The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (16 page)

“Well, you’ve boobed. I know damn all—and
you’re welcome to it.”

There was a silence, during which Peters, with an
abrupt and by no means friendly nod in Fiedler’s direction, quietly let himself
out of the room.

Fiedler picked up the bottle of whisky and poured a little into
each glass.

“We have no soda, I’m afraid,” he said.
“Do you like water? I ordered soda, but they brought some wretched
lemonade.”

“Oh, go to hell,” said Leamas. He suddenly felt very
tired.

Fiedler shook his head.

“You are a very proud man,” he observed,
“but never mind. Eat your supper and go to bed.”

One of the guards came in with a tray of food—
black bread, sausage and cold green salad.

“It is a little crude,” said Fiedler,
“but quite satisfying. No potato, I’m afraid. There is a temporary
shortage of potatoes.”

They began eating in silence, Fiedler very
carefully, like a man who counted his calories.

The guards showed Leamas to his bedroom. They let
him carry his own
luggage—the
same luggage that Kiever had given him before he left
England
—and he
walked between them along the wide central corridor which led through the house
from the front door. They came to a
large double door, painted dark green, and one of
the guards unlocked it; they beckoned to Leamas to go first. He
pushed open the door
and- found
himself in a small barrack bedroom with two bunk beds, a chair and a
rudimentary desk. It was like something in prison camp. There were pictures of
girls on the walls and the windows were shuttered. At the far end of the room
was another
door. They signaled
him forward again. Putting down his baggage, he went and opened
the door. The second room was
identical to the first, but there was one bed and the walls were bare.

“You bring those cases,” he said. “I’m
tired.” He lay on the bed, fully dressed,
and within a few minutes he was fast asleep.

A sentry woke him with breakfast: black bread and
Ersatz
coffee. He got out of bed and went to the window.

The house stood on a high bill. The ground fell
steeply away from beneath his
window,
the crowns of pine trees visible above the crest. Beyond them, spectacular in
their symmetry, unending hills, heavy
with trees, stretched into the distance. Here and
there a timber gully or firebreak formed a thin brown divide
between the pines,
seeming like
Aaron’s rod miraculously to hold apart massive seas of encroaching forest.
There was no sign of man; not a house or church, not even the ruin of some
previous habitation—only the road,
the yellow dirt road, a crayon line across the
basin of the valley. There was no sound. It seemed incredible
that anything so vast could be so still. The day was cold but clear. It must
have rained in the night; the ground was moist, and the whole landscape so
sharply defined against the white sky that Leamas could distinguish even single
trees on the farthest hills.

He dressed slowly, drinking the sour coffee
meanwhile. He had nearly finished
dressing
and was about to start eating the bread when Fiedler came into the room.

“Good morning,” he said cheerfully.
“Don’t let me keep you from your breakfast.” He sat down on the bed.
Leamas had to hand it to Fiedler; he had guts. Not that there was anything
brave about coming to see him—the sentries, Leamas supposed, were still in the
adjoining room. But there was
an endurance
, a defined
purpose in his manner which Leamas could sense and admire.

“You have presented us with an intriguing
problem,” Fiedler observed.
“I’ve
told you all I know.”

“Oh no.”
He
smiled. “Oh no, you haven’t. You have told us all you are
conscious
of knowing.”

“Bloody clever,” Leamas muttered,
pushing his food aside and lighting a cigarette—his last.

“Let me ask
you
a question,” Fiedler
suggested with the exaggerated
bonhomie
of a man proposing a party game. “As an experienced intelligence officer, what
would
you
do with the information you have given us?”

“What information?”

“My dear Leamas, you have only given us one piece of
intelligence. You have told us about Riemeck: we knew about Riemeck. You have
told us about the dispositions of your
Berlin
organization, about its personalities and its agents. That, if I may say so, is
old hat.
Accurate—yes.
Good background, fascinating
reading, here and there good collateral, here and there a little fish which we
shall take out of the pool.
But not— if I may be crude—not
fifteen thousand pounds’ worth of intelligence.
Not,” he smiled
again, “at current rates.”

