The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

by John le Carré

  ‘Mundt, presumably equipped with a photograph or a description from Dieter, decides to liquidate S. (on Dieter’s authority?) and later that day nearly succeeds. (Note: Mundt did not return the car to Scarr’s garage till the night of the 4th. This does not necessarily prove that Mundt had no plans for flying earlier in the day. If he had originally meant to fly in the morning he might well have left the car at Scarr’s earlier and gone to the airport by bus.)

  ‘It does seem pretty likely that Mundt changed his plans after Elsa’s telephone call. It is not clear that he changed them because of her call.’ Would Mundt really be panicked by Elsa? Panicked into staying, panicked into murdering Adam Scarr, he wondered.

  The telephone was ringing in the hall …

  ‘George, it’s Peter. No joy with the address or the telephone number. Dead end.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The telephone number and the address both led to the same place – furnished apartment in Highgate village.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Rented by a pilot in Lufteuropa. He paid his two months’ rent on the fifth of January and hasn’t come back since.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘The landlady remembers Mundt quite well. The pilot’s friend. A nice polite gentleman he was, for a German, very open-handed. He used to sleep on the sofa quite often.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘I went through the room with a toothcomb. There was a desk in the corner. All the drawers were empty except one, which contained a cloakroom ticket. I wonder where that came from … Well, if you want a laugh, come round to the Circus. The whole of Olympus is seething with activity. Oh, incidentally—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I dug around at Dieter’s flat. Another lemon. He left on the fourth of January. Didn’t tell the milkman.’

  ‘What about his mail?’

  ‘He never received any, apart from bills. I also had a look at Comrade Mundt’s little nest: couple of rooms over the Steel Mission. The furniture went out with the rest of the stuff. Sorry.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’ll tell you an odd thing though, George. You remember I thought I might get on to Fennan’s personal possessions – wallet, notebook and so on? From the police.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I did. His diary’s got Dieter’s full name entered in the address section with the Mission telephone number against it. Bloody cheek.’

  ‘It’s more than that. It’s lunacy. Good Lord.’

  ‘Then for the fourth of January the entry is “Smiley C.A. Ring eight-thirty”. That was corroborated by an entry for the third which ran “request call for Wed. morning”. There’s your mysterious call.’

  ‘Still unexplained.’ A pause.

  ‘George, I sent Felix Taverner round to the FO to do some ferreting. It’s worse than we feared in one way, but better in another.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, Taverner got his hands on the registry schedules for the last two years. He was able to work out what files have been marked to Fennan’s section. Where a file was particularly requested by that section they still have a requisition form.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Felix found that three or four files were usually marked in to Fennan on a Friday afternoon and marked out again on Monday morning; the inference is that he took the stuff home at weekends.’

  ‘Oh my Lord!’

  ‘But the odd thing is, George, that during the last six months, since his posting in fact, he tended to take home unclassified stuff which wouldn’t have been of interest to anyone.’

  ‘But it was during the last months that he began dealing mainly with secret files,’ said Smiley. ‘He could take home anything he wanted.’

  ‘I know, but he didn’t. In fact you’d almost say it was deliberate. He took home very low-grade stuff barely related to his daily work. His colleagues can’t understand it now they think about it – he even took back some files handling subjects outside the scope of his section.’

  ‘And unclassified.’

  ‘Yes – of no conceivable intelligence value.’

  ‘How about earlier, before he came into his new job? What kind of stuff went home then?’

  ‘Much more what you’d expect – files he’d used during the day, policy and so on.’

  ‘Secret?’

  ‘Some were, some weren’t. As they came.’

  ‘But nothing unexpected – no particularly delicate stuff that didn’t concern him?’

  ‘No. Nothing. He had opportunity galore quite frankly and didn’t use it. Windy, I suppose.’

  ‘So he ought to be if he puts his controller’s name in his diary.’

  ‘And make what you like of this: he’d arranged at the FO to take a day off on the fourth – the day after he died. Rather an event apparently – he was a glutton for work, they say.’

