Chapter twenty

The Circus archives were not accessible from the main entrance. They rambled through a warren of dingy rooms and half landings at the back of the building, more like one of the secondhand bookshops which proliferate round there, than the organised memory of a large department. They were reached by a dull doorway in the Charing Cross Road jammed between a picture-framer and an all-day café that was out of bounds to staff. A plate on the door read ‘Town and Country Language School, Staff Only’ and another ‘C and L Distribution Ltd’. To enter you pressed one or other bell and waited for Alwyn, an effeminate Marine who spoke only of weekends. Till Wednesday or so he spoke of the weekend past, after that he spoke of the weekend to come. This morning, a Tuesday, he was in a mood of indignant unrest.

‘Here, what about that storm then?’ he demanded as he pushed the book across the counter for Guillam to sign. ‘Might as well live in a lighthouse. All Saturday, all Sunday. I said to my friend: “Here we are in the middle of London and listen to it.” Want me to look after that for you?’

‘You should have been where I was,’ said Guillam, consigning the brown canvas grip into Alwyn’s waiting hands. ‘Talk about listen to it, you could hardly stand upright.’

Don’t be over-friendly, he thought, talking to himself.

‘Still I do like the country,’ Alwyn confided, stowing the grip in one of the open lockers behind the counter. ‘Want a number then? I’m supposed to give you one, the Dolphin would kill me if she knew.’

‘I’ll trust you,’ said Guillam. Climbing the four steps he pushed open the swing doors to the reading room. The place was like a makeshift lecture hall: a dozen desks all facing the same way, a raised area where the archivist sat. Guillam took a desk near the back. It was still early – ten ten by his watch – and the only other reader was Ben Thruxton of research, who spent most of his time here. Long ago, masquerading as a Latvian dissident, Ben had run with revolutionaries through the streets of Moscow calling death to the oppressors. Now he crouched over his papers like an old priest, white-haired and perfectly still.

Seeing Guillam standing at her desk, the archivist smiled. Quite often, when Brixton was dead, Guillam would spend a day here searching through old cases for one that could stand retiring. She was Sal, a plump, sporting girl who ran a youth club in Chiswick and was a judo black belt.

‘Break any good necks this weekend?’ he asked, helping himself to a bunch of green requisition slips.

Sal handed him the notes she kept for him in her steel cupboard.

‘Couple. How about you?’

‘Visiting aunts in Shropshire, thank you.’

‘Some aunts,’ said Sal.

Still at her desk he filled in slips for the next two references on his list.

He watched her stamp them, tear off the flimsies, and post them through a slot on her desk.

‘D corridor,’ she murmured, handing back the top copies. ‘The two-eights are halfway on your right, the three-ones are next alcove down.’

Pushing open the far door, he entered the main hall. At the centre an old lift like a miner’s cage carried files into the body of the Circus. Two bleary juniors were feeding it, a third stood by to operate the winch.

Guillam moved slowly along the shelves reading the fluorescent number cards.

‘Lacon swears he holds no file on Testify at all,’ Smiley had explained in his usual worried way. ‘He has a few resettlement papers on Prideaux and nothing else.’ And in the same lugubrious tone: ‘So I’m afraid we’ll have to find a way of getting hold of whatever there is in Circus Registry.’

For ‘getting hold’, in Smiley’s dictionary, read ‘steal’.

One girl stood on a ladder. Oscar Allitson the collator was filling a laundry basket with wrangler files, Astrid the maintenance man was mending a radiator. The shelves were wooden, deep as bunks and divided into pigeon-holes by panels of ply. He already knew that the Testify reference was four-four eight-two E, which meant alcove forty-four, where he now stood. E stood for extinct and was used for dead operations only. Guillam counted to the eighth pigeon-hole from the left. Testify should be second from the left but there was no way of making certain because the spines were unmarked. His reconnaissance complete, he drew the two files he had requested, leaving the green slips in the steel brackets provided for them.

‘There won’t be much, I’m sure,’ Smiley had said, as if thinner files were easier. ‘But there ought to be something, if only for appearances.’ That was another thing about him that Guillam didn’t like just then: he spoke as if you followed his reasoning, as if you were inside his mind all the time.

Sitting down he pretended to read but passed the time thinking of Camilla. What was he supposed to make of her? Early this morning as she lay in his arms she told him she had once been married.

Sometimes she spoke like that: as if she’d lived about twenty lives. It was a mistake, so they packed it in.

