The Secret Pilgrim by John le Carré Read Free Book Online

sometimes letters?”
    â€œOnly postcards.”
    â€œHow many?”
    â€œThree or four since he’s been there.”
    â€œAlways in colour?”
    â€œI don’t remember. Probably. Yes.”
    â€œAnd always of girls?”
    â€œI think so.”
    â€œOh, but you remember, really. Of course you do. And always naked too, I expect?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhere are the others?”
    â€œI must have thrown them away too.”
    â€œBecause of your cleaning lady?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œTo protect her sensitivities?”
    â€œYes!”
    The owlish man took his time to consider this. “So the dirty postcards—forgive me, I don’t mean that offensively, really not— they were a sort of running joke between you?”
    â€œOn his side, yes.”
    â€œBut you didn’t send him any in return? Please say if you did.
    Don’t be embarrassed. There isn’t time.”
    â€œI’m not embarrassed! I didn’t send him any. Yes, they were a running joke. And they were getting increasingly risqué. If youwant to know, I was becoming slightly bored with seeing them laid out on the hall table for my collection. So was Mr. Simpson. He’s the landlord. He suggested I write to Ben and tell him to stop sending them. He said it was getting the house a bad name. Now will you please, one of you, tell me what the hell’s going on?”
    This time Personnel replied. “Well, that’s what we thought you might be able to tell us, ” he said in a mournful voice. “Ben Cavendish has disappeared. So have his agents, in a manner of speaking. A couple of them are featured in this morning’s Neues Deutschland. British spy ring caught red-handed. The London evening papers are running the story in their late editions. He hasn’t been seen for three days. This is Mr. Smiley. He wants to talk to you. You’re to tell him whatever you know. And that means anything. I’ll see you later.”
    I must have lost my bearings for a moment, because when I saw Smiley again he was standing at the centre of my carpet, gloomily peering round him at the havoc he and Personnel had wreaked.
    â€œI’ve a house across the river in Bywater Street,” he confessed, as if it were a great burden to him. “Perhaps we ought to pop round there, if it’s all the same to you. It’s not terribly tidy, but it is better than this.”
    We drove there in Smiley’s humble little Austin, so slowly you would have supposed he was conveying an invalid, which was perhaps how he regarded me. It was dusk. The white lanterns of Albert Bridge floated at us like waterborne coachlights. Ben, I thought desperately, what have we done? Ben, what have they done to you?
    Bywater Street was jammed, so we parked in a mews. Parking for Smiley was as complicated as docking a liner, but he managed it and we walked back. I remember how impossible it was to keep alongside him, how his thrusting roundarm waddle somehow ignored my existence. I remember how he steeled himself to turn the key of his own front door, and his alertness as he stepped intothe hall. As if home were a dangerous place for him, as I know now that it was. There was a couple of days’ milk in the hall and a halfeaten plate of chop and peas in the drawing room. The turntable of a gramophone was silently revolving. It didn’t take a genius to surmise that he had been called out in a hurry—presumably by Personnel yesterday evening—while he was tucking into his chop and listening to a spot of music.
    He wandered off to the kitchen in search of soda for our whiskies. I followed him. There was something about Smiley that made you responsible for his solitude. Open tins of food lay about and the sink was crammed with dirty plates. While he mixed our whiskies, I started clearing up, so he fished a teacloth from the back of the door and set to work drying and putting away.
    â€œYou