The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (22 page)

Seven people came.

Seven people and Liz and the
Branch Secretary and the man from District.
Liz
put a brave face on it but she was terribly upset. She could
scarcely concentrate on the speaker, and when she tried he used long German
compounds that she couldn’t work out anyway. It was like the meetings in Bayswater,
it was like midweek evensong when she used to go to church—the same dutiful
little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling
of a great idea in the hands of little people. She always felt the same thing—it
was awful really but she did—she wished no one would turn up, because that was
absolute and it suggested persecution,
humiliation—it
was something you could react to.

But seven people were nothing: they were worse
than nothing, because they were evidence of the inertia of the uncapturable
mass. They broke your heart.

The room was better than the schoolroom in
Bayswater, but even that was no
comfort.
In Bayswater it had been fun trying to find a room. In the early days they
had pretended they were something
else, not the Party at all. They’d taken back
rooms in pubs, a committee room at the Ardena Café or met
secretly in one another’s
houses.
Then Bill Hazel had joined from the Secondary School and they’d used his
classroom. Even that was a risk—the headmaster thought Bill ran a drama group,
so
theoretically at least they
might still be chucked out. Somehow that fitted better than this Peace Hall in
pre-cast concrete with the cracks in the corners and the picture of Lenin. Why
did they have that silly frame thing all around the picture?
Bundles
of organ pipes sprouting from the corners and the bunting all dusty.
It
looked like
something from a
fascist funeral. Sometimes she thought Alec was right—you believed in things
because you needed to; what you believed in had no value of its own, no
function. What did he say? “A dog scratches where it itches. Different
dogs itch in different places.” No, it was wrong, Alec was wrong—it was a
wicked thing to say. Peace and freedom and equality—they were facts, of course
they were. And
what about
history—all those laws the Party proved? No, Alec was wrong: truth existed
outside people, it was demonstrated in history, individuals must bow to it, be
crushed by it if necessary. The Party
was the vanguard of history, the spear point in the fight for Peace…She went
over the rubric a little uncertainly. She wished more people had come. Seven
was so few. They looked so cross; cross and hungry.

The meeting over, Liz waited for Frau Liiman to
collect the unsold literature from the heavy table by the door, fill in her
attendance book and put on her coat, for it was cold that evening. The speaker
had left— rather rudely, Liz thought—before
the general discussion. Frau Liiman was standing at the door
with her hand on the light switch when a man appeared out of the darkness,
framed in the doorway. Just for a moment Liz thought it was Ashe. He was tall
and fair and wore one of those raincoats with leather buttons.

“Comrade Liiman?” he inquired.

“Yes?”

“I am looking for an English Comrade, Gold. She is staying
with you?”

“I’m Elizabeth Gold,” Liz put in, and the man came into
the hail, closing the door behind him so that the light shone full upon his
face.

“I am Holten from District.” He showed
some paper to Frau Liiman who was
still
standing at the door, and she nodded and glanced a little anxiously toward Liz.

“I have been asked to give a message to Comrade Gold from
the Präsidium,” he said. “It concerns an alteration in your program;
an invitation to attend a special meeting.”

“Oh,” said Liz rather stupidly. It seemed fantastic
that the Präsidium should even have heard of her.

“It is a gesture,” Holten said.
“A gesture of goodwill.”

“But I…but Frau Liiman…” Liz began,
helplessly.

“Comrade Liiman, I am sure, will forgive you under the
circumstances.” - “Of course,” said Frau Liiman quickly.

“Where is the meeting to be held?”

“It will necessitate your leaving
tonight,” Holten replied. “We have a long way
to go.
Nearly to
Gorlitz
.”

“To
Gorlitz
…Where
is that?”

“East,” said Frau Liiman quickly.
“On the Polish border.”

“We can drive you home now. You can collect
your things and we will continue the journey at once.”

“Tonight?
Now?”

“Yes.” Holten didn’t seem to consider
Liz had much choice.

