The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (18 page)

Leamas was still in bed the next morning when
Fiedler brought him the letters
to
sign. One was on the thin blue writing paper of the Seller Hotel Alpenblick,
Lake Spiez
,
Switzerland
,
the other from the Palace Hotel, Gstaad.

Leamas read the first letter:

To the Manager,

The Royal Scandinavian
Bank Ltd.,
Copenhagen
.

Dear Sir,

I have been traveling
for some weeks and have not received any mail from
England
. Accordingly I have not had
your reply to my letter of March 3rd requesting a current statement of the
deposit account of which I am a joint signatory with Herr Karlsdorf. To avoid
further delay, would you be good enough to forward a duplicate statement to me
at the following address, where I shall be staying for two weeks beginning
April 21st:

c/o
Madame Y. de Sanglot,

13 Avenue des
Colombes
,

Paris
XII,

France
.

I apologize for this
confusion,

Yours faithfully,

(Robert Lang)

“What’s all this about a letter of March
third?” he asked. “I didn’t write them any letter.”

“No, you didn’t. As far as we know, no one
did. That will worry the bank. If there is any inconsistency between the
letter
we are sending them now and letters they have had
from Control, they will assume the solution is to be found in the
missing
letter of March third. Their reaction will be to send you the statement as you
ask, with a covering note regretting that they have not received your letter of
the third.”

The second letter was the same as the first; only
the names were different. The address in
Paris
was the same. Leamas took a blank piece of paper and his
fountain pen and wrote half a dozen times in a fluent hand
“Robert Lang,” then signed the first letter. Sloping his pen
backwards he practiced the second signature until he
was satisfied with it,
then
wrote
“Stephen Bennett” under the second letter.

“Admirable,” Fiedler observed,
“quite admirable.”

“What do we do now?”

“They will be posted in
Switzerland
tomorrow, in
Interlaken
and Gstaad. Our people in
Paris
will telegraph the replies to me as soon as they arrive. We shall have
the answer in a week.”

“And until then?”

“We shall be constantly in one another’s
company. I know that is distasteful to you, and I apologize. I thought we could
go for walks, drive around in the hills a bit,
kill
time. I want you to relax and talk; talk about
London
, about Cambridge Circus and working in
the Department; tell me the gossip, talk about the pay, the leave, the
rooms, the paper and the people.
The pins and the paper clips.
I want to know all the little
things that don’t matter. Incidentally…”
A change of
tone.

“Yes?”

“We have facilities here for people who…for people who are
spending some time with us.
Facilities for diversion and so
on.”

“Are you offering me a woman?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“No thank you. Unlike you, I haven’t reached
the stage where I need a pimp.” Fiedler seemed indifferent to his reply.
He went on quickly.

“But you had a woman in
England
didn’t
you— the girl in the library?” Leamas turned on
him,
his hands open at his sides.

“One thing!” he shouted. “Just that
one thing— don’t ever mention that again,
not as a joke, not as a threat, not even to turn the screws, Fiedler,
because it won’t
work, not ever;
I’d dry up, do you see, you’d never get another bloody word from me as long as
I lived. Tell that to them, Fiedler, to Mundt and Stammberger or whichever little
alley-cat told you to say it— tell them what I said.”

“I’ll tell them,” Fiedler replied.
“I’ll tell them. It may be too late.”

In the afternoon they went walking again. The sky
was dark and heavy, and the air warm.

“I’ve only been to
England
once,” Fiedler
observed casually. “That was on my
way to
Canada
,
with my parents before the war. I was a child then of course. We were there for
two days.”

Leamas nodded.

“I can tell you this now,” Fiedler
continued. “I nearly went there a few years back. I was going to replace
Mundt on the Steel Mission—did you know he was once in
London
?”

“I knew,” Leamas replied cryptically.

“I always wondered what it would have been
like, that job.”

“Usual game of mixing with the other Bloc
Missions, I suppose. Certain
amount
of contact with British business—not much of that.” Leamas sounded bored.
“But Mundt got about all right:
he found it quite easy.”

