The Secret Pilgrim Part 20

Hansen pressed her. Marie was one of a group of half a dozen girls, said the woman. They were wh.o.r.es but they had the a.s.surance of fighters. When they were not entertaining men, they kept themselves apart from everyone and were tough to handle. One day they broke bounds. She had heard they were picked up by the Thai police. She never saw them again.

The woman who said this appeared unsure whether to say what else was on her mind, but Hansen gave her no choice.

"We were afraid for her," she said. "She gave different names for herself. She gave conflicting accounts of how she came to us. The doctors argued over whether she was mad. Somewhere along her journey, she had lost track of who she was."

Hansen presented himself to the Thai police and, by threats or animal persuasion, traced Marie to a police hostel run for the enjoyment of the officers. They never asked him who he was, it seems, or what he had for papers. He was a round-eye, a farang, who spoke Khmer and Thai. Marie had stayed three months, then vanished, they said. She was strange, said a kindly sergeant.

"What is strange?" Hansen asked.

"She would speak only English," the sergeant replied.

There was another girl, a friend of Marie's, who had stayed longer and married one of the corporals. Hansen obtained her name.

He had ceased speaking.

"And did you find her?"

I asked after a long silence.

I knew the answer already, as I had known it from halfway through his story, without knowing that I knew. He was sitting at the girl's head, which he was gently stroking. Slowly she sat upright and with her little, old hands rubbed her eyes, pretending she had been asleep. I think she had listened to us all night.

"It was all she understood any more," Hansen explained in English, while he continued to stroke her head. He was speaking of the brothel where he had found her. "She wanted no big choices, did you, Marie? No big words, no promises."

He pressed her to him. "She wishes only to be admired. By her own people. By us. All of us must love Marie. That is what comforts her."

I think he mistook my reticence for reproach, for his voice rose. "She wishes to be harmless. Is that so bad? She wishes to be left alone, as all of them wish. It would be a good thing if more of us wished the same. Your bombers and your spies and your big talk are not for her. She is not the child of Dr. Kissinger. She asks only for a small existence where she can give pleasure and hurt no one. Which is worse? Your brothel or hers? Get out of Asia. You should never have come, any of you. I am ashamed I ever helped you. Leave us alone."

"I shall tell Rumbelow very little of this," I said as I rose to leave.

"Tell him what you like."

From the doorway, I took a last look at them. The girl was staring at me as I believe she had stared at Hansen from outside the circle of chains, her eyes unflinching, deep and still. I thought I knew what was in her mind. I had paid for her and not had her. She was wondering whether I wanted my money's worth.

Rumbelow drove me to the airport. Like Hansen, I would have preferred to do without him, but we had matters to discuss.

"You promised him how much?" he cried in horror.

"I told him he was ent.i.tled to a resettlement grant and all the protection we can give him. I told him you would be sending him a cashier's cheque for fifty thousand dollars."

Rumbelow was furious. "Me give him fifty thousand dollars? My dear man, he'll be drunk for six months and spill his life story all over Bangkok. What about that Cambodian wh.o.r.e of his? She's in the know, I'll bet."

"Don't worry," I said. "He turned me down."

This news astonished Rumbelow so profoundly that he ran out of indignation altogether, preserving instead a wounded silence that lasted us the rest of the journey.

On the plane I drank too much and slept too little. Once, waking from a bad dream, I was guilty of a seditious thought about Rumbelow and the Fifth Floor. I wished I could pack off the whole tribe of them on Hansen's march into the jungle, Smiley included. I wished I could make them throw everything over for a flawed and impossible pa.s.sion, only to see the object of it turn against them, proving there is no reward for love except the experience of loving, and nothing to be learned by it except humility.

Yet I was content, as I am content to this day whenever I think of Hansen. I had found what I was looking for - a man like myself, but one who in his search for meaning had discovered a worthwhile object for his life; who had paid every price and not counted it a sacrifice; who was paying it still and would pay it till he died; who cared nothing for compromise, nothing for his pride, nothing for ourselves or the opinion of others; who had reduced his life to the one thing that mattered to him, and was free. The slumbering subversive in me had met his champion. The would-be lover in me had found a scale by which to measure his own trivial preoccupations.

