Fiedler nodded. "That is a viewpoint I understand. It is primitive, negative and very stupid--but it is a viewpoint, it exists. But what about the rest of the Circus?"
"I don"t know. How should I know?"
"Have you never discussed philosophy with them?"
"No. We"re not Germans." He hesitated, then added vaguely: "I suppose they don"t like Communism."
"And that justifies, for instance, the taking of human life? That justifies the bomb in the crowded restaurant; that justifies your write-off rate of agents--all that?"
Leamas shrugged. "I suppose so."
"You see, for us it does," Fiedler continued. "I myself would have put a bomb in a restaurant if it brought us farther along the road. Afterwards I would draw the balance--so many women, so many children; and so far along the road. But Christians--and yours is a Christian society--Christians may not draw the balance."
"Why not? They"ve got to defend themselves, haveji"t they?"
"But they believe in the sanct.i.ty of human life. They believe every man has a soul which can be saved. They believe in sacrifice."
"I don"t know. I don"t much care," Leamas added. "Stalin didn"t either, did he?"
Fiedler smiled. "I like the English," he said, almost to himself; "my father did too. He was very fond of the English."
"That gives me a nice, warm feeling," Leamas retorted and lapsed into silence.
They stopped while Fiedler gave Leamas a cigarette and lit it for him. - They were climbing steeply now. Leamas liked the exercise, walking ahead with long strides, his shoulders thrust forward. Fiedler followed, slight and agile, like a terrier behind his master. They must have been walking for an hour, perhaps more, when suddenly the trees broke above them and the sky appeared. They had reached the top of a small hill, and could look down on the solid ma.s.s of pine broken only here and there by gray cl.u.s.ters of beach. Across the valley Leamas could glimpse the hunting lodge, perched below the crest of the opposite hill, low and dark against the trees. In the middle of the clearing was a rough bench beside a pile of logs and the damp remnants of a charcoal fire.
"We"ll sit down for a moment," said Fiedler, "then we must go back." He paused. "Tell me: this money, these large sums in foreign banks--what did you think they were for?"
"What do you mean? I"ve told you, they were payments to an agent."
"An agent from behind the Iron Curtain?"
"Yes, I thought so," Leamas replied wearily.
"Why did you think so?"
"First, it was a h.e.l.l of a lot of money. Then the complications of paying him; the special security. And of course, Control being mixed up in it."
"What do you think the agent did with the money?"
"Look, I"ve told you--I don"t know. I don"t even know if he collected it. I didn"t know anything--I was just the b.l.o.o.d.y office boy."
"What did you do with the pa.s.sbooks for the accounts?"
"I handed them in as soon as I got back to London--together with my phony pa.s.sport."
"Did the Copenhagen or Helsinki banks ever write to you in London--to your alias, I mean?"
"I don"t know. I suppose any letters would have been pa.s.sed straight to Control anyway."
"The false signatures you used to open the accounts--Control had a sample of them?"
"Yes. I practiced them a lot and they had samples."
"More than one?"
"Yes. Whole pages."
"I see. Then letters could have gone to the banks after you had opened the accounts. You need not have known. The signatures could have been forged and the letters sent without your knowledge."
"Yes. That"s right. I suppose that"s what happened. I signed a lot of blank sheets too. I always a.s.sumed someone else took care of the correspondence."
"But you never did actually _know_ of such correspondence?"
Leamas shook his head. "You"ve got it all wrong," he said, "you"ve got it all out of proportion. There was a lot of paper going around--this was just part of the day"s work. It wasn"t something I gave much thought to. Why should I? It was hush-hush, but I"ve been in on things all my life where you only know a little and someone else knows the rest. Besides, paper bores me stiff. I didn"t lose any sleep over it. I liked the trips of course--I drew operational subsistence which helped. But I didn"t sit at my desk all day, wondering about Rolling Stone. Besides," he added a little shamefacedly, "I was. .h.i.tting the bottle a bit."
"So you said," Fiedler commented, "and of course, I believe you."
"I don"t give a d.a.m.n whether you believe me or not," Leamas rejoined hotly.
Fiedler smiled.
"I am glad. That is your virtue," he said, "that is your great virtue. It is the virtue of indifference. A little resentment here, a little pride there, but that is nothing: the distortions of a tape recorder. You are objective. It occurred to me," Fiedler continued after a slight pause, "that you could still help us to establish whether any of that money was ever drawn. There is nothing to stop you writing to each bank and asking for a current statement. We could say you were staying in Switzerland; use an accommodation address. Do you see any objection to that?"
"It might work. It depends on whether Control has been corresponding with the bank independently, over my forged signature. It might not fit in."
