He brought a pack of cigarettes from the desk and gave one to Leamas.
“You’re going to find these more expensive,” he said and Leamas nodded dutifully. Slipping the cigarettes into his pocket, Control sat down.
There was a pause; finally Leamas said: “Riemeck’s dead.”
“Yes, indeed,” Control declared, as if Leamas had made a good point. “It is very unfortunate. Most . . . I suppose that girl blew him–Elvira?”
“I suppose so.” Leamas wasn’t going to ask him how he knew about Elvira.
“And Mundt had him shot,” Control added.
“Yes.”
Control got up and drifted around the room looking for an ashtray. He found one and put it awkwardly on the floor between their two chairs.
“How did you feel? When Riemeck was shot, I mean? You saw it, didn’t you?”
Leamas shrugged. “I was bloody annoyed,” he said.
Control put his head to one side and half closed his eyes. “Surely you felt more than that? Surely you were upset? That would be more natural.”
“I was upset. Who wouldn’t be?”
“Did you like Riemeck–as a man?”
“I suppose so,” said Leamas helplessly. “There doesn’t seem much point in going into it,” he added.
“How did you spend the night, what was left of it, after Riemeck had been shot?”
“Look, what is this?” Leamas asked hotly; “what are you getting at?”
“Riemeck was the last,” Control reflected, “the last of a series of deaths. If my memory is right it began with the girl, the one they shot in Wedding, outside the cinema. Then there was the Dresden man, and the arrests at Jena. Like the ten little niggers. Now Paul, Viereck and Ländser–all dead. And finally Riemeck.” He smiled deprecatingly. “That is quite a heavy rate of expenditure. I wondered if you’d had enough.”
“What do you mean–enough?”
“I wondered whether you were tired. Burned out.” There was a long silence.
“That’s up to you,” Leamas said at last.
“We have to live without sympathy, don’t we? That’s impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really. I mean . . . one can’t be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold. . . do you see what I mean?”
Leamas saw. He saw the long road outside Rotterdam, the long straight road beside the dunes, and the stream of refugees moving along it; saw the little airplane miles away, the procession stop and look toward it; and the plane coming in, neatly over the dunes; saw the chaos, the meaningless hell, as the bombs hit the road.
“I can’t talk like this, Control,” Leamas said at last. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to stay out in the cold a little longer.” Leamas said nothing, so Control went on: “The ethic of our work, as I understand it, is based on a single assumption. That is, we are never going to be aggressors. Do you think that’s fair?”
Leamas nodded. Anything to avoid talking.
“Thus we do disagreeable things, but we are _defensive_. That, I think, is still fair. We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night. Is that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things.” He grinned like a schoolboy. “And in weighing up the moralities, we rather go in for dishonest comparisons; after all, you can’t compare the ideals of one side with the methods of the other, can you now?”
Leamas was lost. He’d heard the man talked a lot of drivel before getting the knife in, but he’d never heard anything like this before.
“I mean, you’ve got to compare method with method, and ideal with ideal. I would say that since the war, our methods–ours and those of the opposition–have become much the same. I mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s _policy_ is benevolent, can you now?” He laughed quietly to himself. “That would _never_ do,” he said.
For God’s sake, thought Leamas, it’s like working for a bloody clergyman. What _is_ he up to?
“That is why,” Control continued, “I think we ought to try and get rid of Mundt. . . . Oh really,” he said, turning irritably toward the door, “where is that damned coffee?”