A Legacy of Spies

by John le Carré

  *

  ‘So the grand plan was working. The beasts of the forest were starting to sniff at your tethered goat. As represented by our well-dressed thirty-year-old man of effeminate appearance. Yes?’

  ‘Not my goat. Control’s.’

  ‘Not Smiley’s?’

  ‘When it came to planting Alec on the opposition, Smiley played second fiddle.’

  ‘Which was the way he wanted it?’

  ‘Presumably.’

  I’m detecting a new Tabitha. Or the real one, showing her claws.

  ‘Had you seen this report before?’

  ‘Heard about it. The substance.’

  ‘Here in this house? Together with your Windfall-cleared colleagues?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, great rejoicing all round. Hurrah, they’ve taken the bait.’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘You don’t sound very sure. You weren’t feeling queasy about the operation at all, you personally? Wishing you could get out of it, and not seeing how?’

  ‘We were on course. The op was going to plan. Why should I be feeling queasy?’

  She seemed about to question this assertion, then changed her mind.

  ‘I love this one,’ she said, pushing another report at me.

  *

  Commander Special Branch to Box. Top Secret & Guard.

  Subject: OPERATION GALAXY. REPORT No. 6.

  Unprovoked assault on Bert Arthur LOWNES, owner of LOWNES THE PEOPLE’S GROCER, a business run on cooperative lines in the Bayswater Road, at 1745 hours, 21 April 1962.

  The following information was taken informally from witnesses not called for trial in view of the uncontested nature of the case.

  Over the week preceding the incident, it appears that Mars had made a habit of calling in at Lownes’s emporium at all odd hours of day in an inebriated state, ostensibly to make a purchase on a personal monthly savings account kept in the name of Venus, to which he had access, but in reality to engage in verbal exchanges with Lownes conducted in a loud and provocative Irish voice. On the day in question, my officer observed Mars loading up a basket with a large quantity of comestibles, including whisky, in the approximate value of £45. On being asked whether the intended purchases were to be paid for in cash, or debited to the Venus account, Mars responded with, I quote, ‘Credit, you arsehole, what d’you effing think?’ plus words to the effect that being a fully paid-up member of the starving masses, he was entitled to his fair share of the world’s riches. Ignoring Lownes’s warning that, the Venus account being overdrawn, no further credit was available, he thereupon advanced towards the main exit carrying the heavily laden basket of unpaid-for goods in front of him. At which point the said Lownes advanced from behind the counter and in robust language ordered Mars to give up his basket forthwith and remove himself from the premises. Instead of which, without further argument, Mars delivered a rapid succession of blows to Lownes’s stomach and groin area, culminating in an elbow-blow to the right face.

  Making no attempt to escape while customers screamed and Mrs Lownes dialled 999, Mars exhibited no remorse, but continued to pour insults on his luckless victim.

  As one of my younger officers afterwards remarked, he was highly grateful not to have been present at the scene since he would have felt obligated to cast aside cover and intervene. Moreover, he frankly doubted his ability to confront the assailant single-handed.

  In the event, uniformed police quickly attended, and the assailant did not resist arrest.

  *

  ‘So my question is: did you personally know in advance that Alec was going to beat up poor Mr Lownes?’

  ‘In principle.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘They wanted a moment when Alec burned his last bridge. He’d come out of prison, be on his uppers, have no way back.’

  ‘They being Control and Smiley.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not you. It wasn’t your own brilliant idea, cooked up by you and poached by your elders and betters?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What worries me is that you personally might have put Alec up to it, you see. Or the other side will suggest you did. Urged your poor broken friend to even greater depths of depravity. But you didn’t. Which is a relief. The same with the money Alec filched from Circus’s Banking Section. That was six other people telling him to do it, not you?’

  ‘Control, I assume.’

  ‘Good. So Alec was trailing his coat for his superiors, you were his pal, not his evil genius. And Alec was aware of that, presumably. Yes?’

  ‘I assume so. Yes.’

  ‘So did Alec also know that you were Windfall cleared?’

  ‘Of course he bloody didn’t! How could he? He didn’t know anything about Windfall!’

