The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

by John le Carré

  ‘I understand,’ said Smiley.

  ‘That girl – what did you say about that girl?’

  ‘She’s alive. Don’t worry. Go on.’

  ‘Fennan liked you, you know. Freitag tried to kill you … why?’

  ‘Because I came back, I suppose, and asked you about the eight-thirty call. You told Freitag that, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said, her fingers at her mouth.

  ‘You rang him up, didn’t you? As soon as I’d gone?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I was frightened. I wanted to warn him to go, him and Dieter, to go away and never come back, because I knew you’d find out. If not today then one day, but I knew you’d find out in the end. Why would they never leave me alone? They were frightened of me because they knew I had no dreams, that I only wanted Samuel, wanted him safe to love and care for. They relied on that.’

  Smiley felt his head throbbing erratically. ‘So you rang him straight away,’ he said. ‘You tried the Primrose number first and couldn’t get through.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said vaguely. ‘Yes, that’s right. But they’re both Primrose numbers.’

  ‘So you rang the other number, the alternative …’

  She drifted back to the window, suddenly exhausted and limp; she seemed happier now – the storm had left her reflective and, in a way, content.

  ‘Yes. Freitag was a great one for alternative plans.’

  ‘What was the other number?’ Smiley insisted. He watched her anxiously as she stared out of the window into the dark garden.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  He came and stood beside her at the window, watching her profile. His voice was suddenly harsh and energetic.

  ‘I said the girl was all right. You and I are alive, too. But don’t think that’s going to last.’

  She turned to him with fear in her eyes, looked at him for a moment, then nodded. Smiley took her by the arm and guided her to a chair. He ought to make her a hot drink or something. She sat down quite mechanically, almost with the detachment of incipient madness.

  ‘The other number was 9747.’

  ‘Any address – did you have an address?’

  ‘No, no address. Only the telephone. Tricks on the telephone. No address,’ she repeated, with unnatural emphasis, so that Smiley looked at her and wondered. A thought suddenly struck him – a memory of Dieter’s skill in communication.

  ‘Freitag didn’t meet you the night Fennan died, did he? He didn’t come to the theatre?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That was the first time he had missed, wasn’t it? You panicked and left early.’

  ‘No … yes, yes, I panicked.’

  ‘No you didn’t! You left early because you had to, it was the arrangement. Why did you leave early? Why?’

  Her hands hid her face.

  ‘Are you still mad?’ Smiley shouted. ‘Do you still think you can control what you have made? Freitag will kill you, kill the girl, kill, kill, kill. Who are you trying to protect, a girl or a murderer?’

  She wept and said nothing. Smiley crouched beside her, still shouting.

  ‘I’ll tell you why you left early, shall I? I’ll tell you what I think. It was to catch the last post that night from Weybridge. He hadn’t come, you hadn’t exchanged cloakroom tickets, had you, so you obeyed the instructions, you posted your ticket to him and you have got an address, not written down but remembered, remembered for ever: “If there is a crisis, if I do not come, this is the address”: is that what he said? An address never to be used or spoken of, an address forgotten and remembered for ever? Is that right? Tell me!’

  She stood up, her head turned away, went to the desk and found a piece of paper and a pencil. The tears still ran freely over her face. With agonizing slowness she wrote the address, her hand faltering and almost stopping between the words.

  He took the paper from her, folded it carefully across the middle and put it in his wallet.

  Now he would make her some tea.

  She looked like a child rescued from the sea. She sat on the edge of the sofa holding the cup tightly in her frail hands, nursing it against her body. Her thin shoulders were hunched forward, her feet and ankles pressed tightly together. Smiley, looking at her, felt he had broken something he should never have touched because it was so fragile. He felt an obscene, coarse bully, his offerings of tea a futile recompense for his clumsiness.

