The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (11 page)

He ruled some lines on a sheet of writing paper, made columns
for name, address and age, and wrote at the bottom of the page:

Each candidate will be interviewed personally. Write to the usual
address stating when and where you wish to be met. Applications will be
considered in seven
days.

C.R.

He put the sheet of paper inside the book. Leamas
drove to the usual place, still in de long’s car, and left the book on the
passenger seat with five used
one
hundred dollar bills inside the cover. When Leamas returned, the book was gone,
and there was a tobacco tin on the seat instead. It contained three rolls of
film.
Leamas developed them that
night: one film contained as usual the minutes of the Präsidium’s last meeting;
the second showed a draft revision of the East German relationship to COMECON;
and the third was a breakdown of the East German Intelligence Service, complete
with functions of departments and details of personalities.

Peters interrupted. “Just a minute,” he
said. “Do you mean to say all this intelligence came from Riemeck?”

“Why not?
You know how much he
saw.”

“It’s scarcely possible,” Peters
observed, almost to himself. “He must have had
help.”

“He did have later on; I’m coming to
that.”

“I know what you are going to tell me. But
did you never have the feeling he got assistance from
above
as well as from the agents he afterwards acquired?”

“No. No, I never did. It never occurred to
me.”

“Looking back on it now, does it seem likely?”

“Not particularly.”

“When you sent all this material back to the
Circus, they never suggested that
even
for a man in Riemeck’s position the intelligence was phenomenally
comprehensive?”

“No.”

“Did they ever ask where Riemeck got his
camera from, who instructed him in
document
photography?”

Leamas hesitated.

“No…I’m sure they never asked.”

“Remarkable,” Peters observed drily.
“I’m sorry— do go on. I did not mean
to anticipate you.”

Exactly a week later, Leamas continued, he drove
to the canal and this time he felt nervous. As he turned into the gravel road
he saw three bicycles lying in the grass and two hundred yards down the canal,
three men fishing. He got out of the car
as usual and began walking toward the line of trees on the other side of
the field. He had gone about twenty yards when he heard a shout. He looked
around and caught sight of one of the men beckoning to him. The other two had
turned and were looking at him too. Leamas was wearing an old mackintosh; he
had his hands in the pockets, and it was too late to take them out. He knew
that the men on either side were
covering
the man in the middle and that if he took his hands out of his pockets they
would probably shoot him; they would think he was holding a revolver in his
pocket.
Leamas stopped ten yards
from the center man.

“You want something?” Leamas asked.

“Are you Leamas?” He was a small, plump
man, very steady. He spoke
English.

“Yes.”

“What is your British national identity number?”

“
PRT
stroke L
58003 stroke one.”

“Where did you spend VJ night?”

“At
Leiden
in
Holland
in my father’s workshop, with some
Dutch friends.”
“Let’s go for a walk, Mr. Leamas. You won’t
need your mackintosh. Take it off and leave it on the ground where you are standing.
My friends will look after it.” Leamas hesitated, shrugged and took off
his mackintosh. Then they walked together briskly toward the wood.

“You know as well as I do who he was,”
said Leamas wearily, “third man in the Ministry of the Interior, Secretary
to the S.E.D. Präsidium, head of the Coordinating Committee for the Protection
of the People. I suppose that was how he
knew about de long and me: he’d seen our counterintelligence files in
the Abteilung. He had three strings to his bow: the Präsidium, straightforward
internal political and
economic
reporting, and access to the files of the East German Security Service.”

“But only
limited
access.
They’d never give an outsider the run of all their files,”
Peters insisted.

Leamas shrugged.

“They did,” he said.

“What did he do with his money?”

“After that afternoon I didn’t give him any.
The Circus took that over straightaway. It was paid into a West German bank. He
even gave me back what I’d given him.
London
banked it for him.”

“How much did you tell
London
?”

“Everything after that.
I had to; then the Circus told the Departments. After that,” Leamas added
venomously, “it was only a matter of time before it packed up. With the
Departments at their backs,
London
got greedy. They began pressing us for more, wanted to give him more money.
Finally we had to suggest to Karl that he
recruit other sources, and we took them on to form a network. It was
bloody stupid, it put a strain on Karl, endangered him,
undermined
his confidence in us. It was the
beginning
of the end.”

“How much did you get out of him?”

Leamas hesitated.
“How
much?
Christ, I don’t know. It lasted an unnaturally long time. I think
he was blown long before he was caught. The standard dropped in the last few
months; think they’d begun to suspect him by then and kept him away from the
good stuff.”

“Altogether, what did he give you?”
Peters persisted.

Piece by piece, Leamas recounted the full extent
of all Karl Riemeck’s work. His memory was, Peters noted approvingly,
remarkably precise considering the amount
he drank. He could give dates and
names,
he
could remember the reaction from
London
,
the nature of corroboration where it existed. He could remember sums of money
demanded and paid, the dates of the conscription of other agents into the
network.

“I’m sorry,” said Peters at last,
“but I do not believe that one man, however well placed, however careful,
however
industrious, could have acquired such a range of
detailed knowledge. For that matter,
even if he had he would never have been able to
photograph it.”

“He
was
able,” Leamas persisted,
suddenly angry. “He bloody well did and
that’s all there is to it.”

“And the Circus never told you to go into it
with him, exactly how and when he saw all this stuff?”

“No,” snapped Leamas. “Riemeck was
touchy about that, and
London
was content to let it go.”

“Well, well,” Peters mused.

