Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré Page B

double-double games before,” Tarr confessed in a tone of injured virtue. “Believe me, Mr. Smiley, they are a can of worms.”
    “I’m sure they are,” said Smiley, and gave a prim tug at his spectacles.
    Tarr cabled Guillam “no sale,” booked a flight home, and went shopping. However, since his flight didn’t leave till Thursday, he thought that before he left, just to pay his fare, he might as well burgle Boris’s room.
    “The Alexandra’s a real ramshackle old place, Mr. Smiley, off Marble Road, with a stack of wooden balconies. As for the locks—why, sir, they give up when they see you coming.”
    In a very short time, therefore, Tarr was standing inside Boris’s room with his back against the door, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. He was still standing there when a woman spoke to him in Russian drowsily from the bed.
    “It was Boris’s wife,” Tarr explained. “She was crying. Look, I’ll call her Irina, right? Mr. Guillam has the details.”
    Smiley was already objecting: wife was impossible, he said. Centre would never let them both out of Russia at the same time; they’d keep one and send the other—
    “Common-law marriage,” Guillam said dryly. “Unofficial but permanent.”
    “There’s a lot that are the other way round these days,” said Tarr with a sharp grin at no one, least of all Smiley, and Guillam shot him another foul look.

6
    F rom the outset of this meeting, Smiley had assumed for the main a Buddha-like inscrutability from which neither Tarr’s story nor the rare interjections of Lacon and Guillam could rouse him. He sat leaning back with his short legs bent, head forward, and plump hands linked across his generous stomach. His hooded eyes had closed behind the thick lenses. His only fidget was to polish his glasses on the silk lining of his tie, and when he did this his eyes had a soaked, naked look that was embarrassing to those who caught him at it. His interjection, however, and the donnish, inane sound that followed Guillam’s explanation, now acted like a signal upon the rest of the gathering, bringing a shuffling of chairs and a clearing of throats.
    Lacon was foremost: “George, what are your drinking habits? Can I get you a Scotch or anything?” He offered drink solicitously, like aspirin for a headache. “I forgot to say it earlier,” he explained. “George, a bracer: come. It’s winter, after all. A nip of something?”
    “I’m fine, thank you,” Smiley said.
    He would have liked a little coffee from the percolator but somehow he didn’t feel able to ask. Also he remembered it was terrible.
    “Guillam?” Lacon proceeded. No; Guillam also found it impossible to accept alcohol from Lacon.
    He didn’t offer anything to Tarr, who went straight on with his narrative.
    Tarr took Irina’s presence calmly, he said. He had worked up his fallback before he entered the building, and now he went straight into his act. He didn’t pull a gun or slap his hand over her mouth or any of that tripe, as he put it, but he said he had come to speak to Boris on a private matter; he was sorry and he was damn well going to sit there till Boris showed up. In good Australian, as became an outraged car salesman from down under, he explained that while he didn’t want to barge into anyone’s business he was damned if he was going to have his girl and his money stolen in a single night by a lousy Russian who couldn’t pay for his pleasures. He worked up a lot of outrage but managed to keep his voice down, and then he waited to see what she did.
    And that, said Tarr, was how it all began.
    It was eleven-thirty when he made Boris’s room. He left at one-thirty with a promise of a meeting next night. By then the situation was all the other way: “We weren’t doing anything improper, mind. Just pen friends—right, Mr. Smiley?”
    For a moment, that bland sneer seemed to lay claim to Smiley’s most precious secrets.
    “Right,” he assented vapidly.
    There