The Secret Pilgrim Part 2

"I think so."

"Oh, but you remember, really. Of course you do. And always naked too, I expect?"

"Yes."

"Where are the others?"

"I must have thrown them away too."

"Because of your cleaning lady?"

"Yes."

"To protect her sensitivities?"

"Yes!"

The owlish man took his time to consider this. "So the dirty postcards - forgive me, I don't mean that offensively, - really not, they were a sort of running joke between you?"

"On his side, yes."

"But you didn't send him any in return? Please say if you did. Don't be embarra.s.sed. There isn't time."

"I'm not embarra.s.sed! I didn't send him any. Yes, they were a running joke. And they were getting increasingly risque. If you want to know, I was becoming slightly bored with seeing them laid out on the hall table for my collection. So was Mr. Simpson. He's the landlord. He suggested I write to Ben and tell him to stop sending them. He said it was getting the house a bad name. Now will you please, one of you, tell me what the h.e.l.l's going on?"

This time Personnel replied. "Well, that's what we thought you might be able to tell us," he said in a mournful voice. "Ben Cavendish has disappeared. So have his agents, in a manner of speaking. A couple of them are featured in this morning's Neues Deutscbland. British spy ring caught red-handed. The London evening papers are running the story in their late editions. He hasn't been seen for three days. This is Mr. Smiley. He wants to talk to you. You're to tell him whatever you know. And that means anything. I'll see you later."

I must have lost my bearings for a moment, because when I saw Smiley again he was standing at the centre of my carpet, gloomily peering round him at the havoc he and Personnel had wreaked.

"I've a house across the river in Bywater Street," he confessed, as if it were a great burden to him. "Perhaps we ought to pop round there, if it's all the same to you. It's not terribly tidy, but it is better than this."

We drove there in Smiley's humble little Austin, so slowly you would have supposed he was conveying an invalid, which was perhaps how he regarded me. It was dusk. The white lanterns of Albert Bridge floated at us like waterborne coachlights. Ben, I thought desperately, what have we done? Ben, what have they done to you? Bywater Street was jammed, so we parked in a mews. Parking for Smiley was as complicated as docking a liner, but he managed it and we walked back. I remember how impossible it was to keep alongside him, how his thrusting round arm waddle somehow ignored my existence. I remember how he steeled himself to turn the key of his own front door, and his alertness as he stepped into the hall. As if home were a dangerous place for him, as I know now that it was. There was a couple of days' milk in the hall and a half-eaten plate of chop and peas in the drawing room. The turntable of a gramophone was silently revolving. It didn't take a genius to surmise that he had been called out in a hurry-presumably by Personnel yesterday evening-while he was tucking into his chop and listening to a spot of music.

He wandered off to the kitchen in search of soda for our whiskies. I followed him. There was something about Smiley that made you responsible for his solitude. Open tins of food lay about and the sink was crammed with dirty plates. While he mixed our whiskies, I started clearing up, so he fished a tea cloth from the back of the door and set to work drying and putting away.

"You and Ben were considerable partners, weren't you?" he asked.

"We shared a cabin at Sarratt, yes."

"So that's what - kitchen, couple of bedrooms, bathroom?"

"No kitchen."

"But you were twinned for your training course as well?"

"For the last year of it. You choose an oppo and learn to work to each other."

"Choose? Or have chosen for you?"

"Choose first, then they approve or break you up."

"And after that, you're landed with each other for better for worse?"

"Pretty much, yes."

"For the whole of the last year? For half the course, in fact? Day and night, as it were? A total marriage?"

I could not understand why he was pressing me about things he must have known.

"And you do everything together?" he continued. "Forgive me but it's some time since I was trained. Written, practical, physical, you mess together, share a cabin-a whole life, in fact."

"We do the syndicate work together, and the strong arm stuff. That's automatic. It begins with being roughly the same weight and physical apt.i.tude."

Despite the disturbing tendency of his questions, I was beginning to feel a great need to talk to him. "Then the rest sort of follows naturally."

"Ah."

"Sometimes they split us up-say, for a special exercise or if they think one person is relying too much on his oppo. But as long as it's fifty-fifty they're happy for you to keep together."

