omar | TLV: IC Inbox

Well, you should come, that's exactly what it's like. If we can find someone to let us into the Enclosure-

[Happily.]

[A brief pause, like he's waiting for something, then--]

You got a warden you can ask, yo.

Oh. Do you think she'd-?

[Ricki hasn't mastered going to Anya for anything.]

Expect she would if you did.

[He really hesitates. Laughs at himself, and shakes his head.]

Can't. I'm so sorry, darling, I'd really like to, but I'm- it's silly, but I haven't been able to ask her for a thing yet, and if I start now I'm never going to be able to stop wondering what I'll have to give up in trade.

Guess we plum outta luck, then.

...I'll ask her. I can't not, it's- you've got to see it.

[Nervous, but excited, but nervous- he qualifies.]

But it might take me a month to get up the nerve. I barely made it down to Paris, even asking to get out was--

Y'all have the phrase day at a time back in the day, Ricki?

Not in my life. [He admits, laughing, entirely at himself.] Nothing but power plays and long games, for us. But that's a waltz I'm doing all on my own, and this is a very, very good excuse to learn to stop dancing.

[He's not laughing along, this time.]

This a good place to learn it. How you gonna plan for a month from now?

Yes, but when I don't plan, I don't sleep.

[There's a lot he could say to that, but he's not actually trying to pick a fight, at least not in the middle of the worst fucking night, darling. He settles, quietly smoothing out his own rumpled feathers on his end.]

What kinda plans you been making?

[He hums, tries to think about it.]

I spend a lot of time thinking about someone from home arriving here. Peter Guillam, Bill Haydon. What kind of trouble would I be in, what kind of damage control am I going to have to run if George Smiley in his spectacles knocks on my door? Who would they be- warden, inmate, warden.

[Well, that's interesting, anyway.]

Other acrobats and circus clowns?

Story for you?

[Apologetic and soft; he knows, he knows he's being demanding and terrible, but hopefully Omar will be forgiving.]

This one's a big one. This one is how I, after twenty years of good service, tried to retire.

[This time, he really feels like he's the one being demanding. Or hovering on it, anyway, with all the buttons he feels himself wanting to push tonight and just barely isn't. Ricki's reticence -- about Anya, more importantly to Anya -- suddenly grates more than usual, and for some reason, it grates all the more in light of this sudden resurgence of Puerto Rico in Omar's mind. That and this lingering sense of debt to Reynaldo, to whom he really owes nothing at all... except that this idle fantasy he really has been imagining these past few days was once a possible future belonging to someone else. An actual cabin on an actual beach that isn't his to share.

It's all unsettling and irritating in ways he doesn't want to indulge any more right now, or at all, so he settles in and tries to fix his mind to listening. This is a big one, Ricki says, and he does want to know. He closes his eyes on his end and leans back, trying to clear his head.]

Go on.

Almost a year ago now, I was doing a job in Istanbul.

[Ricki might pick up on it- maybe he does- maybe he'd do something about it, if they were in person. But instead he goes on talking. The texture of the sound changes; he's lying down with his head on the pillow, with the device in close.]

They had me following a trade delegate. This Russian named Boris. He was a boozer, a party animal, so the local men were having trouble keeping in his footsteps. They thought they might be able to turn him with one of your honey traps, convince him to man a box- but when I got there I realized it was much worse than that. He was a hood, a Moscow trained man if I ever saw one. He might even have been on the look out for someone like me, trying to lure me in to work a soft target, and then get me into an ugly double-double game on the other side. I wired home, no sale, and decided to just watch his apartment, maybe burgle the place, see if I could find something worth the hotel and airfare.

[Ricki always has to ease into the language of Omar's stories, and Omar tends to have to do the same for his. Some things get translated automatically -- honey trap, he already knows. Others, like man a box, get filed away for later reference. The gist is clear enough, though, and it's not hard to follow along with this one.]

Which y'all did.

[Or there wouldn't be a story, he assumes.]

I saw him through a window, beating his wife.

[He answers, letting out a long breath.]

A slip of a girl, and another operative. I went to go check up on her, offer a gentle shoulder. I'm good with women, and I know them- I know when they have secrets. I had a feeling about this girl.

