The Secret Pilgrim Part 21

"Yes, sir. I understand, sir."

Opening the drawer of our desk, Smiley took out a small red Cartier box, which he handed to the old man. "I happened to find this in my safe," he said.

The old man pa.s.sed the box to his wife without looking at it. With firm fingers, she forced it open. Inside lay a pair of superb gold cufflinks with a tiny English rose set discreetly in a corner, handengraved, a marvel of fine work. Her husband still did not look. Perhaps he didn't have to; perhaps he didn't trust himself. Closing the box, she parted the clasp of her scuffed purse and popped it inside. Then snapped the purse shut again, so loudly you would think she was slamming down the lid on her son's tomb. I have listened to the tape; it too is waiting to be destroyed.

The old man still said nothing. They were too proud to bother with Smiley as they left.

And the cufflinks? you ask-where did Smiley get the cufflinks from? I had my answer not from the yellowing records of Room 909 but from Ann Smiley herself, quite by chance one evening in a splendid Cornish castle near Saltash where we both happened to be guests. Ann was on her own, and chastened. Mabel had a golf tournament. It was long after the Bill Haydon business, but Smiley still could not bear to have her near him. When dinner was over, the guests dispersed themselves in groups, but Ann stayed close to me, I supposed as a subst.i.tute for being close to George. And I asked her, half intuitively, whether she had ever given George a pair of cufflinks. Ann was always at her most beautiful when she was alone.

"Oh those," she said, as if she scarcely remembered. "You mean the ones he gave to the old man."

Ann had given them to George on their first anniversary, she said. After her fling with Bill, he had decided they should be put to better use.

But why, exactly, did George decide that? I wondered.

At first it seemed perfectly clear to me. This was Smiley's soft centre. The old cold warrior was revealing his bleeding heart.

Like most things with George - maybe.

Or an act of vengeance against Ann perhaps? Or against his other faithless love, the Circus, at a time when the Fifth Floor was locking him out of the house? Gradually I arrived at a slightly different theory, which I may as well pa.s.s on to you, since one thing is certain, and that is' that George himself will not enlighten us.

Listening to the old soldier, Smiley recognised one of those rare moments when the Service could be of real value to real people. For once, the mythology of espionage would be used not to disguise yet another tale of incompetence or betrayal, but to leave an old couple with their dreams. For once, Smiley could look at an intelligence operation and say with absolute confidence that it had worked.

ELEVEN.

"AND SOME INTERROGATIONS," said Smiley, gazing into the dancing flames of the log fire, "are not interrogations at all, but communions between damaged souls."

He had been talking about his debriefing of the Moscow Centre spymaster, codename Karla, whose defection he had secured. But for me, he was talking only of poor Frewin, of whom, so far as I know, he had never heard.

The letter denouncing Frewin as a Soviet spy arrived on my desk on a Monday evening, posted first cla.s.s in the S.W.1 area of London on the Friday, opened by Head Office Registry on the Monday morning and marked by the a.s.sistant Registrar on duty "HIP to see," HIP being the unlikely acronym of the Head of the Interrogators' Pool; in other words, myself, and in the opinion of some the "H" ought to be an "R"-you Rest in Peace at the Interrogators' Pool. It was five o'clock by the time the Head Office green van unloaded its humble package at Northumberland Avenue, and in the Pool such late intrusions were customarily ignored until next morning. But I was trying to change all that and, having anyway nothing else to do, I opened the envelope at once.

Two pink trace slips were pinned to the letter, each bearing a pencilled note. Head Office's notes to the Pool always had the ring of instructions addressed to an idiot. The first read, "FREWIN C presumed identical with FREWIN Cyril Arthur, Foreign Office cypher clerk," followed by Frewin's positive vetting reference and white file number, which was a c.u.mbersome way of telling me there was nothing recorded against him. The second said, "MODRIAN S presumed identical with MODRIAN Sergei," followed by a further string of references, but I didn't bother with them. After my five years in the Russia House, Sergei Modrian was plain Sergei to me, as he had been to the rest of us: old Sergei, the crafty Armenian, head boy of Moscow Centre's generously over-staffed residence at the Soviet Emba.s.sy in London.

