A Legacy of Spies

by John le Carré

  *

  It’s the Bunny and Laura show again. No Leonard. Bunny leads. Laura listens sceptically.

  ‘So you compiled your report. In tedious detail, if I may say so. You took all available evidence, and then some. You sent an advance copy to Joint Steering. You then stole the same copy back from Circus archives. Does that about sum it up?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  ‘Then why is your report lodged here in the Stables, among a whole lot of papers that you did steal?’

  ‘Because it never went out on submission.’

  ‘To anyone?’

  ‘To anyone.’

  ‘None of it? Not even a shortened form?’

  ‘The Treasury Committee decided not to meet.’

  ‘You’re talking about the so-called committee of the Three Wise Men, I take it? Of whom the Circus lived in supposed dread?’

  ‘It was chaired by Oliver Lacon. Lacon concluded after much soul-searching that a report served no useful purpose. Even in shortened form.’

  ‘On the grounds?’

  ‘That an inquiry into the suicide of a woman who had not landed in the United Kingdom was not a valid use of taxpayers’ money.’

  ‘Was Lacon by any conceivable chance prompted in this decision by George Smiley?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Easily, I’d have thought. If it was your arse among others that Smiley was protecting, if – for instance, taking a purely hypothetical case at random – we assume Tulip hanged herself on your account. Was there perhaps a particular element or episode of the report that Smiley considered too disturbing for Treasury’s tender ears?’

  ‘For Joint’s tender ears, conceivably. Not Treasury’s. Joint was already much too deep into the Mayflower operation for George’s comfort. He may have thought an inquiry would open the door even wider. And advised Lacon accordingly. That’s only my guess.’

  ‘You don’t think by any chance that the real reason the inquiry was binned was that Tulip wasn’t the cooperative defector she is painted to be – not least by your arse-kissing report – and paid the price?’

  ‘What price? What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘She was a woman of great determination. We know that. She was also, when she wished to be, a harridan. And she wanted her child back. I’m suggesting she refused to cooperate with the interrogation team until her son was returned to her, and her interrogators took a dim view of that, and their report – your report – was a fudge, cobbled together on Smiley’s orders. And Camp 4, since scrapped, boasted as we know a special confinement cell for people like her. It was dubbed the Submarine. It was used for what these days we are pleased to call enhanced interrogation, and it was the preserve of a couple of rather perverted security guards not known for their gentle ways. I’m suggesting she had the benefit of their attentions. You look shocked. Have I touched a nerve?’

  It took me a moment to get there:

  ‘Tulip wasn’t interrogated, for Christ’s sake! She was in the process of being debriefed, humanely and decently, by professional people who liked her and were grateful to her, and understood a defector’s tantrums!’

  ‘So laugh this one off,’ Bunny suggests. ‘We have another letter before action, and another potential litigant if the case comes to law. One Gustav Quinz, son of Doris, apparently but not certainly at the instigation of Christoph Leamas, has added his name to those who are intent on suing the shit out of this Service. We, this Service, largely in the person of yourself, seduced his dear mother, blackmailed her into spying for us, smuggled her out of the country against her will, tortured her to hell and back, thereby causing her to hang herself from the nearest tree. True? Not true?’

  I thought he had finished, but he hadn’t.

  ‘And since these allegations, being dignified by the passage of time, cannot be suppressed by the draconian legislation that has been available to us in more recent cases of the same nature, there’s a good chance that the All-Party Group, and/or any subsequent litigation, will be used to pry into matters of considerably more relevance to us today. You seem amused.’

  Amused. Perhaps I was. Gustav, I was thinking. Well done you. You’ve decided to collect your due after all, even if you’ve come to the wrong address for it.

  *

  I have ridden across France and Germany at breakneck speed through driving rain. I am standing at Alec’s graveside. The same rain sweeps the little cemetery in East Berlin. I am wearing my motorcycle leathers, but out of respect for Alec I have removed my helmet and the rain is pouring down my bare face as we silently exchange banalities. The elderly sacristan or whatever he is ushers me into his cabin and shows me the condolence book with Christoph’s name among the mourners.

