“I don’t know. I don’t much care,” Leamas added. “Stalin didn’t either, did he?”
Fiedler smiled. “I like the English,” he said, almost to himself; “my father did too. He was very fond of the English.”
“That gives me a nice, warm feeling,” Leamas retorted and lapsed into silence.
They stopped while Fiedler gave Leamas a cigarette and lit it for him. –
They were climbing steeply now. Leamas liked the exercise, walking ahead with long strides, his shoulders thrust forward. Fiedler followed, slight and agile, like a terrier behind his master. They must have been walking for an hour, perhaps more, when suddenly the trees broke above them and the sky appeared. They had reached the top of a small hill, and could look down on the solid mass of pine broken only here and there by gray clusters of beach. Across the valley Leamas could glimpse the hunting lodge, perched below the crest of the opposite hill, low and dark against the trees. In the middle of the clearing was a rough bench beside a pile of logs and the damp remnants of a charcoal fire.
“We’ll sit down for a moment,” said Fiedler, “then we must go back.” He paused. “Tell me: this money, these large sums in foreign banks–what did you think they were for?”
‘What do you mean? I’ve told you, they were payments to an agent.”
“An agent from behind the Iron Curtain?”
“Yes, I thought so,” Leamas replied wearily.
“Why did you think so?”
“First, it was a hell of a lot of money. Then the complications of paying him; the special security. And of course, Control being mixed up in it.”
“What do you think the agent did with the money?”
“Look, I’ve told you–I don’t know. I don’t even know if he collected it. I didn’t know anything–I was just the bloody office boy.”
“What did you do with the passbooks for the accounts?”
“I handed them in as soon as I got back to London–together with my phony passport.”
“Did the Copenhagen or Helsinki banks ever write to you in London–to your alias, I mean?”
“I don’t know. I suppose any letters would have been passed straight to Control anyway.”
“The false signatures you used to open the accounts–Control had a sample of them?”
“Yes. I practiced them a lot and they had samples.”
“More than one?”
“Yes. Whole pages.”
“I see. Then letters could have gone to the banks after you had opened the accounts. You need not have known. The signatures could have been forged and the letters sent without your knowledge.”
“Yes. That’s right. I suppose that’s what happened. I signed a lot of blank sheets too. I always assumed someone else took care of the correspondence.”
“But you never did actually _know_ of such correspondence?”
Leamas shook his head. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he said, “you’ve got it all out of proportion. There was a lot of paper going around–this was just part of the day’s work. It wasn’t something I gave much thought to. Why should I? It was hush-hush, but I’ve been in on things all my life where you only know a little and someone else knows the rest. Besides, paper bores me stiff. I didn’t lose any sleep over it. I liked the trips of course–I drew operational subsistence which helped. But I didn’t sit at my desk all day, wondering about Rolling Stone. Besides,” he added a little shamefacedly, “I was hitting the bottle a bit.”
“So you said,” Fiedler commented, “and of course, I believe you.”
“I don’t give a damn whether you believe me or not,” Leamas rejoined hotly.
Fiedler smiled.
“I am glad. That is your virtue,” he said, “that is your great virtue. It is the virtue of indifference. A little resentment here, a little pride there, but that is nothing: the distortions of a tape recorder. You are objective. It occurred to me,” Fiedler continued after a slight pause, “that you could still help us to establish whether any of that money was ever drawn. There is nothing to stop you writing to each bank and asking for a current statement. We could say you were staying in Switzerland; use an accommodation address. Do you see any objection to that?”