If I had had any lingering wish to postpone my reading of the letter till tomorrow, Sergei's name dispelled it. The letter might be bunk.u.m, but I was playing on home ground.

To the Director, The Security Department, The Foreign Office, Downing Street, SW.

Dear Sir, This is to inform you, that C. Frewin, a Foreign Office cypher clerk with constant and regular access to Top Secret and Above, has been keeping surrept.i.tious company with S. Modrian, First Secretary at the Soviet Emba.s.sy in London, for the last four years, and has not revealed same in his annual vetting returns. Secret materials have been pa.s.sed. Mr. Modrian's whereabouts are no longer known, in view of the fact that he has recently been recalled to the Soviet Union. The said Frewin still resides at the Chestnuts, Beavor Drive, Sutton, and Modrian has been present there at least on one occasion. C. Frewin is now living a highly solitary life.

Yours sincerely, A. Patriot.

Electronically typed. Plain white A4 paper, no watermark. Dated, overpunctuated, accurately spelt and crisply folded. And no address of sender. There never is.

Having nothing much else to do that evening, I had a couple of Scotches at The Sherlock Holmes, then wandered round to Head Office, where I checked myself into the Registry reading room and drew the files. Next morning at the surgery hour of ten I took my place in Burr's waiting room, having first spelt my name to his glossy personal a.s.sistant, who seemed never to have heard of me. Brock, from Moscow Station, was ahead of me in the queue. We talked intently about cricket till his name was called, and managed not to refer to the fact that he had worked for me in the Russia House, most recently on the Blair case. A couple of minutes later, Peter Guillam drifted in clutching a bunch of files and looking hung-over. He had recently become Head of Secretariat for Burr.

"Don't mind if I squeeze ahead of you, do you, old boy? I've been sent for urgently. b.l.o.o.d.y man seems to expect me to work in my sleep. What's your problem?"

"Leprosy," I said.

There is nowhere quite like the Service - except possibly Moscow - for becoming an unperson overnight. In the upheavals that had followed Barley Blair's defection, not even Burr's predecessor, the nimble Clive, had kept his foothold on the slippery Fifth Floor deck. When last heard of, he was on his way to take up the salubrious post of Head of Station, Guyana. Only our craven legal adviser, Harry Palfrey, seemed as usual to have weathered the changes, and as I entered Burr's shiny executive suite, Palfrey was slipping stealthily out of the other door - but not quite quickly enough, so he treated me to a rhapsodic smile instead. He had recently grown himself a moustache for greater integrity.

"Ned! Marvellous! We must do that lunch," he breathed in an excited whisper, and disappeared below the waterline.

Like his office, Burr was all modern man. Where he came from was a mystery to me, but then I was no longer in the swim. Someone had told me advertising, someone else the City, someone else the Inns of Court. One wit in the Pool mailroom said he came from nowhere at all: that he had been born as found, smelling of aftershave and power, in his two-piece executive blue suit and his patent black shoes with side buckles. He was big and floating and absurdly young. Grasping his soft hand, you at once relaxed your grip for fear of denting it. He had Frewin's file in front of him on his executive desk, with my loose minute - written late last night - pinned to the cover.

"Where does the letter come from?" he demanded in his dry North Country cadence, before I had sat down.

"I don't know. It's well informed. Whoever wrote it did his homework."

"Probably Frewin's best friend," said Burr, as if that was what best friends were known for.

"He's got Modrian's dates right, he's got Frewin's access right," I said. "He knows the positive vetting routine."

"Not a work of art, though, is it? Not if you're an insider? Most likely a colleague. Or his girl. What do you want to ask me?"

I had not expected this quickfire interrogation. After six months in the Pool, I wasn't used to being hurried.

"I suppose I need to know whether you want me to pursue the case," I said.

"Why shouldn't I?"

"It's outside the Pool's normal league. Frewin's access is formidable. His section handles some of the most delicate signals traffic in Whitehall. I a.s.sumed you'd prefer to pa.s.s it to the Security Service."

