The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (3 page)

Leamas was lost. He’d heard the man talked a lot
of drivel before getting the
knife
in, but he’d never heard anything like this before.

“I mean, you’ve got to compare method with
method, and ideal with ideal. I would say that since the war, our methods—ours
and those of the opposition—have become much the same. I mean you can’t be less
ruthless than the opposition simply
because
your government’s
policy
is benevolent, can you now?” He laughed quietly
to himself. “That would
never
do,” he said.

For God’s sake, thought Leamas, it’s like working
for a bloody clergyman. What
is
he up to?

“That is why,” Control continued,
“I think we ought to try and get rid of Mundt…Oh really,” he said,
turning irritably toward the door, “where is that
damned coffee?”

Control crossed to the door, opened it and talked
to some unseen girl in the outer room. As he returned he said: “I really
think we
ought
to get rid of him if we can manage it.”

“Why? We’ve got nothing left in
East Germany
,
nothing at all. You just said so—Riemeck was the last. We’ve nothing left to
protect.”

Control sat down and looked at his hands for a while.

“That is not altogether true,” he said
finally; “but I don’t think I need to bore you with the details.”

Leamas shrugged.

“Tell me,” Control continued, “are
you tired of spying? Forgive me if I repeat the question. I mean that is a
phenomenon we understand here, you know. Like aircraft designers…metal
fatigue, I think the term is. Do say if you are.” Leamas remembered the
flight home that morning and wondered.

“If you were,” Control added, “we
would have to find some other way of taking care of Mundt. What I have in mind
is a little out of the ordinary.”

The girl came in with the coffee. She put the tray
on the desk and poured out two cups. Control waited till she had left the room.

“Such a
silly
girl,” he said, almost
to himself. “It seems extraordinary they
can’t find good ones any more. I do wish Ginnie wouldn’t go on
holiday at times like this.” He stirred his coffee disconsolately for a
while.

“We really must discredit Mundt,” he said. “Tell
me, do y6u drink a lot?
Whisky and that kind of thing?”

Leamas had thought he was used to Control.

“I drink a bit. More than most, I
suppose.”

Control nodded understandingly. “What do you
know about Mundt?”

“He’s a killer. He was here a year or two
back with the East German Steel Mission. We had an adviser here then:
Maston.”

“Quite so.”

“Mundt was running an agent, the wife of an F.O. man. He
killed her.”

“He tried to kill George Smiley. And of
course he shot the woman’s husband.
He
is a very distasteful man.
Ex Hitler-Youth and all that kind
of thing.
Not at all the intellectual kind of
Communist.
A practitioner of the cold war.”

“Like us,” Leamas observed drily.

Control didn’t smile. “George Smiley knew the
case well. He isn’t with us any more, but I think you ought to
ferret
him out. He’s doing things on seventeenth century
Germany
. He
lives in
Chelsea
,
just behind
Sloane Square
.
Bywater Street
,
do you know it?”

“Yes.”

“And Guillam was on the case as well. He’s in
Satellites Four, on the first
floor.
I’m afraid everything’s changed since your day.”

“Yes.”

“Spend a day or two with them. They know what
I have in mind. Then I wondered if you’d care to stay with me for the weekend.
My wife,” he added hastily, “is looking after her mother, I’m afraid.
It will be just you and I.”

“Thanks. I’d like to.”

“We can talk about things in comfort then. It
would be very nice. I think you might make a lot of money out of it. You can
have whatever you make.”

“Thanks.”

“That is, of course, if you’re sure you want
to no mental fatigue or anything?” “If it’s a question of killing
Mundt, I’m game.”

“Do you really feel that?” Control
inquired politely.
And then, having looked at
Leamas thoughtfully for a moment, he
observed, “Yes, I really think you do.
But you mustn’t feel you
have to say it. I mean in our world we pass so quickly out of the register on
hate or love—like certain sounds a dog can’t hear. All that’s left in the end
is a kind of nausea; you never want to cause suffering again. Forgive me, but
isn’t that rather what you felt when Karl Riemeck was shot? Not hate for Mundt,
nor love for Karl, but a sickening jolt like a blow on a numb body…They tell
me you
walked all night—just
walked through the streets of Berlin. Is that right?”

“It’s right that I went for a walk.”

