Ricki Tarr

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[Ricki's insomnia is not getting all that much better. There isn't anything to do around during the day, exactly, either, but it's even worse at this hour in the morning. All he can think of is the library, again, and the network.

Today, it's;]

Who knows what about fruit hybrids? Did you know they've invented something called a pluot that's halfway between an apricot and a plum? I'm not an old fashioned bloke but that strikes me as a little ghastly.

[Flipping the age of his book.]

A plumcot. A pleacotum. This can't be real, it must be nonsense- here. Limequats. That, at least, is properly illustrative.

I'm pleased to see you haven't squandered the future that past generations won for you. Additionally, I think we should request all of these for the kitchen, immediately.

All right, this is all good fun and games, kids, but I'm going to be the one who spoils it by asking the question.

What the hell is going on?

And, for that matter, if we're the ones apparently running the show now, is anyone steering the boat?

[Ricki does not want the barge to smash into a sun and everyone to burn up, even though he's currently in the inmate-reclaimed bar and part of him is rather enjoying the fiddling.]

[Video]

[He'd woken up this morning to a terrible new alteration to his body, and to Zane's (rather terrifying) network announcement. So, subdued, short;]

I don't know what the hell is wrong with you people, but this place is fucking dreadful. Someone let us know when the rampage killing lunatic has-

[Fuck. He stops himself, because he hadn't intended to let his temper get away with him. This isn't helping anyone. He, quite visibly, draws a breath in through his nose, lets it out through his mouth.]

I'm sorry. I hope there can be an announcement when the halls are safe again.

[Spam]

[The flood really hasn't been good to him. He gives up on staying holed into his cabin, and makes the trek to go get breakfast. He looks rather unusual, in a low slung pair of jeans and a sheet wrapped around his head and shoulders, held together over his chest with one hand, like a grandmother with a massive shawl.

It's better than going shirtless, which is his only other option. By the way his bedsheet tents up the centre of his back, something is clearly wrong with his spine. When he gets his tray, one handed, and the hood of sheet over his head spills back to reveal a dip at the top of his shoulders, a keen observer will catch sight of a ridge of uncomfortable protruding plates. They're interspersed enough that the movements of his spine are only a little restricted, though twisting side to side more than a bare inch is impossible.

So, he learns quickly, is sitting back comfortably against anything. He perches up gingerly on the edge of his chair, flings one end of the sheet over his shoulder like a scarf to free up his hands a little better, and starts to stab at his meal. He is in a mildly better mood than he was earlier.

Very mildly.]

User Name/Nick: Steph
User DW: knights_say_nih
AIM/IM: UndrwO
E-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: None

Character Name: Ricki Tarr
Series: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film primarily, backstory from the novel)
Age: Early thirties
From When?: The moment of his theoretical post-canonical death, on his knees in a back alley in then-Borneo, a gun to the back of his head.

Inmate/Warden: Inmate—Ricki is a violent man, a spy, an absent father and a cad. He worked for the most violent, bottom tier of British Intelligence as raw muscle, then as a recruiter, and is as dangerous a man in that world as it as possible to be.

Abilities/Powers: A Sarrat-trained operative for the Circus, and a rough and tumble child besides, Ricki is physically human but trained and dangerous.

Personality: Ricki Tarr is one of those characters that has a series of different faces, each projected in turn as a dancing series of feints to keep strangers from getting anywhere close to him. An operative for British Intelligence, the ‘surface projection’ identity he works with is fluid, but tends to be lighthearted, a frequenter of bars, a seducer of women.

He’s observant, but quick with a smile, a quip, likes to drive convertibles around the shoreline on sunny days. Even when he isn’t working, you get a sense that the sly tongue and ready laugh aren’t entirely his persona, that he tends to be good humoured by nature. It's hard to tell where the good ends and the bad begins, because it's sort of his style to slip jabs in with a smile, but on the whole the majority of people who deal with him will have the sense that he's a nice, gregarious, man. A 'cool cat' if you forgive the seventies parlance, which is when his canon is set.

It makes his deeply violent streak all the more terrifying. Ricki works for the messiest part of the Circus, as a foreign operative doing ‘wetwork’ and recruiting sources, and kills ruthlessly, if it seems infrequently, in service of his work. His penchant for violence preceded the work, but was certainly honed by his recruitment and training. It slips occasionally into his personal life. He runs into a room and finds a disemboweled man in a bathtub unexpectedly, but beyond one blink keeps right on functioning, unruffled.