[Omar hesitates, this time. He'll cheerfully admit that he's the last person suited for Ricki's craft -- if he ever were any kind of spy, he'd be the one in the James Bond model -- but he already has a bad feeling that he might know where this is going. He's heard too many of these stories from him now.]

...a'ight. Still with you.

"Your man's a bit of a bastard, isn't he?"

[Ricki asks, recalls, the voice that just makes people melt to do whatever they can for him, with a solicitous;]

"I came over to check you were all right."

She let me in. I was a businessman, it was a holiday romance- convertibles down port side streets, with her split lip and bruised jaw healing slowly. I didn't sleep with her. I hardly had to, she needed someone so badly. [And here's the twist, the way this story is unlike any of the others;] And anyways, the moment she had me alone, one sunny day, away from any ears, she put her small hands on mine and told me that she knew who I was, and that I had to get a message back to Control for her. That- that's not language you guess at, it was credible. She had gold for him.

[It's honestly not a surprise at all to hear it. It is a twist, but it's one he saw coming this time, no blind-siding like the Leamas tale. He suspects there's at least one more ahead.]

Bet she did, at that.

My problem was this. I, in staying behind, was a little off the beaten path. Mister Guillam wasn't asking after me exactly, yet, but there had been a few gentle queries put in with Tufty Thessinger at the telegraph office. How was I to say, 'I have a girl here, I have a gut feeling about her, she needs an extract and she says she has something good.' People want to come over all the time; we don't offer free tickets. They buy their way into the west.

I slept with her. I kept my foot on the vodka bottle. I listened and listened, about how Boris was a bastard, about the things she'd done and seen, as she worked her slow way up to the truth- and she was like me, you know, she'd been taken in to the Lubyanka at puberty, to become the liar she'd grown into. So she told me. There was, she insisted, a mole, right at the top of the Circus.

[Anything he can think of to say doesn't convey the half of it, how bad it is, it would be, if that were true.]

If it were true, it would mean- oh, potentially, I thought, an entire department being blown. The Circus is stratified- there's Control, and under him, five men, and below that there are networks, precarious and fragile. You remember Leamas losing Berlin? A few years before that, we had the same thing happen in North Africa, just a whole network rolled in one night. Again, in Poland, when Jim Prideaux was captured and killed, and gave up his team to save his own skin. Any kind of mole operating in a position of personnel management would have to be handled delicately. If I got word back to the wrong ears, then I would put every man under his command at risk if he decided to cut his losses.

I couldn't go to Peter, for that reason. I didn't think he was the one, but I- suppose I thought he might stand on ceremony, and go to one of his immediate higher ups. And, if it were him, he was one of a very small handful of people in the world who knew where I was. A rival section head, though-

[Trailing off, quietly, with a little shrug. Like he said; planning. Every moment, every step, of every day.]

[He listens, keeps listening, and the dread keeps rising, starts to solidify a little bit. No, he's sure he knows where the story goes this time. And even that aside-- this is one of those stories of his that Omar just doesn't like. It's the part of Ricki that sneaks away from time to time, when he looks at Omar with his wide, honest eyes or buries his head in his shoulder and whispers things Omar knows to be true.

The part he'd warned him so vehemently about too, though.

And it's not in him this time -- not yet, anyway -- but the idea of living like that at all unsettles on a level deeper than anything Renaldo Ramirez could stir up in him. He looks over his shoulder enough as it is. He can think how bad it would be, in his own terms, if there were a mole at what little exists above his head -- imagine if he had to be looking over his shoulder at his own people.]

A'ight. Tell me how it ended up.

[Quietly, but a little intently. He needs to know where this went.]

I cabled home, priority, for the eyes of Control or those top five men, that there was a woman with me who had information about a mole, at the head of the circus.

I waited all night for a response, until prayer was called, at three am, and I got back, we read you.

So I went home for some sleep.

When I came back, Tufty's throat had been slit; neat work, I couldn't have done better myself, and I don't say so often. I went for her apartment next, to warn her, and found Boris- well. Worse than that. Bloodless and opened.

When I caught up to them, they were putting her on a boat to Odessa. She was already on a stretcher, and there were a dozen of them. I watched them wheel her away.

[He'd wept and wept, the first time telling this story, but this time around he just sounds hollow, tired, distant.]

You can see what must have happened?