  He could think of nothing to say. After a while, she said: ‘He liked you, you know. He really liked you … he said you were a clever little man. It was quite a surprise when Samuel called anyone clever.’ She shook her head slowly. Perhaps it was the reaction that made her smile: ‘He used to say there were two forces in the world, the positive and the negative. “What shall I do then?” he would ask me. “Let them ruin their harvest because they give me bread? Creation, progress, power, the whole future of mankind waits at their door: shall I not let them in?” And I said to him: “But Samuel, maybe the people are happy without these things?” But you know he didn’t think of people like that.

  ‘But I couldn’t stop him. You know the strangest thing about Fennan? For all that thinking and talking, he had made up his mind long ago what he would do. All the rest was poetry. He wasn’t coordinated, that’s what I used to tell him …’

  ‘… and yet you helped him,’ said Smiley.

  ‘Yes, I helped him. He wanted help so I gave it him. He was my life.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘That was a mistake. He was a little boy, you know. He forgot things just like a child. And so vain. He had made up his mind to do it and he did it so badly. He didn’t think of it as you do, or I do. He simply didn’t think of it like that. It was his work and that was all.

  ‘It began so simply. He brought home a draft telegram one night and showed it to me. He said: “I think Dieter ought to see that” – that was all. I couldn’t believe it to begin with – that he was a spy, I mean. Because he was, wasn’t he? And gradually, I realized. They began to ask for special things. The music case I got back from Freitag began to contain orders, and sometimes money. I said to him: “Look at what they are sending you – do you want this?” We didn’t know what to do with the money. In the end we gave it away mostly, I don’t know why. Dieter was very angry that winter, when I told him.’

  ‘What winter was that?’ asked Smiley.

  ‘The second winter with Dieter – 1956 in Mürren. We met him first in January 1955. That was when it began. And shall I tell you something? Hungary made no difference to Samuel, not a tiny bit of difference. Dieter was frightened about him then, I know, because Freitag told me. When Fennan gave me the things to take to Weybridge that November I nearly went mad. I shouted at him: “Can’t you see it’s the same? The same guns, the same children dying in the streets? Only the dream has changed, the blood is the same colour. Is that what you want?” I asked him: “Would you do this for Germans, too? It’s me who lies in the gutter, will you let them do it to me?” But he just said: “No, Elsa, this is different.” And I went on taking the music case. Do you understand?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. I think perhaps I do.’

  ‘He was all I had. He was my life. I protected myself, I suppose. And gradually I became a part of it, and then it was too late to stop … And then you know,’ she said, in a whisper; ‘there were times when I was glad, times when the world seemed to applaud what Samuel was doing. It was not a pretty sight for us, the new Germany. Old names had come back, names that had frightened us as children. The dreadful, plump pride returned, you could see it even in the photographs in the papers, they marched with the old rhythm. Fennan felt that too, but then thank God he hadn’t seen what I saw.

  ‘We were in a camp outside Dresden, where we used to live. My father was paralysed. He missed tobacco more than anything and I used to roll cigarettes from any rubbish I could find in the camp – just to pretend with. One day a guard saw him smoking and began laughing. Some others came and they laughed to
o. My father was holding the cigarette in his paralysed hand and it was burning his fingers. He didn’t know, you see.

  ‘Yes, when they gave guns to the Germans again, gave them money and uniforms, then sometimes – just for a little while – I was pleased with what Samuel had done. We are Jews, you know, and so …’

  ‘Yes, I know, I understand,’ said Smiley. ‘I saw it too, a little of it.’

  ‘Dieter said you had.’

  ‘Dieter said that?’

  ‘Yes. To Freitag. He told Freitag you were a very clever man. You once deceived Dieter before the war, and it was only long afterwards that he found out, that’s what Freitag said. He said you were the best he’d ever met.’

  ‘When did Freitag tell you that?’

  She looked at him for a long time. He had never seen in any face such hopeless misery. He remembered how she had said to him before: ‘The children of my grief are dead.’ He understood that now, and heard it in her voice when at last she spoke:

  ‘Why, isn’t it obvious? The night he murdered Samuel.

  ‘That’s the great joke, Mr Smiley. At the very moment when Samuel could have done so much for them – not just a piece here and a piece there, but all the time – so many music cases – at that moment their own fear destroyed them, turned them into animals and made them kill what they had made.

