On the table lay a copy of the day's Times, crossword uppermost. Each square was inked in laboured letters. There were no blanks.
'Went to the footer today,' she sang from the dark under the stairs as she cheered herself up from the trolley. 'Lovely Will took me. My favourite dunderhead, wasn't that super of him?' Her little-girl voice, it went with an outrageous pout. 'Connie got cold, George. Froze solid, Connie did, toes an' all.'
He guessed she was crying so he fetched her from the dark and led her to the sofa. Her glass was empty so he filled it half. Side by side on the sofa they drank while Connie's tears ran down her blazer on to his hands.
'Oh George,' she kept saying. 'Do you know what she told me when they threw me out? That personnel cow?' She was holding one point of Smiley's collar, working it between her finger and thumb while she cheered up. 'You know what the cow said?' Her sergeant-major voice: '"You're losing your sense of proportion, Connie. It's time you got out into the real world." I hate the real world, George. I like the Circus and all my lovely boys.' She took his hands, trying to interlace her fingers with his.
'Polyakov,' he said quietly, pronouncing it in accordance with Tarr's instruction, 'Aleksey Aleksandrovich Polyakov, Cultural Attach, Soviet Embassy London. He's come alive again, just as you predicted.'
A car was drawing up in the road, he heard only the sound of the wheels, the engine was already switched off. Then footsteps, very lightly.
'Janet, smuggling in her boyfriend,' Connie whispered, her pink-rimmed eyes fixed on his while she shared his distraction. 'She thinks I don't know. Hear that? Metal quarters on his heels. Now wait.' The footsteps stopped, there was a small scuffle. 'She's giving him the key. He thinks he works it more quietly than she can. He can't.' The lock turned with a heavy snap. 'Oh you men,' Connie breathed with a hopeless smile. 'Oh George. Why do you have to drag up Aleks?' And for a while she wept for Aleks Polyakov.
Her brothers were dons, Smiley remembered; her father was a professor of something. Control had met her at bridge and invented a job for her.
She began her story like a fairy-tale: 'Once upon a time there was a defector called Stanley, way back in sixty-three,' and she applied to it the same spurious logic, part inspiration, part intellectual opportunism, born of a wonderful mind which had never grown up. Her formless white face took on the grandmother's glow of enchanted reminiscence. Her memory was as compendious as her body and surely she loved it more, for she had put everything aside to listen to it: her drink, her cigarette, even for a while Smiley's passive hand. She sat no longer slouched but strictly, her big head to one side as she dreamily plucked the white wool of her hair. He had assumed she would begin at once with Polyakov, but she began with Stanley; he had forgotten her passion for family trees. Stanley, she said; the inquisitors' covername for a fifth-rate defector from Moscow Centre. March sixty-three. The scalphunters bought him secondhand from the Dutch and shipped him to Sarratt and probably if it hadn't been the silly season and if the inquisitors hadn't happened to have time on their hands, well who knows whether any of it would ever have come to light? As it was, Brother Stanley had a speck of gold on him, one teeny speck, and they found it. The Dutch missed it but the inquisitors found it and a copy of their report came to Connie: 'Which was a whole other miracle in itself,' Connie bellowed huffily, 'considering that everyone, and specially Sarratt, made an absolute principle of leaving research off their distribution lists.'
Patiently Smiley waited for the speck of gold, for Connie was of an age where the only thing a man could give her was time.
Now Stanley had defected while he was on a mailfist job in the Hague, she explained. He was by profession an assassin of some sort and had been sent to Holland to murder a Russian migr who was getting on Centre's nerves. Instead, he decided to give himself up. 'Some girl had made a fool of him,' said Connie with great contempt. 'The Dutch set him a honey-trap, my dear, and he barged in with his eyes wide shut.'
To prepare him for the mission Centre had posted him to one of their training camps outside Moscow for a brush-up in the black arts: sabotage and silent killing. The Dutch, when they had him, were shocked by this and made it the focal point of their interrogation. They put his picture in the newspapers and had him drawing pictures of cyanide bullets and all the other dreary weaponry which Centre so adored. But at the Nursery the inquisitors knew that stuff by heart so they concentrated on the camp itself, which was a new one, not much known. 'Sort of millionaires' Sarratt,' she explained. They made a sketch-plan of the compound, which covered several hundred acres of forest and lakeland, and put in all the buildings Stanley could remember: laundries, canteens, lecture huts, ranges, all the dross. Stanley had been there several times and remembered a lot. They thought they were about finished when Stanley went very quiet. He took a pencil and in the north-west corner he drew five more huts and a double fence round them for the guard dogs, bless him. These huts were new, said Stanley, built in the last few months. You reached them by a private road; he had seen them from a hilltop when he was out walking with his instructor, Milos. According to Milos (who was Stanley's friend, said Connie with much innuendo) they housed a special school recently founded by Karla for training military officers in conspiracy.
'So, my dear, there we were,' Connie cried. 'For years we'd been hearing rumours that Karla was trying to build a private army of his own inside Moscow Centre but, poor lamb, he hadn't the power. We knew he had agents scattered round the globe and naturally he was worried that as he grew older and more senior he wouldn't be able to manage them alone. We knew that like everyone else he was dreadfully jealous of them and couldn't bear the idea of handing them over to the legal residencies in the target countries. Well naturally he wouldn't: you know how he hated residencies: overstaffed, insecure. Same as he hated the old guard. Flat-earthers, he called them. Quite right. Well now he had the power and he was doing something about it, as any real man would. March sixty-three,' she repeated in case Smiley had missed the date.
Then nothing, of course. 'The usual game: sit on your thumbs, get on with other work, whistle for a wind.' She sat on them for three years, until Major Mikhail Fedorovich Komarov, Assistant Military Attach in the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo, was caught in flagrante taking delivery of six reels of top secret intelligence procured by a senior official in the Japanese Defence Ministry. Komarov was the hero of her second fairy-tale: not a defector but a soldier with the shoulder boards of the artillery.
'And medals, my dear! Medals galore!'
Komarov himself had to leave Tokyo so fast that his dog got locked in his flat and was later found starved to death, which was something Connie could not forgive him for. Whereas Komarov's Japanese agent was of course duly interrogated and by a happy chance the Circus was able to buy the report from the Toka.
'Why, George, come to think of it, it was you who arranged the deal!'
With a quaint moue of professional vanity, Smiley conceded that it might well have been.
The essence of the report was simple. The Japanese defence official was a mole. He had been recruited before the war in the shadow of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, by one Martin Brandt, a German journalist who seemed to be connected with the Comintern. Brandt, said Connie, was one of Karla's names in the nineteen-thirties. Komarov himself had never been a member of the official Tokyo residency inside the Embassy, he'd worked solo with one legman and a direct line to Karla, whose brother officer he had been in the war. Better still, before he arrived in Tokyo he had attended a special training course at a new school outside Moscow set up specially for Karla's hand-picked pupils. 'Conclusion,' Connie sang. 'Brother Komarov was our first and alas not very distinguished graduate of the Karla training school. He was shot, poor lamb,' she added, with a dramatic fall of her voice. 'They never hang, do they: too impatient, the little horrors.'