‘Keep your voice down!’ Jerry hissed from beside him.
But Jerry had become an irrelevance. Drake’s whole life was for Nelson. From the shelter of the near headland, Drake’s sampan tottered alongside the rocking junk. The moon came out of hiding and for a moment Jerry forgot his anxiety as a little grey-clad figure, small and sturdy, in stature Drake’s antithesis, in a kapok coat and bulging proletarian cap, lowered himself over the side and leapt for the waiting arms of the sampan’s crew. Drake gave another cry, the junk filled its sails and slid behind the headland till only the green lights on its masthead remained visible above the rocks, and then vanished. The sampan was making for the beach and Jerry could see Nelson’s stocky frame as he stood on the bow waving with both hands and Drake Ko in his beret wild on the beach, dancing like a madman, waving back.
The throb of engines grew steadily louder, but still Jerry couldn’t place them. The sea was empty, and when he - looked upward he saw only the hammerhead cliff and its peak black against the stars. The brothers met, and embraced, and stayed locked in each other’s arms, not moving. Seizing hold of both of them, pummelling them, Jerry cried out for all his life.
‘Get back in the boat! Hurry!’
They saw no one but each other. Running back to the water’s edge Jerry grabbed the sampan’s prow and held it, still calling to them as he saw the sky behind the peak turn yellow, then quickly brighten as the throb of engines swelled to a roar and three blinding searchlights burst ort them from blackened helicopters. The rocks danced to the whirl of landing lights, the sea furrowed and the pebbles bounced and flew around in storms. For a fraction of a second Jerry saw Drake’s face turn to him beseeching help: as if, too late, he had recognised where help lay. He mouthed something, but the din drowned it. Jerry hurled himself forward. Not for Nelson’s sake, still less for Drake’s; but for what linked them, and what linked him to Lizzie. But long before he reached them, a dark swarm closed on the two men, tore them apart and bundled the baggy shape of Nelson into the helicopter’s hold. In the mayhem Jerry had drawn his gun and held it in his hand. He was screaming, though he could not hear himself above the hurricanes of war. The helicopter was lifting. A single figure remained in the open doorway, looking down, and perhaps it was Fawn, for he looked dark and mad. Then an orange flash broke from the doorway, then a second and a third and after that Jerry wasn’t counting any more. In fury he threw up his hands, his open mouth still calling, his face still silently imploring. Then he fell, and lay there, till there was once more no sound but the surf flopping on the beach and Drake Ko’s hopeless, choking grief against the victorious armadas of the West, which had stolen his brother and left their hard-pressed soldier dead at his feet.
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In the Circus a mood of wild triumph broke out when the grand news came through from the Cousins. Nelson landed. Nelson bagged! Not a hair of his head injured! For two days there was speculation about medals, knighthoods and promotions. They must do something for George, at last, they must! Not so, said Connie shrewdly from the touchline. They would never forgive him for taking up Bill Haydon.
The euphoria was followed by certain perplexing rumours. Connie and Doc di Salis, for instance, who were eagerly ensconced in the Maresfield safe house, now dubbed the Dolphinarium, waited a full week for their body to arrive and waited in vain. So did the interpreters, transcribers, inquisitors, babysitters and allied trades who made up the rest of the reception and interrogation unit there.
The match was rained off, said the housekeepers. Another date would be fixed. Stand by, they said. But quite soon a source at the local estate agent in the neighbouring town of Uckfield revealed that the housekeepers were trying to renege on the lease. Sure enough. after another week the team was stood down ‘pending policy decisions.’ It was never reassembled.
Next, word filtered out that Enderby and Martello jointly - the combination even then seemed odd - were chairing an Anglo-American processing committee. It would meet alternately in Washington and London and have responsibility for simultaneous distribution of the Dolphin product, codename CAVIAR, on either side of the Atlantic.
Quite incidentally, it emerged that Nelson was somewhere in the United States, in an armed compound already prepared for him in Philadelphia. The explanation was even slower in coming. It was felt - presumably by somebody, but feelings are hard to trace among so many corridors - that Nelson would be safer there. Physically safer. Think of the Russians. Think of the Chinese. Also, the housekeepers insisted, the Cousins’ processing and evaluation units were more of a scale to handle the unprecedented take which was expected. Also, they said, the Cousins could afford the cost.
Also -
‘Also gammon and spinach!’ Connie stormed, when she heard the news.
She and di Silis waited moodily to be invited to join the Cousins’ team. Connie even got herself the injections to be ready, but no call came.
