John le Carré - The Honourable Schoolboy

'Drunk,' said Fawn in disgust.

In the lobby Lawrence the porter watched with keen interest. In the forecourt, a Peugeot saloon waited, blue. Peter Guillam was sitting in the driving seat.

'Get in,' he snapped.

The passenger door was locked. Jerry climbed into the back, Fawn after him.

'What the hell do you think you're up to?' Guillam demanded through clenched teeth. 'Since when did half-arsed London Occasionals cut anchor in mid-operation?'

'Keep clear,' Jerry warned Fawn. 'Just the hint of a frown from you right now is enough to get me going. I mean that. I warn you. Official.'

The ground mist had returned, rolling over the bonnet. The passing city offered itself like the framed glimpses of a junk yard: a painted sign, a shop window, strands of cable strung across a neon, a clump of suffocated foliage; the inevitable building site, floodlit. In the mirror, Jerry saw a black Mercedes following, male passenger, male driver.

'Cousins bringing up the tail,' he announced.

A spasm of pain in the abdomen almost blacked him out, and for a moment he actually thought Fawn had hit him again, but it was only an afterthought of the first time. In Central, he made Guillam pull up and was sick in the gutter in full public view, leaning his head through the window while Fawn crouched tensely over him. Behind them, the Mercedes stopped too.

'Nothing like a spot of pain,' he exclaimed, settling in the car again, 'for getting the old brain out of mothballs once in a while. Eh Peter?'

In his black anger Guillam made an obscene answer.

You don't understand what's going on, Smiley had said. How much you could upset things. Billions of dollars and thousands of men could not obtain a part of what we stand to gain...

How? he kept asking himself. Gain what? His knowledge of Nelson's position inside Chinese affairs was sketchy. Craw had told him only the minimum he needed to know. Nelson has access to the Crown jewels of Peking, your Grace. Whoever gets his hooks on Nelson has earned a lifetime's merit for himself and his noble house.

They were skirting the harbour, heading for the tunnel. From sea level the American aircraft carrier looked strangely small against the merry backdrop of Kowloon.

'How's Drake getting him out by the way?' he asked Guillam chattily. 'Not trying to fly him again, that's for sure. Ricardo put the lid on that one for good, didn't he?'

'Suction,' Guillam snapped — which was very silly of him, thought Jerry jubilantly, he should have kept his mouth shut.

'Swimming?' Jerry asked. 'Nelson on the Mirs Bay ticket. That's not Drake's way is it? Nelson's too old for that one anyway. Freeze to death, even if the sharks didn't get his whatnots. How about the pig-train, come out with the grunters? Sorry you've got to miss the big moment, sport, all on account of me.'

'So am I, as a matter of fact. I'd like to kick your teeth in.'

Inside Jerry's brain, the sweet music of rejoicing sounded. It's true! he told himself. That's what's happening! Drake's bringing Nelson out and they're all queuing up for his finish!

Behind Guillam's lapse — just one word, but in Sarratt terms totally unforgivable, indivisibly wrong — there lay nevertheless a revelation as dazzling as anything which Jerry was presently enduring, and in some respects vastly more bitter. If anything mitigates the crime of indiscretion — and in Sarratt terms nothing does — then Guillam's experiences of the last hour — half of it spent driving Smiley frantically through rush-hour traffic, and half of it waiting, in desperate indecision, in the car outside Star Heights — would surely qualify. Everything he had feared in London, the most Gothic of his apprehensions regarding the Enderby-Martello connection, and the supporting roles of Lacon and Sam Collins, had in these sixty minutes been proven to him beyond all reasonable doubt as right, and true, and justified, and if anything somewhat understated.

They had driven first to Bowen Road in the Midlevels, to an apartment block so blank and featureless and large that even those who lived there must have had to look twice at the number before they were sure they were entering the right one. Smiley pressed a bell marked Mellon and, idiot that he was, Guillam asked 'Who's Mellon?' at exactly the same time as he remembered that it was Sam Collins's workname. Then he did a double take and asked himself — but not Smiley, they were in the lift by now — what maniac, after Haydon's ravages, could conceivably award himself the same workname which he had used before the fall? Then Collins opened the door to them, wearing his Thai silk dressing gown, a brown cigarette jammed into a holder, and his washable non-iron smile, and the next thing was, they were grouped in a parquet drawing room with bamboo chairs and Sam had switched two transistor radios to different programmes, one voice, the other music, to provide rudimentary anti-bug security while they talked. Sam listened, ignoring Guillam entirely, then promptly phoned Martello direct — Sam had a direct line to him, please note, no dialling, nothing, a straight landline apparently — to ask in veiled language 'how things stood with chummy'. Chummy — Guillam learned later — being gambling slang for a mug. Martello replied that the surveillance van had just reported in. Chummy and Tiu were presently sitting in Causeway Bay aboard the Admiral Nelson, said the watchers, and the directional mikes (as usual) were picking up so much bounce from the water that the transcribers would need days if not weeks to clean off the extraneous sound and find out whether the two men had ever said anything interesting. Meanwhile they had dropped one man at the quayside as a static post, with orders to advise Martello immediately should the boat weigh anchor or either of the two quarries disembark.

'Then we must go there at once,' said Smiley, so they piled back into the car, and while Guillam drove the short distance to Star Heights, seething and listening impotently to their terse conversation, he became with every moment more convinced that he was looking at a spider's web, and that only George Smiley, obsessed by the promise of the case and the image of Karla, was myopic enough, and trusting enough, and in his own paradoxical way innocent enough, to bumble straight into the middle of it.

George's age, thought Guillam. Enderby's political ambitions, his fondness for the hawkish, pro-American stance — not to mention the crate of champagne and his outrageous courtship of the fifth floor. Lacon's tepid support of Smiley, while he secretly cast around for a successor. Martello's stopover in Langley. Enderby's attempt, only days ago, to prise Smiley away from the case and hand it to Martello on a plate. And now, most eloquent and ominous of all, the reappearance of Sam Collins as the joker in the pack with a private line to Martello! And Martello, Heaven help us, acting dumb about where George got his information from — the direct line notwithstanding.

To Guillam all these threads added up to one thing only, and he could not wait to take Smiley aside and by any means at his command deflect him sufficiently from the operation, just for one moment, for him to see where he was heading. To tell him about the letter. About Sam's visit to Lacon and Enderby in Whitehall.

Instead of which? He was to return to England. Why was he to return to England? Because a genial thick-skulled hack named Westerby had had the gall to slip the leash.

Even without his crying awareness of impending disaster, the disappointment to Guillam would have been scarcely supportable. He had endured a great deal for this moment. Disgrace and exile to Brixton under Haydon, poodling for old George instead of getting back to the field, putting up with George's obsessive secretiveness, which Guillam privately considered both humiliating and self-defeating — but at least it had been a journey with a destination, till bloody Westerby, of all people, had robbed him even of that. But to return to London knowing that for the next twenty-two hours at least, he was leaving Smiley and the Circus to a bunch of wolves, without even the chance to warn him — to Guillam it was the crowning cruelty of a frustrated career, and if blaming Jerry helped, then damn him, he would blame Jerry or anybody else.