So that when a few years later I was appointed Head of the Russia House, only to watch my most valuable agent betray his country for his love, I could never quite muster the outrage required of me by my masters. Personnel was not all stupid when he packed me off to the Interrogators' Pool.

TEN.

MAGGS, MY Crypto journalist, was trying to draw Smiley on the amoral nature of our work. He was wanting Smiley to admit that anything went, as long as you got away with it. I suspect he was actually wanting to hear this maxim applied to the whole of life, for he was ruthless as well as mannerless, and wished to see in our work some kind of licence to throw aside his few remaining scruples.

But Smiley would not give him this satisfaction. At first he appeared ready to be angry, which I hoped he would be. If so, he checked himself. He started to speak, but stopped again, and faltered, leaving me wondering whether it was time to call a halt to the proceedings. Until, to my relief, he rallied, and I knew he had merely been distracted by some private memory among the thousands that made up his secret self. ..

"You see," he explained-replying, as so often, to the spirit rather than the letter of the question-"it really is essential in a free society that the people who do our work should remain unreconciled. It's true that we are obliged to sup with the Devil, and not always with a very long spoon. And as everyone knows-" a sly glance at Maggs produced a gust of grateful laughter - "the Devil is often far better company than the G.o.dly, isn't he? All the same, our obsession with virtue won't go away. Self-interest is so limiting. So is expediency."

He paused again, still deep inside his own thoughts. "All I'm really saying, I suppose, is that if the temptation to humanity does a.s.sail you now and then, I hope you won't take it as a weakness in yourselves, but give it a fair hearing."

The cufflinks, I thought, in a flash of inspiration. George is remembering the old man.

For a long time I could not fathom why the story had continued to haunt me for so long. Then I realised I had happened upon it at a period when my relationship with my son Adrian had hit a low point. He was talking of not bothering with university, and getting himself a well-paid job instead. I mistook his restlessness for materialism and his dreams of independence for laziness, and one night I lost my temper and insulted him, and was duly ashamed of myself for weeks thereafter. It was during one of those weeks that I unearthed the story.

Then I remembered also that Smiley had had no children, and that perhaps his ambiguous part in the affair was to some extent explained by this. I was slightly chilled by the thought that he might have been filling an emptiness in himself by redressing a relationship he had never had.

Finally I remembered that just a few days after coming upon the papers, I had received the letter that anonymously denounced poor Frewin as a Russian spy. And that there were certain mystical affinities between Frewin and the old man, to do with dogged loyalty and lost worlds. All this for context, you understand, for I never knew a case yet that was not made up of a hundred others.

Finally there was the fact that, as so often in my life, Smiley turned out once again to have been my precursor, for I had no sooner settled myself at my unfamiliar desk in the Interrogators' Pool than I found his traces everywhere: in our dusty archives, in backnumbers of our duty officer's log and in the reminiscent smiles of our senior secretaries, who spoke of him with the old vestal's treacly awe, part as G.o.d, part as teddy bear and part - though they were always quick to gloss over this aspect of his nature - as killer shark. They would even show you the bone-china cup and saucer by Thomas Goode of South Audley Street - where else? - a present to George from Ann, they explained dotingly, which George had bequeathed to the Pool after his reprieve and rehabilitation to Head Office - and, of course, like the Grail itself, the Smiley cup could never possibly be drunk from by a mere mortal.

The Pool, if you have not already gathered as much, is by way of being the Service's Siberia, and Smiley, I was comforted to discover, had served out not one exile there but two: the first, for his gall in suggesting to the Fifth Floor that it might be nursing a Moscow Centre mole to its bosom; and the second, a few years later, for being right. And the Pool has not only the monotony of Siberia but its remoteness also, being situated not in the main building but in a run of cavernous offices on the ground floor of a gabled pile in Northumberland Avenue at the northern end of Whitehall.

And, like so much of the architecture around it, the Pool has seen great days. It was set up in the Second World War to receive the offerings of strangers, to listen to their suspicions and calm their fears or - if they had indeed stumbled on a larger truth-misguide or scare them into silence.

