The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (15 page)

“I thought we’d be going further east.”

“We are. We are spending a day or two here
first. We thought the Germans ought to have a talk with you. “

“I see.”

“After all, most of your work has been on the
German side. I sent them details from your statement.”

“And they asked to see me?”

“They’ve never had anything quite like you,
nothing quite so…near the source. My people agreed that they should have the
chance to meet you.”

“And from there?
Where do we go
from
Germany
?”

“East again.”

“Who will I see on the German side?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not particularly. I know most of the
Abteilung people by name, that’s all. I just wondered.”

“Who would you expect to meet?”

“Fiedler,” Leamas replied promptly,
“deputy head of security.
Mundt’s man.
He does
all the big interrogations. He’s a bastard.”

“Why?”

“A savage little bastard.
I’ve heard about him. He caught an agent of Peter
Guillam’s and bloody nearly killed him.”

“Espionage is not a cricket game,”
Peters observed sourly, and after that they sat in silence. So it is Fiedler,
Leamas thought.

Leamas knew Fiedler, all right. He knew him from the photographs
on the file and the accounts of his former subordinates.
A
slim, neat man, quite young, smooth-faced.
Dark hair, bright brown eyes;
intelligent and savage, as Leamas had said.
A lithe, quick
body containing a patient, retentive mind; a man seemingly without ambition for
himself but remorseless in the destruction of others.
Fiedler was a
rarity in the Abteilung—he took no part in its intrigues, seemed content to
live in Mundt’s shadow without prospect of promotion. He could not be labeled
as a member of this or that clique; even those who had worked close to him in
the Abteilung could not say where he stood in its power complex. Fiedler was a
solitary; feared, disliked and mistrusted. Whatever motives he had were
concealed beneath a cloak of destructive sarcasm.

“Fiedler is our best bet,” Control had
explained. They’d been sitting together
over dinner—Leamas, Control and Peter Guillam—in the dreary little seven
dwarfs’
house in Surrey where
Control lived with his beady wife, surrounded by carved Indian tables with
brass tops. “Fiedler is the acolyte who one day will stab the high priest
in the back. He’s the only man who’s a match for Mundt—” here Guillam had
nodded—”and he hates his guts. Fiedler’s a Jew of course, and Mundt is
quite the
other thing.
Not at all a good mixture.
It has been our job,” he
declared, indicating Guillam and himself, “to give Fiedler the weapon with
which to destroy Mundt. It will be yours, my dear Leamas, to encourage him to
use it.
Indirectly, of course, because
you’ll never meet him.
At least I certainly hope you
won’t.”

They’d all laughed then, Guillam too. It had seemed
a good joke at the time;
good by
Control’s standards anyway.

It must have been after
midnight
.

For some time they had been traveling an unpaved
road, partly through a
wood and
partly across open country. Now they stopped and a moment later the DKW drew up
beside them.
As he and Peters got out Leamas noticed that
there were now three people in the second car.
Two were already getting
out. The third was sitting in
the
back seat looking at some papers by the light from the car roof, a slight
figure
half in shadow.

They had parked by some disused stables; the
building lay thirty yards back. In the headlights of the car Leamas had
glimpsed a low farmhouse with walls of timber and white-washed brick. The moon
was up, and shone so brightly that the wooded hills behind were sharply defined
against the pale night sky. They walked to the house, Peters and Leamas leading
and the two men behind. The other man in the
second car had still made no attempt to move; he remained
there, reading.

As they reached the door Peters stopped, waiting
for the other two to catch up. One of the men carried a bunch of keys in his
left hand, and while he fiddled with
them
the other stood off, his hands in his pockets, covering him.

“They’re taking no chances,” Leamas
observed to Peters. “What do they think
I am?”

“They are not paid to think,” Peters
replied, and turning to one of them he asked in German, “Is he
coming?”

The German shrugged and looked back toward the
car. “He’ll come,” he said;
“he
likes to come alone.”

