The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (13 page)

Leamas replied impassively, “On what
charge?”

“Nominally for failing to
report to a police station within the statutory period after release from
prison.”

“And in fact?”

“The word is going around that you’re wanted
for an offense under the Official
Secrets
Act. Your photograph’s in all the
London
evening papers. The captions are very vague.”

Leamas was standing very still.

Control had done it. Control had started the hue
and cry. There was no other
explanation.
If Ashe or Kiever had been pulled in, if they had talked—even then, the
responsibility for the hue and cry
was still Control’s. “A couple of weeks,” he’d said; “I expect
they’ll take you off somewhere for the interrogation—it may even be abroad. A
couple of weeks should see you through, though. After that, the thing should
run itself. You’ll have to lie low
over here while the chemistry works itself out; but you won’t mind that, I’m
sure. I’ve agreed to keep you on operational subsistence until
Mundt is eliminated: that seemed the
fairest way.” -

And now this.

This wasn’t part of the bargain; this was
different. What the hell was he supposed to do? By pulling out now, by refusing
to go along with Peters, he was wrecking the operation. It was just possible
that Peters was lying, that this was the test—all the more reason that he
should agree to go. But if he went, if he agreed to go east, to Poland,
Czechoslovakia or God knows where, there was no good reason why they should
ever let him out—there was no good reason (since he was notionally a wanted man
in the West) why he should
want
to be let out.

Control had done it—he was sure. The terms had
been too
generous,
he’d known that all along. They
didn’t throw money about like that for nothing—not unless they thought they
might lose you. Money like that was a
douceur
for discomforts and dangers
Control would not openly admit to. Money like that was a warning;
Leamas had not heeded the warning.

“Now how the devil,” he asked quietly,
“could they get onto that?” A thought
seemed to cross his mind and he said, “Your friend Ashe
could have told them, of course, or Kiever…”

“It’s possible,” Peters replied.
“You know as well as I do that such things are
always possible. There is no certainty in our job. The fact
is,” he added with something like impatience, “that by now every country
in
Western Europe
will be looking for
you.”

Leamas might not have heard what Peters was
saying. “You’ve got me on the
hook
now, haven’t you, Peters?” he said. “Your people must be laughing
themselves sick. Or did they give the tip-off themselves?”

“You overrate your own importance,”
Peters said sourly.

“Then why do you have me followed, tell me
that? I went for a walk this
morning.
Two little men in brown suits,
one
twenty
yards behind the other, trailed me
along the seafront. When I came back the housekeeper rang you
up.”

“Let us stick to what we know,” Peters
suggested. “How your own authorities
have got on to you does not at the moment acutely concern us. The fact
is
,
they
have.”

“Have you brought the
London
evening papers with you?”

“Of course not.
They
are not available here. We received a telegram from
London
.”

“That’s a lie. You know perfectly well your
apparatus is only allowed to
communicate
with Centre.”

“In this case a direct link between two
outstations was permitted,” Peters retorted angrily.

“Well, well,” said Leamas with a wry
smile, “you must be quite a big wheel. Or”—a thought seemed to strike
him—”isn’t Centre in on this?”

Peters ignored the question.

“You know the alternative. You let us take
care of you, let us arrange your safe passage, or you fend for yourself—with
the certainty of eventual capture. You’ve no false papers, no money, nothing.
Your British passport will have expired in ten
days.”

“There’s a third possibility. Give me a Swiss
passport and some money and let me run. I can look after myself.”

“I am afraid that is not considered
desirable.”

“You mean you haven’t finished the
interrogation. Until you have I am not
expendable?”

“That is roughly the position.”

“When you have completed the interrogation,
what will you do with me?”
Peters
shrugged. “What do you suggest?”

“A new identity.
Scandinavian passport perhaps.
Money.”

“It’s very academic,” Peters replied,
“but I will suggest it to my superiors. Are you coming with me?”

Leamas hesitated. Then he smiled a little
uncertainly and asked, “If I didn’t, what would you do? After all, I’ve
quite a story to tell, haven’t I?”

“Stories of that kind are hard to
substantiate. I shall be gone tonight. Ashe and Kiever…” He shrugged.
“What do they add up to?”

Leamas went to the window. A storm was gathering
over the gray
North Sea
. He watched the gulls
wheeling against the dark clouds. The girl had gone.

“All right,” he said at last, “fix
it up.”

“There’s no plane east until tomorrow. There’s
a flight to
Berlin
in an hour. We shall take that. It’s going to be very close.”

Leamas’ passive role that evening enabled him once
again to admire the unadorned efficiency of Peters’ arrangements. The passport
had been put together long
ago—Centre
must have thought of that. It was - made out in the name of Alexander Thwaite,
travel agent, and filled with visas and frontier stamps—the old,
well-fingered passport of the
professional traveler. The Dutch frontier guard at the airport just nodded and
stamped it for form’s sake—Peters was three or four behind him in the queue and
took no interest in the formalities.

As they entered the “passengers only”
enclosure Leamas caught sight of a bookstall. A selection of international
newspapers was on show:
Figaro
,
Monde
,
Neue Züricher
Zeitung
,
Die Welt
, and half a dozen British dailies and weeklies. As
he watched, the girl came around to
the front of the kiosk and pushed an
Evening
Standard
into the rack. Leamas hurried across to the bookstall and took the paper from
the rack.

“How much?” he asked. Thrusting his hand
into his trouser pocket he suddenly
realized
that he had no Dutch currency.

“Thirty cents,” the girl replied. She
was rather pretty; dark and jolly.

“I’ve only got two English shillings. That’s
a guilder. Will you take them?”

