Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré Read Free Book Online Page B

night for understanding time. Among Smiley’s jobs in those days was the vetting of recruits: no one taken on without his nod, no one trained without his signature on the schedule. The cold war was running high, scalp-hunters were in demand, the Circus’s residencies abroad had been ordered by Haydon to look out for likely material. Steve Mackelvore from Djakarta came up with Tarr. Mackelvore was an old pro with cover as a shipping agent, and he had found Tarr angry drunk, kicking round the docks looking for a girl called Rose, who had walked out on him.
    According to Tarr’s story, he was mixed up with a bunch of Belgians running guns between the islands and up-coast. He disliked Belgians and he was bored with gunrunning and he was angry because they’d stolen Rose. Mackelvore reckoned he would respond to discipline and was young enough to train for the type of mailfist operation that the scalp-hunters undertook from behind the walls of their glum Brixton schoolhouse. After the usual searches, Tarr was forwarded to Singapore for a second look, then to the Nursery at Sarratt for a third. At that point Smiley came into the act as moderator at a succession of interviews, some hostile. Sarratt Nursery was the training compound, but it had space for other uses.
    Tarr’s father was an Australian solicitor living in Penang, it seemed. The mother was a small-time actress from Bradford who came East with a British drama group before the war. The father, Smiley recalled, had an evangelical streak and preached in local gospel halls. The mother had a small criminal record in England, but Tarr’s father either didn’t know or didn’t care. When the war came, the couple evacuated to Singapore for the sake of their young son. A few months later, Singapore fell and Ricki Tarr began his education in Changi jail under Japanese supervision. In Changi the father preached God’s charity to everyone in sight, and if the Japs hadn’t persecuted him his fellow prisoners would have done the job for them. With Liberation, the three of them went back to Penang. Ricki tried to read for the law but more often broke it, and the father turned some rough preachers loose on him to beat the sin out of his soul. Tarr flew the coop to Borneo. At eighteen he was a fully paid-up gunrunner playing all seven ends against the middle around the Indonesian islands, and that was how Mackelvore stumbled on him.
    By the time he had graduated from the Nursery, the Malayan emergency had broken. Tarr was played back into gunrunning. Almost the first people he bumped into were his old Belgian friends. They were too busy supplying guns to the Communists to bother where he had been, and they were shorthanded. Tarr ran a few shipments for them in order to blow their contacts, then one night got them drunk, shot four of them, including Rose, and set fire to their boat. He hung around Malaya and did a couple more jobs before being called back to Brixton and refitted for special operations in Kenya—or, in less sophisticated language, hunting Mau Mau for bounty.
    After Kenya, Smiley pretty much lost sight of him, but a couple of incidents stuck in his memory because they might have become scandals and Control had to be informed. In 1964, Tarr was sent to Brazil to make a crash offer of a bribe to an armaments minister known to be in deep water. Tarr was too rough; the minister panicked and told the press. Tarr had Dutch cover and no one was wiser except Netherlands intelligence, who were furious. In Spain a year later, acting on a tip-off supplied by Bill Haydon, Tarr blackmailed—or burned, as the scalp-hunters would say—a Polish diplomat who had lost his heart to a dancer. The first yield was good; Tarr won a commendation and a bonus. But when he went back for a second helping the Pole wrote a confession to his ambassador and threw himself, with or without encouragement, from a high window.
    In Brixton, they used to call him accident-prone. Guillam, by the