“Is that a choice?”
“Of a sort.”
“And you too, you are a volunteer?”
“Yes.”
“Whom are you imitating?”
“No one.”
“Ben had no capacity for such a life. They had no business to be charmed by him. He was too persuasive.”
“I know.”
“And you? Do you need them to make a man of you?”
“It’s something that has to be done.”
“To make a man of you?”
“The work. It’s like emptying the dustbins or cleaning up in hospitals. Somebody has to do it. We can’t pretend it isn’t there.”
“Oh, I think we can.” She took my hand and wound her fingers stiffly into mine. “We pretend a lot of things aren’t there. Or we pretend that other things are more important. That’s how we survive. We shall not defeat liars by lying to them. Will you stay here tonight?”
“I have to go back. I’m not Ben. I’m me. I’m his friend.”
“Let me tell you something. May I? It is very dangerous to play with reality. Will you remember that?”
I have no picture of our leavetaking, so I expect it was too painful and my memory has rejected it. All I know now is, I had to catch the ferry. There was no jeep waiting so I walked. I remember the salt of her tears and the smell of her hair as I hurried through the night wind, and the black clouds writhing round the moon and the thump of the sea as I skirted the rocky bay. I remember the headland and the stubby little lighted steamer starting to cast off. And I know that for the entire journey I stood on the foredeck and that for the last part of it Smiley stood beside me. He must have heard Ben’s story by then, and come up on deck to offer me his silent consolation.
I never saw Ben again—they kept me from him as we disembarked—but when I heard he had been discharged from the Service I wrote to Stefanie and asked her to tell me where he was. My letter was returned marked “Gone Away.”
I would like to be able to tell you that Ben did not cause the destruction of the network, because Bill Haydon had betrayed it long before. Or better, that the network had been set up for us by the East Germans or the Russians in the first place, as a means of keeping us occupied and feeding us disinformation. But I am afraid the truth is otherwise, for in those days Haydon’s access was limited by compartmentation, and his work did not take him to Berlin. Smiley even asked Bill, after his capture, whether he had had a hand in it, and Bill had laughed.
“I’d been wanting to get my hooks on that network for years,” he’d replied. “When I heard what had happened, I’d a bloody good mind to send young Cavendish a bunch of flowers, but I suppose it wouldn’t have been secure.”
The best I could tell Ben, if I saw him today, is that if he hadn’t blown the network when he did, Haydon would have blown it for him a couple of years later. The best I could tell Stefanie is that she was right in her way, but then so was I, and that her words never left my memory, even after I had ceased to regard her as the fountain of all wisdom. If I never understood who she was—if she belonged, as it were, more to Ben’s mystery than my own— she was nevertheless the first of the siren voices that sounded in my ear, warning me that my mission was an ambiguous one. Sometimes I wonder what I was for her, but I’m afraid I know only too well: a callow boy, another Ben, unversed in life, banishing weakness with a show of strength, and taking refuge in a cloistered world.
I went back to Berlin not long ago. It was a few weeks after the Wall had been declared obsolete. An old bit of business took me, and Personnel was pleased to pay my fare. I never was formally stationed there, as it worked out, but I had been a frequent visitor, and for us old cold warriors a visa to Berlin is like returning to the source. And on a damp afternoon I found myself standing at the grimy little bit of fencing known grandly as the Wall of the Unknown Ones, which was the memorial to those killed while trying to escape during the sixties, some of whom did not have the foresight to give their names in advance. I stood among a humble group of East Germans, mostly women, and I noticed that they were examining the inscriptions on the crosses: unknown man, shot on such-and-such a date, in 1965. They were looking for clues, fitting the dates to the little that they knew.
And the sickening notion struck me that they could even have been looking for one of Ben’s agents who had made a dash for freedom at the eleventh hour and failed. And the notion was all the more bewildering when I reflected that it was no longer we Western Allies, but East Germany itself, which was struggling to snuff out its existence.
The memorial is gone now. Perhaps it will find a corner in a museum somewhere, but I doubt it. When the Wall came down— hacked to pieces, sold—the memorial came down with it, which strikes me as an appropriate comment on the fickleness of human constancy.
