"Yes," said Fiedler, "he is a b.a.s.t.a.r.d." He seemed excited; he wants to boast to somebody, thought Leamas.
"I thought a lot about you," Fiedler added. "I thought about that talk we had--you remember-- about the motor."
"What motor?"
Fiedler smiled. "I"m sorry, that is a direct translation. I mean "_Motor_," the engine, spirit, urge; whatever Christians call it."
"I"m not a Christian."
Fiedler shrugged. "You know what I mean." He smiled again. "The thing that embarra.s.ses you. . . . I"ll put it another way. Suppose Mundt is right? He asked me to confess, you know; I was to confess that I was in league with British spies who were plotting to murder him. You see the argument--that the whole operation was mounted by British Intelligence in order to entice us--me, if you like--into liquidating the best man in the Abteilung. To turn, our own weapon against us."
"He tried that on me," said Leamas indifferently. And he added, "As if I"d cooked up the whole b.l.o.o.d.y story."
"But what I mean is this: suppose you had done that, suppose it were true--I am taking an example, you understand, a hypothesis, would you kill a man, an innocent man--"
"Mundt"s a killer himself."
"Suppose he wasn"t. Suppose it were me they wanted to kill: would London do it?"
"It depends. It depends on the need. . . ."
"Ah," said Fiedler contentedly, "it depends on the need. Like Stalin, in fact. The traffic accident and the statistics. That is a great relief."
"Why?"
"You must get some sleep," said Fiedler. "Order what food you want. They wifi bring you whatever you want. Tomorrow you can talk." As he reached the door he looked back and said, "We"re all the same, you know, that"s the joke."
Soon Leamas was asleep, content in the knowledge that Fiedler was his ally and that they would shortly send Mundt to his death. That was something which he had looked forward to for a very long time.
* * 19 * Branch Meeting
Liz was happy in Leipzig. Austerity pleased her--it gave her the comfort of sacrifice. The little house she stayed in was dark and meager, the food was poor and most of it had to go to the chilthen. They talked politics at every meal, she and Frau Luman, Branch Secretary for the Ward Branch of Leipzig-Neuenhagen, a small gray woman whose husband managed a gravel quarry on the outskirts of the city. It was like living in a religious community, Liz thought; a convent or a kibbutz or something. You felt the world was better for your empty stomach. Liz had some German which she had learned from her aunt, and she was surprised how quickly she was able to use it. She tried it on the children first and they grinned and helped her. The children treated her oddly to begin with, as if she were a person of great quality or rarity value, and on the third day one of them plucked up courage and asked her if she had brought any chocolate from "_druben_"--from "over there." She"d never thought of that and she felt ashamed. Alter that they seemed to forget about her.
In the evenings there was Party work. They distributed literature, visited Branch members who had defaulted on their dues or lagged behind in their attendance at meetings, called in at District for a discussion on "Problems Connected with the Centralized Distribution of Agricultural Produce" at which all local Branch Secretaries were present, and attended a meeting of the Workers" Consultative Council of a machine tool factory on the outskirts of the town.
At last, on the fourth day, a Thursday, came their own Branch Meeting. This was to be, for Liz at least, the most exhilarating experience of all; it would be an example of all that her own Branch in Bayswater could one day be. They had chosen a wonderful t.i.tle for the evening"s discussions--"Coexistence After Two Wars"--and they expected a record attendance. The whole ward had been circularized; they had taken care to see that there was no rival meeting in the neighborhood that evening; it was not a late shopping day.
Seven people came.
Seven people and Liz and the Branch Secretary and the man from District. Liz put a brave face on it but she was terribly upset. She could scarcely concentrate on the speaker, and when she tried he used long German compounds that she couldn"t work out anyway. It was like the meetings in Bayswater, it was like midweek evensong when she used to go to church--the same dutiful little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people. She always felt the same thing--it was awful really but she did--she wished no one would turn up, because that was absolute and it suggested persecution, humiliation--it was something you could react to.
But seven people were nothing: they were worse than nothing, because they were evidence of the inertia of the uncapturable ma.s.s. They broke your heart.