  ‘Yes, well, I was afraid you’d be indignant. I’m going off to do some homework if you don’t mind, while you browse through this horror. The English translation is dire. But so, I’m told, is the original text. Makes one long for Special Branch’s magic way with words.’

  EXTRACTS FROM HITHERTO UNRELEASED STASI FILES MARKED NOT TO BE RELEASED TILL 2050 AS EXCERPTED AND TRANSLATED BY ZARA N. POTTER ASSOCIATES, COURT-APPROVED INTERPRETERS AND TRANSLATORS AS COMMISSIONED BY MESSRS SEGROVE, LOVE & BARNABAS, SOLICITORS AT LAW, LONDON W.C.

  As the door closed after her, I was seized by an irrational anger. Where had she gone, damn her? Why did she walk out on me like that? To render a breathless account to her pals in the bastion? Is that the game she’s playing? They hand her a bunch of Special Branch reports and say: try these on him for size? Is that how it works? But it wasn’t how it worked. I knew that. Tabitha was every defendant’s good angel. And her soft sad eyes saw a sight further than Bunny’s or Laura’s. I knew that too.

  *

  Alec is propped against the grimy window, peering out. I am sitting in the only armchair. We are in an upstairs bedroom of a commercial hotel in Paddington that lets out rooms by the hour. This morning he called me on an unlisted line at Marylebone reserved for joes: ‘Meet me at the Duchess, six o’clock.’ The Duchess of Albany, Praed Street, one of his old haunts. He is haggard, red-eyed and twitchy. The glass in his drinking hand trembles. Short, grudging sentences, bitten out between pauses.

  ‘There’s this girl,’ he is saying. ‘Bloody Communist. Can’t blame her. Not where she comes from. Anyway, who blames who for what any more?’

  Wait. Don’t ask. He’ll tell you what he wants.

  ‘I told Control. Keep her out of it. I don’t trust the old bastard. Never know what he’s up to. Wonder whether he does himself.’ Long contemplation of street below. Continued sympathetic silence from me. ‘Anyway, where the fuck’s George hiding?’ – swinging round on me accusingly. ‘I had a treff with Control in Bywater Street the other night. George didn’t bloody show up.’

  ‘George is doing a lot of Berlin, just now,’ I say untruthfully, and again I wait.

  Alec has decided to mimic Control’s donnish bray:

  ‘I want you to get rid of Mundt for me, Alec. Make the world a better place. Are you up for that, old man? Course I’m bloody up for it. Bastard killed Riemeck, didn’t he? Killed half my bloody network. Had a go at George too, a year or two back. Can’t have that, can we, Pierrot?’

  ‘No, we can’t,’ I agree heartily.

  Did he catch a false note in my voice? He takes a pull of Scotch, and goes on staring at me.

  ‘You don’t happen to have met her by any chance, Pierrot?’

  ‘Met who?’

  ‘My girl. You know bloody well who I mean.’

  ‘How the hell could I have met her, Alec? What are you bleating about? Jesus, man.’

  He turns away at last. ‘Someone she’d met, a man. Sounded a bit like you. That’s all.’

  I shake my head in mystificati
on, shrug, smile. Alec goes back to his contemplations, peering down at the passers-by on the pavement as they scurry through the rain.

  *

  SUBJECT: FALSE ACCUSATIONS MADE AGAINST COMRADE HANS-DIETER MUNDT BY FASCIST BRITISH INTELLIGENCE AGENTS. FULL, TOTAL AND COMPLETE EXONERATION OF H-D MUNDT BY PEOPLE’S TRIBUNAL. LIQUIDATION OF IMPERIALIST SPIES WHILE ATTEMPTING TO ESCAPE. SUBMITTED TO SED PRAESIDIUM.

  28 OCTOBER 1962.

  If the Star Chamber that sat in judgement over Hans-Dieter Mundt was a travesty, the official account of it was worse. The prologue might have been written by Mundt himself. Perhaps it was.

  The odious and corrupt counter-revolutionary agitator Leamas was a known degenerate, a drunken bourgeois opportunist, liar, womanizer, thug, obsessed by money and a hatred of progress.