“So I hear,” said Leamas; “he even
managed to kill a couple of people.”
“So you heard about that too?”

“From Peter Guillam.
He was in on it with George Smiley. Mundt bloody
nearly killed George as well.”

“The Fennan Case,” Fiedler mused.
“It was amazing that Mundt managed to
escape at all, wasn’t it?”

“I suppose it was.”

“You wouldn’t think that a man whose
photograph and personal particulars were filed at the Foreign Office as a
member of a Foreign Mission would have a chance against the whole of British
Security.”

“From what I hear,” Leamas said,
“they weren’t too keen to catch him
anyway.”

Fiedler stopped abruptly. “What did you
say?”

“Peter Guillam told me he didn’t reckon they
wanted to catch Mundt, that’s all I said. We had a different setup then—an
Adviser instead of an Operational
Control—a
man called Maston. Maston had made a bloody awful mess of the Fennan
Case from the start, that’s what
Guillam said. Peter reckoned that if they’d caught Mundt it would have made a
hell of a stink—they’d have tried him and probably
hanged him. The dirt that came out in the process would have
finished Maston’s career. Peter never knew quite what happened, but he was
bloody sure there was no full-scale search for Mundt.”

“You are sure of
that,
you are sure Guillam told you that in so many words? No full-scale
search?”

“Of course I am sure.”

“Guillam never suggested any other reason why
they might have let Mundt
go?”

“What do you mean?”

Fiedler shook his head and they walked on along
the path.

“The Steel Mission was closed down after the
Fennan Case,” Fiedler observed
a
moment later, “that’s why I didn’t go.” -

“Mundt must have been mad. You may be able to
get away with assassination in the Balkans—-or here— but not
London
.”

“He did get away with it though, didn’t
he?” Fiedler put in quickly. “And he did good work.” - -

“Like recruiting Kiever and
Ashe?
God help him.”

“They ran the Fennan woman for long
enough.”

Leamas shrugged.

“Tell me something else about Karl
Riemeck,” Fiedler began again. “He met
Control once, didn’t he?”

“Yes, in
Berlin
about a year ago, maybe a bit more.”

“Where did they meet?”

‘We all met together in my flat.”

“Why?”

“Control loved to come in on success. We’d
got a hell of a lot of good stuff from Karl—I suppose it had gone down well
with
London
. He
came out on a short
trip to
Berlin
and asked me to
fix it up for them to meet.”

“Did you mind?”

“Why should I?”

“He was your agent. You might not have liked
him to meet other operators.”
“Control
isn’t an operator, he’s head of Department. Karl knew that and it tickled his
vanity.”

“Were you all three together, all the
time?”

“Yes. Well, not quite. I left them alone for
a quarter of an hour or so—not more. Control wanted that— he wanted a few
minutes alone with Karl, God knows
why,
so I left the flat on some excuse, I forget what. Oh—I know, I pretended we’d
run out of Scotch. I actually went and collected a bottle from de Jong, in
fact.”

“Do you know what passed between them while you were
out?”

“How could I? I wasn’t that interested,
anyway.”

“Didn’t Karl tell you afterwards?”

“I didn’t ask him. Karl was a cheeky sod in
some ways, always pretending he had something over me. I didn’t like the way he
sniggered about Control Mind you, he
had
every right to snigger—it was a pretty ridiculous performance. We laughed about
it together a bit, as a matter of fact. There wouldn’t have been any point in
pricking Karl’s vanity; the whole meeting was supposed to give him a shot in
the arm.”

“Was Karl depressed then?”

“No, far from it.
He
was spoiled already. He was paid too much, loved too much, trusted too much. It
was partly my fault, partly
London
‘s.
If we hadn’t spoiled him he wouldn’t have told that bloody woman of his about
his network.”

“Elvira?”

“Yes.”

They walked on in silence for a while, until
Fiedler interrupted his own
reverie
to observe: “I’m beginning to like you. But there’s one thing that puzzles
me. It’s odd—it didn’t worry me before I met you.”

