The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (21 page)

“So the sentry died, did he?” Leamas
replied.

A wave of intense pain passed through his head.

Mundt nodded. “That being so,” he said,
“your trial for espionage is somewhat
academic. I propose that the case against Fiedler should be publicly
heard. That is also
the wish of
the Präsidium.”

“And you want my confession?”

“Yes.”

“In other words you haven’t any proof.”

“We shall have proof. We shall have your
confession.” There was no menace in Mundt’s voice. There was no style, no
theatrical twist. “On the other hand, there could be mitigation in your
case. You were blackmailed by British Intelligence; they
accused you of stealing money and then coerced you into
preparing a
revanchist
trap
against
myself. The court would have sympathy for such a plea.”

Leamas seemed to be taken off his guard.

“How did you know they accused me of stealing
money?” But Mundt made no
reply.

“Fiedler has been very stupid,” Mundt
observed. “As soon as I read the report of our friend Peters I knew why
you had been sent, and I knew that Fiedler would fall into the trap. Fiedler
hates me so much.” Mundt nodded, as if to emphasize the truth of his
observation. “Your people knew that of course. It was a very clever
operation. Who prepared it, tell me. Was it Smiley? Did he do it?” Leamas
said
nothing.

“I wanted to see Fiedler’s report of his own
interrogation of you, you see. I told him to send it to me. He procrastinated
and I knew I was right. Then yesterday he circulated it among the Präsidium,
and did not send me a copy. Someone in
London
has been very clever.”

Leamas said nothing.

“When did you last see Smiley?” Mundt
asked casually. Leamas hesitated, uncertain of
himself
.
His head was aching terribly.

“When did you last see him?” Mundt
repeated.

“I don’t remember,” Leamas said at last;
“he wasn’t really in the outfit any more. He’d drop in from time to
time.”

“He is a great friend of Peter Guillam, is he
not?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Guillam, you thought, studied the economic
situation in the GDR. Some odd little section in your Service; you weren’t
quite sure what it did.”

“Yes.” Sound and sight were becoming
confused in the mad throbbing of his brain. His eyes were hot and painful. He
felt sick.

“Well, when did you last see Smiley?”

“I don’t remember…I don’t remember.”

Mundt shook his head.

“You have a very good memory—for anything
that incriminates me. We can all remember when we last saw somebody. Did you,
for instance, see him after you
returned
from
Berlin
?”

“Yes, I think so. I bumped into him…in the
Circus once, in
London
.”
Leamas had closed his eyes and he was sweating. “I can’t go on, Mundt…not
much
longer, Mundt…I’m
sick,” he said.

“After Ashe had picked you up, after he had
walked into the trap that had been set for him, you had lunch together, didn’t
you?”

“Yes. Lunch together.”

“Lunch ended at about
four o’clock
. Where did you go then?”

“I went down to the City, I think. I don’t
remember for sure…For Christ’s sake, Mundt,” he said holding his head
with his hand, “I can’t go on.
My bloody head’s.

“And after that where did you go? Why did you
shake off your followers, why
were
you so keen to shake them off?”

Leamas said nothing: he was breathing in sharp
gasps, his head buried in his
hands.

“Answer this one question, then you can go.
You shall have a bed. You can sleep if you want. Otherwise you must go back to
your cell, do you understand? You will be tied up again and fed on the floor
like an animal, do you understand? Tell me where you went.”

The wild pulsation of his brain suddenly
increased, the room was dancing; he
heard
voices around him and the sound of footsteps; spectral shapes passed and
repassed, detached from sound and gravity; someone was shouting, but not at
him; the door was open, he was sure someone had opened the door. The room was
full of
people, all shouting
now, and then they were going, some of them had gone, he heard
them marching away, the stamping of
their feet was like the throbbing of his head; the
echo died and there was silence. Then like the touch of mercy
itself, a cool cloth was laid across his forehead, and kindly hands -carried
him away.

He woke on a hospital bed, and standing at the foot
of it was Fiedler, smoking a cigarette.

