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On the avenue his own pace slowed. Instinctively he began to practise tradecraft, or writing craft. He became observant, guarded, watchful, keeping to the edge of the path where the undergrowth slightly obscured him. Writers and spies shared the same "corrosive eye", as Graham Greene put it: that wish to penetrate the surface to the centre and truth of things. In fact he had not been in "the circus" for long; just a few years, running low-grade agents into eastern Europe and then working out of the British embassy in Bonn, before Kim Philby, a celebrated double agent, exposed him. He was a writer who, very briefly, had been a spy.
在大街上，他自己的腳步放慢了。他本能地開始練習間諜情報技術，或寫作技巧。他變得敏銳、謹慎、警惕，一直守在灌木叢稍稍遮住他的小路邊上。作家和間諜都有一個“腐蝕性的眼睛”，就像格雷厄姆·格林所說的那樣：他們希望從表面滲透到事物的中心和真相。事實上，他在“馬戲團”里待的時間不長，只有幾年，從低級特工到東歐，然后在英國駐波恩大使館工作，在著名的雙重間諜金·菲爾比揭發他之前。他是一位作家，曾短暫地做過間諜。
Yet he felt he had been recruited to the secret world from childhood, as Conrad was to the sea. He had acquired the comforting habit of cover-stories to try to account for a father who was in jail one moment and at Ascot the next: an epic conman from whom his mother bolted when he was five. He had joined the secret service for all kinds of romantic reasons, to do some good for society, and to discover how the world was really run; but also because he felt corporate attachment offered him a family's protection.
然而，他覺得自己從小就被征召到這個秘密世界，就像康拉德被征召到大海一樣。他養成了用封面故事安慰人的習慣，試圖解釋一個父親，他曾在監獄里呆過一段時間，后來又在阿斯科特：一個史詩般的騙子，他五歲時母親就離開了他。他因為各種浪漫的原因加入了特勤局，為社會做點好事，發現世界是如何運轉的；但也因為他覺得組織的依戀為他提供了一個家庭的保護。
To some extent it did. But he soon found with Alec Leamas, the pretend defector whom Smiley in "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" sent into East Germany and ultimately to his death, that spies were not priests or saints, but "a squalid procession of vain fools, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives". In the cold war Western agents, aping Soviet ones, walked on the thinnest moral ice. It often broke.
在某種程度上確實如此。但他很快發現亞歷克·萊馬斯，在《從寒冷中走來的間諜》中，那個假裝叛逃的人被派往東德，最后被處死，間諜不是牧師或圣徒，而是“一群虛榮的傻瓜、虐待狂和醉漢組成的骯臟隊伍，扮演牛仔和印第安人來照亮他們腐朽生活的人”。在冷戰中，西方特工，仿效蘇聯特工，走在道德冰層最薄的地方，冰經常裂掉。
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