The Looking Glass War

by John le Carré

  Avery put on his overcoat and went along the corridor, past tapestries of biblical quotations and an old print of Lübeck harbour. Leiser was sitting on a chair beside the tiled oven.

  ‘Hullo, Fred.’

  He looked old and tired.

  ‘It’s near here, isn’t it, where I cross?’

  ‘About five kilometres. The Director will brief us in the morning. They say it’s quite an easy run. He’ll give you all your papers and that kind of thing. In the afternoon we’ll show you the place. They’ve done a lot of work on it in London.’

  ‘In London,’ Leiser repeated, and suddenly: ‘I did a job in Holland in the war. The Dutch were good people. We sent a lot of agents to Holland. Women. They were all picked up. You were too young.’

  ‘I read about it.’

  ‘The Germans caught a radio operator. Our people didn’t know. They just went on sending more agents. They said there was nothing else to do.’ He was talking faster. ‘I was only a kid then; just a quick job they wanted, in and out. They were short of operators. They said it didn’t matter me not speaking Dutch, the reception party would meet me at the drop. All I had to do was work the set. There’d be a safe house ready.’ He was far away. ‘We fly in and nothing moves, not a shot or a searchlight, and I’m jumping. And when I land, there they are: two men and a woman. We say the words and they take me to the road to get the bikes. There’s no time to bury the parachute – we aren’t bothering by then. We find the house and they give me food. After supper we go upstairs where the set is – no schedules, London listened all the time in those days. They give the message: I’m sending a call sign – “Come in TYR, come in TYR” – then the message in front of me, twenty-one groups, four-letter.’

  He stopped.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘They were following the message, you see; they wanted to know where the safety signal came. It was in the ninth letter; a back shift of one. They let me finish the message and then they were on me, one hitting me, men all over the house.’

  ‘But who, Fred? Who’s they?’

  ‘You can’t talk about it like that: you never know. It’s never that easy.’

  ‘But for God’s sake, whose fault was it? Who did it? Fred!’

  ‘Anyone’s. You can never tell. You’ll learn that.’ He seemed to have given up.

  ‘You’re alone this time. Nobody has been told. Nobody’s expecting you.’

  ‘No. That’s right.’ His hands were clasped on his lap. He made a hunched figure, small and cold. ‘In the war it was easier because, however bad it got, you thought one day we’d win. Even if you were picked up, you thought, “They’ll come and get me, they’ll drop some men or make a raid.” You knew they never would, see, but you could think it. You just wanted to be left alone to think it. But nobody wins this one, do they?’

  ‘It’s not the same. But more important.’

  ‘What do you do if I’m caught?’

  ‘We’ll get you back. Not to worry, eh, Fred?’

  ‘Yes, but how?’

  ‘We’re a big outfit, Fred. A lot goes on you don’t know about. Contacts here and there. You can’t see the whole picture.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Not all of it, Fred. Only the Director sees it all. Not even the Captain.’

  ‘What’s he like, the Director?’

  ‘He’s been in it a long time. You’ll see him tomorrow. He’s a very remarkable man.’

  ‘Does the Captain fancy him?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He never talks about him,’ Leiser said.

  ‘None of us talk about him.’

  ‘There was this girl I had. She worked in the bank. I told her I was going away. If anything goes wrong I don’t want anything said, see. She’s just a kid.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  A moment of mistrust. ‘Never mind. But if she turns up just keep it all right with her.’

  ‘What do you mean, Fred?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Leiser didn’t talk after that. When the morning came Avery returned to his room.

  ‘What’s it all about?’ Haldane asked.

  ‘He was in some mess in the war, in Holland. He was betrayed.’

  ‘But he’s giving us a second chance. How nice. Just what they always said.’ And then: ‘Leclerc arrives this morning.’

  His taxi came at eleven. Leclerc was getting out almost before it had pulled up. He was wearing a duffel coat, heavy brown shoes for rough country and a soft cap. He looked very well.

  ‘Where’s Mayfly?’

  ‘With Johnson,’ Haldane said.

  ‘Got a bed for me?’

