* * 2 * The Circus
He watched the Templehof runway sink beneath him.
Leamas was not a reflective man and not a particularly philosophical one. He knew he was written off–it was a fact of life which he would henceforth live with, as a man mUst live with cancer or imprisonment. He knew there was no kind of preparation which could have bridged the gap between then and now. He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary. He’d lasted longer than most; now he was beaten. It is said a dog lives as long as its teeth; metaphorically, Leamas’ teeth had been drawn; and it was Mundt who had drawn them.
Ten years ago he could have taken the other path–there were desk jobs in that anonymous government building in Cambridge Circus which Leamas could have taken and kept till he was God knows how old; but Leamas wasn’t made that way. You might as well have asked a jockey to become a betting clerk as expect Leamas to abandon operational life for the tendentious theorizing and clandestine self-interest of Whitehall. He had stayed on in Berlin, conscious that Personnel had marked his file for review at the end of every year–stubborn, willful, contemptuous of instruction, telling himself that something would turn up. Intelligence work has one moral law–it is justified by results. Even the sophistry of Whitehall paid court to that law, and Leamas got results. Until Mundt came.
It was odd how soon Leamas had realized that Mundt was the writing on the wail.
Hans-Dieter Mundt, born forty-two years ago in Leipzig. Leamas knew his dossier, knew the photograph on the inside of the cover, the blank, hard face beneath the flaxen hair; knew by heart the story of Mundt’s rise to power as second man in the Abteilung and effective head of operations. Mundt was hated even within his own department. Leamas knew that from the evidence of defectors, and from Riemeck, who as a member of the SED Praesidium sat on security committees with Mundt, and dreaded him. Rightly as it turned out, for Mundt had killed him.
Until 1959 Mundt had been a minor functionary of the Abteilung, operating in London under the cover of the East German Steel Mission. He returned to Germany in a hurry after murdering two of his own agents to save his skin and was not heard of for more than a year. Quite suddenly he reappeared at the Abteilung’s headquarters in Leipzig as head of the Ways and Means Department, responsible for allocating currency, equipment and personnel for special tasks. At the end of that year came the big struggle for power within the Abteilung. The number and influence of Soviet liaison officers were drastically reduced, several of the old guard were dismissed on ideological grounds and three men emerged: Fielder as head of counterintelligence, Jahn took over from Mundt as head of facilities, and Mundt himself got the plum–deputy director of operations–at the age of forty-one. Then the new style began. The first agent Leamas lost was a girl. She was only a small link in the network; she was used for courier jobs. They shot her dead in the street as she left a West Berlin cinema. The police never found the murderer and Leamas was at first inclined to write the incident off as unconnected with her work. A month later a railroad porter in Dresden, a discarded agent from Peter Guillam’s network, was found dead and mutilated beside a railroad track. Leamas knew it wasn’t coincidence any longer. Soon after that two members of another network under Leamas’ control were arrested and summarily sentenced to death. So it went on: remorseless and unnerving.
And now they had Karl, and Leamas was leavmg Berlin as he had come–without a single agent worth a farthing. Mundt had won.
Leamas was a short man with close-cropped, irongray hair, and the physique of a swimmer. He was very strong. This strength was discernible in his back and shoulders, in his neck, and in the stubby formation of his hands and fingers.
He had a utilitarian approach to clothes, as. he did to most other things, and even the spectacles he occasionally wore had steel rims. Most of his suits were of artificial fiber, none of them had waistcoats. He favored shirts of the American kind with buttons on the points of the collars, and suede shoes with rubber soles.