The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

by John Le Carré

Leamas, the new men were told, was the old school; blood, guts and cricket and School Cert. French. In Leamas’ case this happened to be unfair, since he was bilingual in German and English and his Dutch was admirable; he also disliked cricket. But it was true that he had no degree.

In the full view of his colleagues he was transformed from a man honourably put aside to a resentful, drunken wreck—and all within a few months.

“You must go when you want. I’ll never follow you, Alec,” and his brown eyes rested on her for a moment: “I’ll tell you when,” he replied.

You’re a fanatic who doesn’t want to convert people, and that’s a dangerous thing. You’re like a man who’s . . . sworn vengeance or something.”

“Then what do you believe in?” “History.” He looked at her in astonishment for a moment, then laughed. “Oh, Liz . . . oh no. You’re not a bloody Communist?”

Control opened the door. “George Smiley’s out,” he said. “I’ve borrowed his house. Come in.” Not until Leamas was inside and the front door closed, did Control put on the hall light.

“This is your last job,” he said. “Then you can come in from the cold.

He was woken up by Ashe, accompanied by a small, rather plump man with long, greying hair swept back and a double-breasted suit.

She had that pitiful, spindly nakedness which is embarrassing because it is not erotic; because it is artless and undesiring.

Everywhere that air of conspiracy which generates among people who have been up since dawn—of superiority almost, derived from the common experience of having seen the night disappear and the morning come.

“After all, why else does a man attack tradesmen?”

His English was nearly perfect, he had the ease and habits of a man long used to civilised comforts.

I want to draw the fifteen thousand and get clear. Your people have a rough way with defected agents; so have mine.

“I see,” he said, “they’ve sent the expert. Or isn’t Moscow Centre in on this?”

“Hackett, Sarrow, and de Jong. De Jong was killed in a traffic accident in fifty-nine. We thought he was murdered but we could never prove it. They all ran networks and I was in charge. Do you want details?” he asked drily.

He never drove again without some corner of his memory recalling the tousled children waving to him from the back of that car, and their father grasping the wheel like a farmer at the shafts of a hand plough. Control would call it fever.

Besides, what was the point? Control knew what had happened; Control had made it happen. There was nothing to say.

“Don’t give it to them all at once, make them work for it. Confuse them with detail, leave things out, go back on your tracks. Be testy, be cussed, be difficult. Drink like a fish; don’t give way on the ideology, they won’t trust that. They want to deal with a man they’ve bought; they want the clash of opposites, Alec, not some half-cock convert. Above all, they want to deduce. The ground’s prepared; we did it long ago, little things, difficult clues. You’re the last stage in the treasure hunt.”

He didn’t want to see Berlin that night. This was his last chance, he knew that. The way he was sitting now he could drive the side of his right hand into Peters’ throat, smashing the promontory of the thorax. He could get out and run, weaving to avoid the bullets from the car behind. He would be free—there were people in Berlin who would take care of him—he could get away. He did nothing.

“Fiedler is the acolyte who one day will stab the high priest in the back. He’s the only man who’s a match for Mundt”—here Guillam had nodded—“and he hates his guts. Fiedler’s a Jew of course, and Mundt is quite the other thing. Not at all a good mixture. It has been our job,” he declared, indicating Guillam and himself, “to give Fiedler the weapon with which to destroy Mundt. It will be yours, my dear Leamas, to encourage him to use it. Indirectly, of course, because you’ll never meet him. At least I certainly hope you won’t.”

Peters shrugged. “For a Jew, he’s not bad,” he replied, and Leamas, hearing a sound from the other end of the room, turned and saw Fiedler standing in the doorway.

All our work—yours and mine—is rooted in the theory that the whole is more important than the individual. That is why a Communist sees his secret service as the natural extension of his arm, and that is why in your own country intelligence is shrouded in a kind of pudeur anglaise. The exploitation of individuals can only be justified by the collective need, can’t it?

“The profession of defector,” Fiedler observed with a smile, “demands great patience. Very few are suitably qualified.”

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-defence. 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 banalities; though he be an affectionate husband and father, he must under all circumstances withhold himself from those in whom he should naturally confide.

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.

“We shall be constantly in one another’s company. I know that is distasteful to you, and I apologise. I thought we could go for walks, drive round 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.

If we hadn’t spoilt him he wouldn’t have told that bloody woman of his about his network.”

He shoots first and asks questions afterwards. The deterrent principle. It’s an odd system in a profession where the questions are always supposed to be more important than the shooting.”

He says Germans are too introspective to make good agents, and it all comes out in counter-intelligence. He says counter-intelligence people are like wolves chewing dry bones—you have to take away the bones and make them find new quarry—I see all that, I know what he means.

That was it, she was sure now: it was Ashe who’d remembered her.

And the letter had that awkward, semi-bureaucratic, semi-Messianic style she had grown accustomed to without ever liking.

matter. I suppose they would either have interrogated him and then tried to exchange him for one of our own people in prison over here; or else they’d have given him a ticket.” “What does that mean?” “Get rid of him.” “Liquidate him?”

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?