“Listen,” said Leamas, “I didn’t
propose this deal— you did.
You, Kiever and Peters.
I
didn’t come crawling to your sissy Mends, peddling old intelligence. You
people made the running, Fiedler; you
named the price and took the risk. Apart from that, I haven’t had a bloody
penny. So don’t blame me if the operation’s a flop.” Make them come to
you, Leamas thought.

“It isn’t a flop,” Fiedler replied,
“
it
isn’t finished. It can’t be. You haven’t told
us what you
know
. I said you had given us one piece of intelligence. I’m
talking about Rolling Stone. Let me ask you again—what would
you
do
if I, if Peters or someone like us, had told
you
a similar story?”

Leamas shrugged. “I’d feel uneasy,” he said. “It’s
happened before. You get an indication, several perhaps, that there’s a spy in
some department or at a certain level. So what? You can’t arrest the whole
government service. You can’t lay traps for a whole department. You just sit
tight and hope for more. You bear it in mind. In Rolling Stone you can’t even
tell what country he’s working in.”

“You are an operator, Leamas,” Fiedler
observed with a laugh, “not an evaluator. That is clear. Let me ask you
some elementary questions.”

Leamas said nothing.

“The file—the actual file on operation Rolling Stone. What
color was it?” “Gray with a red cross on it—that means limited
subscription.”

“Was anything attached to the outside?”

“Yes, the Caveat. That’s the subscription
label. With a legend saying that any
unauthorized
person not named on this label finding the file in his possession must at once
return it unopened to Banking Section.”

“Who was on the subscription list?”

“For Rolling Stone?”

“Yes.”

“P.A. to Control, Control,
Control’s secretary; Banking Section, Miss Bream of
Special Registry and Satellites Four.
That’s all, I
think. And Special Dispatch, I
suppose—I’m
not sure about them.”

“Satellites Four?
What do they do?”

“Iron Curtain countries
excluding the
Soviet Union
and
China
.
The Zone.”
“You
mean the GDR?”

“I mean the Zone.”

“Isn’t it unusual for a whole section to be
on a subscription list?”

“Yes, it probably is. I wouldn’t know—I’ve
never handled limited subscription stuff before. Except in
Berlin
, of course; it was all different
there.”

“Who was in Satellites Four at that
time?”

“Oh, God.
Guillam,
Haverlake, de long, I think. De Jong was just back from
Berlin
.”

“Were they
all
allowed to see this
file?”

“I don’t know, Fiedler,” Leamas retorted
irritably, “and if I were you…”
“Then isn’t it odd that a whole section was on the
subscription list while all the rest of the subscribers are individuals?”

“I tell you I don’t know—how could I know? I
was just a clerk in all this.” “Who carried the file from one
subscriber to another?”

“Secretaries, I suppose—I can’t remember.
It’s
bloody months since…”

“Then why weren’t the secretaries on the
list? Control’s secretary was.” There
was a moment’s silence.

“No, you’re right; I remember now,” Leamas
said, a note of surprise in his voice. “We passed it by hand.”

“Who else in Banking dealt with that file?”

“No one.
It was my
pigeon when I joined the Section. One of the women had done it before, but when
I came I took it over and they were taken off the list.”
“Then you alone passed the file
by hand to the next reader?”

“Yes…yes, I suppose I did.”

“To whom did you pass it?”

“I…I can’t remember.”

“
Think!
”
Fiedler had not raised his voice, but it contained a sudden urgency which took
Leamas by surprise.

“To Control’s P.A., I think, to show what
action we had taken or
recommended.”

“Who brought the file?”

“What do you mean?” Leamas sounded off
balance.

“Who brought you the file to read? Somebody on the list must
have brought it to you.”

