John le Carr� - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Then to his fleeting amusement he actually heard Bill's infuriated roar, echoing from God knows what distance: 'Stop that moaning. Who is the fool?'

Move. Once you stop you never start again: there is a special stage-fright that can make you dry up and walk away, that burns your fingers when you touch the goods and turns your stomach to water. Move. He put back the April volume and drew four others at random, February, June, September and October. He flicked through them fast, looking for comparisons, returned them to the shelf and dropped into a crouch. He wished to God the dust would settle. Why didn't someone complain? Always the same when a lot of people use one place: no one's responsible, no one gives a hoot. He was looking for the night janitors' attendance lists. He found them on the bottom shelf, jammed in with the teabags and the condensed milk: sheafs of them in envelope-type folders. The janitors filled them in and brought them to you twice in your twelve hours' tour of duty: at midnight and again at six a.m. You vouched for their correctness - God knows how, since the night staff were scattered all over the building - signed them off, kept the third copy and chucked it in the cupboard, no one knew why. That was the procedure before the Flood, and it seemed to be the procedure now.

Dust and teabags on one shelf, he thought. How long since anyone made tea?

Once again he fixed his sights on April 10th/11th. His shirt was clinging to his ribs. What's happened to me? Christ, I'm over the hill. He turned forward and back, forward again, twice, three times, then closed the cupboard on the lot. He waited, listened, took a last worried look at the dust then stepped boldly across the corridor, back to the safety of the men's room. On the way the clatter hit him: coding machines, the ringing of the telephones, a girl's voice calling 'Where's that damn float, I had it in my hand,' and that mysterious piping again, but no longer like Camilla's in the small hours. Next time I'll get her to do the job, he thought savagely; without compromise, face to face, the way life should be.

In the men's room he found Spike Kaspar and Nick de Silsky standing at the hand basins and murmuring at each other into the mirror: legmen for Haydon's Soviet networks, they'd been around for years, known simply as the Russians. Seeing Guillam they at once stopped talking.

'Hullo, you two. Christ you really are inseparable.'

They were blond and squat and they looked more like Russians than the real ones. He waited till they'd gone, rinsed the dust off his fingers then drifted back to Lauder Strickland's room.

'Lord save us, that Dolphin does talk,' he said carelessly.

'Very able officer. Nearest thing to indispensable we have around here. Extremely competent, you can take my word for it,' said Lauder. Looking closely at his watch before he signed the chit, he led Guillam back to the lifts. Toby Esterhase was at the barrier, talking to the unfriendly young janitor.

'You are going back to Brixton, Peter?' His tone was casual, his expression as usual impenetrable.

'Why?'

'I have a car outside actually. I thought maybe I could run you. We have some business out that way.'

Run you: Tiny Toby spoke no known language perfectly, but he spoke them all. In Switzerland Guillam had heard his French and it had a German accent; his German had a Slav accent and his English was full of stray flaws and stops and false vowel sounds.

'It's all right, Tobe, I think I'll just go home. Night.'

'Straight home? I would run you, that's all.'

'Thanks, I've got shopping to do. All those bloody godchildren.'

'Sure,' said Toby as if he hadn't any, and stuck in his little granite jaw in disappointment.

What the hell does he want? Guillam thought again. Tiny Toby and Big Roy both: why were they giving me the eye? Was it something they were reading or something they ate?

Out in the street he sauntered down the Charing Cross Road peering at the windows of the bookshops while his other mind checked both sides of the pavement. It had turned much colder, a wind was getting up and there was a promise to people's faces as they bustled by. He felt elated. Till now he had been living too much in the past, he decided. Time to get my eye in again. In Zwemmers he examined a coffee-table book called Musical Instruments Down the Ages and remembered that Camilla had a late lesson with Doctor Sand, her flute teacher. He walked back as far as Foyles, glancing down the bus queues as he went. Think of it as abroad, Smiley had said. Remembering the duty room and Roy Bland's fishy stare, Guillam had no difficulty. And Bill too: was Haydon party to their same suspicion? No. Bill was his own category, Guillam decided, unable to resist a surge of loyalty to Haydon. Bill would share nothing that was not his own in the first place. Set beside Bill, those other two were pygmies.

In Soho he hailed a cab and asked for Waterloo Station. At Waterloo from a reeking phone box he telephoned a number in Mitcham, Surrey, and spoke to Inspector Mendel, formerly of Special Branch, known to both Guillam and Smiley from other lives. When Mendel came on the line he asked for Jenny and heard Mendel tell him tersely that no Jenny lived there. He apologised and rang off. He dialled the time and feigned a pleasant conversation with the automatic announcer because there was an old lady outside waiting for him to finish. By now he should be there, he thought. He rang off and dialled a second number in Mitcham, this time a callbox at the end of Mendel's avenue.

'This is Will,' said Guillam.

'And this is Arthur,' said Mendel cheerfully. 'How's Will?' He was a quirkish, loping tracker of a man, sharp-faced and sharp-eyed, and Guillam had a very precise picture of him just then, leaning over his policeman's notebook with his pencil poised.

'I want to give you the headlines now in case I go under a bus.'

'That's right, Will,' said Mendel consolingly. 'Can't be too careful.'

He gave his message slowly, using the scholastic cover they had agreed on as a last protection against random interception: exams, students, stolen papers. Each time he paused he heard nothing but a faint scratching. He imagined Mendel writing slowly and legibly and not speaking till he had it all down.

'I got those happy snaps from the chemist by the by,' said Mendel finally, when he had checked it all back. 'Come out a treat. Not a miss among them.'

'Thanks. I'm glad.'

But Mendel had already rung off.

I'll say one thing for moles, thought Guillam: it's a long dark tunnel all the way. As he held open the door for the old lady he noticed the telephone receiver lying on its cradle, how the sweat crawled over it in drips. He considered his message to Mendel, he thought again of Roy Bland and Toby Esterhase staring at him through the doorway, he wondered quite urgently where Smiley was, and whether he was taking care. He returned to Eaton Place needing Camilla badly, and a little afraid of his reasons. Was it really age that was against him suddenly? Somehow, for the first time in his life, he had sinned against his own notions of nobility. He had a sense of dirtiness, even of self-disgust.

There are old men who go back to Oxford and find their youth beckoning to them from the stones. Smiley was not one of them. Ten years ago he might have felt a pull. Not now. Passing the Bodleian he vaguely thought: I worked there. Seeing the house of his old tutor in Parks Road, he remembered that before the war in its long garden Jebedee had first suggested he might care to talk to 'one or two people I know in London'. And hearing Tom Tower strike the evening six he found himself thinking of Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux, who must have arrived here the year that Smiley went down and were then gathered up by the war; and he wondered idly how they must have looked together then, Bill the painter, polemicist and socialite; Jim the athlete, hanging on his words. In their heyday together in the Circus, he reflected, that distinction had all but evened out: Jim grew nimble at the brainwork and Bill in the field was no man's fool. Only at the end, the old polarity asserted itself: the workhorse went back to his stable, the thinker to his desk.