  The devoted Stasi operatives who had procured the false testimony of this evil Judas had done so in good faith and could not be blamed for introducing a viper into the heartland of those dedicated to combating the forces of Fascist imperialism.

  The trial was a triumph of Socialist justice and a call for ever-greater vigilance against the intrigues of capitalist spies and provocateurs.

  The woman who called herself Elizabeth Gold was a political simpleton of pro-Israel sympathies, brainwashed by the British Secret Service, besotted by her older lover and lured wide-eyed into a web of Western intrigue.

  Even after the impostor Leamas had made a full confession of his crimes, the woman Gold had treacherously assisted him in his escape, and paid the full price for her duplicity.

  And a closing word of congratulation to that fearless guardian of Democratic Socialism who didn’t hesitate to shoot her down as she made her escape.

  *

  ‘So, Peter. A quick replay of the truly awful kangaroo trial in plain English. Are we up for that?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  But her voice was brisk and purposeful, and she had plonked herself down directly in front of me across the table like a People’s Commissar.

  ‘Alec arrives in the Star Chamber as Fiedler’s prize witness with best-laid plans to dish the dirt on Mundt. Yes? Fiedler tells the court all about the bogus money trail that leads to Mundt’s front door. Yes? He makes a whole mouthful of Mundt’s time as a pseudo-diplomat in England which, according to Fiedler, was when he was picked up and turned by the forces of reactionary imperialism, alias the Circus. Then we have a list of all the shocking State secrets Mundt has allegedly sold to his Western masters for his thirty pieces of silver, and it’s all going down a storm with the tribunal’s judges. Until what?’

  The sweet smile is long gone.

  ‘Until Liz, I suppose,’ I reply grudgingly.

  ‘Until Liz, indeed. Up pops poor Liz and, because she doesn’t know any better, she puts the kibosh on everything her beloved Alec has just told the court. Did you know she was going to do that?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t! How the devil could I?’

  ‘How could you indeed? And did you notice, by any chance, what actually sank Liz – and her Alec? It was the moment when she brought up George Smiley’s name. Her absolutely innocent admission to the Star Chamber that one George Smiley, accompanied by a younger man, had dropped in to see her soon after Alec’s mysterious disappearance, and told her that her Alec was doing a marvellous job – implicitly for his country – and everything was going to be hunkydory. Your George then left his visiting card with her to make sure she didn’t forget. Smiley being anyway a name effortlessly remembered, and by no means unknown to the Stasi. Such an inept thing to do, don’t you think, for a sly old fox like George?’

  I said something to the effect that even George could slip up now and then.

  ‘And were you the younger man who tagged along with him, by any chance?’

  ‘No I wasn’t! How could I be? I was Marcel – remember?’

  ‘So who was it?’

  ‘Jim, probably. Prideaux. He’d come across.’

  ‘Across?’

  ‘From Joint to Covert.’

  ‘And was also Windfall cleared?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Only believe?’

  ‘He was cleared.’

  ‘Then tell me this, if you’re allowed to. When Alec Leamas was sent off on his mission to shaft Mundt at any price, who did he believe was the anonymous source who was providing the Circus with all its lovely Windfall material?’

  ‘No idea. Never discussed it with him. Probably Control did. Don’t know.’

  ‘Let me put it another way, if it’s simpler. Would it be fair to say, on balance, by inference, by a process of elimination, by certain hints half dropped, that by the time Alec Leamas sets out on his fatal voyage he has taken it into his fuddled head that Josef Fiedler is the vital source he is protecting, which is why the odious Hans-Dieter Mundt has to be eliminated?’

  I heard my voice rise and couldn’t stop it:

  ‘How the hell am I supposed to know what Alec thought or didn’t think? Alec was a fieldman. You don’t think round corners if you’re a fieldman. There’s a Cold War on. You’ve got a job to do. You get on with it!’

  Was I talking about Alec? Or myself?