“All night?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to Elvira?”

“God knows…I’d like to take a swing at
Mundt,” he said.

“Good…good. Incidentally, if you should meet
any old friends in the
meantime,
I don’t think there’s any point in discussing this with them. In fact,”
Control added after a moment, “I should be rather short with them. Let
them think we’ve
treated you
badly. It’s as well to begin as one intends to continue, isn’t it?”

It surprised no one very much when they put Leamas
on the shelf. In the main, they said,
Berlin
had been a failure for years, and someone had to take the rap.
Besides, he was old for operational
work, where your reflexes often had to be as
quick as those of a professional tennis player. Leamas had done
good work in the war,
everyone
knew that. In
Norway
and
Holland
he
had somehow remained demonstrably alive, and at the end of it they gave him a
medal and let him go. Later, of course,
they got him to come back. It was bad luck about his pension, decidedly
bad luck. Accounts Section had let it out, in the person of Elsie. Elsie said
in the canteen that poor Alec Leamas would only have £400 a year to live on
because of his interrupted
service.
Elsie felt it was a rule they really ought to change; after all, Mr. Leamas had
done
the service, hadn’t he? But there they were with Treasury on their backs, not a
bit like the old days, and what could they do? Even in the bad days of Maston
they’d managed things better.

Leamas, the new men were told, was the old school;
blood, guts and cricket and High School French. In Leamas’ case this happened
to be unfair, since he was
bilingual
in German and English and his Dutch was admirable; he also disliked cricket.
But it was true that he had no degree.

Leamas’ contract had a few months to run, and they
put him in
Banking
to do
his time. Banking Section was different from Accounts; it dealt
with overseas
payments,
financing agents and operations. Most of the jobs in Banking could have been
done by an office boy were it not for the high degree of secrecy involved, and
thus Banking was one of several sections of the Service which were regarded as
laying-out places for officers shortly to be buried.

Leamas went to seed.

The process of going to seed is generally
considered to be a protracted one, but in Leamas this was not the case. In the
full view of his colleagues he was transformed from a man honorably put aside
to a resentful, drunken wreck—and all within a few months. There is a kind of
stupidity among drunks, particularly when
they are sober, a kind of disconnection which the unobservant interpret
as vagueness and which Leamas seemed to acquire with unnatural speed. He
developed small dishonesties, borrowed insignificant sums from secretaries and
neglected to return them, arrived late or left early under some mumbled
pretext. At first his colleagues treated him with indulgence; perhaps his
decline scared them in the same way as we are scared by cripples, beggars and
invalids because we fear we could ourselves become them; but in the end his
neglect, his brutal, unreasoning malice, isolated him.

Rather to people’s surprise, Leamas didn’t seem to
mind being put on the shelf. His will seemed suddenly to have collapsed. The
debutante secretaries, reluctant
to
believe that Intelligence Services are peopled by ordinary mortals, were
alarmed to
notice that Leamas
had become definitely seedy. He took less care of his appearance
and less notice of his surroundings,
he lunched in the canteen which was normally the
preserve of junior staff, and it was obvious that he was
drinking. He became a solitary, belonging to that tragic class of active men
prematurely deprived of activity;
swimmers
barred from the water or actors banished from the stage.

Some said he had made a mistake in
Berlin
, and that was why
his network had been rolled up; no one quite knew. All agreed that he had been
treated with unusual harshness, even by a personnel department not famed for
its philanthropy. They would point to him covertly as he went by, as men will point
to an athlete of
the past and
say: “That’s Leamas. He made a mistake in
Berlin
. Pathetic the way he’s let himself
go.”

And then one day he had vanished. He said goodbye
to no one, not even, apparently, Control. In itself that was not surprising.
The nature of the Service
precluded
elaborate farewells and the presentation of gold watches, but even by these
standards Leamas’ departure seemed
abrupt. So far as could be judged, his departure
occurred before the statutory termination of his contract.
Elsie, of Accounts Section,
offered
one or two crumbs of information: Leamas had drawn the balance of his pay in
cash, which if Elsie knew anything,
meant he was having trouble with his bank. His severance pay was to be paid at
the turn of the month, she couldn’t say how much but it wasn’t four figures,
poor lamb. His National Insurance card had been sent on.
Personnel had an address for
him,
Elsie added with a sniff, but of course they weren’t
revealing it, not Personnel.

