The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (9 page)

Leamas shrugged. “I suppose so. Have you any
cigarettes?”

“No,” Kiever replied, “but you can
get some on the plane. You’d better look through this,” he added, and
handed Leamas a British passport. It was made out in his
name with his own photograph mounted in it, embossed by a
deep-press Foreign Office seal running across the corner. It was neither old
nor new; it described Leamas
as
a clerk, and gave his status as single. Holding it in his hand for the first
time, Leamas was a little nervous. It was like getting married: whatever
happened, things would never be the same again.

“What about money?” Leamas asked.

“You don’t need any. It’s on the firm.”

It was cold that
morning,
the light mist was damp and gray, pricking the skin.
The airport reminded Leamas of the war: machines, half hidden
in the fog, waiting patiently for their masters; the resonant voices and their
echoes, the sudden shout and
the
incongruous clip of a girl’s heels on a stone floor; the roar of an engine that
might
have been at your elbow.
Everywhere that air of conspiracy which generates among
people who have been up since dawn—of superiority almost, from
the common
experience of having
seen the night disappear and the morning come. The staff had that
look
which is informed by the mystery of dawn and animated
by the cold, and they treated the passengers and their luggage with the
remoteness of men returned from the front: ordinary mortals and nothing for
them that morning.

Kiever had provided Leamas with luggage. It was a
detail: Leamas admired it.
Passengers
without luggage attract attention, and it was not part of Kiever’s plan to do that.
They checked in at the airline desk and followed the signs to passport control.
There was a ludicrous moment when they lost the way and Kiever was rude to a
porter. Leamas supposed Kiever was worried about the passport—he needn’t be
,
thought Leamas, there’s nothing wrong with it.

The passport officer was a youngish little man
with an Intelligence Corps tie and some mysterious badge in his lapel. He had a
ginger mustache and a
North Country
accent
which was his life’s enemy.

“Going to be away for a long time, sir?” he asked
Leamas.

“A couple of weeks,” Leamas replied.

“You’ll want to watch it, sir. Your
passport’s due for renewal on the thirty-first.”

“I know,” said Leamas.

They walked side by side into the passengers’
waiting room. On the way Leamas said: “You’re a suspicious sod, aren’t
you, Kiever?” and the other laughed
quietly.

“Can’t have you on the loose, can we? Not part of the
contract,” he replied.

They still had twenty minutes to wait. They sat
down at a table and ordered coffee. “And take these things away,”
Kiever added to the waiter, indicating the used
cups, saucers and ashtrays on the table.

“There’s a trolley coming around,” the
waiter replied.

“Take them,” Kiever repeated, angry
again. “It’s disgusting, leaving dirty dishes there like that.”

The waiter just turned and walked away. He didn’t
go near the service counter
and
he didn’t order their coffee. Kiever was white, ill with anger. “For
Christ’s sake,”
Leamas
muttered, “let it go. Life’s too short.”

“Cheeky bastard, that’s what he is,”
said Kiever.

“All right, all right, make a scene; you’ve
chosen a good moment, they’ll never
forget
us here.”

The formalities at the airport at
The Hague
provided no problem. Kiever seemed
to have recovered from his anxieties. He became jaunty and talkative as they
walked the short distance between the
plane and the customs sheds. The young Dutch
officer gave a perfunctory glance at their luggage and
passports and announced in
awkward,
throaty English, “I hope you have a pleasant stay in the
Netherlands
.”

“Thanks,” said Kiever, almost too gratefully,
“thanks very much.”

They walked from the customs shed along the corridor
to the reception hail on the other side of the airport buildings. Kiever led
the way to the main exit,
between
the little groups of travelers staring vaguely at kiosk displays of scent,
cameras and fruit. As they pushed their way through the revolving glass door,
Leamas
looked back.
Standing at the newspaper kiosk, deep in a copy of the
Continental Daily Mail
stood a small, froglike figure wearing glasses, an earnest, worried little man.
He
looked like a civil servant.
Something
like
that.

A car was waiting for them in the parking lot, a
Volkswagen with a Dutch registration, driven by a woman who ignored them. She
drove slowly, always stopping if the lights were amber, and Leamas guessed she
had been briefed to drive that way
and
that they were being followed by another car. He watched the side view mirror,
trying to recognize the car but without success. Once he saw a black Peugeot
with a CD number, but when they turned the corner there was only a furniture
van behind them. He knew
The Hague
quite well from the war, and he tried to work out where they were heading. He
guessed they were traveling northwest toward Scheveningen.
Soon they had left the suburbs behind
them and were approaching a colony of villas
bordering the dunes along the seafront.

Here they stopped. The woman got out, leaving them
in the car, and rang the
front
doorbell of a small cream-colored bungalow which stood at the near end of the
row. A wrought-iron sign hung on the porch with the words LE MIRAGE in pale
blue Gothic script. There was a notice in the window which proclaimed that all
the rooms were taken.

The door was opened by a kindly, plump woman who
looked past the driver toward the car. Her eyes still on the car, she came down
the drive toward them, smiling with pleasure. She reminded Leamas of an old
aunt he’d once had who beat him for wasting string.

“How nice that you have come,” she
declared; “we are so
pleased
that you
have
come!”

They followed her into the bungalow, Kiever
leading the way. The driver got back into the car. Leamas glanced down the road
which they had just traveled; three
hundred
yards away a black car, a Flat perhaps, or a Peugeot, had parked. A man in a
raincoat was getting out.

Once in the hall, the woman shook Leamas warmly by
the hand. ‘Welcome, welcome to Le Mirage. Did you have a good journey?”

“Fine,” Leamas replied.

“Did you fly or come by sea?”

“We flew,” Kiever said; “a very
smooth flight.” He might have owned the
airline.

