The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

by John Le Carré

the

Leamas went to the window and waited, in front of him the road and to either side the Wall, a dirty, ugly thing of breeze blocks and strands of barbed wire, lit with cheap yellow light, like the backdrop for a concentration camp. East and west of the Wall lay the unrestored part of Berlin, a half-world of ruin, drawn in two dimensions, crags of war.

He seemed to be in bad shape; he had the drunkard’s habit of ducking his mouth towards the rim of his glass just before he drank, as if his hand might fail him and the drink escape.

Kiever played it, Leamas reflected, very long. Like someone used to horses, he let you come to him. He conveyed to perfection a man who suspected that he was about to be asked a favour, and was not easily won.

She had that pitiful, spindly nakedness which is embarrassing because it is not erotic; because it is artless and undesiring. She turned slowly, jerking sporadically with her arms or legs as if she only heard the music in snatches, and all the time she looked at them with the precocious interest of a child in adult company. The tempo of the music increased abruptly, and the girl responded like a dog to the whistle, scampering back and forth. Removing her brassiere on the last note, she held it above her head, displaying her meagre body with its three tawdry patches of tinsel hanging from it like old Christmas decorations. They watched in silence, Leamas and Kiever.

It is said that there are shops in London which will sell you bound books by the yard, and interior decorators who will harmonise the colour scheme of the walls with that of a painting.

Standing at the newspaper kiosk, deep in a copy of the Continental Daily Mail, stood a small, froglike figure in glasses, an earnest, worried little man. He looked like a civil servant. Something like that.

He noticed two things: that Peters was left-handed, and that once again he had put the cigarette in his mouth with the maker’s name away from him, so that it burnt first. It was a gesture Leamas liked: it indicated that Peters, like himself, had been on the run.

It had taken a long time to build a decent East Zone network from Berlin, Leamas explained. In the earlier days the city had been thronging with second-rate agents: intelligence was discredited and so much a part of the daily life of Berlin that you could recruit a man at a cocktail party, brief him over dinner, and he would be blown by breakfast.

For a professional it was a nightmare: dozens of agencies, half of them penetrated by the opposition, thousands of loose ends; too many leads, too few sources, too little space to operate.

He worked like a madman for three weeks. He combed the personality files of each member of the Praesidium. He drew up a list of all the clerical staff who might have had access to the minutes. From the distribution list on the pages of the facsimiles he extended the total of possible informants to thirty-one, including clerks and secretarial staff.

James Bond never did this clerical work.

Confronted with the almost impossible task of identifying an informant from the incomplete records of thirty-one candidates, Leamas returned to the original material, which, he said, was something he should have done earlier. It puzzled him that in none of the photostat minutes he had so far received were the pages numbered, that none was stamped with a security classification, and that in the second and fourth copy words were crossed out in pencil or crayon. He came finally to an important conclusion: that the photocopies related not to the minutes themselves, but to the draft minutes. This placed the source in the Secretariat and the Secretariat was very small. The draft minutes had been well and carefully photographed: that suggested that the photographer had had time and a room to himself.

“Blatt and Rodney, a chichi little bank in the City. There’s a sort of theory in the Circus that Etonians are discreet.”

There was a girl standing on the beach throwing bread to the seagulls. Her back was turned to him. The sea wind played with her long black hair and pulled at her coat, making an arc of her body, like a bow strung towards the sea.

But this little bloke who come round, funny little shy chap with specs, he said Mr. Leamas had particularly requested, quite particularly, that the rent owing should be settled up.

“Espionage is not a cricket game,” Peters observed sourly and after that they sat in silence.

To Leamas these lapses from anonymity signified the involuntary identification of the Abteilung with bureaucracy. That was something he was familiar with in the Circus.

“This is hardly the time to philosophise,” he said, “but you can’t really complain, you know. 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? I find it slightly ridiculous that you should be so indignant. We are not here to observe the ethical laws of English country life. After all,” he added silkily, “your own behaviour has not, from the purist’s point of view, been irreproachable.”

One of the guards came in with a tray of food—black bread, sausage, and cold green salad. “It is a little crude,” said Fiedler, “but quite satisfying. No potato, I’m afraid. There is a temporary shortage of potato.”

He possessed, however, that persistent inquisitiveness which for journalists and lawyers is an end in itself.

A man who lives apart, 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-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...

“The English! The rich have eaten your future and your poor have given them the food—that’s what’s happened to the English.”

Are you going to eat that?” she enquired, 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 potato. You must have a lover in the kitchen.” The humour of this observation sustained her until she had finished the last of Liz’s meal.

It makes me sick with shame and anger and . . . but I’ve been brought up differently, Liz; I can’t see it in black and white. People who play this game take risks.

What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?