‘What went wrong?’

‘Nothing. We weren’t right for each other.’

Guillam didn’t believe her.

‘Did you get a divorce?’

‘I expect so.’

‘Don’t be damn silly, you must know whether you’re divorced or not!’

His parents handled it, she said; he was foreign.

‘Does he send you money?’

‘Why should he? He doesn’t owe me anything.’

Then the flute again, in the spare room, long questioning notes in the half light while Guillam made coffee. Is she a fake or an angel? He’d half a mind to pass her name across the records. She had a lesson with Sand in an hour.

Armed with a green slip with a four-three reference, he returned the two files to their places and positioned himself at the alcove next to Testify.

‘Dry run uneventful,’ he thought.

The girl was still up her ladder. Allitson had vanished but the laundry basket was still there. The radiator had already exhausted Astrid and he was sitting beside it reading the Sun. The green slip read four-three four-three and he found the file at once because he had already marked it down. It had a pink jacket like Testify. Like Testify it was reasonably thumbed. He fitted the green slip into the bracket. He moved back across the aisle, again checked Allitson and the girls, then reached for the Testify file and replaced it very fast with the file he had in his hand.

‘I think the vital thing, Peter’ – Smiley speaking – ‘is not to leave a gap.

So what I suggest is, you requisition a comparable file, physically comparable I mean, and pop it into the gap which is left by-‘

‘I get you,’ Guillam said.

Holding the Testify file casually in his right hand, title inward to his body, Guillam returned to the reading room and again sat at his desk.

Sal raised her eyebrows and mouthed something. Guillam nodded that all was well, thinking that was what she was asking, but she beckoned him over. Momentary panic. Take the file with me or leave it? What do I usually do? He left it on the desk.

‘Juliet’s going for coffee,’ Sal whispered. ‘Want some?’

Guillam laid a shilling on the counter.

He glanced at the clock, then at his watch. Christ, stop looking at your damn watch! Think of Camilla, think of her starting her lesson, think of those aunts you didn’t spend the weekend with, think of Alwyn not looking in your bag. Think of anything but the time. Eighteen minutes to wait. ‘Peter, if you have the smallest reservation, you really mustn’t go ahead with it. Nothing is as important as that.’ Great, so how do you spot a reservation, when thirty teenage butterflies are mating in your stomach, and the sweat is like a secret rain inside your shirt?

Never, he swore, never had he had it this bad.

Opening the Testify file he tried to read it.

It wasn’t all that thin, but it wasn’t fat either. It looked pretty much like a token volume, as Smiley had said: the first serial was taken up with a description of what wasn’t there. ‘Annexes 1 to 8 held London Station, cross refer to PFs ELLIS Jim, PRIDEAUX Jim, HAJEK Vladimir, COLLINS Sam, HABOLT Max…’ and Uncle Tom Cobley and All. ‘For these files, consult H/London Station or CC,’ standing for Chief of Circus and his appointed mothers. Don’t look at your watch, look at the clock and do the arithmetic, you idiot. Eight minutes. Odd to be pinching files about one’s predecessor. Odd to have Jim as a predecessor, come to think of it, and a secretary who held a wake over him without ever mentioning his name. The only living trace Guillam had ever found of him, apart from his workname on the files, was his squash racquet jammed behind the safe in his room, with J.P. hand-done in poker work on the handle. He showed it to Ellen, a tough old biddy who could make Cy Vanhofer quail like a schoolboy, and she broke into floods of tears, wrapped it and sent it to the housekeepers by the next shuttle with a personal note to the Dolphin insisting that it be returned to him ‘if humanly possible’. How’s your game these days, Jim, with a couple of Czech bullets in your shoulder bone?

Still eight minutes.

‘Now if you could contrive,’ said Smiley, ‘I mean if it wouldn’t be too much bother, to take your car in for a service at your local garage.

Using your home phone to make the appointment, of course, in the hope that Toby is listening…’

In the hope. Mother of pearl. And all his cosy chats with Camilla? Still eight minutes.

The rest of the file seemed to be Foreign Office telegrams, Czech press cuttings, monitoring reports on Prague radio, extracts from a policy file on the resettlement and rehabilitation of blown agents, draft submissions to the Treasury and a post-mortem by Alleline which blamed Control for the fiasco. Sooner you than me, George.

