John Le Carré - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

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The story of a perilous assignment for the agent who wants to desperately end his career of espionage — to come in from the cold.

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Perhaps that was the answer. Perhaps Fiedler was the special interest Control was fighting so desperately to preserve. Leamas didn't dwell on that possibility. He did not want to know. In matters of that kind he was wholly uninquisitive: he knew that no conceivable good could come of his deductions. Nevertheless, he hoped to God it was true. It was possible, just possible in that case, that he would get home.

14

Letter to a Client

Leamas was still in bed the next morning when Fiedler brought him the letters to sign. One was on the thin blue writing paper of the Seller Hotel Alpenblick, Lake Spiez, Switzerland, the other from the Palace Hotel, Gstaad.

Leamas read the first letter:

To the Manager,

The Royal Scandinavian Bank Ltd., Copenhagen.

Dear Sir,

I have been traveling for some weeks and have not received any mail from England. Accordingly I have not had your reply to my letter of March 3rd requesting a current statement of the deposit account of which I am a joint signatory with Herr Karlsdorf. To avoid further delay, would you be good enough to forward a duplicate statement to me at the following address, where I shall be staying for two weeks beginning April 21st:

c/oMadame Y. de Sanglot,

13 Avenue des Colombes,

Paris XII,

France.

I apologize for this confusion,

Yours faithfully,

(Robert Lang)

"What's all this about a letter of March third?" he asked. "I didn't write them any letter."

"No, you didn't. As far as we know, no one did. That will worry the bank. If there is any inconsistency between the letter we are sending them now and letters they have had from Control, they will assume the solution is to be found in the missing letter of March third. Their reaction will be to send you the statement as you ask, with a covering note regretting that they have not received your letter of the third."

The second letter was the same as the first; only the names were different. The address in Paris was the same. Leamas took a blank piece of paper and his fountain pen and wrote half a dozen times in a fluent hand "Robert Lang," then signed the first letter. Sloping his pen backwards he practiced the second signature until he was satisfied with it, then wrote "Stephen Bennett" under the second letter.

"Admirable," Fiedler observed, "quite admirable."

"What do we do now?"

"They will be posted in Switzerland tomorrow, in Interlaken and Gstaad. Our people in Paris will telegraph the replies to me as soon as they arrive. We shall have the answer in a week."

"And until then?"

"We shall be constantly in one another's company. I know that is distasteful to you, and I apologize. I thought we could go for walks, drive around in the hills a bit, kill time. I want you to relax and talk; talk about London, about Cambridge Circus and working in the Department; tell me the gossip, talk about the pay, the leave, the rooms, the paper and the people. The pins and the paper clips. I want to know all the little things that don't matter. Incidentally..." A change of tone.

"Yes?"

"We have facilities here for people who...for people who are spending some time with us. Facilities for diversion and so on."

"Are you offering me a woman?" he asked.

"Yes."

"No thank you. Unlike you, I haven't reached the stage where I need a pimp." Fiedler seemed indifferent to his reply. He went on quickly.

"But you had a woman in England didn't you— the girl in the library?" Leamas turned on him, his hands open at his sides.

"One thing!" he shouted. "Just that one thing— don't ever mention that again, not as a joke, not as a threat, not even to turn the screws, Fiedler, because it won't work, not ever; I'd dry up, do you see, you'd never get another bloody word from me as long as I lived. Tell that to them, Fiedler, to Mundt and Stammberger or whichever little alley-cat told you to say it— tell them what I said."

"I'll tell them," Fiedler replied. "I'll tell them. It may be too late."

* * *

In the afternoon they went walking again. The sky was dark and heavy, and the air warm.

"I've only been to England once," Fiedler observed casually. "That was on my way to Canada, with my parents before the war. I was a child then of course. We were there for two days."

Leamas nodded.

"I can tell you this now," Fiedler continued. "I nearly went there a few years back. I was going to replace Mundt on the Steel Mission—did you know he was once in London?"

"I knew," Leamas replied cryptically.

"I always wondered what it would have been like, that job."

"Usual game of mixing with the other Bloc Missions, I suppose. Certain amount of contact with British business—not much of that." Leamas sounded bored.

"But Mundt got about all right: he found it quite easy."

"So I hear," said Leamas; "he even managed to kill a couple of people."

"So you heard about that too?"

"From Peter Guillam. He was in on it with George Smiley. Mundt bloody nearly killed George as well."

"The Fennan Case," Fiedler mused. "It was amazing that Mundt managed to escape at all, wasn't it?"

"I suppose it was."

"You wouldn't think that a man whose photograph and personal particulars were filed at the Foreign Office as a member of a Foreign Mission would have a chance against the whole of British Security."

"From what I hear," Leamas said, "they weren't too keen to catch him anyway."

Fiedler stopped abruptly. "What did you say?"

"Peter Guillam told me he didn't reckon they wanted to catch Mundt, that's all I said. We had a different setup then—an Adviser instead of an Operational Control—a man called Maston. Maston had made a bloody awful mess of the Fennan Case from the start, that's what Guillam said. Peter reckoned that if they'd caught Mundt it would have made a hell of a stink—they'd have tried him and probably hanged him. The dirt that came out in the process would have finished Maston's career. Peter never knew quite what happened, but he was bloody sure there was no full-scale search for Mundt."

"You are sure of that, you are sure Guillam told you that in so many words? No full-scale search?"

"Of course I am sure."

"Guillam never suggested any other reason why they might have let Mundt go?"

"What do you mean?"

Fiedler shook his head and they walked on along the path.

"The Steel Mission was closed down after the Fennan Case," Fiedler observed a moment later, "that's why I didn't go."

"Mundt must have been mad. You may be able to get away with assassination in the Balkans—-or here— but not London."

"He did get away with it though, didn't he?" Fiedler put in quickly. "And he did good work."

"Like recruiting Kiever and Ashe? God help him."

"They ran the Fennan woman for long enough."

Leamas shrugged.

"Tell me something else about Karl Riemeck," Fiedler began again. "He met Control once, didn't he?"

"Yes, in Berlin about a year ago, maybe a bit more."

"Where did they meet?"

"We all met together in my flat."

"Why?"

"Control loved to come in on success. We'd got a hell of a lot of good stuff from Karl—I suppose it had gone down well with London. He came out on a short trip to Berlin and asked me to fix it up for them to meet."

"Did you mind?"

"Why should I?"

"He was your agent. You might not have liked him to meet other operators."

"Control isn't an operator, he's head of Department. Karl knew that and it tickled his vanity."

"Were you all three together, all the time?"

"Yes. Well, not quite. I left them alone for a quarter of an hour or so—not more. Control wanted that— he wanted a few minutes alone with Karl, God knows why, so I left the flat on some excuse, I forget what. Oh—I know, I pretended we'd run out of Scotch. I actually went and collected a bottle from de Jong, in fact."

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