The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (2 page)

At that moment Karl seemed to hear some sound,
sense some danger; he glanced over his shoulder, began to pedal furiously,
bending low over the handlebars.
There
was still the lonely sentry on the bridge, and he had turned and was watching
Karl. Then, totally unexpected, the searchlights went on, white and brilliant,
catching Karl and holding him in their beam like a rabbit in the headlights of
a car. There came
the seesaw
wail of a siren, the sound of orders wildly shouted. In front of Leamas the
two policemen dropped to their knees,
peering through, the sandbagged slits, deftly
flicking the rapid load on their automatic rifles.

The East German sentry fired, quite carefully, away
from them, into his own
sector.
The first shot seemed to thrust Karl forward, the second to pull him back.
Somehow he was still moving, still on the bicycle, passing the sentry, and the
sentry was still shooting at him. Then he sagged, rolled to the ground, and
they heard quite
clearly the
clatter of the bike as it fell. Leamas hoped to God he was dead.

He watched the Tempelhof runway sink beneath him.

Leamas was not a reflective man and not a
particularly philosophical one. He knew he was written off—it was a fact of
life which he would henceforth live with,
as a man must live with cancer or imprisonment. He knew there was no
kind of
preparation which could
have bridged the gap between then and now. He met failure as
one day he would probably meet death,
with cynical resentment and the courage of a
solitary. He’d lasted longer than most; now he was beaten. It
is said a dog lives as long as its teeth; metaphorically, Leamas’ teeth had
been drawn; and it was Mundt who had drawn them.

Ten years ago he could have taken the other path—there
were desk jobs in that anonymous government building in Cambridge Circus which
Leamas could have taken and kept till he was God knows how old; but Leamas
wasn’t made that way. You
might
as well have asked a jockey to become a betting clerk as expect Leamas to
abandon operational life for the tendentious theorizing and clandestine
self-interest of
Whitehall
. He had stayed
on in
Berlin
,
conscious that Personnel had marked his file for
review at the end of every year—stubborn, willful, contemptuous
of instruction, telling himself that something would turn up. Intelligence work
has one moral law—it is justified by results. Even the sophistry of
Whitehall
paid court to
that law, and Leamas got results.
Until Mundt came.

It was odd how soon Leamas had realized that Mundt
was the writing on the
wail.

Hans-Dieter Mundt, born
forty-two years ago in
Leipzig
.
Leamas knew his dossier, knew the photograph on the inside of the cover, the
blank, hard face beneath
the
flaxen hair; knew by heart the story of Mundt’s rise to power as second man in
the Abteilung and effective head of operations. Mundt was hated even within his
own
department. Leamas knew that
from the evidence of defectors, and from Riemeck, who
as a member of the SED Präsidium sat on security committees
with Mundt, and dreaded him. Rightly as it turned out, for Mundt had killed
him.

Until 1959 Mundt had been a minor functionary of
the Abteilung, operating in
London
under the cover of
the East German Steel Mission. He returned to
Germany
in a hurry after murdering
two of his own agents to save his skin and was not heard of for more than a
year. Quite suddenly he reappeared at the Abteilung’s headquarters in
Leipzig
as head of the Ways and Means Department, responsible for allocating
currency, equipment and personnel for
special tasks. At the end of that year came the
big struggle for power within the Abteilung. The number and
influence of Soviet
liaison
officers were drastically reduced, several of the old guard
were
dismissed on
ideological grounds
and three men emerged: Fielder as head of counterintelligence, Jahn
took over from Mundt as head of
facilities, and Mundt himself got the plum—deputy director of operations—at the
age of forty-one. Then the new style began. The first agent Leamas lost was a
girl. She was only a small link in the network; she was used for courier jobs.
They shot her dead in the street as she left a
West Berlin
cinema. The police never found the murderer and Leamas was at first inclined to
write the incident off as unconnected with her work. A month later a railroad
porter in
Dresden
,
a discarded agent from Peter Guillam’s network, was found dead and mutilated
beside a railroad track. Leamas knew it wasn’t coincidence any longer. Soon
after that two
members of
another network under Leamas’ control were arrested and summarily sentenced to
death. So it went on: remorseless and unnerving.