In his mind, Guillam began measuring the distance from his desk to the rear door where Alwyn dozed at the reception counter. He reckoned it was five paces and he decided to make a tactical staging post. Two paces from the door stood a chart chest like a big yellow piano. It was filled with oddments of reference: large-scale maps, back copies of Who’s Who, old Baedekers. Putting a pencil between his teeth he picked up the Testify file, wandered to the chest, selected a telephone directory of Warsaw and began writing names on a sheet of paper. My hand! a voice screamed inside him: my hand is shaking all over the page, look at those figures, I might be drunk! Why has no one noticed? The girl Juliet came in with a tray and put a cup on his desk. He blew her a distracted kiss. He selected another directory, he thought for Poznan, and laid it beside the first. When Alwyn came through the door he didn’t even look up.

‘Telephone, sir,’ he murmured.

‘Oh to hell,’ said Guillam deep in the directory. ‘Who is it?’

‘Outside line, sir. Someone rough. The garage, I think, regarding your car. Said he’d got some bad news for you,’ said Alwyn, very pleased.

Guillam was holding the Testify file in both hands, apparently cross-referring with the directory. He had his back to Sal and he could feel his knees shaking against his trouser legs. The pencil was still jammed in his mouth. Alwyn went ahead and held the swing door for him and he passed through it reading the file: like a damned choirboy, he thought. He waited for lightni ng to strike him, Sal to call murder, old Ben the superspy to leap suddenly to life, but it didn’t happen. He felt much better: Alwyn is my ally, I trust him, we are united against the Dolphin, I can move. The swing doors closed, he went down the four steps and there was Alwyn again, holding open the door to the telephone cubicle. The lower part was panelled, the upper part glass.

Lifting the receiver he laid the file at his feet and heard Mendel tell him he needed a new gear box, the job could cost anything up to a hundred quid. They’d worked this up for the benefit of the housekeepers or whoever read the transcripts, and Guillam kept it going nicely to and fro till Alwyn was safely behind his counter, listening like an eagle. It’s working, he thought, I’m flying, it’s working after all. He heard himself say: ‘Well, at least get on to the main agents first and find out how long they’ll take to supply the damn thing. Have you got their number?’ And irritably: ‘Hang on.’

He half opened the door and kept the mouthpiece jammed against his backside because he was very concerned that this part should not go on tape. ‘Alwyn, chuck me that bag a minute will you?’

Alwyn brought it over keenly, like the first-aid man at a football match.

‘All right, Mr Guillam, sir? Open it for you, sir?’

‘Just dump it there, thanks.’

The bag was on the floor outside the cubicle. Now he stooped, dragged it inside and unzipped it. At the middle, among his shirts and a lot of newspaper, were three dummy files, one buff, one green, one pink. He took out the pink file and his address book and replaced them with the Testify file. He closed the zip, stood up and read Mendel a telephone number, actually the right one. He rang off, handed Alwyn the bag and returned to the reading room with the dummy file. He dawdled at the chart chest, fiddled with a couple more directories, then sauntered to the archive carrying the dummy file. Allitson was going through a comedy routine, first pulling then pushing the laundry basket.

‘Peter, give us a hand will you, I’m stuck.’

‘Half a sec.’

Recovering the four-three file from the Testify pigeonhole, he replaced it with the dummy, restored it to its rightful place in the four-three alcove and removed the green slip from the bracket. God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow. He could have sung out loud: God is in his Heaven and I can still fly.

He took the slip to Sal, who signed it and put it on a spike as she always did. Later today she would check. If the file was in its place she would destroy both the green slip and the flimsy from the box, and not even clever Sal would remember that he had been alongside the four-four alcove. He was about to return to the archive to give old Allitson a hand when he found himself looking straight into the brown, unfriendly eyes of Toby Esterhase.

‘Peter,’ said Toby in his not quite perfect English. ‘I am so sorry to disturb you but we have a tiny crisis and Percy Alleline would like quite an urgent word with you. Can you come now? That would be very kind.’ And at the door, as Alwyn let them out: ‘Your opinion he wants actually,’ he remarked with the officiousness of a small but rising man.

‘He wishes to consult you for an opinion.’

In a desperately inspired moment Guillam turned to Alwyn and said,

‘There’s a midday shuttle to Brixton. You might just give Transport a buzz and ask them to take that thing over for me, will you?’

‘Will do, sir,’ said Alwyn. ‘Will do. Mind the step, sir.’

And you pray for me, thought Guillam.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14