"And you won everything," Smiley suggested approvingly, helping himself to another wet plate. "You were the best pair. You and Ben."

"It was just that Ben was the best student," I said. "Whoever had him would have won."

"Yes, of course. Well, we all know people like that. Did you know each other before you joined the Service?"

"No. But we'd run parallel. We were at the same school, different houses. We were at Oxford, different colleges. We both read languages but we still never met. He did a short service commission in the army, I did the same in the navy. It took the Circus to bring us together."

Taking up a delicate bone-china cup, he peered doubtfully into it, as if searching for something I had missed. "Would you have sent Ben to Berlin?"

"Yes, of course I would. Why not?"

"Well, why?"

"He's got perfect German from his mother. He's bright. Resourceful. People do what he wants them to do. His father had this terrific war."

"So did your mother, as I remember."

He was referring to my mother's work with the Dutch Resistance. "What did be do-Ben's father, I mean?" he continued, as if he really didn't know.

"He broke codes," I said, with Ben's pride. "He was a wrangler. A mathematician. A genius, apparently. He helped organise the double-cross system against the Germans-recruit their agents and play them back. My mother was very small beer by comparison."

"And Ben was impressed by that?"

"Who wouldn't be?"

"He talked of it, I mean," Smiley insisted. "Often? It was a big matter for him. You had that impression?"

"He just said it was something he had to live up to. He said it was the up-side of having a German mother."

"Oh dear," said Smiley unhappily. "Poor man. And those were his words? You're not embellis.h.i.+ng?"

"Of course I'm not! He said that with a background like his, in England you had to run twice as fast as everyone else, just to keep up.1 Smiley seemed genuinely upset. "Oh dear," he said again. "How unkind. And do you think he has the stamina, would you say?"

He had once more stopped me short. At our age, we really didn't think of stamina as being limited.

"What for?" I asked.

"Oh, I don't know. What kind of stamina would one need for running twice as fast as everyone else in Berlin? A double ration of nerves, I suppose-always a strain. A doubly good head for alcohol-and where women are concerned-never easy."

"I'm sure he's got whatever it takes," I said loyally.

Smiley hung his teacloth on a bent nail which looked like his own addition to the kitchen.

"Did you ever talk politics, the two of you?" he asked as we took our whiskies to the drawing room.

"Never."

"Then I'm sure he's sound," he said, with a sad little laugh, and I laughed too.

Houses always seem to me, at first acquaintance, to be either masculine or feminine, and Smiley's was undoubtedly feminine, with pretty curtains and carved mirrors and clever woman's touches. I wondered who he was living with, or wasn't. We sat down.

"And is there any reason why you mightn't have sent Ben to Berlin?" he resumed, smiling kindly over the top of his gla.s.s.

"Well, only that I wanted to go myself. Everybody wants a Berlin break. It's the front line."

"He simply disappeared," Smiley explained, settling back and appearing to close his eyes. "We're not keeping anything from you. I'll tell you what we know. Last Thursday he crossed into East Berlin to meet his head agent, a gentleman named Hans Seidl - you can see his photograph in Neues Deutschland. It was Ben's first solo meeting with him. A big event. Ben's superior in the Berlin Station is Haggarty. Do you know Haggarty?"

"No."

"Have you heard of him?"

"No."

"Ben never mentioned him to you?"

"No. I told you. I've never heard his name."

"Forgive me. Sometimes an answer can vary with a context, if you follow me."

I didn't.

"Haggarty is second man in the Station under the Station Commander. Did you not know that either?"

"No."

"Has Ben a regular girlfriend?"

"Not that I know of."

"Irregular?"

"You only had to go to a dance with him, they were all over him."

"And after the dance?"

"He didn't brag. He doesn't. If he slept with them, he wouldn't say. He's not that kind of man."

"They tell me you and Ben took your bits of leave together. Where did you go?"

"Twickenham. Lord's. Bit of fis.h.i.+ng. Mainly we stayed with one another's people."

"Ah."

I couldn't understand why Smiley's words were scaring me. Perhaps I was so scared for Ben that I was scared by everything. Increasingly I had the feeling Smiley a.s.sumed I was guilty of something, even if we had still to find out what. His recitation of .events was like a summary of the evidence.

