The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (20 page)

Fiedler hesitated. “Where’s that damn
guard?” Fiedler asked Leamas. “There
should be a guard on the front door.”

Leamas shrugged.

“Why aren’t the lights on in the hail?”
he asked again; then, still unconvinced,
he began walking slowly toward the men.

Leamas waited a moment, then, hearing nothing,
made his way through the unlit house to the annex behind it. This was a shoddy
barrack hut attached to the back of the building and hidden from all sides by
close plantations of young pine trees.
The
hut was divided into three adjoining bedrooms; there was no corridor. The
center
room had been given to Leamas,
and the room nearest to the main building was occupied by two guards. Leamas
never knew who occupied the third. He had once tried to open the connecting
door between it and his own room, but it was locked. He had only discovered it
was a bedroom by peering through a narrow gap in the lace curtains early one
morning as he went for a walk. The two guards, who followed him
everywhere at fifty yards’ distance,
had not rounded the corner of the hut, and he looked in at the window. The room
contained a single bed, made, and a small writing
desk with papers on it. He supposed that someone, with what
passes for German thoroughness, watched him from that bedroom. But Leamas was
too old a dog to allow
himself
to be bothered by surveillance. In
Berlin
it had been a fact of life—if you
couldn’t spot it, so much the worse: it only meant they were taking greater
care, or you were losing your grip. Usually, because he was good at that kind
of thing, because
he was
observant and had an accurate memory—because, in short, he was good at his job—he
spotted them anyway. He knew the formations favored by a shadowing
team,
he knew the tricks, the weaknesses, the momentary
lapses that could give them
away.
It meant nothing to Leamas that he was watched, but as he walked through the
improvised doorway from the lodge to
the hut and stood in the guards’ bedroom, he had the distinct feeling that
something was wrong.

The lights in the annex were controlled from some
central point. They were put on and off by an unseen hand. In the mornings he
was often awakened by the sudden blaze of the single overhead light in his
room. At night he would be hastened to bed by perfunctory darkness. It was only
nine o’clock
as he entered
the annex, and
the lights were
already out. Usually they stayed on till eleven, but now they were out and the
shutters had been lowered. He had left the- connecting door from the house
open, so that the pale twilight from the hallway reached, but scarcely
penetrated, the
guards’ bedroom,
and by it he could just see the two empty beds. As he stood there peering into
the room, surprised to find it empty, the door behind him closed. Perhaps by
itself, but Leamas made no attempt to open it. It was pitch-dark. No sound
accompanied the closing of the door, no click nor footstep. To Leamas, his
instinct suddenly alert, it was as if the sound track had stopped. Then he
smelled the cigar smoke. It must have been hanging in the air but he had not
noticed it till now. Like a blind man, his senses of touch and smell were
sharpened by the darkness.

There were matches in his pocket but he did not
use them. He took one pace
sideways,
pressed his back against the wall and remained motionless. To Leamas there
could only be one explanation——they
were waiting for him to pass from the guards’ room to his own and therefore he
determined to remain where he was. Then from the direction of the main building
whence he had come he heard clearly the
sound of a footstep. The door which had just closed was tested, the lock
turned and made fast. Still Leamas did not move. Not yet. There was no
pretense: he was a prisoner in the hut. Very slowly, Leamas now lowered himself
into a crouch, putting his hand in the side pocket of his jacket as he did so.
He was quite calm, almost relieved at the prospect of action, but memories were
racing through his mind. “You’ve
nearly
always got a weapon: an ashtray, a couple of coins, a fountain pen— anything
that will gouge or cut.” It was the favorite dictum of the mild little
Welsh sergeant at that house near
Oxford
in the war: “Never use both hands at once, not with a knife, a stick or a
pistol; keep your left arm free, and hold it across the belly. If you can’t
find anything to hit with, keep the
hands -open and the thumbs stiff.” Taking the box of matches in his right
hand, he clasped it longways and deliberately crushed it, so that the small,
jagged edges of boxwood protruded from between his fingers. This done, he edged
his way along the wall until he came to a chair which be knew was in the corner
of the room. Indifferent now to the noise he made, he shoved the chair into
the center of the floor. Counting his
footsteps as he moved back from the chair, he positioned himself in the angle
of the two walls. As he did so, he heard the door of his own bedroom flung
open. Vainly he tried to discern the figure that must be
standing in the doorway, but there was no light from his own
room either. The darkness was impenetrable. He dared not move forward to
attack, for the chair was now in the middle of the room; it was his tactical
advantage, for he knew where it was, and they did not. They must come for him,
they must; he could not let them
wait
until their helper outside had reached the master switch and put on the lights.

