The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (26 page)

“Alec
wasn’t
a casual lover!” she
cried. “How can you—”

“But he gave you money. Did the men give you money,
too?”

“Oh God,” she sobbed, “don’t ask—”

“Who were they?” She did not reply, then
Karden shouted, quite suddenly; it was the first time he had raised his voice.
“
Who?
”

“I don’t know. They came in a car.
Friends of Alec.”

“More friends?
What did they
want?”

“I don’t know. They kept asking me what he
had told me. They told me to
get
in touch with them if—”

“
How?
How
get
in touch with them?”

At last she replied: “He lived in
Chelsea
…his name was Smiley…George Smiley…I
was to ring him.”

“And did you?”

“No!”

Karden had put down his file. A deathly silence
had descended on the court. Pointing toward Leamas, Karden said, in a voice
more impressive because it was perfectly under control:

“Smiley wanted to know whether Leamas had
told her too much. Leamas had done the one thing British Intelligence had never
expected him to do: he had taken a
girl
and wept on her shoulder.”

Then Karden laughed quietly, as if it were all such
a neat joke.
“Just as Karl Riemeck did.
He’s made
the same mistake.”

“Did Leamas ever talk about himself?”
Karden continued.

“No.”

“You know nothing about his past?”

“No. I knew he’d done something in
Berlin
.
Something for the Government.”
“Then he did talk
about his past, didn’t he? Did he tell you he had been married?”

There was a long silence. Liz nodded.

“Why didn’t you see him after he went to
prison? You could have visited him.”
“I didn’t think he’d want me to.”

“I see. Did you write to him?”

“No. Yes, once…just to tell him I’d wait. I
didn’t think he’d mind.”
“You
didn’t think he would want that either?”

“No.”

“And when he had served his time in prison,
you didn’t try to get in touch with him?”

“No.”

“Did he have anywhere to go, did he have a
job waiting for him—friends who
would
take him in?”

“I don’t know…I don’t know.”

“In fact, you were finished with him, weren’t
you?” Karden asked with a sneer. “Had you found another lover?”

“No! I waited for him…I’ll always wait for
him.” She checked herself. “I wanted him to come back.”

“Then why had you not written? Why didn’t you
try to find out where he was?”

“He didn’t want me to, don’t you see! He made me promise…never
to follow him…never to…”

“
So he expected to go to prison, did he?
”
Karden demanded triumphantly.
“No—I
don’t know. How can I tell you what I don’t know?”

“And on that last evening,” Karden
persisted, his voice harsh and bullying, “on
the evening before he hit the grocer, did he make you renew
your promise? Well, did
he?”

With infinite weariness, she nodded in a pathetic
gesture of capitulation. “Yes.”
“And you said good-bye?”

“We said good-bye.”

“After supper, of course.
It was quite late. Or did you spend the night with
him?”

“After supper.
I
went home—not straight home. I went for a walk first, I don’t know where.
Just walking.”

“What reason did he give for breaking off
your relationship?”

“He didn’t break it off,” she said.
“Never.
He just said there was something he
had to do; someone he had to get even
with, whatever it cost, and afterwards, one day perhaps, when it was all over…he
would… come back, if I was still there and..
.”

“And you said,” Karden suggested with
irony, “that you would always wait for
him, no doubt?
That you would always love
him?”

“Yes,” Liz replied simply.

“Did he say he would send you money?”

“He said…he said things weren’t as bad as
they seemed.
That I would be…looked after.”

“And that was why you didn’t inquire,
afterwards, wasn’t it, when some
Charity
in the City casually gave you a thousand pounds?”

“Yes! Yes, that’s right! Now you know
everything— you knew it all already. Why did you send for me if you knew?”

Imperturbably Karden waited for her sobbing to stop.

“That,” he observed finally to the
Tribunal before him, “is the evidence of the
defense. I am sorry that a girl whose perception is clouded by
sentiment and whose
alertness is
blunted by money should be considered by our British comrades a suitable
person for Party office.”