Ricki has an oh-so-slightly insubordinate way about him, but with a intelligence and charm to him that make it hard to call him on the behaviour. His boss refers to him as ‘accident prone,’ tending to get himself into situations that simply require him to go off script and abandon his handler’s directives in such a way that it seems completely necessary in the post-mortem breakdown. It makes him difficult to discipline without seeming despotic, and is part of what makes him so frustrating to deal with. He has a complex relationship with authority, thanks to an abusive father and his unorthodox career. He seems simultaneously inclined to try to nettle anyone with any sort of power over him, and yet to have to trust them suicidally and completely, despite knowing that they may very well see him as completely disposable. As closed off as he is in other respects, as immune to violence, his part in the film opens with him sitting, nervous and sometimes weeping, on his superior’s couch, telling him everything.

When you peel all that back, he’s deeply intelligent and keenly observant, thanks in part to his training but also to innate ability. He’d initially read for the bar but been too intent on breaking the law to ever work in it. The whole series is something of a push-back against the glitzy glam James Bond spy, half the characters are middle aged men leafing through notebooks and decoding more code, and Ricki is the closest thing there is to an exception to this rule. Instead of cultured, though, he’s played crass, strong and solemn and a little tatty, and not at all flash. He's actually from Asia originally, but an expat family, and you are given the deliberate sense that it's not a particularly good family, by society standards. Ricki feels rough in more ways than he does smooth.

When he tells stories, he’s described as having a total and perfect stillness to him, recalling events in tremendous detail as though hearing his own voice describe them back to him. He is patient when he wants to be.

He’s also a sort of incoherent romantic. The tears he sheds in front of his handler, earlier, were for the life of Irina, young woman whom he’d unintentionally gotten captured while in the process of turning her to their side. He talks about needing to save her, owing her, adoring her, despite the briefness of their fling and the fact that he’d been seducing her with hopes to bring her over.

He also talks about his young daughter, holing up with her and her mother during the book in their native Kuala Lampur. When he's in trouble that's where he goes. He is referenced to have ‘wives around the globe’ and the woman in Kuala Lampur as 'currently leading the pack,' but this doesn’t seem to disqualify his desire to rescue Irina. Whether he intends to add her to their numbers, or to hole up with her and his daughter and daughter’s mother one day and just get away from it all isn't clear. It's even possible that, given the brevity of their actual relationship and its' being founded so heavily on lies, she represents an idea more than a person, a deep romanticism for loving and saving women. Though it's not handled explicitly in the book, and left out entirely in the film, there's clearly some sort of dissonance going on there. I would speculate that it's related to compartmentalization, to living one life with his wife and child (actually barely living it, he's absent most of the time and in the 1970s Kuala Lampur is hardly in close and easy contact with the outside world) so rather to leaving them as a sacrosanct island, representing home and safety, that he lives largely outside of with another identity entirely, himself as spy.

As The infidelity is slightly morally repugnant, but in the context of the book and film it’s just so refreshing to see someone invested in the wellbeing of another person that it actually really touching and romantic somehow? Maybe that just provides a more stark sense of the incredibly low standards for human decency in the twisted and shady world of espionage. Him expressing genuine grief, even over such an unorthodox situation, is really striking.

With regards to the romance in particular, Ricki has a slight ability not to see his own wrongdoing at every given moment. Early in his career he had what he refers to as 'a brush with a honeytrap' meaning being seduced by the enemy. Regarding Irina, he talks about her being pushed to tears or pushed to confess things as though it had happened quite spontaneously, as though he hadn't had a role in drawing these details and things out of her. This isn't to say he doesn't feel guilty, he clearly does, but when he talks about it there's a sort of ringing disconnect between the feeling and his out-loud interpretation of the past. Remorse without explicit acknowledgement.

Summed up, his personality is best described as profoundly dysfunctional, anesthetized to the suffering of others and out of touch with his own moral compass, meaning well(ish) but ultimately a terrifying muddle.

Barge Reactions: Ricki will have his ‘spy face’ on for the Barge, and will react with bright, glossy laughing marvel, wrinkling his nose at the gross things and shaking his head at the strange things and generally putting on a shiny, candy coloured front of a nice, reasonable person. Underneath that he will be deeply, violently, brutally suspicious and will try to find a way to start sleeping with a proverbial knife under his pillow.
This is partially due to his being an inmate, which will be a profoundly triggering experience for him, thanks again to teenaged years spent as a son of a persecuted Christian minister in the Japanese Changi Prison. More than that, though, for someone so wary and used to people trying to kill him, having his world view tilt on its’ head will be traumatic. He relies on seeing, understanding and controlling his environment to survive. He’ll try to cope with some of the difference by at least keeping a good mask up, but will be in pretty constant fight-or-flight for a good long while.