4
Somebody asked Smiley about interrogation, yet again. It was a question that cropped up often as the night progressed—mainly because his audience wanted to squeeze more case histories out of him. Children are merciless.
“Oh, there’s some art to faulting the liar, of course there is, Smiley conceded doubtfully, and took a sip from his glass. “But the real art lies in recognising the truth, which is a great deal harder. Under interrogation, nobody behaves normally. People who are stupid act intelligent. Intelligent people act stupid. The guilty look innocent as the day, and the innocent look dreadfully guilty. And just occasionally people act as they are and tell the truth as they know it, and of course they’re the poor souls who get caught out every time. There’s nobody less convincing to our wretched trade than the blameless man with nothing to hide.”
“Except possibly the blameless woman,” I suggested under my breath.
George had reminded me of Bella and the ambiguous sea captain Brandt.
He was a big, rough flaxen fellow, at first guess Slav or Scandinavian, with the roll of a landed seaman and the far eyes of an adventurer. I first met him in Zurich where he was in hot water with the police. The city superintendent called me in the middle of the night and said, “Herr Konsul, we have somebody who says he has information for the British. We have orders to put him over the border in the morning.”
I didn’t ask which border. The Swiss have four, but when they are throwing somebody out they’re not particular. I drove to the district prison and met him in a barred interviewing room: a caged giant in a roll-neck pullover who called himself Sea Captain Brandt, which seemed to be his personal version of Kapitän zur See.
“You’re a long way from the sea,” I said as I shook his great, padded hand.
As far as the Swiss were concerned, he had everything wrong with him. He had swindled a hotel, which in Switzerland is such a heinous crime it gets its own paragraph in the criminal code. He had caused a disturbance, he was penniless and his West German passport did not bear examination—though the Swiss refused to say this out loud, since a fake passport could prejudice their chances of getting rid of him to another country. He had been picked up drunk and vagrant and he blamed it on a girl. He had broken someone’s jaw. He insisted on speaking to me alone.
“You British?” he asked in English, presumably in order to disguise our conversation from the Swiss, though they spoke better English than he did.
“Yes.”
“Prove, please.”
I showed him my official identity card, describing me as Vice-Consul for Economic Affairs.
“You work for British Intelligence?” he asked.
“I work for the British government.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, and in sudden weariness sank his head into his hand so that his long blond hair flopped forward, and he had to toss it back again with a sweep of his arm. His face was chipped and pitted like a boxer’s.
“You ever been in prison?” he asked, staring at the scrubbed white table.
“No, thank God.”
“Jesus,” he said, and in bad English told me his story. He was a Latvian, born in Riga of Latvian and Polish parents
. He spoke Latvian, Russian, Polish and German. He was born to the sea, which I sensed immediately, for I was born to it myself. His father and grandfather had been sailors, he had served six years in the Soviet navy, sailing the Arctic out of Archangel, and the Sea of Japan out of Vladivostok. A year back he had returned to Riga, bought a small boat and taken up smuggling along the Baltic coast, running cheap Russian vodka into Finland with the help of Scandinavian fishermen. He was caught and put in prison near Leningrad, escaped and stowed away to Poland, where he lived illegally with a Polish girl student in Cracow. I tell you this exactly as he told it to me, as if stowing away to Poland from Russia were as self-evident as catching a number II bus or popping down the road for a drink. Yet even with my limited familiarity with the obstacles he had overcome, I knew it was an extraordinary feat—and no less so when he performed it a second time. For when the girl left him to marry a Swiss salesman, he headed back to the coast and got himself a ride to Malmö, then down to Hamburg where he had a distant cousin, but the cousin was distant indeed, and told him to go to hell. So he stole the cousin’s passport and headed south to Switzerland, determined to get back his Polish girl. When her new husband wouldn’t let her go, Brandt broke the poor man’s jaw for him, so here he was, a prisoner of the Swiss police.
