John le Carré

Quotes

1. The door opened part way, held on a chain; a body swelled into the opening. Two shrewd eyes, wet like a baby's, appraised him, noted his briefcase and his spattered shoes, flickered upward to peer past his shoulder down the drive, then once more looked him over. Finally the white face broke into a charming smile, and Miss Connie Sachs, formerly queen of research at the Circus, registered her spontaneous joy.

2. 

   The matter of Miss Aaronson's mail was more complex. There were two envelopes on the staffroom sideboard Thursday morning after chapel, one addressed to Jim and one to Miss Aaronson…At the door, Roach looked round. Jim was standing again, leaning back to open the morning's Daily Telegraph. The sideboard was empty. Both envelopes had gone. Had Jim written to Miss Aaronson and changed his mind? Proposing marriage, perhaps? Another thought came to Bill Roach…Was he so lonely that he wrote himself letters, and stole other people's as well?

3. 

   “I'd leave that coat on if I were you, George, old boy,” said an amiable voice. “We've got a long way to go.”…Their destination was the residence of Mr. Oliver Lacon of the Cabinet Office, a senior adviser to various mixed committees and a watch-dog of intelligence affairs…Whitehall's head prefect.

4. 

   “I hate the real world, George. I like the Circus and all my lovely boys.” She took his hands.

   ”Polyakov,” he said quietly, pronouncing it in accordance with Tarr's instruction, “Aleksey Aleksandrovich Polyakov, Cultural Attaché, Soviet Embassy London. He's come alive again, just as you predicted.”

5. 

   On the way he became even more irritable and, from a callbox, sought an appointment with his solicitor for that afternoon.

   “George, how can you be so vulgar? Nobody divorces Ann. Send her flowers and come to lunch.”

6. 

   “Are you enjoying retirement, George?” Lacon asked, as if blurting into the ear trumpet of a deaf aunt. “You don't miss the warmth of human contact? I rather would, I think.“

7. 

   At Waterloo, from a reeking phone box, Guillam telephoned a number in Mitcham, Surrey, and spoke to Inspector Mendel, formerly of Special Branch, known to both Guillam and Smiley from other lives…He was a quirkish, loping tracker of a man, sharp-faced and sharp-eyed, and Guillam had a very precise picture of him just then, leaning over his policeman's notebook with his pencil poised.

8. 

   "It wasn't suicide, Toby," Smiley said, still without a glance at him. "It definitely wasn't suicide. I saw the body, believe me. It wasn't a jealous husband either - not unless he was equipped with a Moscow Centre murder weapon."

9. 

   "Oliver, I wonder if you'd mind finally telling me what I'm doing here," Smiley heard himself suggesting for the third time, hardly above a murmur.

   Even then, Lacon dithered, pondered, hunted with his eyes, delayed. In Lacon's world, direct questions were the height of bad taste, but direct answers were worse.

10. 

    The drawing-pin was where Mostyn said it was, at head height exactly, in the best Sarratt tradition of regularity, its Circus-issue brass head as new and as unmarked as the boy who had put it there.

    Proceed to the rendezvous, it said, no danger sighted.

    Moscow Rules, thought Smiley yet again. Moscow, where it could take a fieldman three days to post a letter to a safe address. Moscow, where all minorities are punk.

11. 

    "The best I ever met," old Mendel, the Superintendent's one-time superior, had told him over a friendly pint not long ago. Mendel was retired now, like Smiley. But Mendel knew what he was talking about and didn't like Funnies any better than the Superintendent did—interfering la-di-da amateurs most of them, and devious with it. But not Smiley. Smiley was different, Mendel had said. Smiley was the best—simply the best case man Mendel had ever met—and old Mendel knew what he was talking about.

12. 

    "Thank you," said Smiley again.

    And a moment later, with more ease than his portly figure might have suggested him capable of, he had vanished among the trees. But not before the Superintendent had shone the torch full upon his face, a thing he hadn't done till now for reasons of discretion. And taken an intense professional look at the legendary features, if only to tell his grandchildren in his old age: how George Smiley, sometime Chief of the Secret Service, by then retired, had one night come out of the woodwork to peer at some dead foreigner of his who had died in highly nasty circumstances.

    Not one face at all actually, the Superintendent reflected. Not when it was lit by the torch like that indirectly from below. More your whole range of faces. More your patchwork of different ages, people and endeavours.