Still eight minutes.
'Now if you could contrive,' said Smiley, 'I mean if it wouldn't be too much bother, to take your car in for a service at your local garage. Using your home phone to make the appointment, of course, in the hope that Toby is listening...'
In the hope. Mother of pearl. And all his cosy chats with Camilla? Still eight minutes.
The rest of the file seemed to be Foreign Office telegrams, Czech press cuttings, monitoring reports on Prague radio, extracts from a policy file on the resettlement and rehabilitation of blown agents, draft submissions to the Treasury and a post-mortem by Alleline which blamed Control for the fiasco. Sooner you than me, George.
In his mind, Guillam began measuring the distance from his desk to the rear door where Alwyn dozed at the reception counter. He reckoned it was five paces and he decided to make a tactical staging post. Two paces from the door stood a chart chest like a big yellow piano. It was filled with oddments of reference: large-scale maps, back copies of Who's Who, old Baedekers. Putting a pencil between his teeth he picked up the Testify file, wandered to the chest, selected a telephone directory of Warsaw and began writing names on a sheet of paper. My hand! a voice screamed inside him: my hand is shaking all over the page, look at those figures, I might be drunk! Why has no one noticed? The girl Juliet came in with a tray and put a cup on his desk. He blew her a distracted kiss. He selected another directory, he thought for Poznan, and laid it beside the first. When Alwyn came through the door he didn't even look up.
'Telephone, sir,' he murmured.
'Oh to hell,' said Guillam deep in the directory. 'Who is it?'
'Outside line, sir. Someone rough. The garage, I think, regarding your car. Said he'd got some bad news for you,' said Alwyn, very pleased.
Guillam was holding the Testify file in both hands, apparently cross-referring with the directory. He had his back to Sal and he could feel his knees shaking against his trouser legs. The pencil was still jammed in his mouth. Alwyn went ahead and held the swing door for him and he passed through it reading the file: like a damned choirboy, he thought. He waited for lightning to strike him, Sal to call murder, old Ben the superspy to leap suddenly to life, but it didn't happen. He felt much better: Alwyn is my ally, I trust him, we are united against the Dolphin, I can move. The swing doors closed, he went down the four steps and there was Alwyn again, holding open the door to the telephone cubicle. The lower part was panelled, the upper part glass. Lifting the receiver he laid the file at his feet and heard Mendel tell him he needed a new gear box, the job could cost anything up to a hundred quid. They'd worked this up for the benefit of the housekeepers or whoever read the transcripts, and Guillam kept it going nicely to and fro till Alwyn was safely behind his counter, listening like an eagle. It's working, he thought, I'm flying, it's working after all. He heard himself say: 'Well, at least get on to the main agents first and find out how long they'll take to supply the damn thing. Have you got their number?' And irritably: 'Hang on.'
He half opened the door and kept the mouthpiece jammed against his backside because he was very concerned that this part should not go on tape. 'Alwyn, chuck me that bag a minute will you?'
Alwyn brought it over keenly, like the first-aid man at a football match. 'All right, Mr Guillam, sir? Open it for you, sir?'
'Just dump it there, thanks.'
The bag was on the floor outside the cubicle. Now he stooped, dragged it inside and unzipped it. At the middle, among his shirts and a lot of newspaper, were three dummy files, one buff, one green, one pink. He took out the pink file and his address book and replaced them with the Testify file. He closed the zip, stood up and read Mendel a telephone number, actually the right one. He rang off, handed Alwyn the bag and returned to the reading room with the dummy file. He dawdled at the chart chest, fiddled with a couple more directories, then sauntered to the archive carrying the dummy file. Allitson was going through a comedy routine, first pulling then pushing the laundry basket.
'Peter, give us a hand will you, I'm stuck.'
'Half a sec.'
Recovering the four-three file from the Testify pigeonhole, he replaced it with the dummy, restored it to its rightful place in the four-three alcove and removed the green slip from the bracket. God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow. He could have sung out loud: God is in his Heaven and I can still fly.
He took the slip to Sal, who signed it and put it on a spike as she always did. Later today she would check. If the file was in its place she would destroy both the green slip and the flimsy from the box, and not even clever Sal would remember that he had been alongside the four-four alcove. He was about to return to the archive to give old Allitson a hand when he found himself looking straight into the brown, unfriendly eyes of Toby Esterhase.
'Peter,' said Toby in his not quite perfect English. 'I am so sorry to disturb you but we have a tiny crisis and Percy Alleline would like quite an urgent word with you. Can you come now? That would be very kind.' And at the door, as Alwyn let them out: 'Your opinion he wants actually,' he remarked with the officiousness of a small but rising man. 'He wishes to consult you for an opinion.'
In a desperately inspired moment Guillam turned to Alwyn and said, 'There's a midday shuttle to Brixton. You might just give Transport a buzz and ask them to take that thing over for me, will you?'
'Will do, sir,' said Alwyn. 'Will do. Mind the step, sir.'
And you pray for me, thought Guillam.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
'Our Shadow Foreign Secretary,' Haydon called him. The janitors called him Snow White because of his hair. Toby Esterhase dressed like a male model but the moment he dropped his shoulders or closed his tiny fists he was unmistakably a fighter. Following him down the fourth-floor corridor, noting the coffee-machine again, and Lauder Strickland's voice explaining that he was unobtainable, Guillam thought: 'Christ, we're back in Berne and on the run.'
He'd half a mind to call this out to Toby, but decided the comparison was unwise.
Whenever he thought of Toby, that was what he thought of: Switzerland eight years ago, when Toby was just a humdrum watcher with a growing reputation for informal listening on the side. Guillam was kicking his heels after North Africa, so the Circus packed them both off to Berne on a one-time operation to spike a pair of Belgian arms dealers who were using the Swiss to spread their wares in unpopular directions. They rented a villa next door to the target house and the same night Toby opened up a junction box and rearranged things so that they overheard the Belgians' conversations on their own phone. Guillam was boss and legman and twice a day he dropped the tapes on the Berne residency, using a parked car as a letter box. With the same ease Toby bribed the local postman to give him a first sight of the Belgians' mail before he delivered it, and the cleaning lady to plant a radio mike in the drawing room where they held most of their discussions. For diversion they went to the Chikito and Toby danced with the youngest girls. Now and then he brought one home but by morning she was always gone and Toby had the windows open to get rid of the smell.