Free Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré Page B

catastrophe, as it happened, luck handed Smiley a small consolation. In Warsaw in broad daylight a Circus head agent on the run picked up the BBC signal and walked straight into the British Embassy. Thanks to ferocious lobbying by Lacon and Smiley between them he was flown home to London the same night disguised as a diplomatic courier, Martindale not withstanding. Mistrusting his cover story Smiley turned the man over to the Circus inquisitors who, deprived of other meat, nearly killed him but afterwards declared him clean. He was resettled in Australia.
    Next, still at the very genesis of his rule, Smiley was compelled to pass judgement on the Circus’s blown domestic out-stations. His instinct was to shed everything: the safe houses, now totally unsafe; the Sarratt Nursery, where traditionally the briefing and training of agents and new entrants was conducted: the experimental audio laboratories in Harlow; the stinks-and-bangs school in Argyll; the water school in the Helford Estuary, where passé sailors practised the black arts of small-boat seacraft like the ritual of some lost religion; and the longarm radio transmission base at Canterbury. He would even have done away with the wranglers’ headquarters in Bath where the codebreaking went on.
    ‘Scrap the lot,’ he told Lacon, calling on him in his rooms.
    ‘And then what?’ Lacon enquired, puzzled by his vehemence, which since the Sochi failure was more marked in him.
    ‘Start again.’
    ‘I see,’ said Lacon, which meant, of course, that he didn’t. Lacon had sheets of Treasury figures before him, and was studying them while he spoke.
    ‘The Sarratt Nursery, for some reason which I fail to understand, is carried on the military budget,’ he observed reflectively. ‘Not on your reptile fund at all. The Foreign Office pays for Harlow - and I’m sure has long forgotten the fact - Argyll is under the wing of the Ministry of Defence, who most certainly won’t know of its existence, the Post Office has Canterbury and the Navy has Helford. Bath, I’m pleased to say, is also supported from Foreign Office funds, over the particular signature of Martindale, appended six years ago and similarly faded from official memory. So they don’t eat a thing. Do they?’
    ‘They’re dead wood,’ Smiley insisted. ‘ And while they exist we shall never replace them. Sarratt went to the devil long ago, Helford is moribund, Argyll is farcical. As to the wranglers, for the last five years they’ve been working practically full time for Karla.’
    ‘By Karla you mean Moscow Centre?’
    ‘I mean the department responsible for Haydon and half a dozen -’
    ‘I know what you mean. But I think it safer to stay with institutions if you don’t mind. In that way we are spared the embarrassment of personalities. After all, that’s what institutions are for, isn’t it?’ Lacon tapped his pencil rhythmically on his desk. Finally he looked up, and considered Smiley quizzically. ‘Well, well, you are the root-and-bough man these days, George. I dread to think what would happen if you were ever to wield your axe round my side of the garden. Those outstations are gilt-edged stock. Do away with them now and you’ll never get them back. Later, if you like, when you’re on the road, you can cash them in and buy yourself something better. You mustn’t sell when the market’s low, you know. You must wait till you can take a profit.’
    Reluctantly, Smiley bowed to his advice.
    As if all these headaches were not enough, there came one bleak Monday morning when a Treasury audit pointed up serious discrepancies in the conduct of the Circus reptile fund over the period of five years before it was frozen by the fall. Smiley was forced to hold a kangaroo court, at which an elderly clerk in Finance Section, hauled from retirement, broke down and confessed to a shameful passion for a girl in Registry who had led him by the nose. In a ghastly fit of remorse, the old man went home and