Leamas’ fingers touched his cheek for a moment in
an involuntary nervous gesture.

“Yes, they must. It’s difficult, you see,
Fiedler; I was putting back a lot of drink in those days.” His tone was
oddly conciliatory. “You don’t realize how hard it is
to…”

“I ask you again. Think. Who brought you the
file?”

Leamas sat down at the table and shook his head.

“I can’t remember. It may come back to me. At
the moment I just can’t remember, really I can’t. It’s no good chasing
it.”

“It can’t have been Control’s girl, can it?
You always handed the file
back
to
Control P.A. You said so. So those on the list must all have
seen it
before
Control.” “Yes, that’s it, I suppose.”

“Then there is Special Registry, Miss
Bream.”

“She was just the woman who ran the strong
room for subscription list files. That’s where the file was kept when it wasn’t
in action.”

“Then,” said Fiedler silkily, “it
must have been Satellites
Four
who brought it,
mustn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it must,” said Leamas
helplessly, as if he were not quite up to Fiedler’s brilliance.

“Which floor did Satellites Four work on?”

“The second.”

“And Banking?”

“The fourth.
Next
to Special Registry.”

“Do you remember
who
brought it up? Or do you
remember, for instance, going downstairs ever to collect the file from
them?”

In despair, Leamas shook his head. Then suddenly
he turned to Fiedler and cried: “Yes, yes I do! Of course I do! I got it
from Peter!” Leamas seemed to have waked up: his face was flushed,
excited. “That’s it: I once collected the file from Peter in his room. We
chatted together about
Norway
.
We’d served there together, you
see.”
 

“Peter Guillam?”

“Yes, Peter—I’d forgotten about him. He’d
come back from
Ankara
a few months before. He was on the list! Peter was—of course! That’s it. It was
Satellites Four and PG in brackets, Peter’s initials. Someone else had done it
before and Special
Registry had
glued a bit of white paper over the old name and put in Peter’s initials.”

“What territory did Guillam cover?”

“The Zone.
East Germany
.
Economic stuff; ran a small section, sort of backwater. He was the chap. He
brought the file up to me once too, I remember that now. He didn’t run agents
though. I don’t quite know how he came into it—Peter and a couple of others
were doing some research job on food shortages.
Evaluation really.”

“Did you not discuss it with him?”

“No, that’s taboo. It isn’t done with
subscription files, I got a homily from the
woman in Special Registry about it—Bream—no discussion, no
questions.”

“But taking into account the elaborate
security precautions surrounding Rolling
Stone, it is possible, is it not, that Guillam’s so-called research job
might have
involved the partial
running of this agent, Rolling Stone?”

“I’ve told Peters,” Leamas almost
shouted, banging his fist on the desk, “it’s just bloody silly to imagine
that any operation could have been run against
East Germany
without my knowledge—without
the knowledge of the
Berlin
organization. I would have known, don’t you see? How many times do I have to
say that? I would have known!”

“Quite so,” said Fiedler softly,
“of course you would.” He stood up and went to the window.

“You should see it in the autumn,” he said, looking
out. “It’s magnificent when the beeches are on the turn.”

Fiedler loved to ask questions. Sometimes, because
he was a lawyer, he asked
them
for his own pleasure alone, to demonstrate the discrepancy between evidence and
perfective truth. He possessed, however, that persistent inquisitiveness which
for journalists and lawyers is an end in itself.

They went for a walk that afternoon, following the
gravel road down into the
valley,
then
branching into the forest along a broad, pitted
track lined with felled
timber.
All the time, Fiedler probed, giving nothing. About the building in Cambridge
Circus, and the people who worked
there. What social class did they come from, what parts of
London
did they inhabit, did husbands and
wives work in the same Departments? He asked about the pay, the leave, the
morale, the canteen; he asked about their love-life, their gossip, their
philosophy. Most of all he asked about their philosophy.