The Secret Pilgrim by John le Carré

bunch of flowers, but I suppose it wouldn’t have been secure.”
    The best I could tell Ben, if I saw him today, is that if he hadn’t blown the network when he did, Haydon would have blown it for him a couple of years later. The best I could tell Stefanie is that she was right in her way, but then so was I, and that her words never left my memory, even after I had ceased to regard her as the fountain of all wisdom. If I never understood who she was—if she belonged, as it were, more to Ben’s mystery than my own— she was nevertheless the first of the siren voices that sounded in my ear, warning me that my mission was an ambiguous one. Sometimes I wonder what I was for her, but I’m afraid I know only too well: a callow boy, another Ben, unversed in life, banishing weakness with a show of strength, and taking refuge in a cloistered world.
    I went back to Berlin not long ago. It was a few weeks after the Wall had been declared obsolete. An old bit of business took me, and Personnel was pleased to pay my fare. I never was formally stationed there, as it worked out, but I had been a frequent visitor, and for us old cold warriors a visa to Berlin is like returning to the source. And on a damp afternoon I found myself standing at the grimy little bit of fencing known grandly as the Wall of the Unknown Ones, which was the memorial to those killed while trying to escape during the sixties, some of whom did not have the foresight to give their names in advance. I stood among a humble group of East Germans, mostly women, and I noticed that they were examining the inscriptions on the crosses: unknown man, shot on such-and-such a date, in 1965. They were looking for clues, fitting the dates to the little that they knew.
    And the sickening notion struck me that they could even have been looking for one of Ben’s agents who had made a dash for freedom at the eleventh hour and failed. And the notion was all the more bewildering when I reflected that it was no longer we Western Allies, but East Germany itself, which was struggling to snuff out its existence.
    The memorial is gone now. Perhaps it will find a corner in a museum somewhere, but I doubt it. When the Wall came down— hacked to pieces, sold—the memorial came down with it, which strikes me as an appropriate comment on the fickleness of human constancy.

4
    Somebody asked Smiley about interrogation, yet again. It was a question that cropped up often as the night progressed—mainly because his audience wanted to squeeze more case histories out of him. Children are merciless.
    â€œOh, there’s some art to faulting the liar, of course there is, Smiley conceded doubtfully, and took a sip from his glass. “But the real art lies in recognising the truth, which is a great deal harder. Under interrogation, nobody behaves normally. People who are stupid act intelligent. Intelligent people act stupid. The guilty look innocent as the day, and the innocent look dreadfully guilty. And just occasionally people act as they are and tell the truth as they know it, and of course they’re the poor souls who get caught out every time. There’s nobody less convincing to our wretched trade than the blameless man with nothing to hide.”
    â€œExcept possibly the blameless woman,” I suggested under my breath.
    George had reminded me of Bella and the ambiguous sea captain Brandt.
    He was a big, rough flaxen fellow, at first guess Slav or Scandinavian, with the roll of a landed seaman and the far eyes of an adventurer. I first met him in Zurich where he was in hot water with the police. The city superintendent called me in the middle of the night and said, “Herr Konsul, we have somebody who says he has informationfor the British. We have orders to put him over the border in the morning.”
    I didn’t ask which border. The Swiss have four, but when they are throwing somebody out they’re not particular. I drove to the