If you thought you had glimpsed your neighbour late at night, for instance, crouched over a radio transmitter; if you had seen strange lights winking from a window and were too shy or untrusting to inform your local police station; if the mysterious foreigner on the bus who questioned you about your work had reappeared at your elbow in your local pub; if your secret lover confessed to you, - out of loneliness or bravado or a desperate need to make himself more interesting in your eyes - that he was working for the German Secret Service - why then, after a correspondence with some spurious a.s.sistant to some unheard of Whitehall Under Secretary, you would quite likely, of an early evening, be summoned to brave the blitz, and find yourself being guided heart-in-mouth down the flaking, sandbagged corridor, on your way to Room 909 where a Major Somebody or a Captain Somebody Else, both bogus as three-dollar bills, would courteously invite you to state your matter frankly without fear of repercussion.

And occasionally, as the covert history of the Pool records, great things were born, and are still occasionally born today, of these inauspicious beginnings, though business is not a patch on what it used to be, and much of the Pool's work is now given over to such ch.o.r.es as unsolicited offers of service, anonymous denunciations like the one levelled at poor Frewin and even in support of the despised security services positive vetting enquiries, which are the worst Siberias of all, and about as far as you can get from the high-wire operations of the Russia House without quitting the Service altogether.

All the same, there is more than mere humility to be learned from these chastis.e.m.e.nts. An intelligence officer is nothing if he has lost the will to listen, and George Smiley, plump, troubled, cuckolded, una.s.suming, indefatigable George, forever polishing his spectacles on the lining of his tie, puffing to himself and sighing in his perennial distraction, was the best listener of us all.

Smiley could listen with his hooded, sleepy eyes; he could listen by the very inclination of his tubby body, by his stillness and his understanding smile. He could listen because with one exception, which was Ann, his wife, he expected nothing of his fellow souls, criticised nothing, condoned the worst of you long before you had revealed it. He could listen better than a microphone because his mind lit at once upon essentials; he seemed able to spot them before he knew where they were leading.

And that was how George had come to be listening to Mr. Arthur Wilfred Hawthorne of 12, The Dene, Ruislip, half a lifetime before me, in the very same Room 909 where I now sat, curiously turning the yellowed pages of a file marked "Destruction Pending" which I had unearthed from the shelves of the Pool's strongroom.

I had begun my quest idly - you may even say frivolously - much as one might pick up an old copy of the Tatler in one's club. And suddenly I realised I had stumbled on page after page of Smiley's familiar, guarded handwriting, with its sharp little German t's and twisted Greek e's, and signed with his legendary symbol. Where he was forced to appear in the drama in person - and you could feel him seeking any means to escape this vulgar ordeal - he referred to himself merely as "D.O.," short for Duty Officer. And since he was notorious for his hatred of initials, you are made once more aware of his reclusive, if not downright fugitive nature. If I had discovered a missing Shakespeare folio, I could not have been more excited. Everything was there: Hawthorne's original letter, transcripts of the microphoned interviews, initialled by Smiley himself, even Hawthorne's signed receipts for his travel money and out-of-pocket expenses.

My dull care was gone. My relegation no longer oppressed me, neither did the silence of the great empty house to which I was condemned. I was sharing them with George, waiting for the clip of Arthur Hawthorne's loyal boots as he was marched down the corridor and into Smiley's presence.

"Dear Sir," he had written to "The Officer in Charge of Intelligence, Ministry of Defence."

And already, because we are British, his cla.s.s is branded on the page - if only by the strangely imperious use of capitals so dear to uneducated people. I imagined much effort in the penning, and perhaps a dictionary at the elbow. "I wish, Sir, to Request an Interview with your Staff regarding a Person who has done Special Work for British Intelligence. at the highest Level, and whose Name is as Important to my Wife and myself as it may be to your good Selves, and which I am accordingly forbidden to Mention in this Letter."

That was all. Signed "Hawthorne, A. W., Warrant Officer Cla.s.s II, retired."

Arthur Wilfred Hawthorne, in other words, as Smiley's researches revealed when he consulted the voters' list, and followed up his findings with an examination of the War Office files. Born 1915, Smiley painstakingly recorded on Hawthorne's personal particulars sheet. Enlisted 1939, served with the Eighth Army from Cairo to El Alamein. Ex-Sergeant Major Arthur Wilfred Hawthorne, twice wounded in battle, three commendations and one gallantry medal for his trouble, demobilised without a stain on his character, "the best example of the best fighting man in the world," wrote his commandant, in a glowing if hyperbolic commendation.