  ‘Samuel always said: “They will win because they know and the others will perish because they do not: men who work for a dream will work for ever” – that’s what he said. But I knew their dream, I knew it would destroy us. What has not destroyed? Even the dream of Christ.’

  ‘It was Dieter then, who saw me in the park with Fennan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And thought—’

  ‘Yes. Thought that Samuel had betrayed him. Told Freitag to kill Samuel.’

  ‘And the anonymous letter?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know who wrote it. Someone who knew Samuel, I suppose, someone from the office who watched him and knew. Or from Oxford, from the Party. I don’t know. Samuel didn’t know either.’

  ‘But the suicide letter—’

  She looked at him, and her face crumpled. She was almost weeping again. She bowed her head:

  ‘I wrote it. Freitag brought the paper, and I wrote it. The signature was already there. Samuel’s signature.’

  Smiley went over to her, sat beside her on the sofa and took her hand. She turned on him in a fury and began screaming at him:

  ‘Take your hands off me! Do you think I’m yours because I don’t belong to them? Go away! Go away and kill Freitag and Dieter, keep the game alive, Mr Smiley. But don’t think I’m on your side, d’you hear? Because I’m the wandering Jewess, the no-man’s land, the battlefield for your toy soldiers. You can kick me and trample on me, see, but never, never touch me, never tell me you’re sorry, d’you hear? Now get out! Go away and kill.’

  She sat there, shivering as if from cold. As he reached the door he looked back. There were no tears in her eyes.

  Mendel was waiting for him in the car.

  13

  The Inefficiency of Samuel Fennan

  They arrived at Mitcham at lunch-time. Peter Guillam was waiting for them patiently in his car.

  ‘Well, children; what’s the news?’

  Smiley handed him the piece of paper from his wallet. ‘There was an emergency number, too – Primrose 9747. You’d better check it but I’m not hopeful of that either.’

  Peter disappeared into the hall and began telephoning. Mendel busied himself in the kitchen and returned ten minutes later with beer, bread and cheese on a tray. Guillam came back and sat down without saying anything. He looked worried. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘what did she say, George?’

  Mendel cleared away as Smiley finished the account of his interview that morning.

  ‘I see,’ said Guillam. ‘How very worrying. Well, that’s it, George, I shall have to put this on paper today, and I’ll have to go to Maston at once. Catching dead spies is a poor game really – and causes a lot of unhappiness.’

  ‘What access did he have at the FO?’ asked Smiley.

  ‘Recently a lot. That’s why they felt he should be interviewed, as you know.’

  ‘What kind of stuff, mainly?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. He was on an Asian desk until a few months ago but his new job was different.’

  ‘American, I seem to remember,’ said Smiley. ‘Peter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Peter, have you thought at all why they wanted to kill Fennan so much? I mean, supposing he had betrayed them, as they thought, why kill him? They had nothing to gain.’

  ‘No; no, I suppose they hadn’t. That does need some explaining, come to think of it … or does it? Suppose Fuchs or Maclean had betrayed them, I wonder what would have happened. Suppose they had reason to fear a chain reaction – not just here but in America – all over the world? Wouldn’t they kill him to prevent that? There’s so much we shall just never know.’

  ‘Like the eight-thirty call?’ said Smiley.

  ‘Cheerio. Hang on here till I ring you, will you? Maston’s bound to want to see you. They’ll be running down the corridors when I tell them the glad news. I shall have to wear the special grin I reserve for bearing really disastrous tidings.’

  Mendel saw him out and then returned to the drawing-room. ‘Best thing you can do is put your feet up,’ he said. ‘You look a ruddy mess, you do.’

  Either Mundt’s here or he’s not, thought Smiley as he lay on the bed in his waistcoat, his hands linked under his head. If he’s not, we’re finished. It will be for Maston to decide what to do with Elsa Fennan, and my guess is he’ll do nothing.

  If Mundt is here, it’s for one of three reasons: A, because Dieter told him to stay and watch the dust settle; B, because he’s in bad odour and afraid to go back; C, because he has unfinished business.

