The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (12 page)

“I wrote these down last night,” he
said. “I thought it would save time.”

Peters took the notes and read them slowly and
carefully. He seemed
impressed.

“Good,” he said, “very good.”

“Then I remember best a thing called Rolling
Stone. I got a couple of trips out of it.
One to
Copenhagen
and one to
Helsinki
.
Just dumping money at banks.”

“How much?”

“Ten thousand dollars in
Copenhagen
, forty thousand D-Marks in
Helsinki
”
Peters put down his pencil.

“Who for?” he asked.

“God knows. We work Rolling Stone on a system
of deposit accounts. The Service gave me a phony British passport; I went to
the Royal Scandinavian Bank in
Copenhagen
and the National Bank of
Finland
in
Helsinki
,
deposited the money and drew a passbook on a joint account—for me in my alias
and for someone else—the agent I suppose in his alias. I gave the banks a
sample of the co-holder’s
signature,
I’d
got that from Head Office. Later, the
agent was given the passbook and a false passport which he showed at the bank
when he drew the money. All I knew was the alias.” He heard himself
talking and it all sounded so ludicrously improbable.

‘Was this procedure common?”

“No. It was a special payment. It had a subscription
list.”

“What’s that?”

“It had a code name known to very few
people.”

“What was the code name?”

“I told you—Rolling Stone. The operation
covered irregular payments often thousand dollars in different currencies and
in different capitals.”

“Always in capital
towns?”

“Far as I know.
I
remember reading in the file that there had been other
Rolling Stone payments before I came to the Section, but in
those cases Banking Section got the local Resident to do it.”

“These other payments that took place before
you came: where were they
made?”

“One in
Oslo
.
I can’t remember where the other
was.”

“Was the alias of the agent always the
same?”

“No. That was an added security precaution. I
heard later we pinched the whole technique from the Russians. It was the most
elaborate payment scheme I’d met. In the same way I used a different alias and
of course a different passport for each trip.” That would please
him,
help him to fill in the gaps.

“These faked passports the agent was given so
that he could draw the money:
did
you know anything about them—how they were made out and dispatched?”

“No. Oh, except that they had to have visas
in them for the country where the money was deposited. And entry stamps.”

“
Entry stamps?
”

“Yes. I assumed the passports were never used
at the border—only presented at the bank for identification purposes. The agent
must have traveled on his
own
passport, quite legally entered the country where the bank was situated, then
used the faked passport at the bank. That was my guess.”

“Do you know of a reason why earlier payments
were made by the Residents,
and
later payments by someone traveling out from
London
?”

“I know the
reason.,
I asked the women in Banking Section, Thursday and Friday. Control was anxious
that—”

“
Control?
Do you mean to
say Control himself was running the case?”

“Yes, he was running it. He was afraid the
Resident might be recognized at the bank. So he used a postman: me.”

“When did you make your journeys?”

“
Copenhagen
on the fifteenth of June.
I
flew back the same night.
Helsinki
at the
end of September.
I stayed two nights there, flew back around the twenty-eighth.
I
had a bit of fun in
Helsinki
.” He
grinned but Peters took no notice.

“And the other payments—when were they
made?”

“I can’t remember. Sorry.”

“But one was definitely in
Oslo
?”

“Yes, in
Oslo
.”

“How much time separated the first two
payments, the payments made by the
Residents?”

“I don’t know. Not long, I think.
Maybe a month.
A bit more perhaps.”

“Was it your impression that the agent had
been operating for some time before the first payment was made? Did the file
show that?”

“No idea. The file simply covered actual
payments.
First payment early fifty-nine.
There was no
other date on it. That is the principle that operates where you have a limited
subscription. Different files handle different bits of a single case. Only
someone with the master file would be able to put it all together.”

Peters was writing all the time now. Leamas assumed
there was a tape
recorder hidden
somewhere in the room but the subsequent transcription would take
time. What Peters wrote down now
would provide the background for this evening’s
telegram to
Moscow
,
while at the Soviet Embassy in
The
Hague
the girls would sit up all night telegraphing
the verbatim transcript on hourly schedules.

“Tell me,” said Peters; “these are
large sums of money. The arrangements for
paying them were elaborate and very expensive. What did you make of it
yourself?”

Leamas shrugged. “What could I make of it? I
thought Control must have a bloody good source, but I never saw the material so
I don’t know. I didn’t like the way it was done—it was too high-powered, too
complicated,
too
clever. Why couldn’t
they just meet him and give him the
money in cash? Did they really let him cross borders on his own passport with a
forged one in his pocket? I doubt it,” said Leamas. It was time he clouded
the issue, let him chase a hare.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that for all I know the money was never
drawn from the bank.
Supposing
he was a highly placed agent behind the Curtain—the money would be on
deposit for him when he could get at
it. That was what I reckoned anyway. I didn’t think about it all that much. Why
should I? It’s part of our work only to know pieces of the whole setup. You
know that. If you’re curious, Clod
help
you.”

“If the money wasn’t
collected, as you suggest, why all the trouble with
passports?”