The room was better than the schoolroom in Bayswater, but even that was no comfort. In Bayswater it had been fun trying to find a room. In the early days they had pretended they were something else, not the Party at all. They"d taken back rooms in pubs, a committee room at the Ardena Caf& or met secretly in one another"s houses. Then Bill Hazel had joined from the Secondary School and they"d used his cla.s.sroom. Even that was a risk--the headmaster thought Bifi ran a drama group, so theoretically at least they might still be chucked out. Somehow that fitted better than this Peace Hall in pre-cast concrete with the cracks in the corners and the picture of Lenin. Why did they have that silly frame thing all around the picture? Bundles of organ pipes sprouting from the corners and the bunting all dusty. It looked like something from a fascist funeral. Sometimes she thought Alec was right--you believed in things because you needed to; what you believed in had no value of its own, no function. What did he say? "A dog scratches where it itches. Different dogs itch in different places." No, it was wrong, Alec was wrong--it was a wicked thing to say. Peace and freedom and equality--they were facts, of course they were. And what about history--all those laws the Party proved? No, Alec was wrong: truth existed outside people, it was demonstrated in history, individuals must bow to it, be crushed by it if necessary. The Party was the vanguard of history, the spearpoint in the fight for Peace . . . She went over the rubric a little uncertainly. She wished more people had come. Seven was so few. They looked so cross; cross and hungry.
The meeting over, Liz waited for Frau Luman to collect the unsold literature from the heavy table by the door, fill in her attendance book and put on her coat, for it was cold that evening. The speaker had left-- rather rudely, Liz thought--before the general discussion. Frau Luman was standing at the door with her hand on the light switch when a man appeared out of the darkness, framed in the doorway. Just for a moment Liz thought it was Ashe. He was tall and fair and wore one of those raincoats with leather b.u.t.tons.
"Comrade Luman?" he inquired.
"Yes?"
"I am looking for an English Comrade, Gold. She is staying with you?"
"I"m Elizabeth Gold," Liz put in, and the man came into the hail, closing the door behind him so that the light shone full upon his face.
"I am Halten from District." He showed some paper to Frau Luman who was still standing at the door, and she nodded and glanced a little anxiously toward Liz.
"I have been asked to give a message to Comrade Gold from the Praesidium," he said. "It concerns an alteration in your program; an invitation to attend a special meeting."
"Oh," said Liz rather stupidly. It seemed fantastic that the Praesidium should even have heard of her.
"It is a gesture," Halten said. "A gesture of goodwill."
"But I.. . but Frau Luman.. ." Liz began, help.lessly.
"Comrade Luman, I am sure, will forgive you under the circ.u.mstances." - "Of course," said Frau Luman quickly.
"Where is the meeting to be held?"
"It will necessitate your leaving tonight," Halten replied. "We have a long way to go. Nearly to Gorlitz."
"To Gorlitz. . . . Where is that?"
"East," said Frau Luman quickly. "On the Polish border."
"We can drive you home now. You can collect your things and we will continue the journey at once."
"Tonight? Now?"
"Yes." Halten didn"t seem to consider Liz had much choice.
A large black car was waiting for them. There was a driver in the front and a flag post on the hood. It looked like a military car.
* * 20 * Tribunal
The court was no larger than a schoolroom. At one end, on the mere five or six benches which were provided, sat guards and warders and here and there among them spectators--members of the Praesidium and selected officials. At the other end of the room sat the three members of the Tribunal on tall-backed chairs at an unpolished oak table. Above them, suspended from the ceiling by three loops of wire, was a large red star made of plywood. The walls of the courtroom were white like the walls of Leamas" cell.
On either side, their chairs a little forward of the table and turned inwards to face one another, sat two men: one was middle-aged, sixty perhaps, in a black suit and a gray tie, the kind of suit they wear in church in German country districts; the other was Fiedler.
Leamas sat at the back, a guard on either side of him. Between the heads of the spectators he could see Mundt, himself surrounded by police, his fair hair cut very short, his broad shoulders covered in the familiar gray of prison uniform. It seemed to Leamas a curious commentary on the mood of the court--or the influence of Fiedler--that he himself should be wearing his own clothes, while Mundt was in prison uniform.
Leamas had not long been in his place when the President of the Tribunal, sitting at the center of the table, rang the bell. The sound directed his attention toward it, and a shiver pa.s.sed over him as he realized that the President was a woman. He could scarcely be blamed for not noticing it before. She was fiftyish, small-eyed and dark. Her hair was cut short like a man"s, and she wore the kind of functional dark tunic favored by Soviet wives. She looked sharply around the room, nodded to a sentry to close the door, and began at once without ceremony to address the court.
"You all know why we are here. The proceedings are secret, remember that. This is a Tribunal convened expressly by the Praesidium. It is to the Praesidium alone that we are responsible. We shall hear evidence as we think fit." She pointed perfunctorily toward Fiedler. "Comrade Fiedler, you had better begin."
Fiedler stood up. Nodding briefly toward the table, he drew from the briefcase beside him a sheaf of papers held together in one corner by a piece of black cord.
He talked quietly and easily, with a diffidence which Leamas had never seen in him before. Leamas considered it a good performance, well adjusted to the role of a man regretfully hanging his superior.