After a moment Peters said, “You heard about
that woman, incidentally?”
“What
woman?” Leamas asked sharply.

“Karl Riemeck’s mistress, the one who came
over to
West Berlin
the night Riemeck was
shot.”

“Well?”

“She was found dead a week ago.
Murdered.
She was shot from a car as she left her flat.”

“It used to be my flat,” said Leamas mechanically.

“Perhaps,” Peters suggested, “she
knew more about Riemeck’s network than you did.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Leamas
demanded.

Peters shrugged. “It’s all very
strange,” he observed. “I wonder who killed
her.”

When they had exhausted the case of Karl Riemeck,
Leamas went on to talk of other less spectacular agents, then of the procedure
of his Berlin office, its
communications,
its staff, its secret ramifications— flats, transport, recording and
photographic equipment. They talked long into the night and throughout the next
day, and when at last Leamas stumbled into bed the following night he knew he
had
betrayed all that he knew of
Allied Intelligence in
Berlin
and had drunk two bottles of
whisky
in two days.

One thing puzzled him: Peters’ insistence that
Karl Riemeck must have had help—must have had a high level collaborator.
Control had asked him the same
question—he
remembered now—Control had asked about Riemeck’s access. How
could they both be so sure Karl
hadn’t managed alone? He’d had helpers, of course; like the guards by the canal
the day Leamas met him. But they were small beer—Karl had told him about them.
But Peters—and Peters, after all, would know precisely how much Karl had been
able to get his hands on—Peters had refused to believe Karl had managed alone.
On this point, Peters and Control were evidently
agreed.

Perhaps it was true. Perhaps there was somebody
else. Perhaps this was the
special
interest
whom
Control was so anxious to protect from
Mundt. That would mean
that Karl
Riemeck had collaborated with this special interest and provided what both of
them had together obtained. Perhaps
that was what Control had spoken to Karl about,
alone, that evening in Leamas’ flat in
Berlin
.

Anyway, tomorrow would tell. Tomorrow he would
play his hand.

He wondered who had killed Elvira. And he wondered
why
they had killed her. Of course—here was a point, here was a possible
explanation—Elvira, knowing the identity of Riemeck’s special collaborator, had
been murdered by that collaborator…No, that was too farfetched. It overlooked
the difficulty of crossing from East to West: Elvira had after all been
murdered in
West Berlin
.

He wondered why Control had never told him Elvira
had been murdered. So that he would react suitably when Peters told him? It was
useless speculating. Control
had
his reasons; they were usually so bloody tortuous it took you a week to work
them out.

As he fell asleep he muttered, “Karl was a damn
fool. That woman did for him, I’m sure she did.” Elvira was dead now, and
serve
her right. He remembered Liz.

Peters arrived at
eight o’clock
the next morning, and without ceremony they
sat down at the table and began.

“So you came back to
London
.
What did you do there?”

“They put me on the shelf. I knew I was
finished when that ass in Personnel met me at the airport. I had to go straight
to Control and report about Karl. He was dead—what else was there to say?”

“What did they do with you?”

“They said at first I could hang around in
London
and wait till I
was qualified for a proper pension. They were so bloody decent about it I got
angry—I told them that if they were so keen to chuck money at me why didn’t
they do the obvious thing and count in all my time instead of bleating about
broken service? Then they got cross when I told them that. They put me in
Banking with a lot of women. I can’t remember much about that part—I began
hitting the bottle a bit.
Went through a bad
phase.”

He lit a cigarette. Peters nodded.

“That was why they gave me the push, really.
They didn’t like me drinking.” “Tell me what you
do
remember about Banking Section,” Peters suggested.
“It was a dreary setup. I never was cut out for desk work,
I knew that.

That’s why I hung on in
Berlin
. I knew when they recalled me I’d be
put on the shelf, but Christ!”

“What did you do?”

Leamas shrugged.

“Sat on my behind in the
same room as a couple of women.
Thursby and Larrett.
I called them Thursday and Friday.” He grinned rather stupidly. Peters
looked
uncomprehending.

“We just pushed paper. A letter came down
from Finance:
‘The payment of seven hundred dollars to so and so is authorized with
effect from so and so. Kindly
get
on with it’
—that was the gist of it. Thursday and Friday would kick it
about a bit, file it, stamp it, and I’d sign a check or get the bank to make a
transfer.”

“What bank?”

“Blatt and Rodney, a chichi
little bank in the City.
There’s a sort of theory in the Circus that
Etonians are discreet.”

“In fact, then, you knew the names of agents
all over the world?”

“Not necessarily. That was the cunning thing.
I’d sign the check, you see, or the order to the bank, but we’d leave a space
for the name of the payee. The covering letter or what have you was all signed
and then the file would go
back
to
Special Dispatch.”

“Who are they?”

“They’re the general holders of agents’
particulars. They put in the names and
posted
the order. Bloody clever, I must say.”

Peters looked disappointed.

“You mean you had no way of knowing the names
of the payees?”
“Not
usually, no.”

“But occasionally?”

“We got pretty near the knuckle now and
again. All the fiddling about between
Banking,
Finance and Special Dispatch led to cockups, of course. Too elaborate. Then
occasionally we came in on special
stuff which brightened one’s life a bit.”

Leamas got up. “I’ve made a list,” he
said, “of all the payments I can remember. It’s in my room. I’ll get
it.”

He walked out of the room, the rather shuffling
walk he had affected since arriving in
Holland
.
When he returned he held in his hand a couple of sheets of lined paper torn
from a cheap notebook.