A large black car was waiting for them. There was a
driver in the front and a
flag
post on the hood. It looked like a military car.

The court was no larger than a schoolroom. At one
end, on the mere five or six benches which were provided, sat guards and
warders and here and there among them spectators—members of the Präsidium and
selected officials. At the other end of the room sat the three members of the
Tribunal on tall-backed chairs at an unpolished oak table. Above them,
suspended from the ceiling by three loops of wire, was a large red star made of
plywood. The walls of the courtroom were white like
the walls of Leamas’ cell.

On either side, their chairs a little forward of
the table and turned inwards to face one another, sat two men: one was
middle-aged, sixty perhaps, in a black suit and a gray tie, the kind of suit
they wear in church in German country districts; the other was Fiedler.

Leamas sat at the back, a guard on either side of
him. Between the heads of the spectators he could see Mundt, himself surrounded
by police, his fair hair cut very
short,
his broad shoulders covered in the familiar gray of prison uniform. It seemed
to
Leamas a curious commentary
on the mood of the court—or the influence of Fiedler—that he himself should be
wearing his own clothes, while Mundt was in prison uniform.

Leamas had not long been in his place when the
President of the Tribunal, sitting at the center of the table, rang the bell.
The sound directed his attention
toward
it, and a shiver passed over him as he realized that the President was a
woman. He could scarcely be blamed
for not noticing it before. She was fiftyish,
small-eyed and dark. Her hair was cut short like a man’s, and
she wore the kind of functional dark tunic favored by Soviet wives. She looked
sharply around the room, nodded to a sentry to close the door, and began at
once without ceremony to address the court.

“You all know why we are here. The
proceedings are secret, remember that. This is a Tribunal convened expressly by
the Präsidium. It is to the Präsidium alone
that we are responsible. We shall hear evidence as we think
fit.” She pointed perfunctorily toward Fiedler. “Comrade Fiedler, you
had better begin.”

Fiedler stood up. Nodding briefly toward the
table, he drew from the briefcase
beside
him a sheaf of papers held together in one corner by a piece of black cord.

He talked quietly and easily, with a diffidence
which Leamas had never seen in him before. Leamas considered it a good
performance, well adjusted to the role of a
man regretfully hanging his superior.

“You should know first, if you do not know
already,” Fiedler began, “that on the day that the Präsidium received
my report on the activities of Comrade Mundt I was arrested, together with the
defector Leamas. Both of us were imprisoned and both of us…invited, under
extreme duress, to confess that this whole terrible charge was a fascist plot
against a loyal Comrade.

“You can see from the report I have already
given you how it was that Leamas came to our notice: we ourselves sought him
out, induced him to defect and finally brought him to Democratic Germany.
Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the impartiality of Leamas than this:
that he still refuses, for reasons I will explain, to
believe that Mundt was a British agent. It is therefore
grotesque to suggest that
Leamas
is a plant: the initiative was ours, and the fragmentary but vital evidence of
Leamas provides only the final proof in a long chain of indications reaching
back over
the last three years.

“You have before you the written record of
this case. I need do no more than
interpret
for you facts of which you are already aware.

“The charge against Comrade Mundt is that he
is the agent of an imperialist
power.
I could have made other charges—that he passed information to the British
Secret Service, that he turned his Department into the unconscious lackey of a
bourgeois state, that he deliberately
shielded revanchist anti-Party groups and
accepted sums of foreign currency in reward. These other charges would
derive from the first; that Hans-Dieter Mundt is the agent of an imperialist
power. The penalty for this crime is death. There is no crime more serious in
our penal code, none which exposes our state to greater danger, nor demands
more vigilance of our Party organs.”
Here he put the papers down.

“Comrade Mundt is forty-two years old. He is
Deputy Head of the Department for the Protection of the People. He is
unmarried. He has always been regarded as a man of exceptional capabilities,
tireless in serving the Party’s interests,
ruthless in protecting them.