Leamas took stock.
A bed with
sheets.
A single ward with no bars in the windows, just curtains and
frosted glass.
Pale green walls, dark green linoleum; and
Fiedler watching him, smoking.

A nurse brought him food: an egg, some thin soup
and fruit. He felt like
death,
but he supposed he’d better eat it. So he did and Fiedler watched.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Bloody awful,” Leamas replied.

“But better?”

“I suppose so.” He hesitated. “Those sods beat me
up.”

“You killed a sentry, you know that?”

“I guessed I had…What do they expect if
they mount such a damn stupid operation? Why didn’t they pull us both in at
once? Why put all the lights out? If anything was over organized, that
was.”

“I am afraid that as a nation we tend to over
organize. Abroad that passes for
efficiency.”

Again there was a pause.

“What happened to you?” Leamas asked.

“Oh, I too was softened for interrogation.”

“By Mundt’s men?”

“By Mundt’s men
and
Mundt.
It was a very peculiar sensation!”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“No, no; not physically.
Physically it was a nightmare, but you see Mundt had a special interest in
beating me up.
Apart from the confession.”

“Because you dreamed up that story about—”

“Because I am a Jew.”

“Oh Christ,” said Leamas softly.

“That is why I got special treatment. All the
time he whispered to me. It was very strange.”

“What did he say?”

Fiedler didn’t reply. At last he muttered,
“That’s all over.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“The day we were arrested I had applied to the Präsidium for
a civil warrant to arrest Mundt as an enemy of the people.”

“But you’re mad—I told you, you’re raving mad, Fiedler!
He’ll never—”

“There was other evidence against him apart
from yours. Evidence I have been accumulating over the last three years, piece
by piece. Yours provided the proof
we
need; that’s all. As soon as that was clear I prepared a report and sent it to
every
member of the Präsidium
except Mundt. They received it on the same day that I
made my application for a warrant.”

“The day we were pulled in.”

“Yes. I knew Mundt would fight. I knew he had
friends on the Präsidium, or yes-men at least, people who were sufficiently
frightened to go running to him as soon as they got my report. And in the end,
I knew he would lose. The Präsidium had the weapon it needed to destroy him;
they had the report, and for those few days
while you and I were being questioned they read it and reread
it until they knew it was true and each knew the others knew. In the end they
acted. Herded together by their common fear, their common weakness and their
common knowledge, they turned
against
him and ordered a Tribunal.”

“Tribunal?”

“A secret one, of course.
It meets tomorrow. Mundt is under arrest.”
“What is this other evidence? The evidence you’ve
collected.”

“Wait and see,” Fiedler replied with a
smile. “Tomorrow you will see.”

Fiedler was silent for a time, watching Leamas eat.

“This Tribunal,” Leamas asked, “
how
is it conducted?”

“That is up to the President. It is not a
People’s Court—it is important to remember that— it is more in the nature of an
inquiry—a committee of inquiry, that’s it, appointed by the Präsidium to
investigate and report upon a certain…subject. Its report contains a
recommendation. In a case like this the recommendation
is tantamount to a verdict, but remains secret, as a part of
the proceedings of the Präsidium.”

“How does it work? Are there counsel and judges?”

“There are three judges,” Fiedler said;
“and in effect, there
are counsel
. Tomorrow I
myself shall put the case against Mundt. Karden will defend him.”

“Who’s Karden?”

Fiedler hesitated.

“A very tough man,” he said. “Looks
like a country doctor, small and benevolent. He was at
Buchenwald
.”

“Why can’t Mundt defend himself?”

“It was Mundt’s wish. It is said that Karden will call a
witness.”

Leamas shrugged. “That’s your affair,” he said.