  ‘You can have Mayfly’s when he’s gone.’

  At eleven thirty Leclerc held a briefing; in the afternoon they were to make a tour of the border.

  The briefing took place in the hall. Leiser came in last. He stood in the doorway, looking at Leclerc, who smiled at him winningly, as if he liked what he saw. They were about the same height.

  Avery said, ‘Director, this is Mayfly.’

  His eyes still on Leiser, Leclerc replied, ‘I think I’m allowed to call him Fred. Hullo.’ He advanced and shook him by the hand, both formal, two weather men coming out of a box.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Leiser.

  ‘I hope they haven’t been working you too hard?’

  ‘I’m all right, sir.’

  ‘We’re all very impressed,’ Leclerc said. ‘You’ve done a grand job.’ He might have been talking to his constituents.

  ‘I haven’t started yet.’

  ‘I always feel the training is three-quarters of the battle. Don’t you, Adrian?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They sat down. Leclerc stood a little away from them. He had hung a map on the wall. By some indefinable means – it may have been his maps, it may have been the precision of his language, or it may have been his strict deportment, which so elusively combined purpose with restraint – Leclerc evoked in that hour that same nostalgic, campaigning atmosphere which had informed the briefing in Blackfriars Road a month before. He had the illusionist’s gift, whether he spoke of rockets or wireless transmission, of cover or the point at which the border was to be crossed, of implying great familiarity with his subject.

  ‘Your target is Kalkstadt’ – a little grin – ‘hitherto famous only for a remarkably fine fourteenth-century church.’ They laughed, Leiser too. It was so good, Leclerc knowing about old churches.

  He had brought a diagram of the crossing point, done in different inks, with the border drawn in red. It was all very simple. On the western side, he said, there was a low, wooded hill overgrown with gorse and bracken. This ran parallel to the border until the southern end curved eastwards in a narrow arm stopping about two hundred and twenty yards short of the border, directly opposite an observation tower. The tower was set well back from the demarcation line: at its foot ran a fence of barbed wire. It had been observed that this wire was laid out in a single apron and only loosely fixed to its staves. East German guards had been seen to detach it in order to pass through and patrol the undefended strip of territory which lay between the demarcation line and the physical border. That afternoon Leclerc would indicate the precise staves. Mayfly, he said, should not be alarmed at having to pass so close to the tower; experience had shown that the attention of the guards was concentrated on the more distant parts of their area; the night was ideal; a high wind was forecast; there would be no moon. Leclerc had set the crossing time for 0235 hours; the guard changed at midnight, each watch lasted three hours. It was reasonable to suppose that the sentries would not be as alert after two and a half hours on duty as they would be at the start of their watches. The relief guard, which had to approach from a barrack some distance to the north, would not yet be under way.

  Much attention had been given, Leclerc continued, to the possibility of mines. They would see from the map – the little forefinger traced the green dotted line from the end of the rise across the bor
der – that there was an old footpath which did indeed follow the very route which Leiser would be taking. The frontier guards had been seen to avoid this path, striking a track of their own some ten yards to the south of it. The assumption was, Leclerc said, that the path was mined, while the area to the side of it had been left clear for the benefit of patrols. Leclerc proposed that Leiser should use the track made by the frontier guards.

  Wherever possible over the two hundred-odd yards between the foot of the hill and the tower, Leiser should crawl, keeping his head below the level of the bracken. This eliminated the small danger that he would be sighted from the tower. He would be comforted to hear, Leclerc added with a smile, that there was no record of any patrol operating on the western side of the wire during the hours of darkness. The East German guards seemed to fear that one of their own number might slip away unseen.

  Once across the border Leiser should keep clear of any path. The country was rough, partly wooded. The going would be hard but all the safer for that; he was to head south. The reason for this was simple. To the south, the border turned westward for some ten kilometres. Thus Leiser, by moving southwards, would put himself not two but fifteen kilometres from the border, and more quickly escape the zonal patrols which guarded the eastern approaches. Leclerc would advise him thus – he withdrew one hand casually from the pocket of his duffel coat and lit a cigarette, conscious all the time of their eyes upon him – march east for half an hour, then turn due south, making for the Marienhorst lake. At the eastern end of the lake was a disused boathouse. There he could lie up for an hour and give himself some food. By that time Leiser might care for a drink – relieved laughter – and he would find a little brandy in his rucksack.