  ‘What’s Maston doing about all this?’ asked Smiley, after a pause.

  ‘Going through the files at the moment and rushing in to see me with bloody fool questions every two minutes. I think he gets lonely in there with hard facts.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll beat them down, Peter, don’t worry.’

  ‘He’s already saying that the whole case against Fennan rests on the evidence of a neurotic woman.’

  ‘Thanks for ringing, Peter.’

  ‘Be seeing you, dear boy. Keep your head down.’

  Smiley replaced the receiver and wondered where Mendel was. There was an evening paper on the hall table, and he glanced vaguely at the headline ‘Lynching: World Jewry Protests’ and beneath it the account of the lynching of a Jewish shopkeeper in Düsseldorf. He opened the drawing-room door – Mendel was not there. Then he caught sight of him through the window wearing his gardening hat, hacking savagely with a pick-axe at a tree stump in the front garden. Smiley watched him for a moment, then went upstairs again to rest. As he reached the top of the stairs the telephone began ringing again.

  ‘George – sorry to bother you again. It’s about Mundt.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Flew to Berlin last night by BEA. Travelled under another name but was easily identified by the air hostess. That seems to be that. Hard luck, chum.’

  Smiley pressed down the cradle with his hand for a moment, then dialled Walliston 2944. He heard the number ringing the other end. Suddenly the dialling tone stopped and instead he heard Elsa Fennan’s voice:

  ‘Hullo … Hullo … Hullo?’

  Slowly he replaced the receiver. She was alive.

  Why on earth now? Why should Mundt go home now, five weeks after murdering Fennan, three weeks after murdering Scarr; why had he eliminated the lesser danger – Scarr – and left Elsa Fennan unharmed, neurotic and embittered, liable at any moment to throw aside her own safety and tell the whole story? What effect might that terrible night not have had upon her? How could Dieter trust a woman now so lightly bound to him? Her husband’s good name could no longer be preserved; might she not, in God knows what mood of vengeance or repentance, blurt out the whole truth? Obviously, a little time must elapse between the murder of Fennan and the murder of his wife, but what event, what information, what danger, had decided Mundt to return last night? A ruthless and elaborate plan to preserve the secrecy of Fennan’s treason had now apparently been thrown aside unfinished. What had happened yesterday that Mundt could know of? Or was the timing of his departure a coincidence? Smiley refused to believe it was. If Mundt had remained in England after the two murders and the assault on Smiley, he had done so un-willingly, waiting upon some opportunity or event that would release him. He would not stay a moment longer than he need. Yet what had he done since Scarr’s death? Hidden in some lonely room, locked away from light and news. Then why did he now fly home so suddenly?

  And Fennan – what spy was this who selected innocuous information for his masters when he had such gems at his fingertips? A change of heart, perhaps? A weakening of purpose? Then why did he not tell his wife, for whom his crime was
a constant nightmare, who would have rejoiced at his conversion? It seemed now that Fennan had never shown any preference for secret papers – he had simply taken home whatever files currently might occupy him. But certainly a weakening of purpose would explain the strange summons to Marlow and Dieter’s conviction that Fennan was betraying him. And who wrote the anonymous letter?

  Nothing made sense, nothing. Fennan himself – brilliant, fluent and attractive – had deceived so naturally, so expertly. Smiley had really liked him. Why then had this practised deceiver made the incredible blunder of putting Dieter’s name in his diary – and shown so little judgement or interest in the selection of intelligence?

  Smiley went upstairs to pack the few possessions which Mendel had collected for him from Bywater Street. It was all over.

  14

  The Dresden Group

  He stood on the doorstep and put down his suitcase, fumbling for his latchkey. As he opened the door he recalled how Mundt had stood there looking at him, those very pale blue eyes calculating and steady. It was odd to think of Mundt as Dieter’s pupil. Mundt had proceeded with the inflexibility of a trained mercenary – efficient, purposeful, narrow. There had been nothing original in his technique: in everything he had been a shadow of his master. It was as if Dieter’s brilliant and imaginative tricks had been compressed into a manual which Mundt had learnt by heart, adding only the salt of his own brutality.