“Let me tell you some details of his career.
He was recruited into the Department at the age of twenty-eight and underwent
the customary instruction. Having
completed
his probationary period he undertook special tasks in Scandinavian
countries—notably
Norway
,
Sweden
and
Finland
—where
he succeeded in establishing
an intelligence
network
which carried the battle against fascist agitators into the enemy’s camp. He
performed this task well, and there is no reason to suppose that at that time
he was other than a diligent member of his Department. But, Comrades, you
should not forget this early
connection with
Scandinavia
. The networks
established by
Comrade Mundt
soon after the war provided the excuse, many years later, for him to travel to
Finland and Norway, where his commitments became a cover enabling him to
draw thousands of dollars from
foreign banks in return for his treacherous conduct. Make no mistake: Comrade
Mundt has not fallen victim to those who try to disprove the arguments of
history. First cowardice, then weakness, then greed were his
motives; the acquirement of great
wealth his dream. Ironically, it was the elaborate system by which his lust for
money was satisfied that brought the forces of justice on his trail.”

Fiedler paused, and looked around the
room,
his eyes suddenly alight with fervor. Leamas watched,
fascinated.

“Let that be a lesson,” Fiedler shouted,
“to those other enemies of the state,
whose crime is so foul that they must plot in the secret hours of the
night!” A dutiful murmur rose from the tiny group of spectators at the
back of the room.

“They will not escape the vigilance of the
people whose blood they seek to sell!” Fiedler might have been addressing
a large crowd rather than the handful of officials and guards assembled in the
tiny, white walled room.

Leamas realized at that moment that Fiedler was
taking no chances: the deportment of the Tribunal, prosecutors and witnesses
must be politically impeccable.
Fiedler,
knowing no doubt that the danger of a subsequent countercharge was inherent
in such cases, was protecting his own
back; the polemic would go down in the record and it would be a brave man who
set himself to refute it.

Fiedler now opened the file that lay on the desk
before him.

“At the end of 1956, Mundt was posted to
London
as a member of the
East German Steel Mission. He had the additional special task of undertaking
counter-subversionary measures against émigré groups. In the course of his work
he exposed himself to great dangers—of that there is no doubt—and he obtained
valuable results.”

Leamas’ attention was again drawn to the three
figures at the center table. To
the
President’s left, a youngish man, dark. His eyes seemed to be half closed. He
had
lank, unruly hair and the
gray, meager complexion of an ascetic. His hands were slim,
restlessly toying with the corner of
a bundle of papers which lay before him. Leamas
guessed he was Mundt’s man; he found it hard to say why. On the
other side of the table sat a slightly older man, balding, with an open
agreeable face. Leamas thought he
looked
rather an ass. He guessed that if Mundt’s fate hung in the balance, the young
man would defend him and the woman condemn. He thought the second man would be
embarrassed by the difference of
opinion and side with the President.

Fiedler was speaking again.

“It was at the end of his service in
London
that recruitment
took place. I have said that he exposed himself to great dangers; in doing so
he fell foul of the British Secret Police, and they issued a warrant for his
arrest. Mundt, who had no diplomatic
immunity
(NATO Britain does not recognize our sovereignty), went into hiding. Ports were
watched; his photograph and description were distributed throughout the
British
Isles
.
Yet after two days in hiding, Comrade Mundt took a taxi to
London
airport and flew to
Berlin
. ‘Brilliant,’ you will say, and so it
was. With the whole of
Britain
‘s
police force alerted, her roads, railways, shipping and air routes under
constant surveillance, Comrade Mundt takes a plane from
London
airport.
Brilliant
indeed.
Or perhaps
you
may feel, Comrades, with the advantage of hindsight, that Mundt’s escape from
England was a little
too
brilliant, a little
too
easy, that without the
connivance of the British authorities it would never have been possible at
all!” Another murmur, more spontaneous than the first, rose from the back
of the room.