Thus bidden, Colonial Wilbraham formally took the floor, backed by his lady in church brown and his red-haired assistant, whose young face was already set bravely in protection of his headmaster.
Wilbraham was one of those men who are unconscious of how much time they take to think. 'Yes,' he began after an age. 'Yes. Yes, well I'd like to stay with the money, if I may, much as Lacon did, to begin with.' It was already clear that he regarded the submission as an assault upon his territory. 'Since the money is all we've got to go on,' he remarked pointedly; turning back a page in his folder. 'Yes.' And there followed another interminable hiatus. 'You say here the money first of all came from Paris through Vientiane.' Pause. 'Then the Russians switched systems, so to speak, and it was paid through a different channel altogether. A Hamburg-Vienna-Hong Kong tie-up. Endless complexities, subterfuges, all that — we'll take your word for it — right? Same amount, different hat, so to speak. Right. Now why d'you think they did that, so to speak?
So to speak, recorded Guillam, who was very susceptible to verbal tics.
'It is sensible practice to vary the routine from time to time,' Smiley replied, repeating the explanation he had already offered in the submission.
'Tradecraft, Chris,' Enderby put in, who liked his bit of jargon, and Martindale, still piano, shot him a glance of admiration.
Again Wilbraham slowly wound himself up.
'We've got to be guided by what Ko does,' Wilbraham declared, with puzzled fervour, and rattled his knuckles on the baize table. 'Not by what he gets. That's my argument. After all, I mean dash it, it's not Ko's own money is it? Legally it's nothing to do with him.'
The point caused a moment's puzzled silence.
'Page two, top. Money's all in trust.' A general shuffle as everyone but Smiley and Guillam reached for their folders. 'I mean, not only is none of it being spent, which in itself is jolly odd — I'll come to that in a bit — it's not Ko's money. It's in trust, and when the claimant comes along, whoever he or she is, it will be the claimant's money. Till then it's the trust's money. So to speak. So, I mean, what's Ko done wrong? Opened a trust? No law against that. Done every day. Specially in Hong Kong. The beneficiary of the trust — oh, well, he could be anywhere! In Moscow, or Timbuctoo or... ' He didn't seem to be able to think of a third place, so he dried up, to the discomfort of his ginger-headed assistant, who scowled straight at Guillam as if to challenge him. 'Point is: what's against Ko?'
Enderby was holding a matchstick to his mouth and rolling it between his front teeth. Conscious, perhaps, that his adversary had made a good point badly — whereas his own speciality tended to be the reverse — he took it out and contemplated the wet end.
'Hell's all this balls about thumbprints, George?' he asked, perhaps in an effort to deflate Wilbraham's success. 'Like something out of Phillips Oppenheim.'
Belgravia Cockney, thought Guillam: the last stage of linguistic collapse.
Smiley's answers contained about as much emotion as a speaking clock.
'The use of thumbprints is old banking practice along the China coast. It dates from the days of widespread illiteracy. Many overseas Chinese prefer to use British banks rather than their own, and the structure of this account is by no means extraordinary. The beneficiary is not named, but identifies himself by a visual means, such as the torn half of a banknote, or in this case his left thumbprint on the assumption that it is less worn by labour than the right. The bank is unlikely to raise an eyebrow provided that whoever founded the trust has indemnified the trustees against charges of accidental or wrongful payment.'
'Thank you,' said Enderby, and did more delving with the matchstick. 'Could be Ko's own thumbprint I suppose,' he suggested. 'Nothing to stop him doing that, is there? Then it would be his money all right. If he's trustee and beneficiary all at once, of course it's his own damn money.' To Guillam, the issue had already taken a quite ludicrous wrong turning.
'That's pure supposition,' Wilbraham said after the usual two-minute silence; 'Suppose Ko's doing a favour for a chum. Just suppose that for a moment. And this chum's on a fiddle, so to speak, or doing business with the Russians at several removes. Your Chinese loves a conspiracy. Get up to all the tricks, even the nicest of 'em. Ko's no different, I'll be bound.'
Speaking for the first time, the red-haired boy ventured direct support.
'The submission rests on a fallacy,' he declared bluntly, speaking at this stage more to Guillam than to Smiley. Sixth-form puritan, thought Guillam: thinks sex weakens you and spying is immoral. 'You say Ko is on the Russian payroll. We say that's not demonstrated. We say the trust may contain Russian money, but that Ko and the trust are separate entities.' In his indignation he went on too long. 'You're talking about guilt. Whereas we say Ko's done nothing wrong under Hong Kong law and should enjoy the due rights of a Colonial subject.'
Several voices pounced at once. Lacon's won. 'No one is talking about guilt,' he retorted. 'Guilt doesn't enter into it in the least degree. We're talking about security. Solely. Security, and the desirability or otherwise of investigating an apparent threat.'
Welsh Hammer's Treasury colleague was a bleak Scot, as it turned out, with a style as bald as the sixth-former's. 'Nobody's sizing up to infringe Ko's Colonial rights either,' he snapped. 'He hasn't any. There's nothing in Hong Kong law whatever which says the Governor cannot steam open Mr Ko's mail, tap Mr Ko's telephone, suborn his maid or bug his house to kingdom come. Nothing whatever. There are a few other things the Governor can do too, if he feels like it.'
'Also speculative,' said Enderby, with a glance to Smiley. 'Circus has no local facilities for those high-jinks and anyway in the circumstances they'd be insecure.'
'They would be scandalous,' said the red-haired boy unwisely, and Enderby's gourmet eye, yellowed by a lifetime's luncheons, lifted to him, and marked him down for future treatment.
So that was the second, inconclusive skirmish. They hacked about in this way till coffee break, no victor and no corpses; Round two a draw, Guillam decided. He wondered despondently how many rounds there would be.
'What's it all about?' he asked Smiley under the buzz. 'They won't make it go away by talking.'
'They have to reduce it to their own size,' Smiley explained uncritically. Beyond that, he seemed bent on oriental self-effacement, and no prodding from Guillam was going to shake him out of it. Enderby demanded fresh ashtrays. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary said they should try to make progress.
'Think what it's costing the taxpayer, just having us sit here,' he urged proudly. Lunch was still two hours away.
Opening round three, Enderby moved the ticklish issue of whether to advise the Hong Kong Government of the intelligence regarding Ko. This was impish of him, in Guillam's view, since the position of the shadow Colonial Office (as Enderby referred to his homespun confrères) was still that there was no crisis, and consequently nothing for anyone to be advised of. But honest Wilbraham, failing to see the trap, walked into it and said:
'Of course we should advise Hong Kong! They're self-administering. We've no alternative.'
'Oliver?' said Enderby with the calm of a man who holds good cards. Lacon glanced up, clearly irritated at being drawn into the open.
'Oliver?' Enderby repeated.
'I'm tempted to reply that it's Smiley's case and Wilbraham's Colony and we should let them fight it out,' he said, remaining firmly on the fence.
Which left Smiley: 'Oh well, if it were the Governor and nobody else I could hardly object,' he said. 'That is, if you feel it's not too much for him,' he added dubiously, and Guillam saw the red-head stoke himself up again.