And I knew that Smiley, as a good professional, would have taken up his post well ahead of his client's arrival, just as I myself had done these last months: at the same scuffed yellow desk of wartime pine, singed brown along the leading edge-legend has it by the Hun; with the same mossy telephone, letters as well as numbers on the dial; the same hand-tinted photograph of the Queen, sitting on a horse when she was twenty. I see George frowning studiously at his watch, then pulling a sour face as he peered round him at the usual mess, for there had been a running battle for as long as anyone could remember about who was supposed to clean the place, the Ministry or ourselves. I see him tug a handkerchief from his sleeve-laboriously again, for no gesture ever came to George without a struggle-and wipe the grime off the seat of his wooden chair, then do the same in advance for Hawthorne on the other side of the desk. Then, as I had done myself a few times, perform a similar service for the Queen, setting her frame straight and bringing back the sparkle to her young, idealistic eyes.

For I imagined George already studying the feelings of his subject, as any good intelligence officer must. An ex-sergeant major would expect a certain order about him, after all. Then I see Hawthorne himself, punctual to the minute, as the janitor showed him in, his best suit b.u.t.toned like a battledress, the polished toecaps of his boots glistening like conkers in the gloom. Smiley's description of him on the encounter sheet was spa.r.s.e but trenchant: height five seven, grey hair close cut, clean shaven, groomed appearance, military bearing Other characteristics: suppressed limp of the left leg, army boots.

"Hawthorne, sir," he snapped, and held himself to attention till Smiley with difficulty persuaded him to sit.

Smiley was Major Nottingham that day and had an impressive card with his photograph to prove it. In my pocket as I read his account of the case lay a similar card in the name of Colonel Ned Ascot. Don't ask me why Ascot except to note that, in choosing a place-name for my alias, I was yet again unconsciously copying one of Smiley's little habits.

"What regiment are you from, sir, if you don't mind my asking?"

Hawthorne enquired of Smiley as he sat.

"The General List, I'm afraid," said Smiley, which is the only way we are allowed to answer.

But I am sure it came hard to Smiley, as it would to me, to have to describe himself as some kind of non-combatant.

As evidence of his loyalty, Hawthorne had brought his medals wrapped in a piece of gun cloth. Smiley obligingly went through them for him.

"It's about our son, sir," the old man said. "I've got to ask you. The wife-well, she won't hear of it any more, she says it's a load of his nonsense. But I told her I've got to ask you. Even if you refuse to answer, I told her, I won't have done my duty by my son if I didn't ask on his account."

Smiley said nothing but I am sure his silence was sympathetic.

"Ken was our only boy, you see, Major, so it's natural," said Hawthorne apologetically.

And still Smiley let him take his time. Did I not say he was a listener? Smiley could draw answers from you to questions he had never put, just by the sincerity of his listening.

"We're not asking for secrets, Major. We're not asking to know what can't be known. But Mrs. Hawthorne is failing, sir, and she needs to know whether it's true before she goes."

He had prepared the question exactly. Now he put it. "Was our boy, or was he not - was Ken - in the course of what appeared to be a criminal career, operating behind enemy lines in Russia?"

And here you might say that for once I was ahead of Smiley, if only because after five years in the Russia House I had a pretty good idea of the operations we had conducted in the past. I felt a smile come to my face, and my interest in the story, if it was possible, increased.

But to Smiley's face, I am sure, came nothing at all. I imagine his features settling into a Mandarin immobility. Perhaps he fiddled with his spectacles, which always gave the impression of belonging to a larger, man. Finally he asked Hawthorne-but earnestly, never a hint of skepticism - why he supposed this might be the case.

"Ken told me he was, sir, that's why."

