The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (27 page)

He looked at the Tribunal. They watched him
impassively, curiously almost, their eyes steady and cold. Fiedler, who had
returned to his chair and was listening with rather studied detachment, looked
at Leamas blankly for a moment.

“And you messed it all up, Leamas, is that
it?” he asked. “An old dog like Leamas, engaged in the crowning
operation of his career, falls for a…what did you call her
?…
a
frustrated little girl in a crackpot library?
London
must have known; Smiley couldn’t have
done it alone.” Fiedler turned to Mundt. “Here’s an odd thing, Mundt;
they must have known you’d check up on every part of his story. That was why
Leamas lived the life. Yet afterwards they sent money to the grocer, paid up
the rent; and they bought the lease for the girl. Of all the extraordinary
things for them to do, people of their experience, to pay a thousand pounds to
a girl—
to
a member of the Party
— who was supposed to believe he was broke.
Don’t tell me Smiley’s conscience goes that far.
London
must have done it. What a risk!”

Leamas shrugged.

“Smiley was right. We couldn’t stop the
reaction. We never expected you to bring me here—
Holland
, yes—but not here.” He fell
silent for a moment, then continued. “And I never thought you’d bring the
girl. I’ve been a bloody fool.”

“But Mundt hasn’t,” Fiedler put in
quickly. “Mundt knew what to look for—he even knew the girl would provide
the proof—very clever of Mundt, I must say. He even knew about that lease—amazing
really. I mean, how
could
he have found out?
She didn’t tell anyone. I know that
girl,
I
understand her…she wouldn’t tell anyone at all.” He glanced toward
Mundt. “Perhaps Mundt can tell us how he knew?”

Mundt hesitated, a second too long, Leamas
thought.

“It was her subscription,” he said.
“A month ago she increased her Party contribution by ten shillings a
month. I heard about it. And so I tried to establish how she could afford it. I
succeeded.”

“A masterly explanation,” Fiedler
replied coolly.

There was silence.

“I think,” said the President, glancing
at her two colleagues, “that the Tribunal is now in a position to make its
report to the Präsidium. That is,” she added, turning
her small, cruel eyes on Fiedler,
“unless you have anything more to say.”

Fiedler shook his head. Something still seemed to
amuse him.

“In that case,” the President continued,
“my colleagues are agreed that
Comrade
Fiedler should be relieved of his duties until the disciplinary committee of
the Präsidium has considered his position.

“Leamas is already under arrest I would
remind you all that the Tribunal has no executive powers. The People’s
Prosecutor, in collaboration with Comrade Mundt,
will no doubt consider what action is to be taken against a
British
agent
provocateur
and
murderer.”

She glanced past Leamas at Mundt. But Mundt was
looking at Fiedler with the
dispassionate
regard of a hangman measuring his subject for the rope.

And suddenly, with the terrible clarity of a man
too long deceived, Leamas understood the whole ghastly tuck.

Liz stood at the window, her back to the wardress,
and stared blankly into the
tiny
yard outside. She supposed the prisoners took their exercise there. She was in
somebody’s office; there was food on
the desk beside the telephones but she couldn’t
touch it. She felt sick and terribly tired; physically tired.
Her legs ached, her face felt stiff and raw from weeping. She felt dirty and
longed for a bath.

“Why don’t you eat?” the woman asked
again. “It’s all over now.” She said this without compassion, as if
the girl were a fool not to eat when the food was
there.

“I’m not hungry.”

The wardress shrugged. “You may have a long
journey,” she observed, “and not much at the other end.”

“What do you mean?”

“The workers are starving in
England
,”
she declared complacently. “The capitalists let them starve.”

Liz thought of saying something but there seemed
no point. Besides, she wanted to know; she had to know, and this woman could
tell her.

“What is this place?”

“Don’t you know?” The wardress laughed.
“You should ask them over there.” She nodded toward the window.
“They can tell you what it is.”

“Who are they?”

“Prisoners.”

“What kind of prisoners?”

“Enemies of the state,” she replied
promptly.
“Spies, agitators.”