“Come on, you windy bastards,” he hissed
in German. “I’m here, in the corner.
Come and get me, can’t you?” Not a move, not a sound.

“I’m here, can’t you see me? What’s the
matter then? What’s the matter, children, come on, can’t you?”

And then he heard one stepping forward, and
another following; and then the oath of a man - as he stumbled against the
chair, and that was the sign that Leamas was waiting for. Tossing away the box
of matches he slowly, cautiously crept forward, pace by pace, his left arm
extended in the attitude of a man warding off twigs in a wood until, quite
gently, he had touched an arm and felt the warm prickly cloth of a military
uniform. Still with his left hand Leamas deliberately tapped the arm twice—two
distinct taps—and heard a frightened voice whisper close to his ear in
German:

“Hans, is it you?”

“Shut up, you fool,” Leamas whispered in
reply, and in that same moment reached out and grasped the man’s hair, pulling
his head forward and down, then in a terrible cutting blow drove the side of
his right hand into the nape of the neck, pulled
him up again by the arm, hit him in the throat with an upward
thrust of his open fist, then released him to fall where the force of gravity
took him. As the man’s body hit the ground, the lights went on.

In the doorway stood a young captain of the
People’s Police smoking a cigar, and behind him two men. One was in civilian
clothes, quite young. He held a pistol in his hand. Leamas thought it was the
Czech kind with a loading lever on the spine of the butt. They were all looking
at the man on the floor. Somebody unlocked the outer
door and Leamas turned to see who it was. As he turned, there
was a shout—Leamas thought it was the captain—telling him to stand still.
Slowly he turned back and faced the three men.

His hands were still at his side as the blow came.
It seemed to crush his skull. As he fell, drifting warmly into unconsciousness,
he wondered whether he had been hit with a revolver, the old kind with a swivel
on the butt where you fastened
the
lanyard.

He was wakened by the lag singing and the warder
yelling at him to shut up.
He
opened his eyes and like a brilliant light the pain burst upon his brain. He
lay quite still, refusing to close them, watching the sharp, colored fragments
racing across his vision. He tried to take stock of himself: his feet were icy
cold and he was aware of the sour stench of prison denims. The singing had
stopped and suddenly Leamas longed for it to start again, although - he knew it
never would. He tried to raise his hand and touch the blood that was caked on
his cheek, but his hands were behind him, locked together. His feet too must be
bound: the blood had left them, that
was
why they were
cold. Painfully he looked about him, trying to lift his head an inch or two
from the floor. To his surprise he saw his own knees in front of him.
Instinctively he tried to stretch his legs and as he did so his whole body was
seized with a pain so sudden and terrible that he screamed out a sobbing
agonized cry of self-pity, like the
last
cry of a man upon the rack. He lay there panting, attempting to master the
pain, then through the sheer perversity of his nature he tried again, quite
slowly, to
straighten his legs.
At once the agony returned, but Leamas had found the cause: his hands and feet
were chained together behind his back. As soon as he attempted to stretch his
legs the chain tightened, forcing his shoulders down and his damaged head onto
the stone floor. They must have beaten him up while he was unconscious, his
whole body was still and bruised and his groin ached. He wondered if he’d
killed the guard. He hoped so.

