The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (6 page)

He was contemptuous of his cellmates, and they
hated him. They hated him
because
he succeeded in being what each in his heart longed to be: a mystery. He
preserved from collectivization some discernible part of his personality; he
could not be drawn at moments of sentiment to talk of his girl, his family or
his children. They knew nothing of Leamas; they waited, but he did not come to
them. New prisoners are
largely
of two kinds—there are those who for shame, fear or shock wait in fascinated horror
to be initiated into the lore of prison life, and there are those who trade on
their wretched novelty in order to endear themselves to the community. Leamas
did
neither of these things. He
seemed pleased to despise them all, and they hated him
because, like the world outside, he did not need them.

After about ten days they had had enough. The
great had had no
homage,
the
small had had no comfort, so they crowded him in the dinner
queue. Crowding is a prison ritual akin to the eighteenth century practice of
jostling. It has the virtue of an
apparent
accident, in which the prisoner’s mess tin is upturned and its contents spilt
on his uniform. Leamas was barged
from one side, while from the other an obliging hand descended on his forearm,
and the thing was done. Leamas said nothing, looked
thoughtfully at the- two men on either side of him, and
accepted in silence the filthy
rebuke
of a warder who knew quite well what had happened.

Four days later, while working with a hoe on the
prison flower bed, he seemed to stumble. He was holding the hoe with both hands
across his body, the end of the handle protruding about six inches from his
right fist. As he strove to recover his balance the prisoner to his right
doubled up with a grunt of agony, his arms across
his stomach. There was no more crowding after that.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all about prison
was the brown paper parcel when he left. In a ridiculous way it reminded him of
the marriage service—with this ring I
thee
wed, with
this paper parcel I return thee to society. They handed it to him and made him
sign for it, and it contained all he had in the world. There was nothing
else. Leamas felt it the most
dehumanizing moment of the three months, and he determined to throw the parcel
away as soon as he got outside.

He seemed a quiet prisoner. There had been no
complaints against him. The
Governor,
who was vaguely interested in his case, secretly put the whole thing down to
the Irish blood he swore he could detect in Leamas.

“What are you going to do,” he asked,
“when you leave here?” Leamas replied,
without a ghost of a smile, that he thought he would make a new
start, and the
Governor said
that was an excellent thing to do.

“What about your family?” he asked.
“Couldn’t you make it up with your
wife?”

“I’ll try,” Leamas had replied indifferently; “but
she’s remarried.”

The probation officer wanted Leamas to become a
male nurse at a mental home in Buckinghamshire and Leamas agreed to apply. He
even took down the address
and
noted the train times from Marylebone.

“
The rail’s
electrified as far as Great Missenden, now,” the probation officer
added, and Leamas said that would be
a help. So they gave him the parcel and he left.
He took a bus to Marble Arch and walked. He had a bit of money
in his pocket and he intended to give himself a decent meal He thought he would
walk through Hyde Park to Piccadilly, then through Green Park and St. James’s
Park to Parliament Square,
then
wander down Whitehall to the Strand where he could go to the big cafe near Charing
Cross Station and get a reasonable steak for six shillings.

London
was beautiful that day. Spring was late and the parks were filled with
crocuses and daffodils. A cool,
cleaning wind was blowing from the south; he could have walked all day. But he
still had the parcel and he had to get rid of it. The little baskets were too
small; he’d look absurd trying to push his parcel into one of those. He
supposed there were one or two things he ought to take out, his wretched pieces
of paper—insurance card, driving license and his E.93 (whatever that was) in a
buff OHMS envelope—but suddenly he couldn’t be bothered. He sat down on a bench
and put the parcel beside him, not too close, and moved a little away from it.
After a
couple of minutes he
walked back toward the footpath, leaving the parcel where it lay.
He had just reached the footpath when
he heard a shout; he turned, a little sharply perhaps, and saw a man in an army
mackintosh beckoning to him, holding the brown paper parcel in the other hand.