“How do you know they are spies?”

“The Party knows. The Party knows more about
people than they know
themselves.
Haven’t you been told that?” The wardress looked at her, shook her head
and observed, “The English! The
rich have eaten your future and your poor have given
them the food—that’s what’s happened to the English.”

“Who told you that?”

The woman smiled and said nothing. She seemed
pleased with herself.
“And
this is a prison for spies?” Liz persisted.

“It is a prison for those who fail to recognize
socialist reality; for those who think they have the right to err; for those
who slow down the march. Traitors,” she concluded briefly.

“But what have they done?”

“We cannot build communism without doing away
with individualism. You cannot plan a great building if some swine builds his
sty on your site.”

Liz looked at her in astonishment.

“Who told you all this?”

“I am Commissar here,” she said proudly.
“I work in the prison.”

“You are very clever,” Liz observed,
approaching her.

“I am a worker,” the woman replied
acidly. “The concept of brain workers as a higher category must be
destroyed. There are no categories, only workers; no antithesis between
physical and mental labor. Haven’t you read Lenin?”

“Then the people in this prison are
intellectuals?”

The woman smiled. “Yes,” she said,
“they are reactionaries who call
themselves
progressive: they defend the individual against the state. Do you know what
Khrushchev said about the counterrevolution in
Hungary
?”

Liz shook her head. She must show interest, she
must make the woman talk. “He said it would never have happened if a
couple of writers had been shot in
time.”

“Who will they shoot now?” Liz asked
quickly.
“After the trial?”

“Leamas,” she replied indifferently,
“and the Jew, Fiedler.” Liz thought for a
moment she was going to fall but her hand found the back of a
chair and she managed
to sit
down.

“What has Leamas done?” she whispered.
The woman looked at her with her
small,
cunning eyes. She was very large; her hair was scant, stretched over her head to
a bun at the nape of her thick neck. Her face was heavy, her complexion flaccid
and watery.

“He killed a guard,” she said.

“Why?”

The woman shrugged.

“As for the Jew,” she continued,
“he made an accusation against a loyal
comrade.”

“Will they shoot Fiedler for that?” asked Liz
incredulously.

“Jews are all the same,” the woman
commented. “Comrade Mundt knows what
to do with Jews. We don’t need their kind here. If they join the Party
they think it belongs to them. If they stay out, they think it is conspiring
against them. It is said that Leamas and Fiedler plotted together against
Mundt. Are you going to eat that?” she inquired, indicating the food on
the desk. Liz shook her head. “Then I must,” she
declared, with a grotesque attempt at
reluctance. “They have given you a potato. You
must have a lover in the kitchen.” The humor of this
observation sustained her until she had finished the last of Liz’s meal.

Liz went back to the window.

In the confusion of Liz’s mind, in the turmoil of
shame and grief and fear, there predominated the appalling memory of Leamas as
she had last seen him in the
courtroom,
sitting stiffly in his chair, his eyes averted from her own. She had failed him
and he dared not look at her before he died; would not let her see the contempt,
the fear
perhaps, that
was written on his face.

But how could she have done otherwise? If Leamas
had only told her what he
had to
do—even now it wasn’t clear to her—she would have lied and cheated for him,
anything, if he had only told her! Surely he understood that; surely he knew
her well enough to realize that in the end she would do whatever he said, that
she would take on his form and being, his will, life, his image, his pain, if
she could; that she prayed for nothing more than the chance to do so. But how
could she have known, if she was not told, how to answer those veiled,
insidious questions? There seemed no end to the destruction she had caused. She
remembered, in the fevered condition of her mind, how, as a child, she had been
horrified to learn that with every step she made, thousands of minute creatures
were destroyed beneath her foot; and now, whether she had lied or told the
truth—or even, she was sure, had kept silent—she had been forced to destroy a
human being; perhaps two, for was there not also the Jew, Fiedler, who had been
gentle with her, taken her arm and told her to go back to
England? They would shoot Fiedler;
that’s what the woman said. Why did it have to be Fiedler—why not the old man
who asked the questions, or the fair one in the front row between the soldiers,
the one who smiled all the time? Whenever she turned
around she had caught sight of his smooth, blond head and his
smooth, cruel face smiling as if it were all a great joke. It comforted her
that Leamas and Fiedler were on the same side.