"You should know first, if you do not know already," Fiedler began, "that on the day that the Praesidium received my report on the activities of Comrade Mundt I was arrested, together with the defector Leamas. Both of us were imprisoned and both of us . . . invited, under extreme duress, to confess that this whole terrible charge was a fascist plot against a loyal Comrade.
"You can see from the report I have already given you how it was that Leamas came to our notice: we ourselves sought him out, induced him to defect and finally brought him to Democratic Germany. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the impartiality of Leamas than this: that he still refuses, for reasons I will explain, to believe that Mundt was a British agent. It is therefore grotesque to suggest that Leamas is a plant: the initiative was ours, and the fragmentary but vital evidence of Leamas provides only the final proof in a long chain of indications reaching back over the last three years.
"You have before you the written record of this case. I need do no more than interpret for you facts of which you are already aware.
"The charge against Comrade Mnndt is that he is the agent of an imperialist power. I could have made other charges--that he pa.s.sed information to the British Secret Service, that he turned his Department into the unconscious lackey of a bourgeois state, that he deliberately shielded revanchist anti-Party groups and accepted sums of foreign currency in reward. These other charges would derive from the first; that HansDieter Mundt is the agent of an imperialist power. The penalty for this crime is death. There is no crime more serious in our penal code, none which exposes our state to greater danger, nor demands more vigilance of our Party organs." Here he put the papers down.
"Comrade Mundt is forty-two years old. He is Deputy Head of the Department for the Protection of the People. He is unmarried. He has always been regarded as a man of exceptional capabilities, tireless in serving the Party"s interests, ruthless in protecting them.
"Let me tell you some details of his career. He was recruited into the Department at the age of twentyeight and underwent the customary instruction. Having completed his probationary period he undertook special tasks in Scandinavian countries--notably Norway, Sweden and Finland--where he succeeded in establishing an intelligence network which carried the battle against fascist agitators into the enemy"s camp. He performed this task well, and there is no reason to suppose that at that time he was other than a diligent member of his Department. But, Comrades, you should not forget this early connection with Scandinavia. The networks established by Comrade Mundt soon after the war provided the excuse, many years later, for him to travel to Finland and Norway, where his commitments became a cover enabling him to draw thousands of dollars from foreign banks in return for his treacherous conduct. Make no mistake: Comrade Mundt has not fallen victim to those who try to disprove the arguments of history. First cowardice, then weakness, then greed were his motives; the acquirement of great wealth his dream. Ironically, it was the elaborate system by which his l.u.s.t for money was satisfied that brought the forces of justice on his trail."
Fiedler paused, and looked around the room, his eyes suddenly alight with fervor. Leamas watched, fascinated.
"Let that be a lesson," Fiedler shouted, "to those other enemies of the state, whose crime is so foul that they must plot in the secret hours of the night!" A dutiful murmur rose from the tiny group of spectators at the back of the room.
"They will not escape the vigilance of the people whose blood they seek to sell!" Fiedler might have been addressing a large crowd rather than the handful of officials and guards a.s.sembled in the tiny, whitewalled room.
Leamas realized at that moment that Fiedler was taking no chances: the deportment of the Tribunal, prosecutors and witnesses must be politically impeccable. Fiedler, knowing no doubt that the danger of a subsequent countercharge was inherent in such cases, was protecting his own back; the polemic would go down in the record and it would be a brave man who set himself to refute it.
Fiedler now opened the file that lay on the desk before him.
"At the end of 1956, Mundt was posted to London as a member of the East German Steel Mission. He had the additional special task of undertaking countersubversionary measures against emigre groups. In the course of his work he exposed himself to great dangers--of that there is no doubt--and he obtained valuable results."
Leamas" attention was again drawn to the three figures at the center table. To the President"s left, a youngish man, dark. His eyes seemed to be half closed. He had lank, unruly hair and the gray, meager complexion of an ascetic. His hands were slim, restlessly toying with the corner of a bundle of papers which lay before him. Leamas guessed he was Mundt"s man; he found it hard to say why. On the other side of the table sat a slightly older man, balding, with an open agreeable face. Leamas thought he looked rather an a.s.s. He guessed that if Mundt"s fate hung in the balance, the young man would defend him and the woman condemn. He thought the second man would be embarra.s.sed by the difference of opinion and side with the President.
Fiedler was speaking again.
