Free The Secret Pilgrim by John le Carré Page B

while the rest of me grappled with the correct, the moral, the decent course of action.
    Ben, my friend.
    Ben, with the dogs after him.
    Ben in anguish, and God knew what more besides.
    Stefanie.
    I took a long bath, then lay on my bed watching the mirror on the chest of drawers because the mirror gave me a view of the street. I could see a couple of men whom I took to be Monty’s, dressed in overalls and doing something longwinded with a junction box. Smiley had said I shouldn’t take them personally. After all, they only wanted to put Ben in irons.
    It is ten o’clock of the same long morning as I stand purposefully to one side of my rear window, peering down into the squalid courtyard, with its creosoted shed that used to be the old privy, and its clapboard gate that opens on the dingy street. The street is empty. Monty is not so perfect after all.
    The Western Isles, Ben had said. A dower house on the Western Isles.
    But which isle? And Stefanie who? The only safe guess was that if she came from the German side of Ben’s family and lived in Munich, and that since Ben’s German relatives were grand, she was likely to be titled.
    I rang Personnel. I might have rung Smiley but I felt safer lying to Personnel. He recognised my voice before I had a chance to state my business.
    â€œHave you heard anything?” he demanded.
    â€œAfraid not. I want to go out for an hour. Can I do that?”
    â€œWhere to?”
    â€œI need a few things. Provisions. Something to read. Thought I’d just pop round to the library.”
    Personnel was famous for his disapproving silences.
    â€œBe back by eleven. Ring me as soon as you get in.”
    Pleased by my cool performance, I went out by the front door, bought a newspaper and bread. Using shop windows, I checked my back. Nobody was following me, I was sure. I went to the public library and from the reference section drew an old copy of Who’s Who and a tattered Almanach de Gotha. I did not pause to ask myself who on earth, in Battersea of all places, could have worn out the Almanach de Gotha. I consulted the Who’s Who first and turned up Ben’s father, who had a knighthood and a battery of decorations: “ 1936, married the Gräfin Ilse Arno zu Lothringen, one son Benjamin Arno. ” I switched to the Almanach and turned up the Arno Lothringens. They rated three pages, but it took me no time to identify the distant cousin whose first name was Stefanie. I boldly asked the librarian for a telephone directory for the Western Isles of Scotland. She hadn’t one, but allowed me to call enquiries on her telephone, which was fortunate for I had no doubt my own was being tapped. By ten-forty-five I was back at the telephone in my flat talking to Personnel in the same relaxed tone as before.
    â€œWhere did you go?” he asked
    â€œTo the newsagent. And the baker’s.”
    â€œDidn’t you go the library?”
    â€œLibrary? Oh yes. Yes, I did.”
    â€œAnd what, pray, did you take out?”
    â€œNothing, actually. For some reason I find it hard to settle to anything at the moment. What do I do next?”
    Waiting for him to reply, I wondered whether I had given too many answers but decided I had not.
    â€œYou wait. The same as the rest of us.”
    â€œCan I come in to Head Office?”
    â€œSince you’re waiting, you might as well wait there as here.”
    â€œI could go back to Monty, if you like.”
    It was probably my over-acute imagination at work, but I had a mental image of Smiley standing at his elbow, telling him how to answer me.
    â€œJust wait where you are,” he said curtly.
    I waited, Lord knows how. I pretended to read. I dramatised myself and wrote a pompous letter of resignation to Personnel. I tore up the letter and burned the pieces. I watched television, and in the evening I lay on the bed observing the changing of Monty’s guard in the mirror and thinking of Stefanie,