She turned to the woman again and asked, “Why
are we waiting here?”
The
wardress pushed the plate aside and stood up.

“For instructions,” she replied.
“They are deciding whether you must stay.”
“Stay?” repeated Liz blankly.

“It is a question of evidence. Fiedler may be
tried. I told you: they suspect conspiracy between Fiedler and Leamas.”

“But who against?
How could he conspire in
England
?
How did he come here?
He’s not
in the Party.”

The woman shook her head.

“It is secret,” she replied. “It
concerns only the Präsidium. Perhaps the Jew
brought him here.”

“But
you
know,” Liz insisted, a note of
blandishment in her voice, “
you
are Commissar at the prison. Surely
they told
you?
”

“Perhaps,” the woman replied
complacently. “It is very secret,” she repeated.
The telephone rang. The woman lifted
the receiver and listened. After a
moment
she glanced at Liz.

“Yes, Comrade.
At
once,” she said, and put down the receiver. “You are to stay,”
she said shortly. “The Präsidium will consider the case of Fiedler. In the
meantime you will stay here. That is the wish of Comrade Mundt.”

“Who is Mundt?”

The woman looked cunning.

“It is the wish of the Präsidium,” she
said.

“I don’t want to stay,” Liz cried.
“I want—”

“The Party knows more about us than we know ourselves,”
the woman interrupted. “You must stay here. It is the Party’s wish.”

“Who is Mundt?” Liz asked again, but
still she did not reply.

Slowly Liz followed her along endless corridors,
through grilles manned by sentries, past iron doors from which no sound came,
down endless stairs, across whole
courtyards
far beneath the ground, until she thought she had descended to the bowels
of hell itself, and no one would even
tell her when Leamas was dead.

She had no idea what time it was when she heard the
footsteps in the corridor outside her cell. It could have been five in the
evening—it could have been
midnight
. She had been awake—staring
blankly into the pitch-darkness, longing for a
sound. She had never imagined that silence could be so
terrible. Once she had cried out, and there had been no echo, nothing.
Just the memory of her own voice.
She had
visualized the sound breaking against
the solid darkness like a fist against a rock. She
had moved her hands about her as she sat on the bed, and it
seemed to her that the
darkness
made them heavy, as if she were groping in the water. She knew the cell was
small; that it contained the bed on which she
sat,
a hand
basin without taps, and a
crude
table; she had seen them when she first entered. Then the light had gone out,
and she had run wildly to where she knew the bed had stood, had struck it with
her shins, and had remained there, shivering with fright. Until she heard the
footstep, and
the door of her
cell was opened abruptly.

She recognized him at once, although she could
only discern his silhouette against the pale blue light in the corridor.
The trim, agile figure, the clear line of the cheek and the short
fair hair just touched by the light behind him.

“It’s Mundt,” he said. “Come with
me, at once.” His voice was contemptuous yet subdued, as if he were not
anxious to be overheard.

Liz was suddenly terrified. She remembered the
wardress: “Mundt knows what
to
do with Jews.” She stood by the bed, staring at him, not knowing what to
do.

“Hurry, you fool.” Mundt had stepped
forward and seized her wrist.
“Hurry.”
She
let herself be drawn into the corridor. Bewildered, she watched Mundt quietly
relock the door of her cell. Roughly he took her arm and forced her quickly
along the first corridor, half running,
half
walking.
She could hear the distant whirr of air
conditioners; and now and then the sound of other footsteps from
passages branching
from their
own. She noticed that Mundt hesitated, drew back even, when they came upon
other corridors, would go ahead and confirm that no one was coming,
then
signal
her
forward. He seemed to assume that she would follow, that she knew the reason.
It
was almost as if he were
treating her as an accomplice.