Above him shone the light, large, clinical and
fierce. No furniture, just whitewashed wails, quite close all around, and the
gray steel door, a smart charcoal
gray,
the color you see on clever
London
houses. There was nothing else.
Nothing at
all.
Nothing
to think about, just the savage pain.

He must have lain there hours before they came. It
grew hot from the light; he was thirsty- but he refused to call out. At last
the door opened and Mundt stood there. He knew it was Mundt from the eyes.
Smiley had told him about them.

They untied him and let him try to stand. For a
moment he almost succeeded, then, as the circulation returned to his hands and
feet, and as the joints of his body were released from the contraction to which
they had been subject, he fell. They let him lie there, watching him with the
detachment of children looking at an insect. One of the guards pushed past
Mundt and yelled at Leamas to get up. Leamas crawled to
the wall and put the palms of his throbbing hands against the
white brick. He was halfway up when the guard kicked him and he fell again. He
tried once more and this
time
the guard let him stand with his back against the wall. He saw the guard move
his weight onto his left leg and he knew he would kick him again. With all his
remaining strength Leamas thrust
himself forward, driving his lowered head into the guard’s face. They fell
together, Leamas on top. The guard got up and Leamas lay there waiting for the
payoff. But Mundt said something to the guard and Leamas felt
himself being picked up by the
shoulders and feet and heard the door of his cell close as they carried him
down the corridor. He was terribly thirsty.

They took him to a small comfortable room,
decently furnished with a desk and armchairs. Swedish blinds half covered the
barred windows. Mundt sat at the desk and Leamas in an armchair, his eyes half
closed. The guards stood at the door.

“Give me a drink,” said Leamas.

“Whisky?”

“Water.”

Mundt filled a carafe from a basin in the corner,
and put it on the table
beside
him with a glass.

“Bring him something to eat,” he
ordered, and one of the guards left the room,
returning with a mug of soup and some sliced sausage. He drank
and ate, and they watched him in silence.

“Where’s Fiedler?” Leamas asked finally.

“Under arrest,” Mundt replied curtly.

“What for?”

“Conspiring to sabotage the
security of the people.”

Leamas nodded slowly. “So you won,” he
said. “When did you arrest him?”
“Last night.”

Leamas waited a moment, trying to focus again on
Mundt.

“What about me?” he asked.

“You’re a material witness. You will of
course stand trial yourself later.”
“So I’m part of a put-up job by
London
to frame Mundt, am I?”

Mundt nodded, lit a cigarette and gave it to one
of the sentries to pass to Leamas. “That’s right,” he said. The
sentry came over, and with a gesture of grudging
solicitude, put the cigarette between Leamas’ lips.

“A pretty elaborate operation,” Leamas
observed, and added stupidly, “Clever
chaps these Chinese.”

Mundt said nothing. Leamas became used to his
silences as the interview progressed. Mundt had rather a pleasant voice, that
was something Leamas hadn’t expected, but he seldom spoke. It was part of
Mundt’s extraordinary self-confidence,
perhaps,
that he did not speak unless he specifically wished to, that he was prepared to
allow long silences to intervene rather than exchange pointless words. In this
he differed from professional interrogators who set store by initiative, by the
evocation of
atmosphere and the
exploitation of that psychological dependency of a prisoner upon his
inquisitor. Mundt despised technique: he was a man of fact and action. Leamas
preferred that.

Mundt’s appearance was fully consistent with his
temperament. He looked an
athlete.
His fair hair was cut short. It lay mat and neat. His young face had a hard,
clean line, and a frightening directness; it was barren of humor or fantasy. He
looked
young but not youthful;
older men would take him seriously. He was well built. His clothes fitted him
because he was an easy man to fit. Leamas found no difficulty in recalling that
Mundt was a killer. There was
a coldness
about him, a
rigorous
self-sufficiency which
perfectly equipped him for the business of murder. Mundt was a very hard man.

“The other charge on which you will stand
trial, if necessary,” Mundt added quietly, “is murder.”