If he has the opportunity he is likely to be in trouble over his adjustment period for some pretty deeply violent overreactions, purely motivated by fear and a profound lack of control. This may not happen within the first few weeks, or even the first few months necessarily. He’ll be too intelligent to slip up unless something really rattles him, but especially insightful wardens may notice he has a vague sense of the ticking time bomb about him.

Regarding his Lothario status, I don't foresee Ricki trying to pick up too many women on the Barge. He would need to be in just the right sweet spot of settled down enough and not redeemed enough, and it would need to be just the right kind of woman... chances seem small. He may very well flirt, but without much bite.

Path to Redemption: I think that a lot of Ricki’s buttons are going to have to do with trust and intelligence and boundary pushing. I can see him really testing his Warden, being good, gaming his way through the system, getting in trouble and crashing back down through it. The key to an ineffective relationship with him is getting locked into a battle of stubbornness over something petty, and the key to a disastrous relationship with him is letting him outmanipulate his warden.

Positive approaches, however, would be steadfastness and trustworthiness. I think a big part of his problems in canon, as I see it, come from being a directionless kid, age 18, recovering from his horrible parenting (seriously, his father sounds like an asshole- the guy was put in prison and continued to preach so loudly that his wife and son were both targets for religious persecution alongside him, and then when Ricki got older tried to ‘beat the sin out of him’) but instead of being taken in by someone reasonable and grown up, he fell in with the Circus who put him to work murdering people and running guns, but not before interrogating him somewhat messily and ‘training’ him for several sinister years. His devotion to his superiors is pockmarked and strange, sometimes seemingly absent and sometimes really more than they deserve. He goes on to put himself in pretty severe danger for them to save the day in the story, and throws himself at their mercy at several key plot moments.

There’s a scene in the film version where his immediate superior, Peter Guillam, walks in on him unexpectedly when he believes that Ricki has betrayed him. He grabs him by the shirt front, standing over him, and punches him several times in the face, before his colleagues succeed in pulling him off and explaining that Ricki has been framed. Throughout the attack, Ricki doesn’t protest or move to defend himself, and doesn’t seem to resent it after the fact, passively licking the blood off his lip and casting him a glance that’s only barely reproachful, continuing as though the incident hasn’t occurred. Another approach could certainly be working with someone who a) never gets him to murder people and b) doesn’t punch him in the face. Consistently morally upright instruction, ie “no Ricki, I see how it could be convenient if you did kill that person but please don’t” particularly from someone who does understand high stakes, casualties, collateral, compromise, would do him a world of good in realigning his own moral compass. He would work best with a Warden who had grappled with some of those difficult questions and come out with a good moral ballast.

He will hate being condescended to, and push back hard against any pop psychology, but definitely stands a very good chance of making it through.

History: Ricki Tarr grew up in Penang, son of an Australian solicitor and British actress. The war saw them evacuated to Singapore, which unfortunately fell a few months later, and young Ricki and his parents were imprisoned in Changi jail under the Japanese. There, his father found a renewed faith in God, and preached loud and long to fellow inmates, resulting in difficulties for the family, traumatizing for Ricki in particular because of his inability to escape or control the situation in the slightest. After they were freed, the family returned to Penang and Ricki’s run-ins with the local law began. Mild crimes escalated gradually until Ricki’s father turned to the church, and had a few rough preachers try to ‘beat the sin out of his soul,’ which was apparently how things were done in the fifties.

Ricki gave up on his family then and there and bolted to Borneo, where he got heavy into gunrunning and got into considerable trouble running scams and causing various parties on the Indonesian isles to chase alternately him and their own tails. A local intelligence man named Mackelvore found him, a little bit heartbroken, a little bit of an alcoholic, but insisted that the young man had potential and sent him off to Singapore for some higher ups to have a look at that.

From there he was sent to Sarratt, to the infamous Nursery, where he was first stripped down to base components in the ungentle way of the agency, to be absolutely sure there was no chance that he was already working for the other side. Once assured that he was theirs, he was educated in various elements of espionage and violence, and graduated a few years later. They sent him back to gunrunning, explaining his few years of absence away, not that many people asked. His old contacts were running guns to the Communists, so he worked with them for a few weeks, picking off and identifying each and every one of them in systematic order, before killing his old friends (an ex-girlfriend among them) and setting fire to their boat.