Then there was the story about the money. It
leaked out—no one, as usual, knew where from—that Leamas’ sudden departure was
connected with irregularities in
the
accounts of Banking Section. A largish sum was missing (not three figures but
four, according to a lady with blue hair who worked in the telephone room) and
they’d
got it back, nearly all
of it, and they’d stuck a lien on his pension. Others said they didn’t believe
it—if Alec had wanted to rob the till, they said, he’d know better ways of
doing it than fiddling with H. Q. accounts.
Not that he
wasn’t capable of it
—he’d just have done it better. But those less
impressed by Leamas’ criminal potential pointed at his large consumption of
alcohol, at the expense of maintaining a separate
household, at the fatal disparity between pay at home and allowances
abroad, and above all at the temptations put in the way of a man handling large
sums of hot
money when he knew
that his days in the service were numbered. All agreed that if Alec had dipped
his hands in the till he was finished for all time—the Resettlement people
wouldn’t look at him and Personnel would give him no reference—or one so icy
cold that the most enthusiastic employer would shiver at the sight of it.
Peculation
was the one sin
Personnel would never let you forget—and they never forgot it
themselves. If it was true that Alec
had robbed the Circus, he would take the wrath of Personnel with him to the
grave—and Personnel would not so much as pay for the
shroud.

For a week or two after his departure, a few people
wondered what had
become of him.
But his former friends had already learned to keep clear of him. He had become
a resentful bore, constantly attacking the Service and its administration, and
what he called the “Cavalry boys” who, he said, managed its affairs
as if it were a regimental club. He never missed an opportunity of railing
against the Americans and
their
intelligence agencies. He seemed to hate them more than the Abteilung, to which
he seldom, if ever, referred. He
would hint that it was they who had compromised his
network; this seemed to be an obsession with him, and it was
poor reward for
attempts to
console him, it made him bad company, so that those who had known and
even tacitly liked him, wrote him
off. Leamas’ departure caused only a ripple on the water; with other winds and
the changing of the seasons it was soon forgotten.

His flat was small and squalid, done in brown paint
with photographs of
Clovelly. It
looked directly onto the gray backs of three stone warehouses, the
windows of which were drawn, for
aesthetic reasons, in creosote. Above the warehouse there lived an Italian
family, quarreling at night and beating carpets in the
morning. Leamas had few possessions with which to brighten his
rooms. He bought some shades to cover the light bulbs, and two pairs of sheets
to replace the Hessian
squares
provided by the landlord. The rest Leamas tolerated: the flower pattern
curtains, not lined or hemmed, the fraying brown carpets and the clumsy dark
wood
furniture, like something
from a seamen’s hostel. From a yellow crumbling geyser he
obtained hot water for a shilling.

He needed a job. He had no money, none at all. So
perhaps the stories of embezzlement were true. The offers of resettlement which
the Service made had seemed to Leamas lukewarm ‘and peculiarly unsuitable. He
tried first to get a job in
commerce.
A firm of industrial adhesive manufacturers showed interest in his application
for the post of assistant manager and personnel officer. Unconcerned by the
inadequate reference with which the
Service provided him, they demanded no qualifications and offered him six
hundred a year. He stayed for a week, by which time the foul’ stench of
decaying fish oil had permeated his clothes and hair, lingering in his nostrils
like the smell of death. No amount of washing would remove it, so that in the
end Leamas had his hair cut short to the scalp and threw away two of his best
suits. He spent another week trying to sell encyclopedias to suburban
housewives, but
he was not a man
that housewives liked or understood; they did not want Leamas, let
alone his encyclopedias. Night after
night he returned wearily to his flat, his ridiculous
sample under his arm. At the end of a week he telephoned the
company and told them
he had
sold nothing. Expressing no surprise, they reminded him of his obligation to
return the sample if he discontinued acting on their behalf, and rang off.
Leamas stalked out of the telephone booth in a fury leaving the sample behind
him, went to a pub and got’ very drunk at a cost of twenty-five shillings, which
he could not afford. They threw him out for shouting at a woman who tried to
pick him up. They told him never to come back, but they’d forgotten all about
it a week later. They were beginning to know Leamas there.