“When I was in
Berlin
we made an arrangement for Karl
Riemeck in case he ever needed to run and couldn’t get hold of us. We kept a
bogus West German
passport for
him at an address in Düsseldorf. He could collect it any time by following a
prearranged procedure. It never expired—Special Travel renewed the passport and
the visas as they expired. Control might have followed the same technique with
this man. I don’t know—it’s only a guess.”

“How do you know for certain that passports were
issued?”

“There were minutes on the file between
Banking Section and Special Travel.
Special
Travel is the section which arranges false identity papers and visas.”

“I see.” Peters thought for a moment and
then he asked: “What names did you
use in
Copenhagen
and
Helsinki
?”

“Robert Lang, electrical engineer from
Derby
. That was in
Copenhagen
.”
“When exactly were you in
Copenhagen
?” Peters
asked.

“I told you, June the fifteenth. I got there
in the morning at about eleven-thirty.”

“Which bank did you use?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Peters,” said
Leamas, suddenly angry, “the Royal Scandinavian. You’ve got it written
down.”

“I just wanted to be sure,” the other
replied
evenly,
and continued writing. “And for
Helsinki
, what
name?”

“Stephen Bennett, marine engineer from
Plymouth
. I was
there,” he - added
sarcastically,
“at the end of September.”

“You visited the bank on the day you arrived?”

“Yes. It was the twenty-fourth or twenty-
fifth,
I can’t be sure, as I told
you.”

“Did you take the money with you from
England
?”

“Of course not.
We
just transferred it to the Resident’s account in each case.
The Resident drew it, met me at the
airport with the money in a suitcase and I took it to the bank.”

“Who’s the Resident in
Copenhagen
?”

“Peter Jensen, a bookseller in the University
bookshop.”

“And what were the names which would be used by the
agent?”

“Horst Karlsdorf in
Copenhagen
.
I
think that was it, yes it was, I remember.
Karlsdorf.
I kept on wanting to say
Karlshorst.”

“Description?”

“Manager, from
Klagenfurt
in
Austria
.”

“And the other?
The
Helsinki
name?”

“Fechtmann, Adolf Fechtmann from
St. Gallen
,
   
Switzerland
.
He had a title—yes, that’s right: Doctor Fechtmann, archivist.”

“I see; both German-speaking.”

“Yes, I noticed that. But it can’t be a
German.”

“Why not?”

“I was head of the
Berlin
setup, wasn’t I? I’d have been in on
it. A high-level agent in
East
Germany
would have to be run from
Berlin
. I’d have
known.” Leamas got up, went to the sideboard and poured himself some
whisky. He didn’t bother about
Peters.

“You said yourself there were special
precautions, special procedures in this
case. Perhaps they didn’t think you needed to know.”

“Don’t be bloody silly,” Leamas rejoined
shortly; “of course I’d have known.” This was the point he would
stick to through thick and thin; it made them feel they knew better, gave
credence to the rest of his information. “They will want to deduce
in spite of you
,”
Control had said. “We must give them the material and remain skeptical to
their conclusions. Rely on their intelligence and conceit, on their suspicion
of one another—that’s what we must
do.”

Peters nodded as if he were confirming a
melancholy truth. “You are a very proud man, Leamas,” he observed
once more.

Peters left soon after that. He wished Leamas good
day and walked down the
road
along the seafront. It was lunchtime.

Peters didn’t appear that afternoon,
nor
the next morning. Leamas stayed in,
waiting with growing irritation for
some message, but none -came. He asked the housekeeper but she just smiled and
shrugged her heavy shoulders. At about
eleven
o’clock
the next morning
he decided to go out for a walk along the front, bought some
cigarettes and stared dully at the
sea.

There was a girl standing on the beach throwing
bread to the sea gulls. Her back was turned to him. The sea wind played with
her long black hair and pulled at her coat, making an arc of her body, like a
bow strung toward the sea. He knew then
what it was that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go
back and find if ever he got home to England: it was the caring about little
things—the faith in ordinary life; that simplicity that made you break up a bit
of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach and throw it to the gulls. It
was this respect for triviality
which
he had never been allowed to possess; whether it was bread for the sea gulls or
love, whatever it was he would go back and find it; he would make Liz find it
for him. A week, two weeks perhaps, and he would be home. Control had said he
could keep whatever they paid—and that would be enough. With fifteen thousand
pounds, a
gratuity and a pension
from the Circus, a man—as Control would say—can afford to come in from the
cold.

He made a detour and returned to the bungalow at a
quarter to twelve
. The
woman let him in without a word, but when he had gone into the back room he
heard her lift the receiver and dial a telephone number. She spoke for only a
few seconds. At half-past twelve she brought his lunch, and, to his pleasure,
some English newspapers which he read contentedly until
three o’clock
. Leamas, who normally read
nothing, read newspapers slowly and
with concentration. He remembered details, like the names and addresses of
people who were the subject of small news items. He did it almost unconsciously
as a kind of private
pelmanism, and it absorbed him
entirely.

At
three
o’clock
Peters arrived, and as soon as Leamas saw him he knew that
something was up. They did not sit at
the table; Peters did not take off his
mackinto
sh.

“I’ve got bad news for you,” he said.
“They’re looking for you in
England
. I heard this morning.
They’re watching the ports.”