“I’ll make your lunch,” she declared,
“a special lunch. I’ll make you something
specially
good. What shall I bring
you?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Leamas under
his breath, and the doorbell rang. The
woman
went quickly into the kitchen; Kiever opened the front door.

He was wearing a mackintosh with leather buttons.
He was about Leamas’ height, but older. Leamas put him at about fifty-five. His
face had a hard, gray hue and sharp furrows; he might have been a soldier. He
held out his hand.

“My name is Peters,” he said. The
fingers were slim and polished. “Did you have a good journey?”

“Yes,” said Kiever quickly, “quite
uneventful.”

“Mr. Leamas and I have a lot to discuss; I do
not think we need to keep you, Sam. You could take the Volkswagen back to
town.”

Kiever smiled. Leamas saw the relief in his smile.

“Good-bye, Leamas,” said Kiever, his
voice jocular. “Good luck, old man.”
Leamas nodded, ignoring Kiever’s hand.

“Good-bye,” Kiever repeated and let
himself quietly out of the front door.

Leamas followed Peters into a back room. Heavy
lace curtains hung at the
window,
ornately frilled and
draped. The windowsill was covered with potted plants—great cacti, tobacco
plant and some curious tree with wide, rubbery leaves. The furniture was heavy,
pseudo-antique. In the center of the room was a table with two carved chairs.
The table was covered with a rust-colored counterpane more like a
carpet; on it before each chair was a
pad of paper and a pencil. On a sideboard there
was whisky and soda. Peters went over to it and mixed them both
a drink.

“Look,” said Leamas suddenly, “from
now on I can do without the goodwill,
do
you follow me? We both know what
we’re about; both professionals. You’ve got a paid
defector—good luck to you. For Christ’s sake
don’t
pretend you’ve fallen in love with me.” He sounded on edge, uncertain of
himself.

Peters nodded. “Kiever told me you were a
proud man,” he observed
dispassionately.
Then he added without smiling, “After all, why else does a man attack
tradesmen?”

Leamas guessed he was Russian, but he wasn’t sure.
His English was nearly
perfect,
he had the ease and habits of a man long used to
civilized comforts.

They sat at the table.

“Kiever told you what I am going to pay
you?” Peters inquired.

“Yes.
Fifteen thousand
pounds to be drawn on a Bern bank.”

“Yes.”

“He said you might have follow-up questions
during the next year,” said Leamas. “You would pay another five
thousand if I kept myself available.”

Peters nodded.

“I don’t accept that condition,” Leamas
continued. “You know as well as I do it
wouldn’t work. I want to draw the fifteen thousand and get
clear. Your people have a
rough
way with defected agents; so have mine. I’m not going to sit on my fanny in
St.
Moritz
while you roll up every network I’ve given you. They’re not fools; they’d know
who to look for. For all you and I know they’re on to us now.”

Peters nodded. “You could, of course, come
somewhere…safer, couldn’t
you?”

“Behind the Curtain?”

“Yes.”

Leamas just shook his head and continued: “I
reckon you’ll need about three
days
for a preliminary interrogation. Then you’ll want to refer back for a detailed
brief.”

“Not necessarily,” Peters replied.

Leamas looked at him with interest. “I
see,” he said, “they’ve sent the expert. Or isn’t Moscow Centre in on
this?”

Peters was silent; he was just looking at Leamas,
taking him in. At last he picked up the pencil in front of him and said,
“Shall we begin with your war service?” Leamas shrugged.

“It’s up to you.”

“That’s right. We’ll begin with your war
service. Just talk.”

“I enlisted in the Engineers in 1939. I was
finishing my training when a notice
came
around inviting linguists to apply for specialist service abroad. I had Dutch
and
German and a good deal of
French and I was fed up with soldiering, so I applied. I knew
Holland
well; my father had a machine tool
agency at
Leiden
;
I’d lived there for nine years. I had the usual interviews and went off to a
school near
Oxford
where they taught me the usual monkey tricks.”

“Who was running that setup?”

“I didn’t know till later. Then I met
Steed-Asprey, and an
Oxford
don called Fielding. They were running it. In forty-one they dropped me into
Holland
and I
stayed there nearly two years. We
lost agents quicker than we could find them in
those days—it was bloody murder. Holland’s a wicked country for
that kind of
work—it’s got no
real rough country, nowhere out of the way you can keep a
headquarters or a radio set.
Always on the move, always running away.
It made it a very
dirty game. I got out in forty-three and had a couple of months in
England
, then I
had a go at
Norway
—that
was a picnic by comparison. In forty-five they paid me
off and I came over here again, to
Holland
, to try and catch up on my father’s
old business. That was no good, so I joined up with an old friend who was
running a
travel agency business
in
Bristol
.
That lasted eighteen months,
then
we went bankrupt.
Then out of the blue I got a letter
from the Department: would I like to go back? But I’d had enough of all that, I
thought, so I said I’d think about it and rented a cottage on
Lundy
Island
.
I stayed there a year contemplating my stomach,
then
I
got fed up again so I wrote to them. By late forty-nine I was back on the
payroll.
Broken service, of course—reduction of pension
rights and the usual crabbing.
Am I going too fast?”

“Not for the moment,” Peters replied,
pouring him some more whisky. “We’ll discuss it again of course, with
names and dates.”

There was a knock at the door and the woman came in
with lunch, an enormous meal of cold meats and bread and soup. Peters pushed
his notes aside and
they ate in
silence. The interrogation had begun.

Lunch was cleared away. “So you went back to the
Circus,” said Peters.

“Yes. For a while they gave me a desk job,
processing reports, making
assessments
of military strengths in Iron Curtain countries, tracing units and that kind of
thing.”

“Which section?”

“Satellites Four.
I
was there from February fifty to May fifty-one.” “Who were your
colleagues?”