They went into the house, the man leading the way.
It was got up like a
hunting
lodge, part old, part new. It was badly lit with pale overhead lights. The
place
had a neglected, musty air
as if it had been opened for the occasion. There were little
touches of officialdom here and there—a
notice of what to do in case of fire, institutional green paint on the door and
heavy spring-cartridge locks; and in the drawing room, which was quite
comfortably done, dark, heavy furniture, badly
scratched, and the inevitable photographs of Soviet leaders. To
Leamas these lapses
from
anonymity signified the involuntary identification of the Abteilung with
bureaucracy. That was something he
was familiar with in the Circus.

Peters sat down, and Leamas did the same. For ten
minutes, perhaps longer,
they
waited,
then
Peters spoke to one of the two men
standing awkwardly at the
other end
of the room.

“Go and tell him we’re waiting. And find us
some food, we’re hungry.” As the man moved toward the door Peters called,
“And whisky—tell them to bring whisky and some glasses.” The man gave
an uncooperative shrug of his heavy shoulders and
went out, leaving the door open behind him.

“Have you been here before?” asked
Leamas.

“Yes,” Peters replied, “several
times.”

“What for?”

“This kind of thing.
Not the same, but our kind of work.”

“With Fiedler?”

“Yes.”

“Is he good?”

Peters shrugged. “For a Jew, he’s not
bad,” he replied, and Leamas, hearing a
sound from the other end of the room, turned and saw Fiedler
standing in the doorway. In one hand he held a bottle of whisky, and in the
other, glasses and some
mineral
water. He couldn’t have been more than five foot six. He wore a dark blue
single-breasted suit; the jacket was cut too long. He was sleek and slightly
animal; his eyes were brown and bright. He was not looking at them but at the
guard beside the door.

“Go away,” he said. He had a slight Saxonian
twang. “Go away and tell the other one to bring us food.”

“I’ve told him,” Peters called;
“they know already. But they’ve brought
nothing.”

“They are great snobs,” Fiedler observed
drily in English. “They think we should have servants for the food.”

Fiedler had spent the war in
Canada
. Leamas
remembered that, now that he
detected
the accent. His parents had been German Jewish refugees, Marxists, and it was
not until 1946 that the family returned home, anxious to take part, whatever
the
personal cost, in the
construction of Stalin’s
Germany
.

“Hello,” he added to Leamas, almost by
the way, “glad to see you.”
“Hello,
Fiedler.”

“You’ve reached the end of the road.”

“What the hell do you mean?” asked
Leamas quickly.

“I mean that contrary to anything Peters told you, you are
not going farther east. Sorry.” He sounded amused. -

Leamas turned to Peters.

“Is this true?” His voice was shaking
with rage. “Is it true? Tell me!”

Peters nodded. “Yes. I am the go-between. We
had to do it that way. I’m sorry,” he added.

“Why?”

“
Force majeure
,” Fiedler put in.
“Your initial interrogation took place in the
West, where only an embassy could provide the kind of link we
needed. The German
Democratic
Republic has no embassies in the West. Not yet. Our liaison section therefore
arranged for us to enjoy facilities and communications and immunities which
are at present denied to us.”

“You bastard,” hissed
Leamas, “you lousy bastard!
You knew I wouldn’t trust
myself to your rotten Service; that
was the reason, wasn’t it? That was why you used a Russian.”

“We used the Soviet Embassy at
The Hague
. What else
could we do? Up till then it was our operation. That’s perfectly reasonable.
Neither we nor anyone else could have known that your own people in
England
would
get onto you so quickly.”

“No? Not even when you put them on to me your
selves? Isn’t that what
happened,
Fiedler? Well, isn’t it?” Always remember to dislike them, Control had
said.
Then they will treasure
what they get out of you.

“That is an absurd suggestion,” Fiedler replied
shortly. Glancing toward Peters
he
added something in Russian. Peters nodded and stood up.

“Good-bye,” he said to Leamas.
“Good luck.”