  Smiley had deliberately left no forwarding address and a heap of mail lay on the door mat. He picked it up, put it on the hall table and began opening doors and peering about him, a puzzled, lost expression on his face. The house was strange to him, cold and musty. As he moved slowly from one room to another he began for the first time to realize how empty his life had become.

  He looked for matches to light the gas fire, but there were none. He sat in an armchair in the living-room and his eyes wandered over the bookshelves and the odds and ends he had collected on his travels. When Ann had left him he had begun by rigorously excluding all trace of her. He had even got rid of her books. But gradually he had allowed the few remaining symbols that linked his life with hers to reassert themselves: wedding presents from close friends which had meant too much to be given away. There was a Watteau sketch from Peter Guillam, a Dresden group from Steed-Asprey.

  He got up from his chair and went over to the corner cupboard where the group stood. He loved to admire the beauty of those figures, the tiny rococo courtesan in shepherd’s costume, her hands outstretched to one adoring lover, her little face bestowing glances on another. He felt in-adequate before that fragile perfection, as he had felt before Ann when he first began the conquest which had amazed society. Somehow those little figures comforted him: it was as useless to expect fidelity of Ann as of this tiny shepherdess in her glass case. Steed-Asprey had bought the group in Dresden before the war, it had been the prize of his collection and he had given it to them. Perhaps he had guessed that one day Smiley might have need of the simple philosophy it propounded.

  Dresden: of all German cities, Smiley’s favourite. He had loved its architecture, its odd jumble of medieval and classical buildings, sometimes reminiscent of Oxford, its cupolas, towers and spires, its copper-green roofs shimmering under a hot sun. Its name meant ‘town of the forest-dwellers’ and it was there that Wenceslas of Bohemia had favoured the minstrel poets with gifts and privilege. Smiley remembered the last time he had been there, visiting a university acquaintance, a Professor of Philology he had met in England. It was on that visit that he had caught sight of Dieter Frey, struggling round the prison courtyard. He could see him still, tall and angry, monstrously altered by his shaven head, somehow too big for that little prison. Dresden, he remembered, had been Elsa’s birthplace. He remembered glancing through her personal particulars at the Ministry: Elsa née Freimann, born 1917 in Dresden, Germany, of German parents; educated Dresden: imprisoned 1938–45. He tried to place her against the background of her home, the patrician Jewish family living out its life amid insult and persecution. ‘I dreamed of long golden hair and they shaved my head.’ He realized with sickening accuracy why she dyed her hair. She might have been like this shepherdess, round-bosomed and pretty. But the body had been broken with hunger so that it was frail and ugly, like the carcass of a tiny bird.

  He could picture her on the terrible night when she found her husband’s murderer standing by his body: hear her breathless, sobbing explanation of why Fennan had been in the park with Smiley: and Mundt unmoved, explaining and reasoning, compelling her finally to conspire once more against her will in this most dreadful and needless of crimes, dragging her to the telephone and forcing her to ring the theatre, leaving her finally tortured and exhausted to cope with the inquiries that were bound to follow, even to type that futile suicide letter over Fennan’s signature. It was inhuman beyond belief and, he added to himself, for Mundt a fantastic risk.

  She had, of course, proved herself a reliable enough accomplice in the past, cool-headed and, ironically, more skilful than Fennan in the techniques of espionage. And, heaven knows, for a woman who had been through such a night as that, her performance at their first meeting had been a marvel.

  As he stood gazing at the little shepherdess, poised eternally between her two admirers, he realized dispassionately that there was another quite different solution to the case of Samuel Fennan, a solution which matched every detail of circumstance, reconciled the nagging inconsistencies apparent in Fennan’s character. The realization began as an academic exercise without reference to personalities; Smiley manoeuvred the characters like pieces in a puzzle, twisting them this way and that to fit the complex framework of established facts – and then, in a moment, the pattern had suddenly re-formed with such assurance that it was a game no more.