And still nothing on Smiley's side, except an ever-open door. "Mrs. Hawthorne wouldn't visit Ken in prison, you see. I would. Every month. He was doing five years for grievous bodily harm, plus three more for being habitual. We had PD in those days, preventive detention. We're in the prison canteen there, me and Ken, sitting together at a table. And suddenly Ken puts his head close to mine, and he says to me in this low voice he's got, 'Don't come here again, Dad. It's difficult for me. I'm not really locked up, you see. I'm in Russia. They had to bring me back special, just to show me to you. I'm working behind the lines, but don't tell Mum. Write to me that's not a problem, they'll send it on. And I'll write back same as if I was a prisoner here, which is what I pretend to be, because you can't get better cover than a prison. But the truth is, Dad, I'm serving the old country just like you did when you was with the Desert Rats, which is why the best of us are put on earth.'

I didn't ask to see Ken after that. I felt I had to obey orders. I wrote to him, of course. In the prison. Hawthorne and then his number. And three months later he'd write back on prison paper like it was a different boy writing to me every time. Sometimes the big heavy writing, like he was angry, sometimes small and quick, like he hadn't had the time. Once or twice there was even the foreign words in there that I didn't understand, crossed out mainly, like he was having difficulty with his own language. Sometimes he'd drop me a clue. 'I'm cold but safe,' he'd say. 'Last week I had a bit more exercise than I needed,' he'd say. I didn't tell the wife because he said I wasn't to. Besides, she wouldn't have believed him. When I offered her his letters, she pushed them away - they hurt too much. But when Ken died we went and saw his body all cut to pieces in the prison morgue. Twenty stab wounds and n.o.body to blame. She didn't weep, she doesn't, but they might as well have stabbed her. And on the way home on the bus I couldn't help it. 'Ken's a hero,' I said to her. I was trying to wake her up because she'd gone all wooden. I got hold of her by the sleeve and gave her a bit of a shake to make her listen. 'He's not a dirty convict,' I said. 'Not our Ken. He never was. And it wasn't convicts who done him in, either. It was the Red Russians.'

I told her about the cufflinks too. 'Ken's romancing,' she said. 'Same as he always did. He doesn't know the difference, he never did, which has been his trouble all along."

Interrogators, like priests and doctors, have a particular advantage when it comes to concealing their feelings. They can ask another question, which is what I would have done myself.

"What cufflinks, Sergeant Major?"

Smiley said, and I see him lowering his long eyelids and sinking his head into his neck as he once more prepared himself to listen to the old man's tale.

"There's no medals, Dad,' Ken says to me. 'Medals wouldn't be secure. You have to be gazetted to get a medal, there'd be too many in the know. Otherwise I'd have a medal same as you. Maybe an even better one, if I'm honest, like the Victoria Cross, because they stretch us as far as we can go and sometimes further. But if you do right in the job, you earn your cufflinks and they keep them for you in a special safe. Then once a year there's this big dinner at a certain place I'm not allowed to mention, with the champagne and butlers you wouldn't believe, and all us Russia boys go to it. And we put on our tuxedos and we wear the cufflinks, same as a uniform but secret. And we have this party, with the speeches and the handshakes, like a special invest.i.ture, same as you had for your medals, I expect, in this place I'm not allowed to mention. And when the party's over, we hand the cufflinks back. We have to, for the security. So if ever I go missing, or if something happens to me, just you write to them at the Secret Service and ask them for the Russia cufflinks for your Ken. Maybe they'll say they never heard of me, maybe they'll say, "What cufflinks?"

But maybe they'll make you a compa.s.sionate exception and let you have them, because they sometimes do. And if they do - you'll know that everything I ever did wrong was more right than you can imagine. Because I'm my dad's boy, right down the line, and the cufflinks will prove it to you. That's all I'm saying, and it's- more than I'm allowed.'

"Smiley asked first for the boy's full name. Then for the boy's date of birth. Then he asked about his schooling and qualifications, which were predictably dismal, both. I see him acting quiet and businesslike as he takes down the details: Kenneth Branham Hawthorne, the old soldier told him - Branham, that was his mother's maiden name, sir; he sometimes used it for what they called his crimes - born Folkestone, July 14, 1946, sir, twelve months after I came back from the war. I wouldn't have a child earlier, although the wife wanted it, sir, I didn't think it right. I wanted our boy brought up in peace, sir, with both his living parents to look after him, Major, which is the right of any child, I say, even if it's not as usual as it ought to be.

