and the matches, they were in his left pocket, not his right.

For something--let us say--that was no longer in his pocket when he was found dead.

For what, then?

Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me. Then perhaps he will see me.... This is Gregory asking for Max. I have something for him, please... .

Proofs. Proofs too precious to post. He was bringing something. Two somethings. Not just in his head--in his pocket. And was playing Moscow rules. Rules that had been drummed into the general from the very day of his recruitment as a defector in place. By Smiley himself, no less, as well as his case officer on the spot. Rules that had been invented for his survival; and the survival of his network. Smiley felt the excitement seize his stomach like a nausea. Moscow rules decree that if you physically carry a message, you must also carry the means to discard it! That, however it is disguised or concealed--microdot, secret writing, undeveloped film, any one of the hundred risky, finicky ways--still, as an object, it must be the first and lightest thing that comes to hand, the least conspicuous when jettisoned!

Such as a medicine bottle full of tablets, he thought, calming a little. Such as a box of matches.

One box Swan Vesta matches partly used, overcoat left, he remembered. A smoker's match, note well.

And in the safe flat, he thought relentlessly--tantalizing himself, staving off the final insight--there on the table waiting for him, one packet of cigarettes, Vladimir's favorite brand.

But no cigarettes in his pockets. None, as the good superintendent would have said, on his person. Or not when they found him, that is to say.

So the premise, George? Smiley asked himself, mimicking Lacon--brandishing Lacon's prefectorial finger accusingly in his own intact face--the premise? The premise is, thus far, Oliver, that a smoker, a habitual smoker, in a state of high nervousness, sets off on a crucial clandestine meeting equipped with matches but not even so much as an empty packet of cigarettes. So that either the assassins found it and removed it--the proof, or proofs, that Vladimir was speaking of, or--or what? Or Vladimir changed his stick from his right hand to his left in time. And put his right hand in his pocket in time. And took it out again, also in time, at the very spot where he could not be seen. And got rid of it, or them, according to Moscow rules.

Having satisfied his own insistence upon a logical succession, George Smiley stepped cautiously into the long grass that led to the spinney, soaking his trousers from the knees down. For half an hour or more, he searched, groping in the grass and among the foliage, retreading his tracks, cursing his own blundering, giving up, beginning again, answering the fatuous inquiries of passers-by, which ranged from the obscene to the manically attentive. There were even two Buddhist monks from a local seminary, complete with saffron robes and lace-up boots and knitted woolen caps, who offered their assistance. Smiley courteously declined it. He found two broken kites, a quantity of Coca-Cola tins. He found scraps of the female body, some in color, some in black and white, ripped from magazines. He found an old running shoe, black, and shreds of an old burnt blanket. He found four beer bottles, empty, and four empty cigarette packets so sodden and old that after one glance he discounted them. And in a branch, slipped into the fork just where it joined its parent trunk, the fifth packet that was not even empty: a relatively dry packet of Gauloises Caporal, filtre and duty-free, high up. Smiley reached for it as if it were forbidden fruit, but, like forbidden fruit, it stayed outside his grasp. He jumped for it and felt his back rip: a distinct and unnerving parting of tissue that smarted and dug at him for days afterward. He said "Damn" out loud and rubbed the spot. Two typists, on their way to work, consoled him with their giggles. He found a stick, poked the packet free, opened it. Four cigarettes remained.

And behind those four cigarettes, half concealed, and protected by its own skin of cellophane, something he recognized but dared not even disturb with his wet and trembling fingers. Something he dared not even contemplate until he was free of this appalling place, where giggling typists and Buddhist monks innocently trampled the spot where Vladimir had died: a single frame of 35-millimeter film, developed, waiting to be printed.

They have one proof, I have the other, he thought. I have shared the old man's legacy with his murderers.

"His complexion was like gray stone. His voice, too, was gray, and mournful as an undertaker's."