Looking first at Leamas and then at Fiedler he
added brutally: “She is a fool. It is fortunate, nevertheless, that Leamas
met her. This is not the first time that a
revanchist
plot has been
uncovered through the decadence of its architects.” With a little, precise
bow toward the Tribunal, Karden sat down.

As he did so, Leamas rose to his feet, and this
time the guards let him alone.

London
must have gone raving mad. He’d told them—
That
was the
joke—he’d told them to leave her alone. And now it was clear that from the
moment, the very moment he left England—before that, even, as soon as he went
to prison—some bloody fool had gone round tidying up—paying the bills, settling
the grocer, the landlord; above all, Liz. It was insane, fantastic. What were
they trying to
do—kill Fiedler,
kill their agent? Sabotage
their own
operation? Was it
just Smiley? Had his wretched little conscience driven him to this? There was
only one thing to do—get Liz and Fiedler out of it and carry the can. He was
probably written off anyway. If he could save Fiedler’s skin—if he could do
that—perhaps there was a chance that Liz would get away.

How the hell did they know so much? He was sure he
hadn’t been followed to Smiley’s house that afternoon. And the money—how did
they pick up the story about him stealing money from the Circus? That was
designed for internal consumption only
…
then
how?
For God’s sake, how?

Bewildered, angry and bitterly ashamed, he walked
slowly up the gangway, stiffly, like a man going to the scaffold.

“All right, Karden.” His face was white
and hard as stone, his head tilted back, a little to one side, in the attitude
of a man listening to some distant sound. There was a frightful stillness about
him, not of resignation but of self-control, so
that his whole body seemed to be in the iron grip of his will.

“All right,
Karden,
let her
go.”

Liz was staring at him, her face crumpled and
ugly, her dark eyes filled with tears.

“No, Alec…no,” she said. There was no
one else in the room—just Leamas tall and straight like a soldier.

“Don’t tell them,” she said, her voice
rising, “whatever it is, don’t tell them just because of me…I don’t mind
any more, Alec. I promise I don’t.”

“Shut up, Liz,” said Leamas awkwardly.
“It’s too late now.” His eyes turned to the President. “She
knows nothing.
Nothing at all.
Get her out of here and
send her
home. I’ll tell you the
rest.”

The President glanced briefly at the men on either
side of her. She deliberated,
then
said, “She can
leave the court, but she cannot go home until the hearing is finished. Then we
shall see.”

“She knows nothing, I tell you!” Leamas
shouted. “Karden’s right, don’t you see? It was an operation, a planned
operation. How could she know that? She’s just a
frustrated little girl from a crackpot library— she’s no good
to you!”

“She is a witness,” replied the
President shortly. “Fiedler may want to
question her.” It wasn’t Comrade Fiedler any more.

At the mention of his name, Fiedler seemed to wake
from the reverie into which he had sunk, and Liz looked at him consciously for
the first time. His deep brown eyes rested on her for a moment, and he smiled
very slightly, as if in recognition of her race. He was a small, forlorn
figure, oddly relaxed she thought.

“She knows nothing,” Fiedler said.
“Leamas is right, let her go.” His voice was
tired.

“You realize what you are saying?” the
President asked. “You realize what this means? Have you no questions to
put to her?”

“She has said what she had to say.”
Fiedler’s hands were folded on his knees
and he was studying them as if they interested him more than the
proceedings of the
court.
“It was all most cleverly done.” He nodded. “Let her go. She
cannot tell us what she does not know.” With a certain mock formality he
added, “I have no questions for the witness.”

A guard unlocked the door and called into the
passage outside. In the total silence of the court they heard a woman’s
answering voice, and her ponderous
footsteps
slowly approaching. Fiedler abruptly stood up and taking Liz by the arm, he
guided her to the door. As she
reached the door she turned and looked back toward
Leamas but he was staring away from her like a man who cannot
bear the sight of
blood.