"It was at the end of his service in London that recuitment took place. I have said that he exposed himself to great dangers; in doing so he fell foul of the British Secret Police, and they issued a warrant for his arrest. Mundt, who had no diplomatic immunity (NATO Britain does not recognize our sovereignty), went into hiding. Ports were watched; his photograph and description were distributed throughout the British Isles. Yet after two days in hiding, Comrade Mundt took a taxi to London airport and flew to Berlin. "Brilliant," you will say, and so it was. With the whole of Britain"s police force alerted, her roads, railways, shipping and air routes under constant surveil lance, Comrade Mundt takes a plane from London airport. Brilliant indeed. Or perhaps you may feel, Comrades, with the advantage of hindsight, that Mundt"s escape from England was a little _too_ brilliant, a little _too_ easy, that without the connivance of the British authorities it would neyer have been possible at all!" Another murmur, more spontaneous than the first, rose from the back of the room.
"The truth is this: Mundt _was_ taken prisoner by the British; in a short historic interview they offered him the cla.s.sic alternative. Was it to be years in an imperialist prison, the end of a brilliant career, or was Mundt to make a dramatic return to his home country, against all expectation, and fulfill the promise he had shown? The British, of course, made it a condition of his return that he should provide them with information, and they would pay him large sums of money. With the carrot in front and the stick behind, Mundt was recruited.
"It was now in the British interest to promote Mundt"s career. We cannot yet prove that Mundt"s success in liquidating minor Western intelligence agents was the work of his imperialist masters betraying their own collaborators--those who were expendable--in order that Mundt"s prestige should be enhanced. We cannot prove it, but it is an a.s.sumption which the evidence permits.
"Ever since 1960--the year Comrade Mundt became head of the Counterespionage Section of the Abteilung--indications have reached us from all over the world that there was a highly placed spy in our ranks. You all know Karl Riemeck was a spy; we thought when he was eliminated that the evil had been stamped out. But the rumors persisted.
"In late 1960 a former collaborator of ours approached an Englishman in the Lebanon known to be in contact with their Intelligence Service. He offered him--we found out soon afterwards--a complete breakdown of the two sections of the Abteilung for which he had formerly worked. His offer, after it had been transmitted to London, was rejected. That was a very curious thing. It could only mean that the British already possessed the intelligence they were being offered, _and that it was up to date_.
"From mid-1960 onwards we were losing collaborators abroad at an alarming rate. Often they were arrested within a few weeks of their dispatch. Sometimes the enemy attempted to turn our own agents back on us, but not often. It was as if they could scarcely be bothered.
"And then--it was early 1961 if my memory is correct--we had a stroke of luck. We obtained by means I will not describe a summary of the information which British Intelligence held about the Abteilung. It was complete, it was accurate, and it was astonishingly up to date. I showed it to Mundt, of course--he was my superior. He told me it came as no surprise to him: he had certain inquiries in hand and I should take no action for fear of prejudicing them. And I confess that at that moment the thought crossed my mind, remote and fantastic as it was, that Mundt himself could have provided the information. There were other indications too. . . .
"I need hardly tell you that the last, the very last person to be suspected of espionage is the head of the Counterespionage Section. The notion is so appalling, so melodramatic, that few would entertain it, let alone give expression to it! I confess that I myself have been guilty of excessive reluctance in reaching such a seemingly fantastic deduction. That was erroneous.
"But, Comrades, the final evidence has been delivered into our hands. I propose to call that evidence now." He turned, glancing toward the back of the room. "Bring Leamas forward."
The guards on either side of him stood up and Leamas edged his way along the row to the rough gangway which ran not more than two feet wide, down the middle of the room. A guard indicated to him that be should stand facing the table. Fiedler stood a bare six feet away from him. First the President addressed him.
"Witness, what is your name?" she asked.
"Alec Leamas."
"What is your age?"
"Fifty."
"Are you married?"
"No?"
"But you were."
"I"m not married now."
"What is your profession?"
"a.s.sistant librarian."
Fiedler angrily intervened. "You were formerly employed by British Intelligence, were you not?" he snapped.
"That"s right. Till a year ago."
"The Tribunal has read the reports of your interrogation," Fiedler continued. "I want you to tell them again about the conversation you had with Peter Guillam sometime in May last year."
"You mean when we talked about Mundt?"
"Yes."
"I"ve told you. It was at the Circus, the office in London, our headquarters in Cambridge Circus. I b.u.mped into Peter in the corridor. I knew he was mixed up with the Fennan Case and I asked him what had become of George Smiley. Then we got to talking about Dieter Frey, who died, and Mundt, who was mixed up in the thing. Peter said he thought that Maston--Maston was effectively in charge of the case then--had not wanted Mundt to be caught."
"How did you interpret that?" asked Fiedler.
"I knew Maston had made a mess of the Fennan Case. I supposed he didn"t want any mud raked up by Mundt appearing at the Old Bailey."
"If Mundt had been caught, would he have been legally charged?" the President put in.
"It depends on who caught him. If the police got him they"d report it to the Home Office. After that no power on earth could stop him from being charged."