Smiley's next task was not half as easy as it might seem, whatever the improbabilities of Kenneth Hawthorne's story. Smiley was never one to deny a good man, or even a bad one, the benefit of the doubt. The Circus of those days possessed no such thing as a reliable central index of its resources, and what pa.s.sed for one was shamefully and often deliberately incomplete, for rival outfits guarded their sources jealously and poached from their neighbours when they saw the chance.

True, the old man's story bristled with unlikelihoods. In purist terms it was grotesque, for example, to imagine a group of secret agents meeting once a year to dine, thus breaking the most elementary rule of "need to know."

But worse things could happen in the lawless world of the irregulars, as Smiley was aware. And it took all his powers of ingenuity and persuasion to satisfy himself that Hawthorne was nowhere on their books: not as a runner, not as a lamplighter or a scalphunter, not as a signalman and not as any other of the beloved tradenames with which these seedy operators glamourised their ranks.

And when he had exhausted the irregulars he turned to the armed services, the security services and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, any one of which might conceivably have employed-if on some much more modest basis than the boy described-a violent criminal of Ken Hawthorne's character.

For one thing at least seemed certain: the boy's criminal record was a nightmare. It would have been hard to imagine a grimmer record of persistent and often b.e.s.t.i.a.l behaviour. As Smiley crossed and recrossed the boy's history, through childhood to adolescence, reform school to prison, there seemed to be no transgression, from pilfering to s.a.d.i.s.tic a.s.sault, that Kenneth Branham Hawthorne, born Folkestone 1946, had not stooped to.

Till at the end of a full week, Smiley appears reluctantly to have admitted to himself what in another part of his head he must have known all along. Kenneth Hawthorne, for whatever sad reasons, had been an unredeemable and habitual monster. The death he had suffered at the hands of his fellow prisoners was no more than he deserved. His past was written and complete, and his tales of heroism on behalf of some mythical British intelligence service were merely the last chapter in his lifelong effort to steal his father's glory.

It was mid-winter. It was a foul grey, sleet-driven evening on which to drag an old soldier back across London to a barren interviewing room in Whitehall. And Whitehall in the meagre lighting of those days was a citadel still at war, even if its guns were somewhere else. It was a place of military austerity, heartless and imperial; of lowered voices and blacked windows, of rare and hurried footsteps and averted eyes. Smiley was in the War too, remember, even if he was sitting behind German lines. I can hear the puttering of the paraffin Aladdin stove which the Circus had grudgingly approved to supplement the faulty ministerial radiators. It has the sound of a wireless transmitter operated by a freezing hand.

Hawthorne had not come alone to hear Major Nottingham's reply. The old soldier had brought his wife, and I can even tell you how she looked, for Smiley had written of her in his log and my imagination has long painted in the rest.

She had a buckled sick body wrapped in Sunday best. She wore a brooch in the design of her husband's regimental badge. Smiley invited her to sit, but she preferred her husband's arm. Smiley stood across the desk from them, the same burned, yellowed desk where I had sat in exile these last months. I see him standing almost to attention, with his rounded shoulders uncharacteristically straightened, his stubby fingers curled at the seams of his trousers in traditional army manner.

Ignoring Mrs. Hawthorne, he addressed the old soldier, man to man. "You understand I have absolutely nothing to say to you at all, Sergeant Major?"

"I do, sir."

"I never heard of your son, you understand? Kenneth Hawthorne is not a name to me, nor to any of my colleagues."

"Yes, sir."

The old man's gaze was fixed parade-ground style above Smiley's head. But his wife had her eyes fiercely turned on Smiley's all the time, even if she found it hard to fix on them through the thick lenses of his spectacles.

"He has never in his life worked for any British department of government, whether secret or otherwise. He was a common criminal all his life. Nothing more. Nothing at all."

"Yes, sir."

"I deny absolutely that he was ever a secret agent in the service of the Crown."

"Yes, sir."

"You understand also that I can answer no questions, give you no explanations, and that you will never see me again or be received at this building?"

"Yes, sir."

"You understand finally that you may never speak of this moment to a living soul? However proud you may be of your son? That there are others still alive who must be protected?"