A Barman Considers the Past
A sharp blast of air from the door made the night manager of
the pub look up, and right away he recognized the spy, who came in from the
cold night to this overheated room. Christ, they were all here tonight: Tinker,
tailor, soldier, spy. It was like some kind of bloody children’s game, he
thought. No, he corrected himself: No child’s game. Our game. The game we used to be in on.
The spy sat down at the bar and ordered a whiskey. He
watched the others through the large mirror behind the bar, who watched him
back in turn—the looking glass war, as the barkeep liked to call it. For it was
a delicate truth, but they were not all absolute friends these days. The spy
had been a traitor to them all once, though give him his due, the bartender
thought, he had been our kind of traitor. He’d done the thing that any of them
would have. He had not exactly been a perfect spy, though, and had ended up a
most wanted man. The barman wondered what had finally brought him here, like some
kind of secret pilgrim. Maybe he was seeking absolution.
Ah, what poor sods they all were when it came down to it,
himself included. There had been a murder of quality since the old days, a real
decline in standards. These days everyone
called him John the Square—behind his back, of course, but he knew anyway,
because bartenders, like writers, do end up digging out everything. But these
pups now hadn’t known him back in the day. Pity he’d never married, but then none
of them had. No, they’d all remained single, hadn’t they, single & single
again. There had been that girl, the little drummer girl, what was her name, Karla
maybe, who had gone the rounds of a small town in Germany they’d all been stationed
in at the time. Right, she sold time shares—it was all coming back to him. He
remembered there was some place near the eastern border, the Russia House she’d
called it, always trying to get people to buy in. He couldn’t remember, maybe some
of them even had. They’d all fought over her, anyway: Tinker the naïve
and sentimental lover, while our spy here had been a sort of chaste knight, acting
in the guise of the honourable school boy he had probably even been once. The bar manager himself had been more the constant gardener type, tending the
soil of their relationship and biding his time. But that hadn’t worked with her
either.
Tonight “the Tailor”, perhaps reacting to the presence of
the spy at the bar, seemed to be on some sort of sad, nostalgic mission. Song
burst from him, a warrior’s dirge, a lament. The barman wondered if it wasn’t
some kind of call for the dead, a summoning. He shivered, half wondering if
Smiley’s people would answer it, gone to Hades as they all by now surely had. The
Tailor was drunk, but he really had been a tailor, a good one—it wasn’t just a
code name. He had been the tailor of
Panama once, if reputation was anything to go on. Of the nine tailors in town—but
the night manager caught himself up short.
The nine tailors. He shook his head ruefully as he wiped
down the bar. Now that was another
story altogether.
This story was written for a challenge Brian Lindemuth conceived and posted over at Do Some Damage. The contest has been extended till 9/28/15, so you still have time to come up with an idea.