  And perhaps that was the point d’appui, the spur: first to Christoph, then to the carrot-haired Gustav with the buckwheat grin who had sung his patriotic songs to me, and then to Alec: the same boy who from the day of his mother’s death I had secretly, if only notionally, taken into my care, picturing him first in some gruesome East German borstal for children of the disgraced, then tossed out into an uncaring world.

  Secretly too, I had from time to time brazenly transgressed standing Circus regulations, tracking him through the archives under a pretext and vowing to myself – or, you may say, fantasizing – that one day, if ever the world turned an inch or two on its axis, I would seek him out and, for love of Tulip, provide him with a leg-up in some undefined way that circumstance would determine.

  The rain was still pelting down as I got on my bike and headed, not westward to France, but southward to Weimar. The last possible address I had for Gustav was ten years old: a hamlet west of the city, a house registered in the name of his father, Lothar. After two hours’ ride I was standing on the doorstep of a dismal, Soviet-style slab house built ten yards from the village church as an act of Socialist aggression. The slabs were parting. Some of the windows were papered over from inside. Spray-paint swastikas adorned the crumbling porch. Quinz’s apartment was 8D. I pressed the bell to no avail. A door opened, a suspicious old woman looked me up and down.

  ‘Quinz?’ she repeated, in distaste. ‘Der Lothar? Längst tot.’ – long dead.

  And Gustav? I asked. The son?

  ‘You mean the waiter?’ she asked, in contempt.

  The hotel was called the Elephant and overlooked Weimar’s historic main square. It wasn’t new. As a matter of fact it had been Hitler’s favourite hotel: the old woman had told me that too. But it had been dramatically refurbished, and its façade glistened like a beacon of Western prosperity shoved in the face of its poorer, beautiful neighbours. At the reception desk, a girl in a new black suit mistook my enquiry: we have no Herr Quinz staying in the house. Then she blushed and said, ‘Oh, you mean Gustav,’ and told me that staff were forbidden to receive visits and I must wait till Herr Quinz came off duty.

  When would that be? At six o’clock. And best to wait where, please? At the delivery entrance, where else?

  The rain had not relented, the day was darkening. I stood at the delivery entrance as directed. A gaunt unsmiling man who somehow looked older than his age emerged from a basement staircase, pulling on an old army raincoat with a hood. A bicycle was chained to the railing. He stooped to it, and set to work undoing the padlock.

  ‘Herr Quinz?’ I said. ‘Gustav?’

  His head rose until he stood his full height under the faltering light of an overhead street lamp. His shoulders were set in a premature stoop. The once red hair was sparse and turning grey.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I was a friend of your mother’s,’ I said. ‘You may remember me. We met on a beach in Bulgaria – long ago. You sang me a song.’ And I gave him my workname, the same name I’d given him on the beach while his mother stood naked behind him.

  ‘You were a friend of my mother?’ he repe
ated, getting used to the idea.

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘French?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘She died.’

  ‘I heard that. I’m very sorry. I wondered if there was anything I could do for you. I happened to have your address. I was in Weimar. It seemed an opportunity. Maybe we could have a drink together. Talk about it.’

  He stared at me. ‘Did you sleep with my mother?’

  ‘We were friends.’

  ‘Then you slept with her,’ he said, as a matter of historical fact, his voice neither rising nor falling. ‘My mother was a whore. She betrayed the homeland. She betrayed the revolution. She betrayed the Party. She betrayed my father. She sold herself to the English and she hanged herself. She was an enemy of the people,’ he explained.

  And, mounting his bicycle, he rode away.

  11

  ‘I think the very first thing we should do, heart,’ Tabitha is saying in her perennially diffident voice – ‘you don’t mind if I call you heart, do you? I call all my best clients heart. It reminds them that I’ve got one, just as they have, even if mine’s necessarily on hold. So the first thing we do is make a hit-list of all the disgraceful things the other side are saying about us, then we’ll knock them down one by one. Just so long as you’re sitting comfortably. Are you? Good. You are hearing me, aren’t you? I never know whether those things work. Are they the National Health ones?’