Leamas had his hands in his pockets and he left
them there, and stood,
looking
back over his shoulder at the man in the mackintosh. The man hesitated,
evidently expecting Leamas to come to him or give some sign of interest, but
Leamas
gave none. Instead, he
shrugged and continued along the footpath. He heard another
shout and ignored it, and he knew the
man was coming after him. He heard the
footsteps
on the gravel, half running, approaching rapidly, and then a voice, a little
breathless, a little aggravated:

“Here you—I say!” and then he had drawn
level, so that Leamas stopped, turned and looked at him.

“Yes?”

“This is your parcel, isn’t it? You left it
on the seat. Why didn’t you stop
when
I called you?”

Tall, with rather curly brown hair; orange tie and
pale green shirt; a little bit
petulant,
a little bit of a pansy, thought Leamas. Could be a schoolmaster, ex
London
School of
Economics
and runs a suburban drama club.
Weak-eyed.

“You can put it back,” said Leamas. “I don’t want
it.”

The man colored. “You can’t just leave it
there,” he said, “
it’s
litter.”

“I bloody well can,” Leamas replied.
“Somebody will find a use for it.” He was
going to move on, but the stranger was still standing in front
of him, holding the
parcel in
both arms as if it were a baby. “Get out of the light,” said Leamas.
“Do you
mind?”

“Look here,” said the stranger, and his
voice had
risen
a key, “I was trying to do you a
favor; why do you have to be so damned rude?”

“If you’re so anxious to do me a favor,”
Leamas replied, “why have you been
following me for the last half hour?”

He’s pretty good, thought Leamas. He hasn’t
flinched but he must be shaken
rigid.

“I thought you were somebody I once knew in
Berlin
, if you must
know.”

“So you followed me for half an hour?”

Leamas’ voice was heavy with
sarcasm,
his brown eyes never left the other’s
face.

“Nothing like half an hour.
I caught sight of you in Marble Arch and I thought you were Alec Leamas, a man
I borrowed some money from. I used to be in the
BBC
in
Berlin
and
there was this man I borrowed some money from. I’ve had a bad
conscience about it ever since and
that’s why I followed you. I wanted to be sure.”

Leamas went on looking at him, not speaking, and
thought he wasn’t all that good but he was good enough. His story was scarcely
plausible-that didn’t matter. The point was that he’d produced a new one and
stuck to it after Leamas had wrecked
what
promised to be a classic approach.

“I’m Leamas,” he said at last. “Who the hell are
you?”

He said his name was Ashe, with an “E” he
added quickly, and Leamas knew he was lying. He pretended not to be quite sure
that Leamas really was Leamas so over lunch they opened the parcel and looked
at the National Insurance card like, thought Leamas, a couple of sissies
looking at a dirty postcard. Ashe ordered lunch with just a fraction too little
regard for expense, and they drank some Frankenwein to
remind them of the old days. Leamas began by insisting he
couldn’t remember Ashe, and Ashe said he was surprised. He said it in the sort
of tone that suggested he was hurt. They met at a party, he said, which Derek
Williams gave in his flat off the Ku-damm (he got that right), and all the
press boys had been there; surely Alec remembered that? No, Leamas did not.
Well surely he remembered Derek Williams from the
Observer
, that
nice
man who gave such lovely pizza parties? Leamas had
a lousy memory for names, after all they were talking about
‘54; a lot of water had flown under the bridge since then…Ashe remembered
(his Christian name was William, by-the-bye, most people called him Bill), Ashe
remembered
vividly
.
They’d
been drinking stingers,
brandy and crème de menthe, and were all rather tiddly, and Derek had provided
some really gorgeous girls, half the cabaret from the Malkasten,
surely
Alec remembered now?
Leamas thought it was probably coming back to him, if Bill would go on a bit.

