'We were speaking French, sir. The card said French was his preferred second language and I'm only Grade B in Russian.'
'Irrelevant,' Strickland snapped.
'Tell what to Max?' Smiley persisted.
Mostyn's eyes searched out a spot on the floor a yard or two out from his own feee 'He meane Tell Max I insist it's Moscow Rules.'
Lacon, who had stayed uncharacteristically quiet these last minutes, now chimed in : 'There's an important point here, George. The Circus were not the suitors here. He was. The ex-agent. He was doing all the pressing, making all the running. If he'd accepted our suggestion, written out his information, none of this need ever have happened. He brought it on himself entirely. George, I insist you take the point!'
Strickland was lighting himself a fresh cigarette.
'Whoever heard of Moscow Rules in the middle of bloody Hampstead anyway?' Strickland asked, waving out the match.
'Bloody Hampstead is right,' Smiley said quietly.
'Mostyn, wrap the story up,' Lacon commanded, blushing scarlet.
They had agreed a time, Mostyn resumed woodenly, now staring at his left palm as if he were reading his own fortune in ie 'Ten-twenty, sir.'
They had agreed Moscow Rules, he said, and the usual contact procedures, which Mostyn had established earlier in the afternoon by consulting the Oddbins encounter index.
'And what were the contact procedures exactly?' Smiley asked.
'A copy-book rendezvous, sir,' Mostyn replied. 'The Sarratt training course all over again, sir.'
Smiley felt suddenly crowded by the intimacy of Mostyn's respectfulness. He did not wish to be this boy's hero, or to be caressed by his voice, his gaze, his 'sirs'. He was not prepared for the claustrophobic admiration of this stranger.
'There's a tin pavilion on Hampstead Heath, ten minutes' walk from East Heath Road, overlooking a games field on the south side of the avenue, sir. The safety signal was one new drawing-pin shoved high in the first wood support on the left as you entered.'
'And the counter-signal?' Smiley asked.
But he knew the answer already.
'A yellow chalk line,' said Mostyn. 'I gather yellow was the sort of Group trade mark from the old days.' He had adopted a tone of ending. 'I put up the pin and came back here and waited. When he didn't show up, I thought, "Well, if he's secrecy-mad I'll have to go up to the hut again and check out his counter-signal, then I'll know whether he's around and proposes to try the fallback." '
'Which was what?'
'A car pick-up near Swiss Cottage underground at eleven-forty, sir. I was about to go out and take a look when Mr Strickland rang through and ordered me to sit tight until further orders.' Smiley assumed he had finished but this was not quite true. Seeming to forget everyone but himself, Mostyn slowly shook his handsome head. 'I never met him,' he said, in amazement. 'He was my first agent, I never met him, I'll never know what he was trying to tell me,' he said. 'My first agent, and he's dead. It's incredible. I feel like a complete Jonah.' His head continued shaking long after he had finished speaking.
Lacon added a brisk postscripe 'Yes, well, Scotland Yard has a computer these days, George. The Heath Patrol found the body and cordoned off the area and the moment the name was fed into the computer a light came up or a lot of digits or something, and immediately they knew he was on our special watch list. From then on it went like clockwork. The Commissioner phoned the Home Office, the Home Office phoned the Circus-'
'And you phoned me,' said Smiley. 'Why, Oliver? Who suggested you bring me in on this?'
'George, does it matter?'
'Enderby?'
'If you insist, yes, it was Saul Enderby. George, listen to me.'
It was Lacon's moment at last. The issue, whatever it might be, was before them, circumscribed if not yet actually defined. Mostyn was forgotten. Lacon was standing confidently over Smiley's seated figure and had assumed the rights of an old friend. 'George, as things now stand, I can go to the Wise Men and say : "I have investigated and the Circus's hands are clean." I can say that. "The Circus gave no encouragement to these people, nor to their leader. For a whole year they have neither paid nor welfared him!" Perfectly honestly. They don't own his flat, his car, they don't pay his rent, educate his bastards, send flowers to his mistress or have any other of the old - and lamentable - connections with him or his kind. His only link was with the past. His case officers have left the stage for good yourself and Esterhase, both old 'uns, both off the books. I can say that with my hand on my breast. To the Wise Men, and if necessary to my Minister personally.'
'I don't follow you,' Smiley said with deliberate obtuseness. 'Vladimir was our agent. He was trying to tell us something.'
'Our ex-agent, George. How do we know he was trying to tell us something? We gave him no brief. He spoke of urgency - even of Soviet Intelligence - so do a lot of ex-agents when they're holding out their caps for a subsidy!'
'Not Vladimir,' Smiley said.
But sophistry was Lacon's element. He was born to it, he breathed it, he could fly and swim in it, nobody in Whitehall was better at it.
'George, we cannot be held responsible for every ex-agent who takes an injudicious nocturnal walk in one of London's increasingly dangerous open spaces! ' He held out his hands in appeal. 'George. What is it to be? Choose. You choose. On the one hand, Vladimir asked for a chat with you. Retired buddies a chin-wag about old times - why not? And in order to raise a bit of wind, as any of us might, he pretended he had something for you. Some nugget of information. Why not? They all do it. On that basis my Minister will back us. No heads need roll, no tantrums, Cabinet hysteria. He will help us bury the case. Not a cover-up, naturally. But he will use his judgement. If I catch him in the right mood he may even decide that there is no point in troubling the Wise Men with it at all.'
'Amen,' Strickland echoed.
'On the other hand,' Lacon insisted, mustering all his persuasiveness for the kill, 'if things were to come unstuck, George, and the Minister got it into his head that we were engaging his good offices in order to clean up the traces of some unlicensed adventure which aborted' - he was striding again, skirting an imaginary quagmire - 'and there was a scandal, George, and the Circus were proved to be currently involved - your old service, George, one you still love, I am sure - with a notoriously revanchist migr outfit - volatile, talkative, violently anti-dtente - with all manner of anachronistic fixations - a total hangover from the worst days of the cold war - the very archetype of everything our masters have told us to avoid' - he had reached his corner again, a little outside the circle of light - 'and there had been a death, George - and an attempted cover-up, as they would no doubt call it - with all the attendant publicity - well, it could be just one scandal too many. The service is a weak child still, George, a sickly one, and in the hands of these new people desperately delicate. At this stage in its rebirth, it could die of the common cold. If it does, your generation will not be least to blame. You have a duty, as we all do. A loyalty.'
Duty to what? Smiley wondered, with that part of himself which sometimes seemed to be a spectator to the rest. Loyalty to whom? 'There is no loyalty without betrayal,' Ann liked to tell him in their youth when he had ventured to protest at her infidelities.
For a time nobody spoke.
'And the weapon?' Smiley asked finally, in the tone of someone testing a theory. 'How do you account for that, Oliver?'
'What weapon? There was no weapon. He was shot. By his own buddies most likely, knowing their cabals. Not to mention his appetite for other people's wives.'