Aware of the overwhelming temptations which assail a man permanently isolated in his deceit, Leamas resorted to the course which armed him best; even when he was alone, he compelled himself to live with the personality he had assumed. It is said that Balzac on his deathbed inquired anxiously after the health and prosperity of characters be had created. Similarly Leamas, without relinquishing the power of invention, identified himself with what he had invented. The qualities he exhibited to Fiedler, the restless uncertainty, the protective arrogance concealing shame, were not approximations but extensions of qualities he actually possessed; hence also the slight dragging of the feet, the aspect of personal neglect, the indifference to food, and an increasing reliance on alcohol and tobacco. When alone, he remained faithful to these habits. He would even exaggerate them a little, mumbling to himself about the iniquities of his Service.
Only very rarely, as now, going to bed that evening, did he allow himself the dangerous luxury of admitting the great lie he lived.
Control had been phenomenally right. Fiedler was walking, like a man led in his sleep, into the net which Control had spread for him. It was uncanny to observe the growing identity of interest between Fiedler and Control: it was as if they had agreed on the same plan, and Leamas had been dispatched to fulfill it.
Perhaps that was the answer. Perhaps Fiedler was the special interest Control was fighting so desperately to preserve. Leamas didn’t dwell on that possibility. He did not want to know. In matters of that kind he was wholly uninquisitive: he knew that no conceivable good could come of his deductions. Nevertheless, he hoped to God it was true. It was possible, just possible in that case, that he would get home.
* * 14 * Letter to a Client
Leamas was still in bed the next morning when Fiedler brought him the letters to sign. One was on the thin blue writing paper of the Seller Hotel Alpenblick, Lake Spiez, Switzerland, the other from the Palace Hotel, Gstaad.
Leamas read the first letter:
To the Manager,
The Royal Scandinavian Bank Ltd.,
Copenhagen.
Dear Sir,
I have been traveling for some weeks and have not received any mail from England. Accordingly I have not had your reply to my letter of March 3rd requesting a current statement of the deposit account of which I am a joint signatory with Herr Karlsdorf. To avoid further delay, would you be good enough to forward a duplicate statement to me at the following address, where I shall be staying for two weeks beginning April 21st:
c/o Madame Y. de Sanglot,
13 Avenue des Colombes,
Paris XII,
France.
I apologize for this confusion,
Yours faithfully,
(Robert Lang)
“What’s all this about a letter of March third?” he asked. “I didn’t write them any letter.”
“No, you didn’t. As far as we know, no one did. That will worry the bank. If there is any inconsistency between the letter we are sending them now and letters they have had from Control, they will assume the solution is to be found in the _missing_ letter of March third. Their reaction will be to send you the statement as you ask, with a covering note regretting that they have not received your letter of the third.”
The second letter was the same as the first; only the names were different. The address in Paris was the same. Leamas took a blank piece of paper and his fountain pen and wrote half a dozen times in a fluent hand “Robert Lang,” then signed the first letter. Sloping his pen backwards he practiced the second signature until he was satisfied with it, then wrote “Stephen Bennett” under the second letter.
“Admirable,” Fiedler observed, “quite admirable.”
“What do we do now?”
“They will be posted in Switzerland tomorrow, in Interlaken and Gstaad. Our people in Paris will telegraph the replies to me as soon as they arrive. We shall have the answer in a week.”
“And until then?”
“We shall be constantly in one another’s company. I know that is distasteful to you, and I apologize. I thought we could go for walks, drive around in the hills a bit, kill time. I want you to relax and talk; talk about London, about Cambridge Circus and working in the Department; tell me the gossip, talk about the pay, the leave, the rooms, the paper and the people. The pins and the paper clips. I want to know all the little things that don’t matter. Incidentally. . .” A change of tone.