"I do not see that we have much to lose."
"What have you got to win?"
"If the money has been drawn, which I agree is doubtful, we shall know where the agent was on a certain day. That seems to be a useful thing to know."
"You"re dreaming. You"ll never find him, Fiedler, not on that kind of information. Once he"s in the West he can go to any consulate, even in a small town and get a visa for another country. How are you any the wiser? You don"t even know whether the man is East German. What are you after?"
Fiedler did not answer at once. He was gazing distractedly across the valley. - "You said you are accustomed to knowing only a little, and I cannot answer your question without telling you what you should not know." He hesitated: "But Rolling Stone was an operation agamst us, I can a.s.sure you.,"
"Us?"
"The GDR." He smiled. "The Zone if you prefer. I am not really so sensitive."
He was watching Fiedler now, his brown eyes restmg on him reflectively.
"But what about me?" Learnas asked. "Suppose I don"t write the letters?" His voice was rising. "Isn"t it time to talk about me, Fiedler?"
Fiedler nodded. "Why not?" he replied, agreeably.
There was a moment"s silence, then Leamas said, "Fve done my bit, Fiedler. You and Peters between you have got all I know. I never agreed to write letters to banks-it could be b.l.o.o.d.y dangerous, a thing like that. That doesn"t worry you, I know. As far as you"re concerned I"m expendable."
"Now let me be frank," Fiedler replied. "There are, as you know, two stages in the interrogation of a defector. The first stage in your case is nearly complete: you have told us all we can reasonably record. You have not - told us whether your Service favors pins or paper clips because we haven"t asked you, and because you did not consider the answer worth volunteering. There is a process on both sides of unconscious selection. Now it is always possible--and this is the worrying thing, Leamas--it is always entirely possible that in a month or two we shall unexpectedly and quite desperately need to know about the pins and paper clips. That is normally accounted for in the second stage-- that part of the bargain which you refused to accept in Holland." - "You mean you"re going to keep me on ice?"
"The profession of defector," Fiedler observed with a smile, "demands great patience. Very few are suitably qualified."
"How long?" Leamas insisted.
Fiedler was silent.
"Well?"
Fiedler spoke with sudden urgency. "I give you my word that as soon as I possibly can, I will tell you the answer to your question. Look--I could lie to you, couldn"t I? I could say one month or less, just to keep you sweet. But I am telling you I don"t know because that is the truth. You have given us some indications: until we have run them to earth I cannot listen to talk of letting you go. But afterwards, if things are as I think they are, you will need a friend and that friend will be me. I give you my word as a German."
Leamas was so taken aback that for a moment he was silent.
"All right," he said finally, "I"ll play, Fiedler, but if you are stringing me along, somehow I"ll break your neck."
"That may not be necessary," Fiedler replied evenly.
A man who lives a part, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious psychological dangers. In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional _expertise_, it is a facility most of us can acquire. But while a confidence trickster, a play-actor or a gambler can return from his performance to the ranks of his admirers, the secret agent enjoys no such relief. For him, deception is first a matter of self-defense. He must protect himself not only from without but from within, and against the most natural of impulses: though he earn a fortune, his role may forbid him the purchase of a razor; though he be erudite, it can befall him to mumble nothing but ba.n.a.lities; though be be an affectionate husband and father, he must under all circ.u.mstances withhold himself from those in whom he should naturally confide. - Aware of the overwhelming temptations which a.s.sail a man permanently isolated in his deceit, Leamas resorted to the course which armed him best; even when he was alone, he compelled himself to live with the personality he had a.s.sumed. It is said that Balzac on his deathbed inquired anxiously after the health and prosperity of characters be had created. Similarly Leamas, without relinquishing the power of invention, identified himself with what he had invented. The qualities he exhibited to Fiedler, the restless uncertainty, the protective arrogance concealing shame, were not approximations but extensions of qualities he actually possessed; hence also the slight dragging of the feet, the aspect of personal neglect, the indifference to food, and an increasing reliance on alcohol and tobacco. When alone, he remained faithful to these habits. He would even exaggerate them a little, mumbling to himself about the iniquities of his Service.
Only very rarely, as now, going to bed that evening, did he allow himself the dangerous luxury of admitting the great lie he lived.
Control had been phenomenally right. Fiedler was walking, like a man led in his sleep, into the net which Control had spread for him. It was uncanny to observe the growing ident.i.ty of interest between Fiedler and Control: it was as if they had agreed on the same plan, and Leamas had been dispatched to fulfill it.
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 G.o.d 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/o Madame 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 a.s.sume 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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. Mnndt b.l.o.o.d.y 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."