All this still in English, so I asked him where he’d learned it. From the BBC, when he was out smuggling, he said. From his Polish girl—she was a language student. I had given him a packet of cigarettes and he was devouring them one after another, making a gas chamber of our little room.
“So what’s this information you’ve got for us?” I asked him.
As a Latvian, he said in preamble, he felt no allegiance to Moscow. He had grown up under the lousy Russian tyranny in Latvia, he had served under lousy Russian officers in the navy, he had been sent to prison by lousy Russians and hounded by lousy Russians, and he had no compunction about betraying them. He hated Russians. I asked him the names of the ships he had served on and he told me. I asked him what armament they carried and he described some of the most sophisticated stuff they possessed at that time. I gave him a pencil and paper and he made surprisingly impressive drawings. I asked him what he knew about signals. He knew a lot. He was a qualified signalman and had used their latest toys, even if his memory was a year old. I asked him, “Why the British?” and he replied that he had known “a couple of you guys in Leningrad”—British sailors on a goodwill visit. I wrote down their names and the name of their ship, returned to my office and sent a flash telegram to London because we only had a few hours’ grace before they put him over the border. Next evening Sea Captain Brandt was undergoing rigorous questioning at a safe house in Surrey. He was on the brink of a dangerous career. He knew every nook and bay along the south Baltic coast; he had good friends who were honest Latvian fishermen, others who were black marketeers, thieves and disaffected drop-outs. He was offering exactly what London was looking for after our recent losses—the chance to build a new supply line in and out of northern Russia, across Poland into Germany.
I have to set the recent history for you here—of the Circus, and of my own efforts to succeed in it.
After Ben, it had been touch and go for me whether they promoted me or threw me out. I think today that I owed more to Smiley’s backstairs intervention than I gave him credit for at the time. Left to himself, I don’t think Personnel would have kept me five minutes. I had broken bounds while under house arrest, I had withheld my knowledge of Ben’s attachment to Stefanie, and if I was not a willing recipient of Ben’s amorous declarations, I was guilty by association, so to hell with me.
“We rather thought you might like to consider the British Council,” Personnel had suggested nastily, at a meeting adorned not even by a cup of tea.
But Smiley interceded for me. Smiley, it appeared, had seen beyond my youthful impulsiveness, and Smiley commanded what amounted to his own modest private army of secret sources scattered around Europe. A further reason for my reprieve was provided—though not even Smiley could have known it at the time—by the traitor Bill Haydon, whose London Station was rapidly acquiring a monopoly of Circus operations worldwide. And if Smiley’s questing eye had not yet focused on Bill, he was already convinced that the Fifth Floor was nursing a Moscow Centre mole to its bosom, and determined to assemble a team of officers whose age and access placed them beyond suspicion. By a mercy, I was one.
For a few months I was kept in limbo, devilling in large back rooms, evaluating and distributing low-grade reports to Whitehall clients. Friendless and bored, I was seriously beginning to wonder whether Personnel had decided to post me to death, when to my joy I was summoned to his office and in Smiley’s presence offered the post of second man in Zurich, under a capable old trooper named Eddows, whose stated principle was to leave me to sink or swim.
Within a month I was installed in a small flat in the Altstadt, working round the clock eight days a week. I had a Soviet naval attaché in Geneva who loved Lenin but loved a French air hostess more, and a Czech arms dealer in Lausanne who was having a crisis of conscience about supplying the world’s terrorists with weapons and explosives. I had a millionaire Albanian with a chalet in St. Moritz who was risking his neck by returning to his homeland and recruiting members of his former household, and a nervous East German physicist on attachment to the Max Planck Institute in Essen who had secretly converted to Rome. I had a beautiful little microphone operation running against the Polish Embassy in Bern and a telephone tap on a pair of Hungarian spies in Basel. And I was by now beginning to fancy myself seriously in love with Mabel, who had recently been transferred to Vetting Section, and was the toast of the Junior Officers’ Bar.
And Smiley’s faith in me was not misplaced, for by my own exertions in the field, and his insistence upon rigid need-to-know at home, we succeeded in netting valuable intelligence and even getting it into the right hands—and you would be surprised how rarely that combination is achieved.