“Go back to
England
,” Fiedler said to her.
“You go back to
England
.”
Suddenly
Liz began to sob
uncontrollably. The wardress put an arm around her shoulder, more for support
than comfort, and led her from the room. The guard closed the door. The
sound of her crying faded gradually
to nothing.

“There isn’t much to say,” Leamas began.
“Karden’s right. It was a put-up job. When we lost Karl Riemeck we lost
our only decent agent in the Zone. All the rest had gone already. We couldn’t
understand it— Mundt seemed to pick them up almost before we’d recruited them.
I came back to
London
and saw Control. Peter Guillam was there and George Smiley. George was in
retirement really, doing
something
clever.
Philology or something.

“Anyway, they’d dreamed up this idea. Set a
man to trap himself, that’s what
Control
said. Go through the motions and see if they bite. Then we worked it out—
backwards so to speak. ‘Inductive’ Smiley called it. If Mundt
were
our agent how would we have paid him, how would the files look, and so
on.
Peter remembered that
some Arab had tried to sell us a breakdown of the Abteilung a
year or two back and we’d sent him packing. Afterwards we found out we’d made a
mistake. Peter had the idea of fitting that in—as if we’d turned it down
because we already knew. That was
clever.

“You can imagine the rest.
The
pretense of going to pieces; drink, money troubles, the rumors that Leamas had robbed
the till.
It all hung together. We got Elsie in Accounts to help with
the gossip, and one or two others. They did it bloody well,” he added with
a touch of pride. “Then I chose a morning—a Saturday morning,
lots of people about—and broke out.
It made the local press—it even made the
Worker
, I think—and by that time
you people had picked it up. From then on,” he added with contempt,
“you dug your own graves.”

“Your grave,” said Mundt quietly. He was
looking thoughtfully at Leamas with
his
pale, pale eyes.
“And perhaps Comrade Fiedler’s.”

“You can hardly blame Fiedler,” said
Leamas indifferently, “he happened to be the man on the spot; he’s not the
only man in the Abteilung who’d willingly hang you, Mundt.”

“We shall hang you, anyway,” said Mundt
reassuringly. “You murdered a guard.
You tried to murder me.” -

Leamas smiled drily.

“All cats are alike in the
dark,
Mundt…Smiley always said it could go
wrong.
He said it might start a reaction we couldn’t stop. His nerve’s gone—you know
that. He’s never been the same since the Fennan Case—since the Mundt affair in
London
. They say
something happened to him then—that’s why he left the Circus.
That’s what I can’t make out, why
they paid off the bills, the girl and all that. It must have been Smiley
wrecking the operation on purpose, it must have been. He must have had a crisis
of conscience, thought it was wrong to kill or something. It was mad,
after all that preparation, all that
work
, to mess up an operation that way.

“But Smiley hated you, Mundt. We all did, I
think, although we didn’t say it. We planned the thing as if it was all a bit
of a game…it’s hard to explain now. We knew we had our backs to the wall:
we’d failed against Mundt and now we were going
to try to kill him. But it was still a game.” Turning to
the Tribunal he said: “You’re wrong about Fiedler; he’s not ours. Why
would
London
take this kind of risk with a man in Fiedler’s position? They counted on him, I
admit. They knew he hated Mundt—why shouldn’t he? Fiedler’s a Jew, isn’t he?
You know, you must know, all of
you,
what Mundt’s reputation is, what he thinks about Jews.

“I’ll tell you something—no one else will, so
I’ll tell you. Mundt had Fiedler beaten up, and all the time, while it was
going on, Mundt baited him and jeered at him for being a Jew. You all know what
kind of man Mundt is, and you put up with him because he’s good at his job.
But”—he faltered for a second,
then
continued—”but
for God’s sake, enough people have
got mixed up in all this without Fiedler’s head going into the basket.
Fiedler’s all right, I tell you…ideologically sound, that’s the expression,
isn’t it?”