  Leclerc had a habit, when making a joke, of holding himself at attention and lifting his heels from the ground as if to launch his wit upon the higher air.

  ‘I couldn’t have something with gin, could I?’ Leiser asked. ‘White Lady’s my drink.’

  There was a moment’s bewildered silence.

  ‘That wouldn’t do at all,’ Leclerc said shortly, Leiser’s master.

  Having rested, he should walk to the village of Marienhorst and look around for transport to Schwerin. From then on, Leclerc added lightly, he was on his own.

  ‘You have all the papers necessary for a journey from Magdeburg to Rostock. When you reach Schwerin, you are on the legitimate route. I don’t want to say too much about cover because you have been through that with the Captain. Your name is Fred Hartbeck, you are an unmarried mechanic from Magdeburg with an offer of employment at the State Co-operative ship-building works at Rostock.’ He smiled, undeterred. ‘I am sure you have all been through every detail of this already. Your love life, your pay, medical history, war service and the rest. There is just one thing that I might add about cover. Never volunteer information. People don’t expect you to explain yourself. If you are cornered, play it by ear. Stick as closely to the truth as you can. Cover,’ he declared, stating a favourite maxim, ‘should never be fabricated but only an extension of the truth.’ Leiser laughed in a reserved way. It was as if he could have wished Leclerc a taller man.

  Johnson brought coffee from the kitchen, and Leclerc said briskly, ‘Thank you, Jack,’ as if everything were quite as it should be.

  Leclerc now addressed himself to the question of Leiser’s target; he gave a résumé of the indicators, implying somehow that they only confirmed suspicions which he himself had long harboured. He employed a tone which Avery had not heard in him before. He sought to imply, as much by omission and inference as by direct allusion, that theirs was a Department of enormous skill and knowledge, enjoying in its access to money, its intercourse with other services and in the unchallenged authority of its judgements an unearthly, oracular immunity, so that Leiser might well have wondered why, if all this were so, he need bother to risk his life at all.

  ‘The rockets are in the area now,’ Leclerc said. ‘The Captain has told you what signs to look for. We want to know what they look like, where they are and above all who mans them.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You must try the usual tricks. Pub gossip, tracing an old soldier friend, you know the kind of thing. When you find them, come back.’

  Leiser nodded.

  ‘At Kalkstadt there’s a workers’ hostel.’ He unfolded a chart of the town. ‘Here. Next to the church. Stay there if you can. You may run into people who have actually been engaged …’

  ‘I know,’ Leiser repeated. Haldane stirred, glanced at him anxiously.

  ‘You might even hear something of a man who used to be employed at the station, Fritsche. He gave us some interesting details about the rockets, then disappeared. If you get the chance, that is. You could ask at the station, say you’re a friend of his …’

  There was a very slight pause.

  ‘Just disappeared,’ Leclerc repeated, for them, not for himself. His mind was elsewhere. Avery watched him anxiously, waiting for him to go on. At last he said, rapidly, ‘I have deliberately avoided the question of communication,’ indicating by his tone that they were nearly done. ‘I imagine you have gone over that enough times already.’

  ‘No worries there,’ Johnson said. ‘All the schedules are at night. That leaves the frequency range pretty simple. He’ll have a clear hand during the day, sir. We’ve had some very nice dummy runs, haven’t we, Fred?’

  ‘Oh yes. Very nice.’

  ‘As regards getting back,’ Leclerc said, ‘we play the war rules. There are no submarines any more, Fred; not for this kind of thing. When you return, you should report at once to the nearest British Consulate or Embassy, give your proper name and ask to be repatriated. You should represent yourself as a distressed British subject. My instinct would be to advise you to come out the way you went in. If you’re in trouble, don’t necessarily move west straight away. Lie up for a bit. You’re taking plenty of money.’

