Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Read Online Free PDF

Grimmelshausen, nevertheless, a modest treasure from his Oxford days, he solemnly set off for Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street, where he occasionally contracted friendly bargains with the proprietor. On the way he became even more irritable, and from a call-box 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.”
    This advice bucked him up and he approached Heywood Hill with a merry heart only to walk slap into the arms of Roddy Martindale emerging from Trumper’s after his weekly haircut.
    Martindale had no valid claim on Smiley either professionally or socially. He worked on the fleshy side of the Foreign Office and his job consisted of lunching visiting dignitaries whom no one else would have entertained in his woodshed. He was a floating bachelor with a grey mane and that nimbleness which only fat men have. He affected buttonholes and pale suits, and he pretended on the flimsiest grounds to an intimate familiarity with the large back rooms of Whitehall. Some years ago, before it was disbanded, he had adorned a Whitehall working party to co-ordinate intelligence. In the war, having a certain mathematical facility, he had also haunted the fringes of the secret world; and once, as he never tired of telling, he had worked with John Landsbury on a Circus coding operation of transient delicacy. But the war, as Smiley sometimes had to remind himself, was thirty years ago.
    “Hullo, Roddy,” said Smiley. “Nice to see you.”
    Martindale spoke in a confiding upper-class bellow of the sort that, on foreign holidays, had more than once caused Smiley to sign out of his hotel and run for cover.
    “My dear boy, if it isn’t the maestro himself! They told me you were locked up with the monks in Saint Gallen or somewhere, poring over manuscripts! Confess to me at once. I want to know all you’ve been doing, every little bit. Are you well? Do you love England still? How’s the delicious Ann?” His restless gaze flicked up and down the street before lighting on the wrapped volume of Grimmelshausen under Smiley’s arm. “Pound to a penny that’s a present for her. They tell me you spoil her outrageously.” His voice dropped to a mountainous murmur: “I say, you’re not back on the beat, are you? Don’t tell me it’s all cover, George, cover?” His sharp tongue explored the moist edges of his little mouth, then, like a snake, vanished between its folds.
    So, fool that he was, Smiley bought his escape by agreeing to dine that same evening at a club in Manchester Square to which they both belonged but which Smiley avoided like the pest, not least because Roddy Martindale was a member. When evening came, he was still full of luncheon at the White Tower, where his solicitor, a very self-indulgent man, had decided that only a great meal would recover George from his doldrums. Martindale, by a different route, had reached the same conclusion, and for four long hours over food Smiley did not want they had bandied names as if they were forgotten footballers. Jebedee, who was Smiley’s old tutor: “Such a loss to us, bless him,” murmured Martindale, who so far as Smiley knew had never clapped eyes on Jebedee. “And what a talent for the game, eh? One of the real greats, I always say.” Then Fielding, the French mediaevalist from Cambridge: “Oh, but what a lovely sense of humour. Sharp mind, sharp!” Then Sparke from the School of Oriental Languages, and lastly Steed-Asprey, who had founded that very club in order to escape from bores like Roddy Martindale.
    “I knew his poor brother, you know. Half the mind and twice the brawn, bless him. Brain went all the other way.”
    And Smiley through a fog of drink had listened to this nonsense, saying “yes” and “no” and “what a pity” and “no, they never found him,” and once, to his abiding shame, “oh, come, you flatter me,” till with lugubrious