More explanations. The Cousins had a new man at Harvard, the housekeepers said, when Connie sailed in on them in her wheelchair.
‘Who?’ she demanded in fury.
A professor somebody, young, a Moscow-gazer. He had made a life speciality of the dark side of Moscow Centre, they said, and had recently published a paper for private distribution only, but based on Company archives, in which he had referred to the mole principle and even in veiled terms to Karla’s private army.
‘Of course he did, the maggot!’ she blurted at them, through her bitter tears of frustration. ‘And he hogged it all from Connie’s blasted reports, didn’t he? Culpepper, that’s his name, and he knows as much about Karla as my left toe!’
The housekeepers were unmoved, however, by thoughts of Connie’s toe. It was Culpepper, not Sachs, who had the new committee’s vote.
‘Wait till George gets back!’ Connie warned them in a voice of thunder. The threat left them strangely unaffected.
Di Salis fared no better. China-watchers were two a penny in Langley, he was told. A glut on the market, old boy. Sorry, but Enderby’s orders, said housekeepers.
Enderby’s? di Salis echoed.
The committee’s, they said vaguely. It was a joint decision.
So di Salis took his cause to Lacon, who liked to think of himself as a poor man’s ombudsman in such matters, and Lacon in turn took di Salis to luncheon, at which they split the bill down the middle because Lacon did not hold with civil servants treating one another at the taxpayers’ expense.
‘How do you an feel about Enderby by the by?’ he asked, at some point in the meal, interrupting di Salis’s plaintive monologue about his familiarity with the Chiu Chow and Hakka dialects. Feeling was playing a large part just at the moment. ‘Does he go down well over there? I’d have thought you liked his way of seeing things. Isn’t he rather sound, wouldn’t you say?’
Sound in the Whitehall vocabulary in those days meant hawkish.
Rushing back to the Circus, di Salis duly reported this amazing question to Connie Sachs - as Lacon, of course, wished him to - and Connie was thereafter seen little. She spent her time quietly ‘packing her trunk’ as she called it: that is to say, preparing her Moscow Centre archive for posterity. There was a new young burrower she favoured, a goatish but obliging youth called Doolittle. She made this Doolittle sit at her feet while she gave him of her wisdom.
‘The old order’s hoofing it,’ she warned whoever would listen. ‘That twerp Enderby is oiling through the back door. It’s a pogrom.’
They treated her at first with much the same derision as Noah had to put up with when he started building his ark. No slouch at tradecraft still, Connie meanwhile secretly took Molly Meakin aside and persuaded her to put in a letter of resignation. ‘Tell the housekeepers you’re looking for something more fulfilling, dear,’ she advised, with much winking and pinching. ‘They’ll give you a rise at the very least.’
Molly had fears of being taken at her word, but Connie knew the game too well. So she wrote her letter, and was at once ordered to stay behind after hours. Certain changes were in the air, the housekeepers told her in great confidence. There was a move to create a younger and more vigorous service with closer links to Whitehall. Molly solemnly promised to reconsider her decision, and Connie Sachs resumed her packing with fresh determination.
Then where was George Smiley all this while? In the Far East? No, in Washington! Nonsense! He was back home and skulking down in the country somewhere - Cornwall was his favourite - taking a well-earned rest and mending his fences with Ann!
Then one of the housekeepers let slip that George might be suffering from a spot of strain, and this phrase struck a chill everywhere, for even the dimmest little gnome in Banking Section knew that strain, like old age, was a disease for which there was only one known remedy, and it did not entail recovery.
Guillam came back eventually, but only to sweep Molly off on leave, and he refused to say anything at all. Those who saw him on his swift passage through the fifth floor said he looked shot-about, and obviously in need of a break. Also he seemed to have had an accident to his collar bone: his right shoulder was all strapped up. From housekeepers it became known that he had spent a couple of days in the care of the Circus leech at his private clinic in Manchester Square. But still there was no Smiley, and the housekeepers showed only a steely bonhomie when asked when he would return. The housekeepers in these cases become the Star Chamber, feared but needed. Unobtrusively, Karla’s portrait disappeared, the wits ironically said for cleaning.
What was odd, and in a way rather terrible, was that none of them thought to drop in on the little house in Bywater Street and simply ring the door bell. If they had done so, they would have found Smiley there, most likely in his dressing gown, either clearing up plates or preparing food he didn’t eat. Sometimes, usually at dusk, he took himself for a solitary walk in the park and peered at people as if he half recognised them, so that they peered in return, and then looked down. Or he would go and sit himself in one of the cheaper cafés in the King’s Road, taking a book for company, and sweet tea for refreshment - for he had abandoned his good intentions about sticking-to saccharine for his waistline. They would have noticed that he spent a deal of time looking at his hands, and polishing his spectacles on his tie, or re-reading the letter Ann had left for him, which was very long, but only because of repetitions.