  ‘French.’

  Tabitha, so far as I remembered from my childhood reading of Beatrix Potter, was the harassed mother of three disobedient children. I was wryly amused therefore to note that outwardly at least the woman of the same name who sat before me shared many of her characteristics: motherly, sweet-faced, forty-something, plump, a little breathless, and heroically tired. She was also, I had been given to understand, my defence lawyer. Leonard had supplied Bunny with the promised shortlist of names, names that Bunny admired hugely – would fight for you like absolute rottweilers, Peter – and two he was a teensy bit doubtful about, not sufficiently road-tested to his mind but don’t quote him, and one – entirely off the record, Peter, and you must protect me on this – that he wouldn’t touch with a bargepole: doesn’t know when to stop, and not the haziest idea of how the courts work, and the judges absolutely detest her. That was Tabitha.

  I said she sounded just right for me and asked to see her in her chambers. Bunny said her chambers weren’t rated secure and offered me his headquarters in the bastion. I told him I didn’t rate his headquarters secure. So here we are back in the library, with the full-length figures of Hans-Dieter Mundt and his arch-rival Josef Fiedler scowling down on us.

  *

  In time present, only one sleepless night has passed since we cremated Tulip, but the world that Tabitha is trying to come to grips with has taken an historic step backwards.

  The Berlin Wall has gone up.

  Every agent and sub-agent of the Mayflower network has gone missing, been arrested, executed or all three.

  Karl Riemeck, the heroic doctor of Köpenick, the network’s accidental founder and its inspiration, has himself been mercilessly shot down while attempting to escape to West Berlin on his workman’s bicycle.

  To Tabitha, these are facts of history. For those of us who endured them, they are a time of despair, bewilderment and frustration.

  Is our agent Windfall for us or against us? From our redoubt in the Stables, we the indoctrinated few had followed with awe his mercurial rise through the Stasi’s ranks to his present position as head of its special operations wing.

  We had received, processed and disseminated, under the generic title Windfall, highest-quality intelligence on a raft of economic, political and strategic targets, to muted cries of delight from Whitehall customers.

  Yet for all Mundt’s undoubted power – or maybe because of it – he had been unable to halt or even abate the relentless cull of Covert’s agents and sub-agents, as conducted by his rival Josef Fiedler.

  In this grisly duel for the favour of Moscow Centre and command of the Stasi, Hans-Dieter Mundt, alias source Windfall, claimed he had no option but to present himself as even more fervent than Fiedler in the business of cleansing the utopian German Democratic Republic of spies, saboteurs and other lackeys of bourgeois imperialism.

  As one faithful agent after another fell to the competing fury of Mundt or his arch-rival, so the morale of the Windfall team sank to a new depth.

  And no one was more affected than Smiley himself, locked night after night in the Middle Room, with only the occasional visit from Control to lower his spirits still further.

  *

  ‘Why can’t I read the plaintiffs’ statements for myself?’ I ask Tabitha. ‘The letters-before-action or whatever they are?’

  ‘Because your former Service in its wisdom has applied to slap a Top Secret classification on all correspondence on the grounds of national security, and you’re not cleared. They won’t get away with it in a month of Sundays, but it will gum up the works and make way for a temporary reporting restriction, which is what they’re after. Meanwhile, I’ve scrounged what scraps I can for you. Go?’

  ‘Where have Bunny and Laura disappeared to?’

  ‘I’m afraid they think they’ve got all they need. And Leonard has accepted their brief. I’ve had a first peek in the other side’s locker. Unfortunately, poor Doris Gamp seems to have had the hots for you from the day she set eyes on you, and she couldn’t wait to tell her sister Lotte all about you. And by the time Lotte had poured her heart out to the Stasi interrogators, there wasn’t much left of you at all. Did you really scamper naked on the beach with her in the Bulgarian moonlight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. And there’s a night of love and laughter you supposedly spent together in a Prague hotel, where nature again took her course.’

