On either side, their chairs a little forward of the table and turned inwards to face one another, sat two men: one was middle-aged, sixty perhaps, in a black suit and a gray tie, the kind of suit they wear in church in German country districts; the other was Fiedler.
Leamas sat at the back, a guard on either side of him. Between the heads of the spectators he could see Mundt, himself surrounded by police, his fair hair cut very short, his broad shoulders covered in the familiar gray of prison uniform. It seemed to Leamas a curious commentary on the mood of the court–or the influence of Fiedler–that he himself should be wearing his own clothes, while Mundt was in prison uniform.
Leamas had not long been in his place when the President of the Tribunal, sitting at the center of the table, rang the bell. The sound directed his attention toward it, and a shiver passed over him as he realized that the President was a woman. He could scarcely be blamed for not noticing it before. She was fiftyish, small-eyed and dark. Her hair was cut short like a man’s, and she wore the kind of functional dark tunic favored by Soviet wives. She looked sharply around the room, nodded to a sentry to close the door, and began at once without ceremony to address the court.
“You all know why we are here. The proceedings are secret, remember that. This is a Tribunal convened expressly by the Praesidium. It is to the Praesidium alone that we are responsible. We shall hear evidence as we think fit.” She pointed perfunctorily toward Fiedler. “Comrade Fiedler, you had better begin.”
Fiedler stood up. Nodding briefly toward the table, he drew from the briefcase beside him a sheaf of papers held together in one corner by a piece of black cord.
He talked quietly and easily, with a diffidence which Leamas had never seen in him before. Leamas considered it a good performance, well adjusted to the role of a man regretfully hanging his superior.
“You should know first, if you do not know already,” Fiedler began, “that on the day that the Praesidium received my report on the activities of Comrade Mundt I was arrested, together with the defector Leamas. Both of us were imprisoned and both of us . . . invited, under extreme duress, to confess that this whole terrible charge was a fascist plot against a loyal Comrade.
“You can see from the report I have already given you how it was that Leamas came to our notice: we ourselves sought him out, induced him to defect and finally brought him to Democratic Germany. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the impartiality of Leamas than this: that he still refuses, for reasons I will explain, to believe that Mundt was a British agent. It is therefore grotesque to suggest that Leamas is a plant: the initiative was ours, and the fragmentary but vital evidence of Leamas provides only the final proof in a long chain of indications reaching back over the last three years.
“You have before you the written record of this case. I need do no more than interpret for you facts of which you are already aware.
“The charge against Comrade Mnndt is that he is the agent of an imperialist power. I could have made other charges–that he passed information to the British Secret Service, that he turned his Department into the unconscious lackey of a bourgeois state, that he deliberately shielded revanchist anti-Party groups and accepted sums of foreign currency in reward. These other charges would derive from the first; that HansDieter Mundt is the agent of an imperialist power. The penalty for this crime is death. There is no crime more serious in our penal code, none which exposes our state to greater danger, nor demands more vigilance of our Party organs.” Here he put the papers down.
“Comrade Mundt is forty-two years old. He is Deputy Head of the Department for the Protection of the People. He is unmarried. He has always been regarded as a man of exceptional capabilities, tireless in serving the Party’s interests, ruthless in protecting them.