  Avery knew he would never forget that morning, how they had sat at the farmhouse table like sprawling boys at the Nissen-hut desks, their strained faces fixed upon Leclerc as in the stillness of a church he read the liturgy of their devotion, moving his little hand across the map like a priest with the taper. All of them in that room – but Avery perhaps best of all – knew the fatal disproportion between the dream and reality, between motive and action. Avery had talked to Taylor’s child, stammered out his half-formed lies to Peersen and the Consul: he had heard that dreadful footfall in the hotel, and returned from a nightmare journey to see his own experiences remade into the images of Leclerc’s world. Yet Avery, like Haldane and Leiser, listened to Leclerc with the piety of an agnostic, feeling perhaps that this was how, in some clean and magic place, it really ought to be.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Leiser. He was looking at the plan of Kalkstadt. He was very much the small man just then. He might have been pointing to a fault in an engine. The station, hostel and church were marked in green; an inset at the bottom left-hand corner depicted the railway warehouses and dumping sheds. At each side, the point of the compass was given adjectivally: Western Prospect, Northern Prospect.

  ‘What’s a prospect, sir?’ Leiser inquired.

  ‘A view, an outlook.’

  ‘What’s it for? What’s it for on the map, please?’

  Leclerc smiled patiently. ‘For purposes of orientation, Fred.’

  Leiser got up and examined the chart closely. ‘And this is the church?’

  ‘That’s right, Fred.’

  ‘Why does it face north? Churches go from east to west. You’ve got the entrance on the eastern side where the altar should be.’

  Haldane leant forward, the index finger of his right hand resting on his lip.

  ‘It’s only a sketch map,’ Leclerc said. Leiser returned to his place and sat to attention, straighter than ever. ‘I see. Sorry.’

  When the meeting was over Leclerc took Avery on one side. ‘Just one point, John, he’s not to take a gun. It’s quite out of the question. The Minist
er was adamant. Perhaps you’ll mention it to him.’

  ‘No gun?’

  ‘I think we can allow the knife. That could be a general-purpose thing; I mean if anything went wrong we could say it was general purpose.’

  After lunch they made a tour of the border – Gorton had provided a car. Leclerc brought with him a handful of notes he had made from the Circus frontier report, and these he kept on his knee, together with a folded map.

  The extreme northern part of the frontier which divides the two halves of Germany is largely a thing of depressing inconsequence. Those who look eagerly for dragon’s teeth and substantial fortifications will be disappointed. It crosses land of considerable variety; gullies and small hills overgrown with bracken and patches of untended forest. Often the Eastern defences are set so far behind the demarcation line as to be hidden from Western eyes – only a forward pillbox, crumbling roads, a vacated farmhouse or an occasional observation tower excite the imagination.

  By way of emphasis the Western side is adorned with the grotesque statuary of political impotence: a plywood model of the Brandenburg Gate, the screws rusting in their sockets, rises absurdly from an untended field; notice boards, broken by wind and rain, display fifteen-year-old slogans across an empty valley. Only at night, when the beam of a searchlight springs from the darkness and draws its wavering finger across the cold earth, does the heart chill for the captive crouching like a hare in the plough, waiting to break cover and run in terror till he fall.

  They followed an unmade road along the top of a hill, and wherever it ran close to the frontier they stopped the car and got out. Leiser was shrouded in a mackintosh and hat. The day was very cold. Leclerc wore his duffel coat and carried a shooting stick – Heaven knows where he had found it. The first time they stopped, and the second, and again at the next, Leclerc said quietly, ‘Not this one.’ As they got into the car for the fourth time he declared, ‘The next stop is ours.’ It was the kind of brave joke favoured in battle.

  Avery would not have recognised the place from Leclerc’s sketch map. The hill was there, certainly, turning inwards towards the frontier, then descending sharply to the plain below. But the land beyond it was hilly and partly wooded, its horizon fringed with trees against which, with the aid of glasses, they could discern the brown shape of a wooden tower. ‘It’s the three staves to the left,’ Leclerc said. As they scanned the ground, Avery could make out here and there the worn mark of the old path.