Again there was silence. At last Fiedler said
reflectively, “I wouldn’t have minded—I don’t think I would have minded,
not so much anyway—if he had hurt me
for
myself, for hate or jealousy. Do you understand that? That long, long pain and
all
the time you say to
yourself, ‘Either I shall faint or I shall grow to bear the pain, nature will
see to that’ and the pain just increases like a violinist going up the E
string. You think it can’t get any higher and it does—the pain’s like that, it
rises and rises, and all that nature does is bring you on from note to note
like a deaf child being taught to hear. And all the time he was whispering Jew…Jew.
I could understand
,
I’m sure I could, if he — had done
it for the idea, for the Party if you like, or if he had hated
me
. But
it wasn’t that; he hated—”

“All right,” said Leamas shortly, “you should
know. He’s a bastard.”

“Yes,” said Fiedler, “he is a
bastard.” He seemed excited; he wants to boast to somebody, thought
Leamas.

“I thought a lot about you,” Fiedler added.
“I thought about that talk we
had—you
remember— about the motor.”

“What motor?”

Fiedler smiled. “I’m sorry, that is a direct
translation. I mean ‘
Motor
,’ the
engine, spirit, urge
; whatever Christians call it.”

“I’m not a Christian.”

Fiedler shrugged. “You know what I
mean.” He smiled again. “The thing that embarrasses you…I’ll put it
another way. Suppose Mundt is right? He asked me to confess, you know; I was to
confess that I was in league with British spies who were plotting to murder
him. You see the argument—that the whole operation was mounted by British
Intelligence in order to entice us—me, if you like—into liquidating the best
man in the Abteilung.
To turn, our own weapon against
us.”

“He tried that on me,” said Leamas
indifferently. And he added, “As if I’d cooked up the whole bloody
story.”

“But what I mean is this: suppose you had
done that, suppose it were
true—I
am taking an example, you understand, a hypothesis, would you kill a man, an
innocent man—”

“Mundt’s a killer himself.”

“Suppose he wasn’t. Suppose it
were
me they wanted to kill: would
London
do
it?”

“It depends. It depends on the need…”

“Ah,” said Fiedler contentedly, “it depends on the
need. Like Stalin, in fact.
The traffic accident and the
statistics.
That is a great relief.”

“Why?”

“You must get some sleep,” said Fiedler.
“Order what food you want. They will bring you whatever you want. Tomorrow
you can talk.” As he reached the door he looked back and said, “We’re
all the same, you know, that’s the joke.”

Soon Leamas was asleep, content in the knowledge that Fiedler was
his ally and that they would shortly send Mundt to his death. That was
something which he had looked forward to for a very long time.

Liz was happy in
Leipzig
. Austerity pleased her—it gave her
the comfort of sacrifice. The little house she stayed in was dark and meager,
the food was poor and
most of it
had to go to the children. They talked politics at every meal, she and Frau Liiman,
Branch Secretary for the Ward Branch of Leipzig-Neuenhagen, a small gray woman
whose husband managed a gravel quarry on the outskirts of the city. It was like
living in a religious community, Liz thought; a convent or a kibbutz or
something. You felt the world was better for your empty stomach. Liz had some German
which she had learned from her aunt, and she was surprised how quickly she was
able to use it. She tried it on the children first and they grinned and helped
her. The children
treated her
oddly to begin with, as if she were a person of great quality or rarity
value, and on the third day one of
them plucked up courage and asked her if she had
brought any chocolate from “
drüben
“—from “over
there.” She’d never thought of that and she felt ashamed. Alter that they
seemed to forget about her.

In the evenings there was Party work. They
distributed literature, visited Branch members who had defaulted on their dues
or lagged behind in their attendance at meetings, called in at District for a
discussion on “Problems Connected with the Centralized Distribution of Agricultural
Produce” at which all local Branch Secretaries
were present, and attended a meeting of the Workers’
Consultative Council of a machine tool factory on the outskirts of the town.

At last, on the fourth day, a Thursday, came
their own
Branch Meeting. This was to be, for Liz at least,
the most exhilarating experience of all; it would be an example of all that her
own Branch in Bayswater could one day be. They had chosen a wonderful title for
the evening’s discussions—”Coexistence
After
Two
Wars”—and they expected a record attendance. The whole ward had been
circularized; they had taken care to see that there was no rival meeting in the
neighborhood that evening; it was not a late shopping day.