  His heart beat faster, as with growing astonishment Smiley retold to himself the whole story, reconstructed scenes and incidents in the light of his discovery. Now he knew why Mundt had left England that day, why Fennan chose so little that was of value to Dieter, had asked for the eight-thirty call and why his wife had escaped the systematic savagery of Mundt. Now at last he knew who had written the anonymous letter. He saw how he had been the fool of his own sentiment, had played false with the power of his mind.

  He went to the telephone and dialled Mendel’s number. As soon as he had finished speaking to him he rang Peter Guillam. Then he put on his hat and coat and walked round the corner to Sloane Square. At a small newsagent’s beside Peter Jones he bought a picture postcard of Westminster Abbey. He made his way to the underground station and travelled north to Highgate, where he got out. At the main post office he bought a stamp and addressed the postcard in stiff, continental capitals to Elsa Fennan. In the panel for correspondence he wrote in spiky longhand: ‘Wish you were here.’ He posted the card and noted the time, after which he returned to Sloane Square. There was nothing more he could do.

  He slept soundly that night, rose early the following morning, a Saturday, and walked round the corner to buy croissants and coffee beans. He made a lot of coffee and sat in the kitchen reading The Times and eating his breakfast. He felt curiously calm and when the telephone rang at last he folded his paper carefully together before going upstairs to answer it.

  ‘George, it’s Peter’ – the voice was urgent, almost triumphant: ‘George, she’s bitten, I swear she has!’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The post arrived at exactly eight thirty-five. By nine-thirty she was walking briskly down the drive, booted and spurred. She made straight for the railway station and caught the nine fifty-two to Victoria. I put Mendel on the train and hared up by car, but I was too late to meet the train this end.’

  ‘How will you make contact with Mendel again?’

  ‘I gave him the number of the Grosvenor Hotel and I’m there now. He’s going to ring me as soon as he gets a chance and I’ll join him wherever he is.’

  ‘Peter, you’re taking this gently, aren’t you?’

  ‘Gen
tle as the wind, dear boy. I think she’s losing her head. Moving like a greyhound.’

  Smiley rang off. He picked up his Times and began studying the theatre column. He must be right … he must be.

  After that the morning passed with agonizing slowness. Sometimes he would stand at the window, his hands in his pockets, watching leggy Kensington girls going shopping with beautiful young men in pale blue pullovers, or the car-cleaning brigade toiling happily in front of their houses, then drifting away to talk motoring shop and finally setting off purposefully down the road for the first pint of the week-end.

  At last, after what seemed an interminable delay, the front-door bell rang and Mendel and Guillam came in, grinning cheerfully, ravenously hungry.

  ‘Hook, line and sinker,’ said Guillam. ‘But let Mendel tell you – he did most of the dirty work. I just got in for the kill.’

  Mendel recounted his story precisely and accurately, looking at the ground a few feet in front of him, his thin head slightly on one side.

  ‘She caught the nine fifty-two to Victoria. I kept well clear of her on the train and picked her up as she went through the barrier. Then she took a taxi to Hammersmith.’

  ‘A taxi?’ Smiley interjected. ‘She must be out of her mind.’

  ‘She’s rattled. She walks fast for a woman anyway, mind, but she damn nearly ran going down the platform. Got out at the Broadway and walked to the Sheridan Theatre. Tried the doors to the box office but they were locked. She hesitated a moment then turned back and went to a café a hundred yards down the road. Ordered coffee and paid for it at once. About forty minutes later she went back to the Sheridan. The box office was open and I ducked in behind her and joined the queue. She bought two rear stalls for next Thursday, Row T, 27 and 28. When she got outside the theatre she put one ticket in an envelope and sealed it up. Then she posted it. I couldn’t see the address but there was a sixpenny stamp on the envelope.’