He smiled wearily, nodded to Fiedler,
then
walked to the door. He put his hand on the door handle,
then turned and called to Leamas again: “Good luck.” He seemed to
want Leamas to say something, but Leamas might not have heard. He had
turned very
pale,
he held his hands loosely across his body, the thumbs upwards as if
he were going to fight. Peters
remained standing at the door.

“I should have known,” said Leamas, and
his voice had the odd, faulty note of a very angry man. “I should have
guessed you’d never have the guts to do your own dirty work, Fiedler. It’s
typical of your rotten little half-country and your squalid little
Service that you get big uncle to do
your pimping for you. You’re not a country at all,
you’re not a government,
you’re
a fifth
rate dictatorship of political neurotics.” Jabbing
his finger in Fiedler’s direction he shouted:

“I know you, you sadistic bastard, it’s
typical of you. You were in
Canada
in the war, weren’t you? A bloody good place to be then, wasn’t it? I’ll bet
you stuck your fat head into Mummy’s apron any time an airplane flew over. What
are you now?
A creeping little acolyte to Mundt and
twenty-two Russian divisions sitting on your mother’s doorstep.
Well, I
pity you, Fiedler, the day you wake up and find them gone.
There’ll be a killing then, and not
Mummy or big uncle will save you from getting
what you deserve.”

Fiedler shrugged.

“Regard it as a visit to the dentist, Leamas.
The sooner it’s all done, the sooner you can go home. Have some food and go to
bed.”

“You know perfectly well I can’t go
home,” Leamas retorted. “You’ve seen to that. You blew me sky high in
England
,
you had to, both of you. You knew damn well I’d never come
here unless I had to.”

Fiedler looked at his thin, strong fingers.

“This is hardly the time to
philosophize,” he said, “but you can’t really
complain, you know. All our work—yours and mine—is rooted in
the theory that the whole is more important than the individual. That is why a
Communist sees his secret
service
as the natural extension of his arm, and that is why in your own country
intelligence is shrouded in a kind of
pudeur anglaise
. The exploitation of
individuals
can only be
justified by the collective need, can’t it? I find it slightly ridiculous that
you should be so indignant. We are not here to observe the ethical laws of
English country life. After all,” he added silkily, “your own
behavior has not, from the purist’s
point
of view, been irreproachable.”

Leamas was watching Fiedler with an expression of
disgust.

“I know your setup. You’re Mundt’s poodle,
aren’t you? They say you want his
job.
I suppose you’ll get it now. It’s time the Mundt dynasty ended; perhaps this is
it.”

“I don’t understand,” Fiedler replied.

“I’m your big success, aren’t I?” Leamas
sneered.

Fiedler seemed to reflect for a moment,
then
he shrugged and said, “The operation was
successful. Whether you were worth it is questionable. We shall see. But it was
a good operation. It satisfied the only requirement of our profession: it
worked.”

“I suppose you take the credit?” Leamas
persisted, with a glance in the
direction
of Peters.

“There is no question of credit,”
Fiedler replied crisply, “none at all.” He sat down on the arm of the
sofa, looked at Leamas thoughtfully for a moment and then
said
:

“Nevertheless, you are right to be indignant
about one thing. Who told your people we had picked you up? We didn’t. You may
not believe me, but it happens to be true. We didn’t tell them. We didn’t even
want them to know. We had ideas then of getting you to work for us later—ideas
which I now realize to be ridiculous. So
who told them? You were lost, drifting
around,
you had no address, no ties, no friends.
Then how the devil did they know you’d gone? Someone told them—scarcely
Ashe or
Kiever, since they are
both now under arrest.”

“Under arrest?”

“So it appears. Not specifically for their
work on your case, but there were other things…”

“Well, well.”

“It is true, what I said just now. We would
have been content with Peters’ report from
Holland
. You could have had your money and
gone. But you hadn’t told us
everything;
and I want to know everything. After all, your presence here provides us with
problems too, you know.”