John le Carr� - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

If they'll let you, thought Guillam, with Camilla in mind.

To help Tarr answer, Smiley was making helpful suggestions: 'Was it because you dipped into your operational expenses to buy these British passports? Was that the reason you didn't tell us? Good heavens, no one here is worried about money. You've brought us a vital piece of information. Why should we quarrel about a couple of thousand dollars?' And the time ticked away again without anyone using it.

'Or was it,' Smiley suggested, 'that you were ashamed?'

Guillam stiffened, his own problems forgotten.

'Rightly ashamed in a way, I suppose. It wasn't a very gallant act, after all, to leave Danny and her mother with blown passports, at the mercy of that so-called Frenchman who was looking so hard for Mr Poole, was it? While you yourself escaped to all this VIP treatment? It is horrible to think of,' Smiley agreed, as if Tarr, not he, had made the point. 'It is horrible to contemplate the lengths Karla would go to in order to obtain your silence. Or your services.'

The sweat on Tarr's face was suddenly unbearable. There was too much of it, it was like tears all over. The cards no longer interested Smiley, his eye had settled on a different game. It was a toy, made of two steel rods like the shafts of a pair of tongs. The trick was to roll a steel ball along them. The further you rolled it the more points you won when it fell into one of the holes underneath.

'The other reason you might not have told us, I suppose, is that you burnt them. You burnt the British passports, I mean, not the Swiss ones.'

Go easy, George, thought Guillam, and softly moved a pace nearer to cover the gap between them. Just go easy.

'You knew that Poole was blown, so you burnt the Poole passports you had bought for Danny and her mother, but you kept your own because there was no alternative. Then you made travel bookings for the two of them in the name of Poole in order to convince everybody that you still believed in the Poole passports. By everybody, I think I mean Karla's footpads, don't I? You doctored the Swiss escapes, one for Danny, one for her mother, took a chance that the numbers wouldn't be noticed, and you made a different set of arrangements which you didn't advertise. Arrangements which matured earlier than those you made for the Pooles. How would that be? Such as staying out East but somewhere else, like Djakarta: somewhere you have friends.'

Even from where he stood, Guillam was too slow. Tarr's hands were at Smiley's throat, the chair toppled and Tarr fell with him. From the heap, Guillam selected Tarr's right arm and flung it into a lock against his back, bringing it very near to breaking as he did so. From nowhere Fawn appeared, took the gun from the pillow and walked back to Tarr as if to give him a hand. Then Smiley was straightening his suit and Tarr was back on the bed, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief.

Smiley said: 'I don't know where they are. As far as I know, no harm has come to them. You believe that, do you?'

Tarr was staring at him, waiting. His eyes were furious, but over Smiley a kind of calm had settled, and Guillam guessed it was the reassurance he had been hoping for.

'Maybe you should keep a better eye on your own damn woman and leave mine alone,' Tarr whispered, his hand across his mouth. With an exclamation, Guillam sprang forward but Smiley restrained him.

'As long as you don't try to communicate with them,' Smiley continued, 'it's probably better that I shouldn't know. Unless you want me to do something about them. Money or protection or comfort of some sort?'

Tarr shook his head. There was blood in his mouth, a lot of it, and Guillam realised Fawn must have hit him but he couldn't work out when.

'It won't be long now,' Smiley said. 'Perhaps a week. Less if I can manage it. Try not to think too much.'

By the time they left, Tarr was grinning again, so Guillam guessed that the visit, or the insult to Smiley or the smash in the face, had done him good.

'Those football pool coupons,' Smiley said quietly to Fawn as they climbed into the car: 'You don't post them anywhere, do you?'

'No, sir.'

'Well, let's hope to God he doesn't have a win,' Smiley remarked in a most unusual fit of jocularity, and there was laughter all round.

The memory plays strange tricks on an exhausted, overladen brain. As Guillam drove, one part of his conscious mind upon the road and another still wretchedly grappling with even more gothic suspicions of Camilla, odd images of this and other long days drifted freely through his memory. Days of plain terror in Morocco as one by one his agent lines went dead on him, and every footfall on the stair had him scurrying to the window to check the street; days of idleness in Brixton when he watched that poor world slip by and wondered how long before he joined it. And suddenly the written report was there before him on his desk: cyclostyled on blue flimsy because it was traded, source unknown and probably unreliable, and every word of it came back to him in letters a foot high.

According to a recently released prisoner from Lubianka, Moscow Centre held a secret execution in the punishment block in July. The victims were three of its own functionaries. One was a woman. All three were shot in the back of the neck.

'It was stamped "internal",' Guillam said dully. They had parked in a layby beside a roadhouse hung with fairy lights. 'Somebody from London Station had scribbled on it: Can anyone identify the bodies ?

By the coloured glow of the lights, Guillam watched Smiley's face pucker in disgust.

'Yes,' he agreed at last. 'Yes, well now the woman was Irina, wasn't she? Then there was Ivlov and then there was Boris, her husband, I suppose.' His voice remained extremely matter of fact. 'Tarr mustn't know,' he continued, as if shaking off lassitude. 'It is vital that he should have no wind of this. God knows what he would do, or not do, if he knew that Irina was dead.' For some moments neither moved; perhaps for their different reasons neither had the strength just then, or the heart.

'I ought to telephone,' said Smiley, but he made no attempt to leave the car.

'George?'

'I have a phone call to make,' he muttered. 'Lacon.'

'Then make it.'

Reaching across him, Guillam pushed open the door. Smiley clambered out, walked a distance over the tarmac, then seemed to change his mind and came back.

'Come and eat something,' he said through the window, in the same preoccupied tone. 'I don't think even Toby's people would follow us in here.'

It was once a restaurant, now a transport cafe with trappings of old grandeur. The menu was bound in red leather and stained with grease. The boy who brought it was half asleep.

'I hear the coq au vin is always reliable,' said Smiley with a poor effort at humour, as he returned from the telephone booth in the corner. And in a quieter voice, that fell short and echoed nowhere: 'Tell me, how much do you know about Karla?'

'About as much as I know about Witchcraft, and Source Merlin, and whatever else it said on the paper I signed for Porteous.'

'Ah well now that's a very good answer, as it happens. You meant it as a rebuke, I expect, but, as it happens, the analogy was most apt.' The boy reappeared, swinging a bottle of Burgundy like an Indian club. 'Would you please let it breathe a little?'

The boy stared at Smiley as if he were mad.

'Open it and leave it on the table,' said Guillam curtly.

It was not the whole story Smiley told. Afterwards Guillam did notice several gaps. But it was enough to lift his spirits from the doldrums where they had strayed.

'It is the business of agent runners to turn themselves into legends,' Smiley began, rather as if he were delivering a trainee lecture at the Nursery. 'They do this first to impress their agents. Later they try it out on their colleagues and in my personal experience make rare asses of themselves in consequence. A few go so far as to try it on themselves. Those are the charlatans and they must be got rid of quickly, there's no other way.'