“What’s that?”

“Why you ever came. Why you defected.” Leamas was going
to say something when Fiedler laughed. “I’m afraid that wasn’t very
tactful, was it?” he said.

They spent that week walking in the hills. In the
evenings they would return to the lodge, eat a bad meal washed down with a
bottle of rank white wine, sit endlessly over their Steinhäer in front of the
fire. The fire seemed to be Fiedler’s
idea—they
didn’t have it to begin with, then one day Leamas overheard him telling a
guard to bring logs. Leamas didn’t
mind the evenings then; after the fresh air all day,
the fire and the rough spirits, he would talk unprompted,
rambling on about his Service. Leamas supposed it was recorded. He didn’t care.

As each day passed in this way Leamas was aware of
an increasing tension in his companion. Once they went out in the DKW—it was
late in the evening— and
stopped
at a telephone booth. Fiedler left him in the car with the keys and made a long
phone call.

When he came back Leamas said, “Why didn’t
you ring from the house?” but Fiedler just shook his head. “We must
take care,” he replied; “you too, you must take care.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“The money you paid into the Copenhagen bank—
we wrote, you remember?”
“Of
course I remember.”

Fiedler wouldn’t say any more, but drove on in silence into the
hills. There they stopped. Beneath them, half screened by the ghostly patchwork
of tall pine trees, lay the meeting point of two great valleys. The steep
wooded hills on either side gradually yielded their colors to the gathering
dusk until they stood gray and lifeless in the twilight.

“Whatever happens,” Fiedler said, “
don’t
worry. It will be all right, do you understand?”
His - voice was heavy with emphasis, his slim hand rested on Leamas’
arm. “You may have to look after
yourself a little, but it won’t last long, do you understand?” he asked
again.

“No. And since you won’t tell me, I shall have to wait and
see. Don’t worry too much for my skin, Fiedler.” He moved his arm, but
Fiedler’s hand still held him. Leamas hated being touched.

“Do you know Mundt?” asked Fiedler. “Do you know
about him?”

“We’ve talked about Mundt.”

“Yes,” Fiedler repeated, “we’ve
talked about him. He shoots first and asks questions afterwards.
The deterrent principle.
It’s an odd system in a profession
where
the questions are always
supposed to be more important than the shooting.” Leamas knew what Fiedler
wanted to tell him. “It’s an odd system unless you’re frightened of the
answers,” Fiedler continued under his breath.

Leamas waited. After a moment Fiedler said,
“He’s never taken on an interrogation before. He’s left it to me before,
always. He used to say to me, ‘You interrogate them,
Jens,
no one can do it like you. I’ll catch them and you make them sing.’ He used to
say that people who do counterespionage are like painters— they need a man with
a hammer standing behind them to strike when they have finished their work,
otherwise they forget what they’re trying to achieve. ‘I’ll be your hammer,’ he
used to say to me. It was a joke between us at first,
then
it began to matter; when he began to kill, kill them before they sang, just as
you said: one here, another
there,
shot or murdered. I asked him, I begged him, ‘Why not arrest them? Why not let
me have them for a month or two? What good to you are they when they are
dead?’ He just shook his head at me
and said there was a law that thistles must be cut down before they flower. I
had the feeling that he’d prepared the answer before I ever asked the question.
He’s a good operator, very good. He’s done wonders with the
Abteilung—you know that. He’s got
theories about it; I’ve talked to him late at night. Coffee he drinks—nothing
else—just coffee all the time. He says Germans are too introspective to make
good agents, and it all comes out in counterintelligence. He says
counterintelligence people are like
wolves chewing dry bones—you have to take away the bones and make them find new
quarry—I see all that, I know what he means.
But he’s gone too far. Why did he kill Viereck? Why did he take
him away from me? Viereck was fresh quarry, we hadn’t even taken the meat from
the bone, you see. So why did he take him?
Why, Leamas,
why?”
The hand on Leamas’ arm was clasping it
tightly; in the total darkness of the
car Leamas was aware of the frightening intensity of Fiedler’s emotion.