  ‘So help me solve this knotty little conundrum, if you will. You, P. Guillam, were Windfall cleared. Yes? One of the very, very few. Can I go on? I can. Alec was emphatically not so cleared. He knew there was an East German super-source, or bunch of sources, with the generic name Windfall. He knew Covert had the running of him, her or them. But he didn’t know anything about this place we’re sitting in now, or what it was actually up to. True?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And it was vital that he should not be Windfall cleared, which has been your refrain from the outset.’

  ‘So?’ – in my dead weary voice.

  ‘Well, if you were Windfall cleared, and Alec Leamas wasn’t Windfall cleared, what did you know that Alec wasn’t allowed to know? Or are we exercising our right to silence? I wouldn’t recommend it. Not with the All-Party lot waiting to tear into you. Or when you’re sitting in front of a tame jury.’

  *

  This is what Alec went through, I’m thinking: defending a hopeless case and watching it fall apart in his hands, with the difference that nobody’s dying except of old age. I’m clinging for dear life to a great untenable lie I promised I’d never betray, and it’s sinking under my weight. But Tabitha has no mercy:

  ‘So our feelings. Can we talk about them for a change? So much more illuminating than facts, I always think. What did you feel, you yourself, when you heard that poor Liz suddenly stood up and trashed all Alec’s marvellous hard work? Trashed poor Fiedler too, while she was about it?’

  ‘I didn’t hear.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Nobody picked up the phone and said, heard the latest about the trial? First thing we got was an East German newsflash. Traitor unmasked. That was Fiedler down the drain. Senior security official totally exonerated. That was Mundt in the clover. Then we got the prisoners’ dramatic escape, and a nationwide hunt for them. And then we got—’

  ‘The shootings at the Wall, presumably?’

  ‘George was there. George saw it. I didn’t.’

  ‘And your feelings again? As you sat here, in this very room, or stood here, paced, or whatever you did, and the awful news came trickling through in bits and pieces? Now hear this, now hear that? On and on?’

  ‘What d’you think I bloody did? Whistled up the champagne?’ Pause, while I collect myself. ‘I thought, Jesus God, that poor girl. Caught up in it all. Refugee family. Head over heels in love with Alec. Meant no harm to anyone. What a bloody awful thing to have to do.’

  ‘Have to? You mean she intended to appear before the tribunal? She intended to save the Nazi and kill the Jew? That doesn’t sound like Liz at all. Whoever would have told her to d
o a thing like that?’

  ‘Nobody bloody told her!’

  ‘The poor girl didn’t even know why she was at the trial. She’d been invited to a comrades’ jamboree in the sunny GDR, and all of a sudden she’s testifying against her lover in a kangaroo court. How did you feel when you heard that? You personally. Then to hear they’d both been mown down at the Wall. Shot while escaping, allegedly. Anguish, it must have been. Utter, surely?’

  ‘Course it was.’

  ‘For all of you?’

  ‘All.’

  ‘Control too?’

  ‘Not an expert on Control’s feelings, I’m afraid.’

  That sad smile of hers. It’s come back.

  ‘And your Uncle George?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Just how did he take it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why not?’ – sharply.

  ‘He disappeared. Took himself down to Cornwall alone.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To walk, I assume. It’s where he goes.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘A few days. Maybe a week.’

  ‘And when he came back. Was he an altered man?’

  ‘George doesn’t alter. He just gets his composure back.’

  ‘And he did?’

  ‘He didn’t talk about it.’

  She thought about this, seemed reluctant to let the subject go.

  ‘And no little smidgeon of triumph anywhere?’ she resumed after further thought. ‘On the other front? The operational front – no sense anywhere of – well, that was the collateral damage, it’s tragic and it’s awful, but mission accomplished nonetheless. Nothing of that kind, so far as we’re aware?’

  Nothing has changed. Not her gentle voice, not her creamy smile. Her manner, if anything, even kindlier than before.

  ‘What I’m asking you is: when did you know, in your own mind, that Mundt’s triumphant vindication was not the fuck-up it was made out to be, but a grand-scale intelligence coup in disguise? And that Liz Gold was the necessary catalyst that made it all happen? It’s about your defence, you see. Your intent, your foreknowledge, your complicity. You could stand or fall by any one of them.’