“Yes, please,” she replied, and Leamas
gave her the florin. He looked back.
Peters
was still at the passport desk, his back turned. Without hesitation Leamas made
straight for the men’s lavatory.
There he glanced rapidly but thoroughly at each page,
then shoved the paper in the litter basket and re-emerged. It
was true: there was his
photograph
with the vague little passage underneath. He wondered if Liz had seen it.
He made his way thoughtfully to the
passengers’ lounge. Ten minutes later they boarded the plane for
Hamburg
and
Berlin
. For the first
time since it all began.
Leamas
was frightened.

The men called on Liz the same evening. Liz Gold’s
room was at the northern end of Bayswater. It had a sofa-bed in it, and a gas
fire—rather a pretty one in
charcoal
gray, which made a modem hiss instead of an old-fashioned bubble. She used
to gaze into it sometimes when Leamas
was there, when the gas fire shed the only light in the room. He would lie on
the sofa, and she would sit beside him and kiss
him, or watch the gas fire with her face pressed against his.
She was afraid to think of him too much now because she had forgot what he
looked like, so she let her mind
think
of him for brief moments like running her eyes across a faint horizon, and then
she would remember some small thing he had said or done, some way he had looked
at her, or more often, ignored her. That was the terrible thing, when her mind
dwelled on it: she had nothing to remember him by—no photograph, no souvenir,
nothing. Not even a mutual friend—only Miss Crail in the library, whose hatred
of him had been vindicated by his spectacular departure. Liz had been around to
his room once and seen the landlord. She didn’t know why she did it quite, but
she plucked up courage and went. The landlord was very kind about Alec; Mr.
Leamas had paid his rent like a
gentleman,
right till the end, then there’d been a week or two owing and a chum of Mr.
Leamas’ had dropped in and paid up handsome, no queries or nothing. He’d always
said it of Mr. Leamas, always would, he
was a gent. Not public school, mind, nothing arsy-tansy but a real gent. He
liked to scowl a bit occasionally, and of course he
drank a drop more than was good for him, though he never acted
tight when he came
home. But
this little bloke who come round, funny little shy chap with specs,
he
said
Mr. Leamas had particularly requested, quite particularly, that the rent owing
should be settled up. And if
that
wasn’t gentlemanly, the landlord
was damned if he
knew what was.
Where he got the money from heaven knows, but that Mr. Leamas was a deep one
and no mistake. He only did to Ford the grocer what a good many had
been wanting
to do ever since the war.
The
room?
Yes, the room had been
taken—a
gentleman from
Korea
,
two days after they took Mr. Leamas away.

That was probably why she went on working at the
library—because there,
at least,
he still existed; the ladders, shelves, the books, the card index, were things
he had known and touched, and one day he might come back to them. He had said
he
would never come back, but
she didn’t believe it. It was like saying you would never get better to believe
a thing like that. Miss Crail thought he would come back: she had discovered
she owed him some money—wages underpaid—and it infuriated her that her monster
had been so unmonstrous as not to collect it. After Leamas had
gone, Liz had never given up asking
herself the same question; why had he hit Mr. Ford? She knew he had a terrible
temper, but that was different. He had intended to do it right from the start
as soon as he had got rid of his fever. Why else had he
said good-bye to her the night before? He knew that he would
hit Mr. Ford on the following day. She refused to accept the only other
possible interpretation: that he had
grown
tired of her and said good-bye, and the next day, still under the emotional
strain of their parting, had lost his
temper with Mr. Ford and struck him. She knew, she had always known, that there
was something Alec had got to do. He’d even told her that himself. What it was
she could only guess.

First, she thought he had a quarrel with Mr. Ford,
some deep-rooted hatred going back for years.
Something to do
with a girl, or Alec’s family perhaps.
But you only had to look at Mr.
Ford and it seemed ridiculous. He was the archetypal
petit-bourgeois
, cautious, complacent,
mean
.
And anyway, if Alec had a vendetta on
with
Mr. Ford, why did he go for him in the shop on a Saturday, in the middle of the
weekend shopping rush, when everyone
could see?

They’d talked about it in the meeting of her Party
branch. George Hanby, the
branch
treasurer, had actually been passing Ford the grocer’s as it happened, he
hadn’t
seen much because of the
crowd but he’d talked to a bloke who’d seen the whole thing. Hanby had been so
impressed that he’d rung the
Worker
, and they’d sent a man to the
trial—that was why the
Worker
had given it a middle-page spread, as
a matter of fact. It was just a
straight case of protest—of sudden social awareness and hatred against the boss
class, as the
Worker
said. This bloke that Hanby spoke
to (he was just a little, ordinary
chap with specs, white-collar type) said it had been so sudden—spontaneous was
what he meant—and it just proved to Hanby once again how incendiary was the
fabric of the capitalist system. Liz had kept very quiet while Hanby talked:
none of them knew, of course, about her and Leamas. She realized then
that she hated George Hanby; he was a
pompous, dirty-minded little man, always leering at her and trying to touch
her.

Then the men called.

She thought they were a little too smart for
policemen: they came in a small black car with an aerial on it. One was short
and rather plump. He had glasses and wore odd, expensive clothes; he was a
kindly, worried little man and Liz trusted him
somehow without knowing why. The other was smoother, but not
glossy—rather a boyish figure, although she guessed he wasn’t less than forty.
They said they came from Special Branch, and they had printed cards with
photographs in cellophane cases.
The
plump one did most of the talking.

“I believe you were friendly with Alec
Leamas,” he began. She was prepared to be angry, but the plump man was so
earnest that it seemed silly.

“Yes,” Liz answered. “How did you know?”

“We found out quite by chance the other day.
When you go to…prison, you
have
to give next of kin. Leamas said he hadn’t any. That was a lie, as a matter of
fact. They asked him whom they should inform if anything happened to him in
prison. He said you.”