And now they had Karl, and Leamas was leaving
Berlin
as he had come—without
a single agent worth a farthing. Mundt had won.

Leamas was a short man with close-cropped, iron
gray hair, and the physique of a swimmer. He was very strong. This strength was
discernible in his back and shoulders, in his neck, and in the stubby formation
of his hands and fingers.

He had a utilitarian approach to clothes, as he
did to most other things, and
even
the spectacles he occasionally wore had steel rims. Most of his suits were of
artificial fiber, none of them had waistcoats. He favored shirts of the
American kind with buttons on the points of the collars, and suede shoes with
rubber soles.

He had an attractive face, muscular, and a
stubborn line to his thin mouth. His
eyes
were brown and small; Irish, some said. It was hard to place Leamas. If he were
to walk into a
London
club the porter would certainly not mistake him for a member; in a
Berlin
night club they
usually gave him the best table. He looked like a man who
could make trouble, a man who looked
after his money; a man who was not quite a
gentleman.

The stewardess thought he was interesting. She
guessed that he was North of
England,
which he might well have been, and rich, which he was not. She put his age at
fifty, which was about right. She guessed he was single, which was half true.
Somewhere long ago there had been a divorce; somewhere there were children, now
in
their teens, who received
their allowance from a rather odd private bank in the City.

“If you want another whisky,” said the
stewardess, “you’d better hurry. We shall be at
London
airport in twenty minutes.”

“No more.” He didn’t look at her; he was
looking out of the window at the gray-green fields of
Kent
.

Fawley met him at the airport and drove him to
London
.

“Control’s pretty cross about Karl,” he
said, looking sideways at Leamas. Leamas nodded.

“How did it happen?” asked Fawley.

“He was shot. Mundt got him.”

“Dead?”

“I should think so, by now. He’d better be.
He nearly made it. He should
never
have hurried, they couldn’t have been sure. The Abteilung got to the checkpoint
just after he’d been let through.
They started the siren and a
Vopo
shot him twenty yards short of the
line. He moved on the ground for a moment,
then
lay
still.”
“Poor
bastard.”

“Precisely,” said Leamas.

Pawley didn’t like Leamas, and if Leamas knew he
didn’t care. Fawley was a
man
who belonged to clubs and wore representative ties, pontificated on the skills
of
sportsmen and assumed a
service rank in office correspondence. He thought Leamas
suspect, and Leamas thought him a fool.

“What section are you in?” asked Leamas.

“Personnel.”

“Like it?”

“Fascinating.”

“Where do I go now?
On ice?”

“Better let Control tell you, old boy.”

“Do you know?”

“Of course.”

“Then why the hell don’t you tell me?”

“Sorry, old man,” Fawley replied, and
Leamas suddenly very nearly lost his
temper.
Then he reflected that Fawley was probably lying anyway.

“Well, tell me one thing, do you mind? Have I
got to look for a bloody flat in
London
?”

Fawley scratched at his ear: “I don’t think
so, old man, no.”

“No? Thank God for that.”

They parked near Cambridge Circus, at a parking
meter, and went together into the hail.

“You haven’t got a pass, have you? You’d better fill in a
slip, old man.”

“Since when have we had passes? McCall knows
me as well as his own
mother.”

“Just a new routine.
Circus is
growing, you know.”

Leamas said nothing, nodded at McCall and got into the lift
without a pass.

Control shook his hand rather carefully, like a
doctor feeling the bones.

“You must be awfully tired,” he said
apologetically, “do sit down.”
That same
dreary voice, the donnish bray.

Leamas sat down in a chair facing an olive-green
electric fire with a bowl of water balanced on the top of it.

