Call for the Dead — первый роман о Джордже Смайли, в котором тихий, неприметный офицер британской разведки сталкивается с делом, начинающимся как обычная проверка благонадёжности, но неожиданно приводящим к смерти и цепочке вопросов, на которые никто не спешит отвечать. Расследуя произошедшее, Смайли вынужден двигаться сквозь туман лжи, старых связей и послевоенных теней, где ничего не выглядит так, как кажется. Это напряжённый, атмосферный детектив о том, как прошлое и политика переплетаются в судьбе одного человека — и всей страны.
1
A Short History of George Smiley
When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her surprised friends as wonderfully ordinary. When she left him two years later in favour of a Cuban motor racing driver, she made the peculiar remark that if she hadn’t left him then, she never could have done.
Who was this man? Was he rich or poor? Where had the beautiful Lady Ann got him from? Short, fat, and quiet, Smiley appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about him like the skin on a toad.
But Smiley, without parents, without school or trade, neither rich nor poor, when the divorce had come and gone, became as uninteresting as yesterday’s news.
When Lady Ann followed her star to Cuba, she gave some thought to Smiley. She admitted to herself that if there were an only man in her life, Smiley would be he. And looking back, she was pleased that she had after all married him.
So Lady Ann had left Smiley, but the effect of this upon her former husband did not interest society. A friend of hers merely remarked partir c’est courir un peu, not realizing that though Lady Ann just ran away, a little of George Smiley had indeed died.
The part of Smiley that lived on matched his appearance as badly as love: it was his profession which was that of intelligence officer.
Some time in the twenties when Smiley had left school and entered an Oxford College, he had dreamed of a lifelong study of the seventeenth-century literature of Germany. But his tutor, who knew Smiley better, guided him wisely away from the honours that could have been his. On a sweet July morning in 1928, a surprised and rather pink Smiley sat before the interviewing board of the Overseas Committee for Academic Research, an organization of which he had never heard. Jebedee, his tutor, had not made himself very clear: ‘Give these people a try, Smiley,’ was all he had said. It worried Smiley.
He wasn’t introduced to the Board, but he knew half of its members by sight. There was Fielding from Cambridge, Sparke from the School of Oriental Languages, and Steed-Asprey who had been dining at High Table the night Smiley had been Jebedee’s guest. He had to admit he felt honoured.
The interview progressed slowly, uncovering bit by bit the different sides of the subject, until finally the naked truth appeared before him. He was being offered a post in what, for want of a better name, Steed-Asprey described as the Secret Service.
Smiley had asked for time to think. They gave him a week. No one mentioned pay.
That night he stayed in London at somewhere rather good and took himself to the theatre. He felt strangely light-headed and this worried him. But he knew very well he would accept the job, that he could have done so at the interview.
Then came the training: anonymous country houses, anonymous teachers, a good deal of travel, and finally he was able to work alone: he was appointed englischer Dozent at a small university in Germany.
He spent the vacations in the contryside with groups of German students. Towards the end of each long vacation he brought some of them to England, having already recommended the likely ones by secret means to an address in Bonn. During the entire two years he had no idea if his messages ever reached the persons they were meant for, or if his advice was ever followed. And he had no contact with the Department while in England.
His feelings in performing his work were mixed. On one side he enjoyed to observe people, from a distant position, finding what he described as “the agent potential of a human being. He liked to think up small tests of character which could inform him of the qualities of a candidate.
On the other hand it made him sad to witness in himself the death of natural pleasures one by one. He always avoided the company and friendship of others for fear of giving himself away. His life became false and he hated it.
He missed his country. The long stay in Germany made his love for England deeper. He dreamt of the beauty of its countryside, he fed hungrily on memories from Oxford. This was his other secret, and he grew to hate the new Germany, the stamping and shouting of students in uniform. He hated what they did to the German literature he loved so much. And there had been a night, a terrible night in the winter of 1937, when Smiley had stood at his window and watched a great bonfire in the university court: round it stood hundreds of students throwing books into the fire. He knew whose books they were: Thomas Mann, Heine, Lessing and lots of others. And Smiley, watching and hating, felt the joy of knowing his enemy.
Nineteen thirty-nine he went to Sweden as an agent of a well-known Swiss small-arms manufacturer. For four years he played the part, travelling back and forth between Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden. He had never guessed it was possible to be frightened for so long. He learnt what it was never to sleep, never to rest. To feel at any time of day or night the beating of his own heart, to know the sudden desire for a woman, for drink, for exercise, for anything that could make him forget his life.
Against this background he carried out his commerce and his work as a spy. With the progress of time the network grew. In 1943 he was called back to England. Within six weeks he was longing to return, but they never let him go.
“You’re finished,” Steed-Asprey said: “train new men, take time off. Get married or something.”
Smiley proposed to Steed-Asprey’s secretary, the Lady Ann Sercomb.
The war was over. They paid him off, and he took his beautiful wife to Oxford to continue his studies of the literature of seventeenth-century Germany. But two years later Lady Ann was in Cuba, and the revelations of a young Russian cypher-clerk in Ottawa had made a new demand for men of Smiley’s experience.
Things changed. Younger men were coming in, perhaps with fresher minds. He realized he had entered middle age without ever being young, and that he was – in the nicest possible way – on the shelf.
Steed-Asprey was gone. Jebedee had disappeared in France in 1941. Only Maston remained, Maston the career man, brought in during the war as the Minister’s Adviser on Intelligence.
The NATO alliance changed the whole nature of Smiley’s service. Gone forever were the days of Steed-Asprey, when you took your orders over a glass oiport. The handful of inspired, underpaid men had given way to the bureaucracy of a large Government department, in the hands of Maston, with his expensive clothes, his distinguished grey hair and silver coloured ties. Maston, who even remembered his secretary’s birthday; Maston, extending his empire and moving to ever larger offices; Maston, holding smart house-parties, and feeding on the success of his subordinates.
This was a new world for Smiley: the bright corridors, the smart young men. He longed for the old house in Knightsbridge where it had all begun. His appearance reflected his lack of comfort and he looked even more toad-like than ever.
Smiley was now too old to go abroad. Maston made that clear: “Anyway, my dear fellow, as like as not you’re finished after all that running about in the war. Better stick at home, old man, and keep the home fires burning.”
Which goes some way to explaining why George Smiley sat in the back of a London taxi at two o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, 4 January, on his way to Cambridge Circus.
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