The Spy Who Came in From The Cold

by Le Carre, John

  The stewardess thought he was interesting. She guessed that he was North of England, which he might well have been, and rich, which he was not. She put his age at fifty, which was about right. She guessed he was single, which was half true. Somewhere long ago there had been a divorce; somewhere there were children, now in their teens, who received their allowance from a rather odd private bank in the City.

  "If you want another whisky," said the stewardess, "you'd better hurry. We shall be at London airport in twenty minutes."

  "No more." He didn't look at her; he was looking out of the window at the gray-green fields of Kent.

  Fawley met him at the airport and drove him to London.

  "Control's pretty cross about Karl," he said, looking sideways at Leamas. Leamas nodded.

  "How did it happen?" asked Fawley.

  "He was shot. Mundt got him."

  "Dead?"

  "I should think so, by now. He'd better be. He nearly made it. He should never have hurried, they couldn't have been sure. The Abteilung got to the checkpoint just after he'd been let through. They started the siren and a Vopo shot him twenty yards short of the line. He moved on the ground for a moment, then lay still."

  "Poor bastard."

  "Precisely," said Leamas.

  Pawley didn't like Leamas, and if Leamas knew he didn't care. Fawley was a man who belonged to clubs and wore representative ties, pontificated on the skills of sportsmen and assumed a service rank in office correspondence. He thought Leamas suspect, and Leamas thought him a fool.

  "What section are you in?" asked Leamas.

  "Personnel."

  "Like it?"

  "Fascinating."

  "Where do I go now? On ice?"

  "Better let Control tell you, old boy."

  "Do you know?"

  "Of course."

  "Then why the hell don't you tell me?"

  "Sorry, old man," Fawley replied, and Leamas suddenly very nearly lost his temper. Then he reflected that Fawley was probably lying anyway.

  "Well, tell me one thing, do you mind? Have I got to look for a bloody flat in London?"

  Fawley scratched at his ear: "I don't think so, old man, no."

  "No? Thank God for that."

  They parked near Cambridge Circus, at a parking meter, and went together into the hail.

  "You haven't got a pass, have you? You'd better fill in a slip, old man."

  "Since when have we had passes? McCall knows me as well as his own mother."

  "Just a new routine. Circus is growing, you know."

  Leamas said nothing, nodded at McCall and got into the lift without a pass.

  Control shook his hand rather carefully, like a doctor feeling the bones.

  "You must be awfully tired," he said apologetically, "do sit down." That same dreary voice, the donnish bray.

  Leamas sat down in a chair facing an olive-green electric fire with a bowl of water balanced on the top of it.

  "Do you find it cold?" Control asked. He was stooping over the fire rubbing his hands together. He wore a cardigan under his black jacket, a shabby brown one. Leamas remembered Control's wife, a stupid little woman called Mandy who seemed to think her husband was on the Coal Board. He supposed she had knitted it.

  "It's so dry, that's the trouble." Control continued. "Beat the cold and you parch the atmosphere. Just as dangerous." He went to the desk and pressed some button. "We'll try and get some coffee," he said, "Ginthe's on leave, that's the trouble. They've given me some new girl. It really is too bad." He was shorter than Leamas remembered him; otherwise, just the same. The same affected detachment, the same fusty conceits; the same horror of drafts; courteous according to a formula miles removed from Leamas' experience. The same milk-and-white smile, the same elaborate diffidence, the same apologetic adherence to a code of behavior which he pretended to find ridicuions. The same banality.

  He brought a pack of cigarettes from the desk and gave one to Leamas.

  "You're going to find these more expensive," he said and Leamas nodded dutifully. Slipping the cigarettes into his pocket, Control sat down.

  There was a pause; finally Leamas said: "Riemeck's dead."

  "Yes, indeed," Control declared, as if Leamas had made a good point. "It is very unfortunate. Most . . . I suppose that girl blew him--Elvira?"

  "I suppose so." Leamas wasn't going to ask him how he knew about Elvira.

  "And Mundt had him shot," Control added.

  "Yes."

  Control got up and drifted around the room looking for an ashtray. He found one and put it awkwardly on the floor between their two chairs.

  "How did you feel? When Riemeck was shot, I mean? You saw it, didn't you?"

  Leamas shrugged. "I was bloody annoyed," he said.

  Control put his head to one side and half closed his eyes. "Surely you felt more than that? Surely you were upset? That would be more natural."

  "I was upset. Who wouldn't be?"

  "Did you like Riemeck--as a man?"

  "I suppose so," said Leamas helplessly. "There doesn't seem much point in going into it," he added.

  "How did you spend the night, what was left of it, after Riemeck had been shot?"

  "Look, what is this?" Leamas asked hotly; "what are you getting at?"

  "Riemeck was the last," Control reflected, "the last of a series of deaths. If my memory is right it began with the girl, the one they shot in Wedding, outside the cinema. Then there was the Dresden man, and the arrests at Jena. Like the ten little niggers. Now Paul, Viereck and Ländser--all dead. And finally Riemeck." He smiled deprecatingly. "That is quite a heavy rate of expenditure. I wondered if you'd had enough."

  "What do you mean--enough?"

  "I wondered whether you were tired. Burned out." There was a long silence.

  "That's up to you," Leamas said at last.

  "We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really. I mean . . . one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold. . . do you see what I mean?"

  Leamas saw. He saw the long road outside Rotterdam, the long straight road beside the dunes, and the stream of refugees moving along it; saw the little airplane miles away, the procession stop and look toward it; and the plane coming in, neatly over the dunes; saw the chaos, the meaningless hell, as the bombs hit the road.

  "I can't talk like this, Control," Leamas said at last. "What do you want me to do?"

  "I want you to stay out in the cold a little longer." Leamas said nothing, so Control went on: "The ethic of our work, as I understand it, is based on a single assumption. That is, we are never going to be aggressors. Do you think that's fair?"

  Leamas nodded. Anything to avoid talking.

  "Thus we do disagreeable things, but we are _defensive_. That, I think, is still fair. We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night. Is that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things." He grinned like a schoolboy. "And in weighing up the moralities, we rather go in for dishonest comparisons; after all, you can't compare the ideals of one side with the methods of the other, can you now?"

  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?"

  Cont
rol 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 seventeenthcentury 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 ol 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?"

  * * 3 * Decline

  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 Leainas. 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 depa
rture 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.