"First comes Willis," he said, as if we were following a difficult trail. "Willis is the Berlin Head of Station, Willis has overall command. Then comes Haggarty, and Haggarty is the senior field officer under Willis and Ben's direct boss. Haggarty is responsible for the day-to-day servicing of the Seidl network. The network is twelve agents strong, or was that is to say, nine men and three women, now all under arrest. An illegal network of that size, communicating partly by radio and partly by secret writing, requires a base team of at least the same number to maintain it, and I'm not talking about evaluating or distributing the product."

"I know."

"I'm sure you do, but let me tell you all the same," he continued at the same ponderous pace. "Then you can help me fill in the gaps. Haggarty is a powerful personality. An Ulsterman. Off duty, he drinks, he's noisy and unpleasant. But when he's working he's none of those things. He's a conscientious officer with a prodigious memory. You're sure Ben never mentioned him to you?"

"I told you. No." - I had not intended this to sound so adamant. There's always a mystery about how often you can deny a thing without beginning to sound like a liar, even to yourself; and of course this was the very mystery Smiley was playing upon in order to bring hidden things to the surface in me.

"Yes, well you did tell me no," he agreed with his habitual courtesy. "And I did hear you say no. I merely wondered whether I had jogged your memory."

"No."

"Haggarty and Seidl were friends," he continued, speaking, if it were possible, even more slowly. "So far as their business allowed, they were close friends. Seidl had been a prisoner of war in England, Haggarty in Germany. While Seidl was working as a farm labourer near Cirencester in 1944, under the relaxed conditions for German prisoners of war that prevailed by then, he succeeded in courting an English landgirl. His guards at the camp took to leaving a bicycle for him outside the main gates with an army greatcoat tossed over the handlebar to cover Seidl's prisoner-of-war tunic. As long as he was back in his own bed by reveille, the guards turned a blind eye. Seidl never forgot his grat.i.tude to the English. When the baby came along, Seidl's guards and fellow prisoners came to the christening. Charming, isn't it? The English at their best. But the story doesn't ring a bell?"

"How could it? You're talking about a joe!"

"A blown joe. One of Ben's. Haggarty's experiences of German prison camp were not so uplifting. Never mind. In 1948, while Haggarty was nominally working with the Control Commission, he picked up Seidl in a bar in Hannover, recruited him and ran him back into East Germany, to his home town of Leipzig. He has been running him ever since. The Haggarty-Seidl friends.h.i.+p has been the linchpin of the Berlin Station for the last fifteen years. At the time of his arrest last week, Seidl was fourth man in the East German Foreign Ministry. He had served as their Amba.s.sador in Havana.

But you've never heard of him. n.o.body ever mentioned him to you. Not Ben. Not anyone."

"No," I said, as wearily as I could manage.

"Once a month Haggarty was accustomed to going into East Berlin and debriefing Seidl - in a car, in a safe flat, on a park bench, wherever - the usual thing. After the Wall there was a suspension of service for a while, before the meetings were cautiously resumed. The game was to cross in a Four Power vehicle - say, an army jeep - introduce a subst.i.tute, hop out at the right moment and rejoin the vehicle at an agreed point. It sounds perilous and it was, but with practice it worked. If Haggarty was on leave or sick, there was no meeting. A couple of months ago Head Office ruled that Haggarty should introduce Seidl to a successor. Haggarty is past retiring age, Willis has had Berlin so long he's blown sky high, and besides he knows far too many secrets to go wandering round behind the Curtain. Hence Ben's posting to Berlin. Ben was untarnished. Clean. Haggarty in person briefed him - I gather exhaustively. I'm sure he was not merciful. Haggarty is not a merciful man, and a twelve-strong network can be a complicated matter: who works to whom and why; who knows whose ident.i.ty; the cut-outs, codes, couriers, covernames, symbols, radios, dead-letter boxes, inks, cars, salaries, children, birthdays, wives, mistresses. A lot to get into one's head all at once."

"I know."

"Ben told you, did he?"

I did not rise to him this time. I was determined not to. "We learned it on the course. Ad infinitum," I said.

"Yes: Well, I suppose you did. The trouble is, the theory's never quite the same as the real thing, is it? Who's his best friend, apart from you?"

"I don't know."