Bill did go on, ad-lib no doubt, but he did it
well, playing up the sex side a little, how they’d finished up in a night club
with three of these girls; Alec, a chap from the political adviser’s office and
Bill, and Bill had been so embarrassed because
he hadn’t any money on him and Alec had paid, and Bill had
wanted to take a girl home and Alec had lent him another tenner—

“Christ,” said Leamas, “I remember now, of course
I do.”

“I
knew
you would,” said Ashe happily,
nodding at Leamas over his glass.
“Look,
do let’s have the other half, this is
such
fun.”

Ashe was typical of
that strata
of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of
challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he
found resistance, retreat. Having himself no
particular opinions or tastes, he relied upon whatever
conformed
with
those of his companion. He was as ready
to drink tea at Fortnum’s as beer at the Prospect of Whitby; he would listen to
military music in St. James’s Park or jazz in a
Compton Street
cellar; his voice would
tremble with sympathy when he spoke of Sharpeville, or
with indignation at the growth of
Britain
‘s colored population. To
Leamas this observably passive role was repellent; it brought out the bully in
him, so that he
would lead the
other gently into a position where he was committed, and then himself
withdraw, so that Ashe was constantly
scampering back from some cul-de-sac into which Leamas had enticed him. There
were moments that afternoon when Leamas was
so brazenly perverse that Ashe would have been justified in
terminating their conversation—especially since he was paying; but he did not.
The little sad man with
spectacles
who sat alone at the neighboring table, deep in a book on the manufacture of
ball bearings, might have deduced, bad he been listening, that Leamas was
indulging
a sadistic nature—or
perhaps (if he had been a man of particular subtlety) that
Leamas was proving to his own
satisfaction that only a man with a strong ulterior motive would put up with
that kind of treatment.

It was nearly
four o’clock
before they ordered the bill, and Leamas
tried to insist on paying his half. Ashe wouldn’t hear of it, paid the bill and
took out his checkbook in order to settle his debt to Leamas.

“Twenty of the best,” he said, and
filled in the date on the check form.

Then he looked up at Leamas, all wide-eyed and
accommodating. “I say, a check is all right with you, isn’t it?”

Coloring a little, Leamas replied, “I haven’t
got a bank at the moment—only just back from abroad, something I’ve got to fix
up. Better give me a check and I’ll cash it at your bank.”

“My dear chap, I wouldn’t
dream
of it! You’d have to go to Rotherhithe to cash this one!” Leamas shrugged
and Ashe laughed, and they agreed to meet at the same place on the following
day, at
one o’clock
, when
Ashe would have the money in
cash.

Ashe took a cab at the corner of
Compton Street
, and Leamas waved at it
until it was out of sight. When it was gone, he looked at his watch. It was
four o’clock
. He guessed he was still
being followed, so he walked down to Fleet Street and
had a cup of coffee in the Black and White. He looked at
bookshops, read the evening
papers
displayed in the show windows of newspaper offices, and then quite suddenly,
as if the thought had occurred to him
at the last minute, he jumped on a bus. The bus went to Ludgate Hill, where it
was held up in a traffic jam near a tube station; he dismounted and caught a
tube. He bought a sixpenny ticket, stood in the end car and
got off at the next station. He
caught another train to Euston, trekked back to
Charing
Cross
. It was
nine o’clock
when he reached the
station and it had turned rather cold.
There
was a van waiting in the forecourt; the driver was fast asleep.

Leamas glanced at the number, went over and called
through the window, “Are
you
from Clements?”

The driver woke up with a start and asked,
“Mr. Thomas?”

“No,” replied Leamas. “Thomas
couldn’t come. I’m Amies from Hounslow.” - “Hop in, Mr. Amies,”
the driver replied, and opened the door. They drove
West
, toward the King’s Road. The
driver knew the way.

Control opened the door.

“George Smiley’s out,” he said.
“I’ve borrowed his house. Come in.” Not until
Leamas was inside and the front door closed, did Control put on
the hail light.