  ‘It didn’t.’

  ‘Good. Now to the two other deaths: Alec Leamas and Elizabeth Gold, our Berliners. Elizabeth first, as formulated against you by her daughter Karen. It’s alleged that you personally contacted her – either on your own initiative or at the instigation of George Smiley and other conspirators unnamed – that you then inveigled, seduced or otherwise obtained her to become human fodder – the other side’s beastly expressions, not mine – in an abortive, grandiose and ill-conceived attempt – who comes up with that stuff, I can’t imagine – to undermine the Stasi leadership. Did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. You begin to see the picture? You’re a professional Lothario hired by the British Secret Service, and you roped in susceptible girls as unwitting accomplices in hare-brained operations that fell apart at the seams. True?’

  ‘Untrue.’

  ‘Of course it is. You also pimped Elizabeth Gold for your colleague Alec Leamas. Did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. You also, because you do a lot of it, bedded Elizabeth Gold. Or if you didn’t, you warmed her up for Alec. Did you do either of those things?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I never for a moment thought you did. And the supposed end effect of your evil machinations: Elizabeth Gold is shot dead at the Berlin Wall, her lover Alec Leamas tries to save her skin, or simply decides to die with her. Either way he gets shot for his pains, and it’s all your fault. Time for a cup of tea, or bomb on? Bomb on. Now to Christoph Leamas’s allegation, which is meatier because his father Alec is the victim of all that goes before. Alec – by the time you inveigled him, lured, bribed, conned, et cetera, into becoming the luckless plaything of your compulsively manipulative nature – was a broken man, in no fit state to cross the road on his own, let alone front a fiendishly intricate deception operation, to wit: pretend to defect to the Stasi while actually remaining under your evil influence. True?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t. So what I suggest is, with your per
mission, take a big pull of that water, cast your beady eye over what I turned up in the wee hours of this morning when I was finally allowed a very limited look at a tiny part of your dear Service’s historical archive. Question one, does this episode mark the beginning of your friend Alec’s decline? And question two, if it does, is it real decline or is it simulated decline? In other words, are we looking at stage one of Alec making himself insufferable to his own Service and hugely attractive to Moscow Centre’s or the Stasi’s talent-spotters?’

  *

  Circus telegram from H/Station Berlin [MCFadyen] to H/Joint Steering, copy to H/Covert Ops, H/Personnel Most Urgent, 10 July 1960.

  Subject: Immediate transfer of Alec Leamas from Berlin Station on disciplinary grounds.

  At 0100 hours this morning, the following episode occurred at the Altes Fass nightclub in West Berlin between DH/Berlin Station Alec Leamas and Cy Aflon, DH/CIA Station Berlin. The facts are not disputed by either party. The two men have a long-running enmity, for which, as previously stated, I regard Leamas as exclusively to blame.

  Leamas entered the nightclub alone and headed for the Damengalerie, a bar set aside for single women in search of custom. He had been drinking but was not in his own judgement drunk.

  Aflon was seated with two female colleagues from his Station, watching the cabaret and enjoying a quiet drink.

  Catching sight of Aflon and his party, Leamas changed direction, walked over to their table and, leaning forward, addressed Aflon in low tones with the following words:

  Leamas: You ever try to buy one of my sources again, I’ll break your fucking neck.

  Aflon: Whoa, Alec. Whoa. Not in front of the ladies, if you don’t mind.

  Leamas: Two thousand dollars a month for first bite of anything he gets before he sells it to us second hand. And you call that fighting a fucking war? Maybe he gets a French kiss from these nice ladies thrown in?

  As Aflon rose to his feet in protest at this flagrant insult, Leamas struck him across the face with his right elbow, causing him to fall to the ground, then kicked him in the groin. West Berlin police were called, who summoned the US military police. Aflon was delivered to the US military hospital where he is presently recovering. Fortunately, no fractures or life-threatening injuries are as yet reported.