  A is improbable because it’s not like Dieter to take needless risks. Anyway, it’s a woolly idea.

  B is unlikely because, while Mundt may be afraid of Dieter, he must also, presumably, be frightened of a murder charge here. His wisest plan would be to go to another country.

  C is more likely. If I was in Dieter’s shoes I’d be worried sick about Elsa Fennan. The Pidgeon girl is immaterial – without Elsa to fill in the gaps she presents no serious danger. She was not a conspirator and there is no reason why she should particularly remember Elsa’s friend at the theatre. No, Elsa constitutes the real danger.

  There was, of course, a final possibility, which Smiley was quite unable to judge: the possibility that Dieter had other agents to control here through Mundt. On the whole he was inclined to discount this, but the thought had no doubt crossed Peter’s mind.

  No … it still didn’t make sense – it wasn’t tidy. He decided to begin again.

  What do we know? He sat up to look for pencil and paper and at once his head began throbbing. Obstinately he got off the bed and took a pencil from the inside pocket of his jacket. There was a writing pad in his suitcase. He returned to the bed, shaped the pillows to his satisfaction, took four aspirin from the bottle on the table and propped himself against the pillows, his short legs stretched before him. He began writing. First he wrote the heading in a neat, scholarly hand, and underlined it.

  ‘What do we know?’

  Then he began, stage by stage, to recount as dispassionately as possible the sequence of events hitherto:

  ‘On Monday, 2 January, Dieter Frey saw me in the park talking to his agent and concluded …’ Yes, what did Dieter conclude? That Fennan had confessed, was going to confess? That Fennan was my agent? ‘… and concluded that Fennan was dangerous, for reasons still unknown. The following evening, the first Tuesday in the month, Elsa Fennan took her husband’s reports in a music case to the Weybridge Repertory Theatre, in the agreed way, and left the case in the cloakroom in exchange for a ticket. Mundt was to bring his own music case and do the same thing. Elsa and Mundt would then excha
nge tickets during the performance. Mundt did not appear. Accordingly she followed the emergency procedure and posted the ticket to a prearranged address, having left the theatre early to catch the last post from Weybridge. She then drove home to be met by Mundt, who had, by then, murdered Fennan, probably on Dieter’s orders. He had shot him at point blank range as soon as he met him in the hall. Knowing Dieter, I suspect that he had long ago taken the precaution of keeping in London a few sheets of blank writing paper signed with samples, forged or authentic, of Sam Fennan’s signature, in case it was ever necessary to compromise or blackmail him. Assuming this to be so, Mundt brought a sheet with him in order to type the suicide letter over the signature on Fennan’s own typewriter. In the ghastly scene which must have followed Elsa’s arrival, Mundt realized that Dieter had wrongly interpreted Fennan’s encounter with Smiley, but relied on Elsa to preserve her dead husband’s reputation – not to mention her own complicity. Mundt was therefore reasonably safe. Mundt made Elsa type the letter, perhaps because he did not trust his English. (Note: But who the devil typed the first letter, the denunciation?)

  ‘Mundt then, presumably, demanded the music case he had failed to collect, and Elsa told him that she had obeyed standing instructions and posted the cloakroom ticket to the Hampstead address, leaving the music case at the theatre. Mundt reacted significantly: he forced her to telephone the theatre and to arrange for him to collect the case that night on his way back to London. Therefore either the address to which the ticket was posted was no longer valid, or Mundt intended at that stage to return home early the next morning without having time to collect the ticket and the case.

  ‘Smiley visits Walliston early on the morning of Wednesday, 4 January, and during the first interview takes an eight-thirty call from the exchange which (beyond reasonable doubt) Fennan requested at seven fifty-five the previous evening. WHY?

  ‘Later that morning S. returns to Elsa Fennan to ask about the eight-thirty call – which she knew (on her own admission) would “worry me” (no doubt Mundt’s flattering description of my powers had had its effect). Having told S. a futile story about her bad memory she panics and rings Mundt.