'Imagine, sir, a great Soviet fighter and a powerful man! And all he had was a bare desk, which was illuminated only by a most inferior light! And behind it sat this priest, sir, a man of no affectation or pretence at all - a man of deep experience, I would say - a man from the very roots of his country - with small, straight eyes, and short grey hair, and a habit of holding his hands together while he smoked.'
'Smoked what?' Smiley asked, writing.
'Please?'
'What did he smoke? The question is plain enough. A pipe, cigarettes, cigar?'
'Cigarettes, American, and the room was full of their aroma. It was like Potsdam again, when we were negotiating with the American officers from Berlin. "If this man smokes American all the time," I thought, "then he is certainly a man of influence." ' Rounding on Toby again in his excitement, Grigoriev put the same point to him in Russian. To smoke American, chain smoke them, he said : imagine the cost, the influence necessary to obtain so many packets!
Then Smiley, true to his pedantic manner, asked Grigoriev to demonstrate what he meant by 'holding his hands together' while he smoked. And he looked on impassively while Grigoriev took a brown wood pencil from his pocket and linked his chubby hands in front of his face, and held the pencil in both of them, and sucked at it in caricature, like someone drinking two-handed from a mug.
'So!' he explained, and with another volatile switch of mood, shouted something in high laughter to Toby in Russian, which Toby did not see fit, at the time, to translate, and in the transcription is rendered only as 'obscene'.
The priest ordered Grigoriev to sit, and for ten minutes described to him the most intimate details of Grigoriev's love affair with Evdokia, and also of his indiscretions with two other girls, who had both worked for hint as secretaries, one in Potsdam and one in Bonn, and had ended up, unbeknown to Grigorieva, by sharing his bed. At which point, if Grigoriev was to be believed, he made a show of courage, and rose to his feet, demanding to know whether he had been brought halfway across Russia in order to attend a court of morals : 'To sleep with one's secretary was not an unknown phenomenon, I told him, even in the politburo! I assured him that I had never been indiscreet with foreign girls, only Russians. "This too I know," he says. "But Grigorieva is unlikely to appreciate the distinction." '
And then, to Toby's continuing amazement, Grigoriev gave vent to another burst of throaty laughter; and though both de Silsky and Skordeno discreetly joined in, Grigoriev's mirth outlived everybody's, so that they had to wait for it to run down.
'Kindly tell us, please, why the man you call the priest summoned you,' Smiley said, from deep in his brown overcoat.
'He advised me that he had special work for me in Berne on behalf of the Thirteenth Directorate. I should reveal it to nobody, not even to my Ambassador, it was too secret for any of them. "But," says the priest, "you shall tell your wife. Your personal circumstances render it impossible for you to make a conspiracy without the knowledge of your wife. This I know, Grigoriev. So tell her." And he was right,' Grigoriev commented. 'This was wise of him! This was clear evidence that the man was familiar with the human condition.'
Smiley turned a page and continued writing. 'Go on, please,' he said.
First, said the priest, Grigoriev was to open a Swiss bank account. The priest handed him a thousand Swiss francs in one hundred notes and told him to use them as the first payment. He should open the account not in Berne, where he was known nor in Zurich, where there was a Soviet trade bank.'
'The Vozhod,' Grigoriev explained gratuitously. 'This bank is used for many official and unofficial transactions.'
Not in Zurich, then, but in the small town of Thun, a few kilometres outside Heme. He should open the account under the name of Glaser, a Swiss subject : 'That I am a Soviet diplomat!' Grigoriev had objected. 'I am not Glaser, I am Grigoriev!'
Undeterred, the priest handed him a Swiss passport in the name of Adolf Glaser. Every month, said the priest, the account would be credited with several thousand Swiss francs, sometimes even ten or fifteen. Grigoriev would now be told what use to make of them. It was very secret, the priest repeated patiently, and to the secrecy belonged both a reward, and a threat. Very much as Smiley himself had done an hour before, the priest boldly set out each in turn. 'Sir, you should have observed his composure towards me,' Grigoriev told Smiley incredulously. 'His calmness, his authority in all circumstances! In a chess game he would win everything, merely by his nerves.'
'But he was not playing chess,' Smiley objected drily.
'Sir, he was not,' Grigoriev agreed, and with a sad shake of his head resumed his story.
A reward, and a threat, he repeated.
The threat was that Grigoriev's parent Ministry would be advised that he was unreliable on account of his philandering, and that he should therefore be barred from further foreign postings. This would cripple Grigoriev's career, also his marriage. So much for the threat.
'This would be extremely terrible for me,' Grigoriev added, needlessly.
Next the reward, and the reward was substantial. If Grigoriev acquitted himself well, and with absolute secrecy, his career would be furthered, his indiscretions overlooked. In Berne he would have an opportunity to move to more agreeable quarters, which would please Grigorieva; he would be given funds with which to buy himself an imposing car which would be greatly to Grigorieva's taste; also he would be independent of Embassy drivers, most of whom were neighbours, it was true, but were not admitted to this great secret. Lastly, said the priest, his promotion to Counsellor would be accelerated in order to explain the improvement in his living standards.
Grigoriev looked at the heap of Swiss francs lying on the desk between them, then at the Swiss passport, then at the priest. And he asked what would happen to him if he said he would rather not take part in this conspiracy. The priest nodded his head. He too, he assured Grigoriev, had considered this third possibility, but unfortunately the urgency of the need did not provide for such an option.
'So tell me what I must do with this money,' Grigoriev had said.
It was routine, the priest replied, which was another reason why Grigoriev had been selected : 'In matters of routine, I am told you are excellent,' he said. Grigoriev, though he was by now scared halfway out of his skin by the priest's words, had felt flattered by this commendation.
'He had heard good reports of me,' he explained to Smiley with pleasure.
Then the priest told Grigoriev about the mad girl.
Smiley did not budge. His eyes as he wrote were almost closed, but he wrote all the time - though God knows what he wrote, said Toby, for George would never have dreamed of consigning anything of even passing confidentiality to a notepad. Now and then, says Toby, while Grigoriev continued talking, George's head lifted far enough out of his coat collar for him to study the speaker's hands, or even his face. In every other respect he appeared remote from everything and everybody inside the room. Millie McCraig was in the doorway, de Silsky and Skordeno kept still as statues, while Toby prayed only for Grigoriev to 'keep talking, I mean talking at any price, who cares? We were hearing of Karla's tradecraft from the horse's mouth.'