'Thank you,' says Smiley and makes another note. 'Fifty-seven,' he repeats. 'Was that before or after the Sino-Soviet split, Doc?'
'Before. The split started in earnest in fifty-nine.'
Smiley asks here whether Nelson's brother receives a mention anywhere: or is Drake as much disowned in Nelson's China as Nelson is in Drake's?
'In one of the earliest official biographies Drake is referred to, but not by name. In the later ones, a brother is said to have died during the Communist takeover of forty-nine.'
Smiley makes a rare joke, which is followed by dense, relieved laughter. 'This case is littered with people pretending to be dead,' he complains. 'It will be a positive relief to me to find a real corpse somewhere.' Only hours later, this mot was remembered with a shudder.
'We also have a note that Nelson was a model student at Leningrad,' di Salis goes on. 'At least in Russian eyes. They sent him back with the highest references.'
Connie from her iron chair allows herself another interjection. She has brought Trot, her mangy brown mongrel, with her. He lies misshapenly across her vast lap, stinking and occasionally sighing, but not even Guillam, who is a dog-hater, has the nerve to banish him.
'Oh and so they would, dear, wouldn't they?' she cries. 'The Russians would praise Nelson's talents to the skies, course they would, specially if Brother Bretlev Ivan Ivanovitch has snapped him up at University, and Karla's lovelies have spirited him off to training school and all! Bright little mole like Nelson, give him a decent start in life for when he gets home to China! Didn't do him much good later though, did it, Doc? Not when the Great Beastly Cultural Revolution got him in the neck! The generous admiration of Soviet imperialist running dogs wasn't at all the thing to be wearing in your cap then, was it?'
Of Nelson's fall, few details are available, the Doc proclaims, speaking louder in response to Connie's outburst. 'One must assume that it was violent, and as Connie has pointed out, those who were highest in Russian favour fell the hardest.' He glances at the sheet of paper which he holds crookedly before his blotched face. 'I won't give you all his appointments at the time of his disgrace, Chief, because he lost them anyway.
But there is no doubt that he did indeed have effective management of most of the shipbuilding, in Kiangnan and consequently of a large part of China's naval tonnage.'
'I see,' says Smiley quietly. Jotting, he purses his lips as if in disapproval, while his eyebrows lift very high.
'His post at Kiangnan also procured him a string of seats on the naval planning committees and in the field of communications and strategic policy. By sixty-three his name is beginning to pop up regularly in the Cousins' Peking watch reports.'
'Well done, Karla,' Guillam says quietly from his place at Smiley's side, and Smiley, still writing, actually echoes this sentiment with a 'Yes'.
'The only one, Peter dear!' Connie yells, suddenly unable to contain herself. 'The only one of all those toads to see it coming! A voice in the wilderness, wasn't he, Trot? Look out for the yellow peril, he told 'em. One day they're going to turn round and bite the hand that's feeding 'em, sure as eggs. And when that happens you'll have eight hundred million new enemies banging on your own back door. And your guns will all be pointing the wrong way. Mark my words. Told em,' she repeats, hauling at the mongrel's ear in her emotion. 'Put it all in a paper, Threat of deviation by emerging Socialist partner. Circulated every little brute in Moscow Centre's Collegium. Drafted it word for word in his clever little mind while he was doing a spot of bird in Siberia for Uncle Joe Stalin, bless him. Spy on your friends today, they're certain to be your enemies tomorrow, he told them. Oldest dictum in the trade, Karla's favourite. When he was given his job back he practically nailed it up on the door in Dzerzhinsky Square. No one paid a blind bit of notice. Not a scrap. Fell on barren ground, my dear. Five years later, he was proved right, and the Collegium didn't thank him for that either, I can tell you! He's been right a sight too often for their liking, the boobies, hasn't he, Trot! You know, don't you darling, you know what the old fool-woman's on about!' At which she lifts the dog a few inches in the air by its forepaws and lets it flop back on to her lap again.
Connie can't bear old Doc hogging the limelight, they secretly agree. She sees the logic of it, but the woman in her can't abide the reality,
'Very well, he was purged, Doc,' Smiley says quietly, restoring calm. 'Let's go back to sixty-seven, shall we?' And puts his chin back in his hand.
In the gloom, Karla's portrait peers stodgily down as di Salis resumes. 'Well, the usual grim story, one supposes, Chief,' he chants. 'The dunce's cap no doubt. Spat on in the street. Wife and children kicked and beaten up. Indoctrination camps, labour education on a scale commensurate with the crime. Urged to reconsider the peasant virtues. One report has him sent to a rural commune to test himself. And when he came crawling back to Shanghai they'd have made him start at the bottom again, driving bolts into a railway line, or whatever. As far as the Russians were concerned — if that's what we're talking about' — he hurries on before Connie can interrupt yet again — 'he was a washout. No access, no influence, no friends.'
'How long did it take him to climb back?' Smiley enquires, with a characteristic lowering of the eyelids.
'About three years ago he started to be functional again. In the long run he has what Peking needs most: brains, technical knowhow, experience. But his formal rehabilitation didn't really occur till the beginning of seventy-three.'
While di Salis goes on to describe the stages of Nelson's ritual reinstatement, Smiley quietly draws a folder to him and refers to certain other dates which for reasons as yet unexplained are suddenly acutely relevant to him.
'The payments to Drake have their beginnings in mid-seventy-two,' he murmurs. 'They rise steeply in mid-seventy-three.'
'With Nelson's access, darling,' Connie whispers after him, like a prompter from the wings. 'The more he knows, the more he tells, and the more he tells the more he gets. Karla only pays for goodies, and even then it hurts like blazes.'
By seventy-three — says di Salis — having made all the proper confessions, Nelson has been embraced into the Shanghai municipal revolutionary committee, and appointed responsible person in a naval unit of the People's Liberation Army. Six months later -
'Date?' Smiley interrupts.
'July seventy-three.'
'Then Nelson was formally rehabilitated when?'
'The process began in January seventy-three.'
'Thank you.'
Six months later, di Salis continues, Nelson is seen to be acting in an unknown capacity with the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
'Holy smoke,' says Guillam softly, and Molly Meakin gives his hand a hidden squeeze.
'And a report from the Cousins,' says di Salis, 'undated as usual but well attested, has Nelson down as an informal adviser to the Munitions and Ordnance Committee of the Ministry of Defence.'
Rather than orchestrate this revelation with his customary range of mannerisms, di Salis again contrives to keep rock still, to great effect.
'In terms of eligibility, Chief,' he goes on quietly, 'from an operational standpoint, we on the China side of your house would regard this as one of the key positions in the whole of the Chinese administration. If we could pick ourselves one slot for an agent inside the Mainland, Nelson's might well be the one.'
'Reasons?' Smiley enquires, still alternating between his jottings and the open folder before him.
'The Chinese Navy is still in the stone age. We do have a formal interest in Chinese technical intelligence, naturally, but our real priorities, like those of Moscow no doubt, are strategic and political. Beyond that, Nelson could supply us with the total capacity of all Chinese shipyards. Beyond that again, he could tell us the Chinese submarine potential, which has been frightening the daylights out of the Cousins for years. And of ourselves too, I may add, off and on.'