So that when after two years of this the Hamburg slot came up—a one-man post, and working directly to London Station, now willy-nilly the operational hub of the Service—I had Smiley’s generous blessing to apply for it, whatever his private reservations about Haydon’s widening embrace. I angled, I was not brash, I reminded Personnel of my naval background. I let him infer, if I did not say it in as many words, that I was straining at the bonds of Smiley’s old-world caution. And it worked. He gave me Hamburg Station on the Haydon ticket, and the same night, after a romantic dinner at Bianchi’s, Mabel and I slept together, the first time for each of us.
My sense of the rightness of things was further increased when, on looking over my new stocklist, I saw to my amusement that one Wolf Dittrich, alias Sea Captain Brandt, was a leading player in my new cast of characters. We are talking of the late sixties now. Bill Hayden had three more years to run.
Hamburg had always been a good place to be English, now it was an even better place to spy. After the lakeside gentility of Zurich, Hamburg crackled with energy and sparkled with sea air. The old Hanseatic ties to Poland, northern Russia and the Baltic states were still very much alive. We had commerce, we had banking—well, so had Zurich. But we had shipping too, and immigrants and adventurers. We had brashness and vulgarity galore. We were the German capital of whoredom and the press. And on our doorstep we had the secretive lowlands of Schleswig-Holstein, with their horizontal rainstorms, red farms, green fields and cloudstacked skies. Every man has his price. To this day, my soul can be bought for a jar of Lübeck beer, a pickled herring and a glass of schnapps after a trudge along the dykes.
Everything else about the job was equally pleasing. I was Ned the Assistant Shipping Consul; my humble office was a pretty brick cottage with a brass plate, handy enough for the Consulate General, yet prudently apart from it. Two clerks on secondment from the Admiralty performed my cover work for me, and kept their mouths shut. I had a radio and a Circus cypher clerk. And if Mabel and I were not yet engaged to be married, our
relationship had reached a stage when she was ready to clear her decks for me whenever I popped back to London for a consultation with Bill or one of his lieutenants.
To meet my joes, I had a safe flat in Wellingsbüttel overlooking the cemetery, on the upper floor of a flower shop managed by a retired German couple who had belonged to us in the war. Their busiest days were Sundays, and on Monday mornings a queue of kids from the housing estate sold them back the flowers they had sold the day before. I never saw a safer spot. Hearses, covered vans and funeral corteges rolled past us all day long. But at night the place was literally as quiet as the grave. Even the exotic figure of my sea captain became unremarkable when he donned his black hat and dark suit and swung into the brick archway of our shop and, with his commercial traveller’s briefcase bouncing at his side, stomped up the stairs to our innocent front door marked “Büro.”
I shall go on calling him Brandt. Some people, however much they change their names, have only one.
But the jewel in my crown was the Margerite—or, as we called her in English, the Daisy. She was a fifty-foot clinker-built, doubleended fishing boat converted to a cabin cruiser, with a wheelhouse, a main saloon and four berths in the foc’sle. She had a mizzen mast and sail to steady her from rolling. She had a dark-green hull with light-green gunnels and a white cabin roof. She was built for stealth, not speed. In poor light and choppy water, she was invisible to the naked eye. She had sparse top-hamper, and lay close to the water, which gave her a harmless image on the radar screens, particularly in heavy weather. The Baltic is a vengeful sea, shallow and tideless. Even in a mild wind, the waves come steep and nasty. At ten knots and full throttle, the Daisy pitched and rolled like a pig. The only speedy thing about her was the fourteen-foot Zodiac dinghy hoisted as the ship’s lifeboat and lashed to the cabin roof, with a Johnson 50-horsepower to whisk our agents in and out.
For her berth she had the old fishing village of Blankenese on the river Elbe, just a few short miles out of Hamburg. And there she lay contentedly among her equals, as humble an example of her kind as you could wish. From Blankenese, when she was needed, she could slip upriver to the Kiel Canal, and crawl its sixty miles at five knots before hitting open sea.