"Why?"

"It's their bailiwick. If it's anything at all, it's a straight security enquiry."

"It's our information, our shout, our letter," Burr retorted", with a bluntness that secretly warmed my heart. "To h.e.l.l with them. When we know what we've got, we'll decide where we go with it. All that those churchy b.u.g.g.e.rs across the Park can think of is a judge proof prosecution and a bunch of medals to hand around. I collect intelligence for the marketplace. If Frewin's bad, maybe we can keep him going and turn him round. He might even get us alongside Brother Modrian back in Moscow. Who knows? The security artists don't, that's for sure."

"Then presumably you'd prefer to hand the case to the Russia House," I said doggedly.

"Why should I do that?"

I had a.s.sumed I would make an unappetising figure to him, for he was still of an age to find failure immoral. Yet he seemed to be asking me to tell him why he shouldn't count on me.

"The Pool has no charter to function operationally," I explained. "We run a front office and listen to the lonely hearts. We've no charter to conduct clandestine investigations or run agents, and no mandate to pursue suspects with Frewin's sort of access."

"You can run a phone tap, can't you?"

"If you get me a warrant I can."

"You can brief watchers, can't you? You've done that a few times, they say."

"Not unless you authorise it personally."

"Suppose I do? The Pool's also empowered to make vetting enquiries. You can play Mr. Plod. You're good at it, by all accounts. This is a vetting matter, right? And Frewin's due for a vetting top-up, right? So vet him."

"In positive vetting cases, the Pool is obliged to clear all enquiries with the Security Service in advance."

"a.s.sume it's done."

"I can't do that unless I have it in writing."

"Oh yes you can. You're not a Service hack. You're the great Ned. You've broken as many rules as you've stuck to, you have, I've read you up. You know Modrian, too."

"Not well."

"How well?"

"I had dinner with him once and played squash with him once. That's hardly knowing him."

"Squash where?"

"At the Lansdowne."

"How did that come about?"

"Modrian was formally declared to us as the Emba.s.sy's Moscow Centre link. I was trying to put together a deal with him on Barley Blair. A swap."

"Why didn't you succeed?"

"Barley wouldn't go along with us. He'd done his own deal already. He wanted his girl, not us."

"What's his game like?"

"Tricky."

"Did you beat him?"

"Yes."

He interrupted his own flow while he looked me over. It was like being studied by a baby. "And you can handle it, can you? You're not under too much stress? You've done some good things in your time. You've a heart too, which is more than I can say for some of the capons in this outfit."

"Why should I be under stress?"

No answer. Or not yet. He seemed to be chewing at something just behind his thick lips.

"Who believes in marriage these days, for Christ's sake?" he demanded. His regional drawl had thickened. It was as if he had abandoned restraint. "If you want to live with your girl, live with her is my advice. We've cleared her, she's n.o.body's worry, she's not a bomb thrower or a secret sympathiser or a druggie, what's your bother? She's a nice girl in a nice way of life, and you're a lucky fellow. Do you want the case, or do you not?"

For a moment I was robbed of an answer. There was nothing surprising in Burr knowing of my affair with Sally. In our world you put those things on record before the record puts them on you, and I had already endured my obligatory confessional with Personnel. No, it was Burr's capacity for intimacy that had silenced me, the speed with which he had got under my skin.

"If you'll cover me and give me the resources, of course I'll take it," I said.

"So get on with it, then. Keep me informed but not too much don't bulls.h.i.t me, always give me bad news straight. He's a man without qualities, our Cyril is. You've read Robert Musil, I dare say, haven't you?"

"I'm afraid I haven't."

He was pulling open Frewin's file. I say "pulling" because his doughy hands gave no impression of having done anything before: now we are going to see how this file opens; now we are going to address ourselves to this strange object called a pencil.

