NEW ANGLE, SMILEY’s POV.
Bywater Street is a cul-de-sac. We follow SMILEY past the parked cars.
NEW ANGLE, showing the door of Number Nine, Bywater Street. One full milk bottle on the doorstep. SMILEY still has the parcel under his arm as he moves up the steps to his own front door. He is at the top step when: CLOSE on SMILEY. Nothing dramatic, almost nothing at all. But a momentary hardening of his expression.
CLOSE on the lower window. Did we see a shadow? Did SMILEY? Is the net curtain very slightly moving?
CLOSE on SMILEY. He holds his own front door key in his hand. Transferring his gaze from the window, he looks downward, at his feet.
NEW ANGLE, SMILEY’s POV. At SMILEY’s feet, a tiny wedge of wood lies on the doorstep, where it has fallen from its place in the lintel.
NEW ANGLE. The door in CLOSE-UP, showing the two sturdy Banham deadlocks. Reaching up, SMILEY very quickly runs his hand along the lintel, confirming his suspicion that the wedge is no longer in place.
CLOSE on SMILEY as he discreetly drops the door key back into his pocket. Then, without further hesitation, he presses his own front door bell.
HOLD SMILEY as he waits impassively, the parcel under his arm. From inside the house, footsteps approach.
We HEAR the sound of a chain being unlatched.
ANOTHER ANGLE, over SMILEY’s shoulder, to show life continuing perfectly normally in the street. A mother pushes her pram, a lonely queer exercises his dog, the milkman continues his round.
ANOTHER ANGLE as the door brightly opens, showing: A tall, fair, handsome thirty-five-year-old man, dressed in a light grey suit and silver tie. Scandinavian or German. Could be a diplomat. His left hand nonchalantly in his jacket pocket.
STRANGER
(German accent)
Good morning.
SMILEY
Oh. Good morning. I’m sorry to bother you.
STRANGER
Not at all. How can I help you?
SMILEY
Is Mr. Smiley in, please? Mr. George Smiley? My name is Mackie, I live round the corner. He does know me.
STRANGER
George is upstairs just at the moment. I am a friend of his, just visiting. Won’t you come in?
SMILEY
No, no, it’s not necessary. If you’d give him this. (He takes the parcel, hands it to him.) Mackie, Bill Mackie. He asked me to pick it up for him.
Ignoring the parcel, the stranger opens the door still wider.
STRANGER
But I’m sure he would like to see you for a moment!
(He calls into the house)
George! Bill Mackie is here. Come down! He has not been well, you see. He loves to be visited. But today he is up at last, such a joy.
(Back to SMILEY)
There, I can hear him coming now. Please come in. You know how he is about the cold.
SMILEY
(dumping the parcel into the stranger’s one free arm)
Thanks, but I must be getting along.
EXT. BYWATER STREET, SMILEY making briskly along the pavement, away from his house, towards the King’s Road. As he walks, CLOSE fast on successive car numbers, aerials, wing mirrors, etc. SMILEY’s expression impassive, functional, not a backward glance. Track him round the corner, into the King’s Road, along the pavement towards a line of phones, most of them smashed.
INT. a filthy phone box. SMILEY talking into the phone.
SMILEY
...height five eleven, colour of eyes blue, colour of hair light brown, youthful hairline, powerful build, clean shaven, German accent, northern at a guess, possibly left handed. Two unfamiliar cars parked in the street, GRK 117F, black Ford van, no rear windows, two aerials, two wing mirrors, looks like an old surveillance horse. OAR 289G, green Datsun saloon with scratch marks on the offside rear wing, could be hired. Both empty, but the Datsun had today’s Evening Standard on the driving seat, late edition. They’re to wait till he leaves, then house him, that’s all. Two teams and ring the changes all the time. A lace-curtain job. No branch lines, no frightening the game. Tell Toby.
(So far, he has a deadpan expression. Now his manner is torn between fear for his wife and plain anger.)
And then, Peter... ring Ann for me, will you.
Tell her that if by any chance she was thinking of coming back to the house in the next few days — don’t.
Joe Gores
Excerpt from Come Morning
Joe Gores was the first writer to win Edgar Allan Poe awards in three categories: for the best first mystery novel, A Time of Predators, in 1969; for the best mystery story, “Goodbye, Pops” in 1969; and for the best episode in a television dramatic series, “No Immunity for Murder” on Kojak, in 1975. Before turning to a literary career, Gores worked at what he regards as the related occupation of private investigator: “A detective gets in and digs around in the garbage of people’s lives. A novelist invents people and then digs around in their garbage. They are very similar.”
Gores is currently working on a new novel and episodic television scripts. Come Morning, the novel from which this excerpt is taken, will be published in spring 1986 by the Mysterious Press.
When Runyan was captured eight years before, the $2,000,000 in diamonds he stole were not recovered. As a result, upon his parole from San Quentin, he finds his freedom and his life threatened on every side: by the insurance investigator who arranged his parole, by mysterious former “partners” who want their cut, by an unknown killer who wants him dead.
He plans to get the diamonds from where he hid them and buy his way out. But they are gone. Now his only hope is to pull another robbery — something he swore never to do again — and use the proceeds to stay alive.
“Brother Blood’s out making a coke buy,” said Taps. He was a handsome ebony man of about thirty-three, with some of Eddie Murphy’s sly, jive-ass manner. “You got one hour for sure, maybe more.”
It was 1:21 in the morning. As they passed the Sunset Boulevard exit of the San Diego Freeway, Grace got the rented Cougar into the right lane. Traffic was late-night fast but light. Louise was beside her in the front seat; Taps and Runyan were in the back. The night was clear and dark and crisp.
“An hour’s enough.” Runyan fought to keep irritation out of his voice. Pregame tension.
“I hear you talkin’.” Tension strummed Taps’s voice also.
They must have gone over the plan in broad strokes a hundred, two hundred times in San Quentin, a fantasy scheme to pass a few of the endless prison hours. Now it was happening.
Grace took the Wilshire Boulevard exit, following the off ramp down and around under the freeway past the huge sterile landscaped area of the Los Angeles Veterans Administration. She went east on Wilshire.
They passed the anachronistic one-story, red-roofed Ships Restaurant in Westwood, a gaudy soft palate for the new high-rise condo teeth that lined Wilshire like multimillion-dollar inlays; a half-mile beyond, Grace turned off at the fringes of the ultraprivate L.A. Country Club.
She turned again, then slowed to crawl past a pair of high-rise condos that took up an entire block. She was a very beautiful black woman in her twenties who wore her hair natural and very short.