“Do you find it cold?” Control asked. He
was stooping over the fire rubbing his hands together. He wore a cardigan under
his black jacket, a shabby brown one.
Leamas
remembered Control’s wife, a stupid little woman called Mandy who seemed to
think her husband was on the Coal
Board. He supposed she had knitted it.

“It’s so dry, that’s the trouble.”
Control continued. “Beat the cold and you parch the atmosphere.
Just as dangerous.”
He went to the desk and pressed
some button. “We’ll try and get some coffee,” he said, “Ginthe’s
on leave, that’s the trouble.
They’ve
given me some new girl. It really is too bad.” He was shorter than Leamas
remembered him; otherwise, just the same. The same affected detachment, the
same
fusty conceits; the same
horror of drafts; courteous according to a formula miles removed from Leamas’
experience.
The same milk-and-white smile, the same elaborate
diffidence, the same apologetic adherence to a code of behavior which he
pretended to find ridiculous.
The same banality.

He brought a pack of cigarettes from the desk and
gave one to Leamas. “You’re going to find these more expensive,” he
said and Leamas nodded dutifully. Slipping the cigarettes into his pocket,
Control sat down.

There was a pause; finally Leamas said:
“Riemeck’s dead.”

“Yes, indeed,” Control declared, as if
Leamas had made a good point. “It is very unfortunate. Most…I suppose
that girl blew him—Elvira?”

“I suppose so.” Leamas wasn’t going to
ask him how he knew about Elvira.
“And
Mundt had him shot,” Control added.

“Yes.”

Control got up and drifted around the room looking
for an ashtray. He found one and put it awkwardly on the floor between their
two chairs.

“How did you feel? When Riemeck was shot, I
mean? You saw it, didn’t you?”
Leamas
shrugged. “I was bloody annoyed,” he said.

Control put his head to one side and half closed
his eyes. “Surely you felt more than that? Surely you were upset? That
would be more natural.”

“I was upset. Who wouldn’t be?”

“Did you like Riemeck—as a man?”

“I suppose so,” said Leamas helplessly.
“There doesn’t seem much point in going into it,” he added.

“How did you spend the night, what was left
of it, after Riemeck had been
shot?”

“Look, what is this?” Leamas asked hotly; “what
are you getting at?”

“Riemeck was the last,” Control
reflected, “the last of a series of deaths. If my memory is right it began
with the girl, the one they shot in Wedding, outside the cinema. Then there was
the
Dresden
man, and the arrests at
Jena
.
Like the ten little
niggers.
Now Paul, Viereck and Ländser—all dead.
And
finally Riemeck.”
He smiled deprecatingly. “That is quite a
heavy rate of expenditure. I wondered if you’d had
enough.”

“What do you mean—enough?”

“I wondered whether you were tired.
Burned out.”
There was a long silence.
“That’s up to you,” Leamas
said at last.

“We have to live without sympathy, don’t we?
That’s impossible of course. We
act
it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really. I mean…one
can’t be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold…do
you see what I mean?”

Leamas saw. He saw the long road outside
Rotterdam, the long straight road
beside
the dunes, and the stream of refugees moving along it; saw the little airplane
miles away, the procession stop and look toward it; and the plane coming in,
neatly over the dunes; saw the chaos, the meaningless hell, as the bombs hit
the road.

“I can’t talk like this, Control,”
Leamas said at last. “What do you want me to
do?”

“I want you to stay out in the cold a little
longer.” Leamas said nothing, so Control went on: “The ethic of our
work, as I understand it, is based on a single assumption. That is, we are
never going to be aggressors. Do you think that’s fair?”

Leamas nodded.
Anything to avoid
talking.

“Thus we do disagreeable things, but we are
defensive
.
That, I think, is still
fair. We
do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep
safely in their beds at night. Is
that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very
wicked things.” He grinned like a schoolboy. “And in
weighing up the moralities, we rather go in for dishonest comparisons; after
all, you can’t compare the ideals of one side with the methods of the other,
can you now?”