"He's got no hobbies, no stated interests beyond music, no wife, no girl, no parents, no money worries, not even any bizarre s.e.xual appet.i.tes, poor devil," Burr complained, flipping to a different part of the file. When on earth had he found time to read it? I asked myself. I presumed the early hours. "And how the h.e.l.l a man of your experience, whose job is dealing with modern civilisation and its discontentments, can manage without the wisdom of Robert Musil is a question which at a calmer moment I shall require you to answer."

He licked his thumb and turned another page. "He's one of five," he said.

"I thought he was an only child."

"Not his brothers and sisters, you mug, his work. There's five clerks in his dreary cyphers office and he's one of them. They all handle the same stuff; they're all the same rank, work the same hours, think the same dirty thoughts."

He looked straight at me, a thing he had not done before. "If he did it, what's his motive? The writer doesn't say. Funny, that. They usually do. Boredom - how about that? Boredom and greed, they're the only motives left these days. Plus getting even, which is eternal."

He went back to the file. "Cyril's the only one not married, notice that? He's a poofter. So am I. I'm a poofter, you're a poofter. We're all poofters. It's just a question which bit of yourself ends on top. He's no hair, see that?"

I caught a flash of Frewin's photograph as he waved it past me and talked on. He had a daunting energy. "Still that's no crime, I dare say, baldness, any more than marriage is. I should know, I've had three and I'm still not done. That's no normal denunciation, is it? That's why you're here. That letter knows what it's talking about. You don't think Modrian wrote it, do you?"

"Why should he have done?"

"I'm asking, Ned, don't fox with me. Wicked thoughts are what keep me going. Perhaps Modrian thought he'd leave a little confusion in his wake when he went back to Moscow. He's a scheming little monkey, Modrian, when he puts his mind to it. I've been reading him too."

When? I thought again. When on earth did you find the time? For another twenty minutes he zigzagged back and forth, tossing possibilities at me, seeing how they came back. And when I finally stepped exhausted into the anteroom, I walked straight into Peter Guillam again.

"Who the h.e.l.l is Leonard Burr?" I asked him, still dazed.

Peter was astonished that I didn't know. "Burr? My dear chap. Leonard was Smiley's Crown Prince for years. George rescued him from a fate worse than death at All Souls."

Of Sally, my reigning extramarital girlfriend, what should I tell you? She was free, and spoke to the captive in me. Monica had been within my walls. Monica was a woman of the Service, bound and not bound to me by the same set of rules. But to Sally I was just a middle-aged civil servant who had forgotten to have any fun. She was a designer and sometime dancer whose pa.s.sion was theatre, and she thought the rest of life unreal. She was tall and she was fair and rather wise, and sometimes I think she must have reminded me of Stefanie.

"Meet you, skipper?" Gorst cried over the telephone. "Top up our Cyril? It'll be my pleasure, sir!"

We met the next day in a Foreign Office interviewing room. I was Captain York, another dreary vetting officer doing his rounds. Gorst was head of Frewin's Cypher Section, which was better known as the. Tank: a lecher in a beadle's suit, a waddling, smirking man with prising elbows and a tiny mouth that wriggled like a worm. When he sat, he scooped up the skirts of his jacket as if he were exposing himself from behind. Then he kicked out a plump leg like a chorus girl, before laying it suggestively over the thigh of the other.

"Saint Cyril, that's what we call Mr. Frewin," he announced blithely. "Doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't swear, certified virgin. End of vetting interview."

Extracting a cigarette from a packet of ten, he tapped the tip of it on his thumbnail, then moistened it with his busy tongue. "Music's his only weakness. Loves the operate. Goes to the operate regular as clockwork. Never cared for it myself. Can't make out whether it's actors singing or singers acting."

He lit his cigarette. I could smell the lunchtime beer on his breath. "I'm not too fond of fat women, either, to be frank. Specially when they scream at me."

He tipped his head back and blew out smoke rings, savouring them as if they were emblems of his authority.

"May I ask how Frewin gets on with the rest of the staff these days?" I said, playing the honest journeyman as I turned a page of my notebook.

"Swimmingly, your grace. Par-fectly."

"The archivists, registrars, secretaries-no trouble on that front?"