From there, more training, and off to Kenya and a somewhat ignominious career marked by several scandals. Ricki was a ‘scalphunter,’ a rough term for someone who recruits willing and unwilling sources of information, who cuts and runs and burns when he needs to. Through his twenties (and the sixties) he accidentally handled a Brazilian minister too roughly and got into a bit of a mess with the press, and then had one of his marks, a Polish diplomat he’d been working in Spain, crumple under some heavy handed blackmail and jump from a high window. These were mostly overshone by a reputation for patience, ingenuity, diligence, but despite his very best work the rest of the time a reputation like that generally isn’t wiped away.

Thus, when he disappeared off the map in Istanbul, his immediate superior, Peter Guillam, wasn’t too concerned. Tarr had a habit of going not-quite-by-the-book, so nothing more was thought of it. In fact, something serious was going on. Ricki had been following a man named Boris, whom he was convinced was a nothing, a waste of time, when he met the man’s wife. Irina seemed to have something to her, so Ricki had turned her, offered her protection in exchange for information. She had informed him that there was a mole at the top of Circus, and he had informed Circus of such. Unfortunately, his missive had clearly reached the mole, because very quickly she was moved on by Russian agents, the information that she’d trusted him with, that he’d in turn trusted his superiors with, being fed right back to the people who she’d been betraying to him.

Ricki, panicked, had gone underground before returning back to London. He’d gotten in contact with Undersecretary Oliver Lacon, letting him know that Circus had been compromised, and kicking off the entire plot of Tinker Tailor. The mole had succeeded in framing Ricki’s flight as him defecting, and so, knowing that both the Russians and Circus were out to kill him, Ricki risked life and limb to go to George Smiley, the man in charge of the operation to catch the mole, and told his story. He’d agreed to help any way he could, provided that Smiley and Guillam would try to rescue Irina, to trade for her in some way. Both agents had been already aware that Irina was dead, murdered for her treason, but Smiley promised to do his best in order to ensure Ricki’s continued cooperation.

Whether or not he’d been aware of this last doublecross is somewhat unclear. He seems so dejected that you get the sense that he simply must, but serves as bait nonetheless to capture the mole and help save the integrity of the agency. We never see his reaction to the news of her death, what he finds out or doesn’t about Smiley’s using him. He slips quietly from the picture after his usefulness has been served.


Sample Journal Entry: I must admit.

[He says, between deep, heaving breaths. He’s in his cabin, doing situps, because situps are what one does in a prison cell. The rhythm helps focus him. The words come out choppy, between each push.]

When I heard the phrase ‘space ship’ this is actually not too far removed from what came to mind.
[Ever so slightly breathless.]

However, the saucer-shapes of the twenty five cent pulp covers seem more intuitive. Less idiosyncratic. Less ridiculous.

[Letting himself, for a split second, given in to his ever so slightly foul temper, mouth curving in a deep frown. He smoothes away as soon as he catches it, and gives up on this activity, sitting up and reaching for a towel, wiping the sweat off his face as he searches for words. He should finish this with something to soften it, but just musters a grin- a good one mind you, a friendly, deprecating, earnest smile, and disconnects.]

Sample RP:

It takes several weeks for Ricki to be able to make himself stand still and look out at the stars going by. At first he chalks his reluctance up to a feeling of profound vertigo, and while that’s fair, it goes a little beyond that. When he keeps his eyes averted from the outside he can let himself pretend he’s on solid ground, or sometimes on a large and very luxe ship, or even at worst in a normal, human prison. A prison staffed by the most sanctimonious and unorthodox guards imaginable, certainly, but something from earth nonetheless. When his self-delusion persists and persists, he finally finds he can’t stand himself any longer, and moves to press his nose up against the glass- god, is it even glass? He grips the windowsill with both hands for the first few seconds, watching the nighttime swirl of lights float by, and hangs on like that, staring, until he can gradually force himself to relax each muscle individually. Until he can stand watching the vortex, posture perfectly at ease, eyes half hooded and features schooled into relaxation, casually as he might watch the sea lapping at the sides of the boats in the port back in Istanbul. At last, when even his breathing is slow and steady, in and out through his nose and to just the right depth in his chest, he turns away as though nothing has happened and ambles his way back downstairs.

Pressed to talk about the strange behaviour, he won’t.

Special Notes: None!