'Indeed yes.'
The silence returned, broken only by the soft tread of Mendel upstairs.
'Prideaux and Haydon were really very close indeed, you know,' Lacon confessed. 'I hadn't realised.'
He was suddenly in a great hurry to leave. Delving in his briefcase, he hauled out a large plain envelope, thrust it into Smiley's hand and went off to the prouder world of Whitehall; and Mr Barraclough to the Islay Hotel, where he returned to his reading of Operation Testify.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It was lunchtime next day. Smiley had read and slept a little, read again and bathed and as he climbed the steps to that pretty London house he felt pleased because he liked Sam.
The house was brown brick and Georgian, just off Grosvenor Square. There were five steps and a brass doorbell in a scalloped recess. The door was black with pillars either side. He pushed the bell and he might as well have pushed the door, it opened at once. He entered a circular hallway with another door the other end, and two large men in black suits who might have been ushers at Westminster Abbey. Over a marble chimney piece horses pranced and they might have been Stubbs. One man stood close while he took off his coat; the second led him to a bible desk to sign the book.
'Hebden,' Smiley murmured as he wrote, giving a workname Sam could remember. 'Adrian Hebden.'
The man who had his coat repeated the name into a house telephone: 'Mr Hebden, Mr Adrian Hebden.'
'If you wouldn't mind waiting one second, sir,' said the man by the bible desk. There was no music and Smiley had the feeling there should have been; also a fountain.
'I'm a friend of Mr Collins as a matter of fact,' said Smiley. 'If Mr Collins is available. I think he may even be expecting me.'
The man at the telephone murmured Thank you' and hung it on the hook. He led Smiley to the inner door and pushed it open. It made no sound at all, not even a rustle on the silk carpet.
'Mr Collins is over there, sir,' he murmured respectfully. 'Drinks are with the courtesy of the house.'
The three reception rooms had been run together, with pillars and arches to divide them optically, and mahogany panelling. In each room was one table, the third was sixty feet away. The lights shone on meaningless pictures of fruit in colossal gold frames, and on the green baize tablecloths. The curtains were drawn, the tables about one third occupied, four or five players to each, all men, but the only sound was the click of the ball in the wheel, and the click of chips as they were redistributed, and the very low murmur of the croupiers.
'Adrian Hebden,' said Sam Collins, with a twinkle in his voice. 'Long time no see.'
'Hullo, Sam,' said Smiley and they shook hands.
'Come to my lair,' said Sam and nodded to the only other man in the room who was standing, a very big man with blood pressure and a chipped face. The big man nodded too.
'Care for it?' Sam enquired as they crossed a corridor draped in red silk.
'It's very impressive,' said Smiley politely.
'That's the word,' said Sam. 'Impressive. That's what it is.' He was wearing a dinner jacket. His office was done in Edwardian plush, his desk had a marble top and ball-and-claw feet, but the room itself was very small and not at all well ventilated, more like the back room of a theatre, Smiley thought, furnished with left-over props.
'They might even let me put in a few pennies of my own later, give it another year. They're toughish boys, but very go-ahead, you know.'
'I'm sure,' said Smiley.
'Like we were in the old days.'
That's right.'
He was trim and light-hearted in his manner and he had a trim black moustache. Smiley couldn't imagine him without it. He was probably fifty. He had spent a lot of time out East, where they had once worked together on a catch-and-carry job against a Chinese radio operator. His complexion and hair were greying but he still looked thirty-five. His smile was warm and he had a confiding, messroom friendliness. He kept both hands on the table as if he were at cards and he looked at Smiley with a possessive fondness that was paternal or filial or both.
'If chummy goes over five,' he said, still smiling, 'give me a buzz, Harry, will you. Otherwise keep your big mouth shut, I'm chatting up an oil king.' He was talking into a box on his desk. 'Where is he now?'
'Three up,' said a gravel voice. Smiley guessed it belonged to the chipped man with blood pressure.
'Then he's got eight to lose,' said Sam blandly. 'Keep him at the table, that's all. Make a hero of him.' He switched off and grinned. Smiley grinned back.
'Really, it's a great life,' Sam assured him. 'Better than selling washing machines, anyway. Bit odd, of course, putting on the dinner jacket at ten in the morning. Reminds me of diplomatic cover.' Smiley laughed. 'Straight, too, believe it or not,' Sam added with no change to his expression. 'We get all the help we need from the arithmetic.'
'I'm sure you do,' said Smiley, once more with great politeness.
'Care for some music?'
It was canned and came out of the ceiling. Sam turned it up as loud as they could bear.
'So what can I do for you?' Sam asked, the smile broadening.
'I want to talk to you about the night Jim Prideaux was shot. You were duty officer.'
Sam smoked brown cigarettes that smelt of cigar. Lighting one, he let the end catch fire, then watched it die to an ember. 'Writing your memoirs, old boy?' he enquired.
'We're reopening the case.'
'What's this we, old boy?'
'I, myself and me, with Lacon pushing and the Minister pulling.'
'All power corrupts but some must govern and in that case Brother Lacon will reluctantly scramble to the top of the heap.'
'It hasn't changed,' said Smiley.
Sam drew ruminatively on his cigarette. The music switched to phrases of Noel Coward.
'It's a dream of mine, actually,' said Sam Collins through the noise. 'One of these days Percy Alleline walks through that door with a shabby brown suitcase and asks for a flutter. He puts the whole of the secret vote on red and loses.'
'The record's been filleted,' said Smiley. 'It's a matter of going to people and asking what they remember. There's almost nothing on the file at all.'
'I'm not surprised,' said Sam. Over the phone he ordered sandwiches. 'Live on them,' he explained. 'Sandwiches and canaps. One of the perks.'
He was pouring coffee when the red pinlight glowed between them on the desk.
'Chummy's even,' said the gravel voice.
'Then start counting,' said Sam and closed the switch.
He told it plainly but precisely, the way a good soldier recalls a battle, not to win or lose any more, but simply to remember. He had just come back from abroad, he said, a three-year stint in Vientiane. He'd checked in with personnel and cleared himself with the Dolphin; no one seemed to have any plans for him so he was thinking of taking off for the South of France for a month's leave when MacFadean, that old janitor who was practically Control's valet, scooped him up in the corridor and marched him to Control's room.
'This was which day exactly?' said Smiley.
'October 19th.'
'The Thursday.'
'The Thursday. I was thinking of flying to Nice on Monday. You were in Berlin. I wanted to buy you a drink but the mothers said you were occup and when I checked with Movements they told me you'd gone to Berlin.'
'Yes, that's true,' Smiley said simply. 'Control sent me there.'
To get me out of the way, he might have added; it was a feeling he had had even at the time.
'I hunted round for Bill but Bill was also in baulk. Control had packed him up-country somewhere,' said Sam, avoiding Smiley's eye.