Lacon called on him, and so did Enderby, and once Martello came along with them, dressed in his London character again, for everyone agreed, and none with greater sincerity than Smiley, that in the interests of the service the handover should be as smooth and painless as possible. Smiley made certain requests regarding staff, and these were carefully noted by Lacon, who let him understand that toward the Circus - if toward no one else - Treasury was at present in a spending mood. In the secret world at least, sterling was on the up. It was not merely the success of the Dolphin affair which accounted for this change of heart, Lacon said. The American enthusiasm for Enderby’s appointment had been overwhelming. It had been felt even at the highest diplomatic levels. Spontaneous applause was how Lacon described it.
‘Saul really knows how to talk to them,’ he said.
‘Oh, does he? Ah, good. Well, good,’ Smiley said, and bucked his head in approval, as the deaf do.
Even when Enderby confided to Smiley that he proposed to appoint Sam Collins as his head of operations, Smiley showed nothing but courtesy toward the suggestion. Sam was a hustler, Enderby explained, and hustlers were what Langley liked these days. The silk shirt crowd had taken a real nosedive, he said.
‘No doubt,’ said Smiley.
The two men agreed that Roddy Martindale, though he had bags of entertainment value, was not cut out for the game. Old Roddy real was too queer, said Enderby, and the Minister was scared stiff of him. Nor did he exactly go down swimmingly with the Americans, even those who happened to be that way themselves. Also, Enderby was a bit chary of taking in any more Etonians. Gave the wrong impression.
A week later, the housekeepers re-opened Sam’s old room on the fifth floor and removed the furniture. Collins’s ghost laid for good, said certain unwise voices with relish. Then on the Monday an ornate desk arrived, with a red leather top, and several fake hunting prints from the walls of Sam’s club, which was in the process of being taken over by one of the larger gambling syndicates, to the satisfaction of all parties.
Little Fawn was not seen again. Not even when several of the more muscular London out-stations were revived, including the Brixton scalp-hunters to whom he had formerly belonged, and the Acton lamplighters under Toby Esterhase. But he was not missed either. Like Sam Collins, somehow, he had stalked the story without ever quite belonging to it. But unlike Sam, he stayed in the thickets when it ended, and never reappeared.
To Sam Collins, also, on his first day back in harness, fen the task of breaking the sad news of Jerry’s death. He did it in the rumpus room, just a small, unaffected speech, and everyone agreed he did it well. They had not thought he had it in him.
‘For fifth floor ears only,’ he told them. His audience was appalled, then proud. Connie wept, and tried to claim him as another of Karla’s victims, but she was held back in this for want of information about who or what had killed him. It was operational, went the word, and it was noble.
Back in Hong Kong, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club showed much initial concern for its missing children Luke and Westerby. Thanks to heavy lobbying by its members, a full-scale confidential enquiry was set up, under the chairmanship of the vigilant Superintendent Rockhurst, to solve the double riddle of their disappearance. The authorities promised full publication of all findings and the United States Consul General offered five thousand dollars of his own money to anyone coming forward with helpful information. As a gesture to local feeling, he included Jerry Westerby’s name in the offer. The two became known as The Missing Newsmen, and suggestions of a disgraceful attachment between them were rampant. Luke’s bureau matched the five-thousand-dollar figure, and the dwarf, though he was inconsolable, entered a strong bid to have the moneys paid to him. It was he, after all, working on both fronts at once, who had learned from Deathwish that the Cloudview Road apartment, which Luke had last used, had been redecorated from floor to ceiling before the Rocker’s sharp-eyed investigators got round to visiting it. Who ordered this? Who paid? Nobody knew. It was the dwarf, also, who collected first hand reports that Jerry had been seen at Kai Tak airport interviewing Japanese package tourists. But the Rocker’s committee of enquiry was obliged to reject them. The Japanese concerned were willing but unreliable witnesses, they said, when it came to identifying a roundeye who sprang at them after a long journey. As to Luke: well, the way he had been going, they said, he was heading for some kind of breakdown anyway. The knowing spoke of amnesia, brought on by alcohol and fast living. After a while, even the best stories grow cold. Rumours went out that the two men had been seen hunting together during the Hue collapse - or was it Da Nang? - and drinking together in Saigon. Another had them sitting side by side on the waterfront at Manila.