* * 21 * The Witness
The President turned to the little man in the black suit sitting directly opposite Fiedler.
“Comrade Karden, you are speaking for Comrade Mundt. Do you wish to examine the witness Leamas?”
“Yes, yes, I should like to in one moment,” he replied, getting laboriously to his feet and pulling the ends of his gold-rimmed spectacles over his ears. He was a benign figure, a little rustic, and his hair was white.
“The contention of Comrade Mundt,” he began– his mild voice was rather pleasantly modulated–“is that Leamas is lying; that Comrade Fiedler either by design or ill chance has been drawn into a plot to disrupt the Abteilung, and thus bring into disrepute the organs for the defense of our socialist state. We do not dispute that Karl Riemeck was a British spy– there is evidence for that. But we dispute that Mundt was in league with him, or accepted money for betraying our Party. We say there is no objective evidence for this charge, that Comrade Fiedler is intoxicated by dreams of power and blinded to rational thought. We maintain that from the moment Leamas returned from Berlin to London he lived a part; that he simulated a swift decline into degeneracy, drunkenness and debt, that he assaulted a tradesman in full public view and affected anti-American sentiments–all solely in order to attract the attention of the Abteilung. We believe that British Intelligence has deliberately spun around Comrade Mundt a mesh of circumstantial evidence– the payment of money to foreign banks, its withdrawal to coincide with Mundt’s presence in this or that country, the casual hearsay evidence from Peter Guillam, the secret meeting between Control and Riemeck at which matters were discussed that Leamas could not hear: these afl provided a spurious chain of evidence and Comrade Fiedler, on whose ambitions the British so accurately counted, accepted it; and thus he became party to a monstrous plot to destroy–to murder in fact, for Mundt now stands to lose his life–one of the most vigilant defenders of our Republic.
“Is it not consistent with their record of sabotage, subversion and human trafficking that the British should devise this desperate plot? What other course lies open to them now that the rampart has been built across Berlin and the flow of Western spies has been checked? We have fallen victim to their plot; at best Comrade Fiedler is guilty of a most serious error; at worst of conniving with imperialist spies to undermine the security of the worker state, and shed innocent blood.
“We also have a witness.” He nodded benignly at the court. “Yes. We too have a witness. For do you really suppose that all this time Comrade Mundt has been in ignorance of Fiedler’s fevered plotting? Do you really suppose that? For months he has been aware of the sickness in Fiedler’s mind. It was Comrade Mundt himself who authorized the approach that was made to Leamas in England: do you think he would have taken such an insane risk if he were himself to be implicated?
“And when the reports of Leamas’ first interrogation in The Hague reached the Praesidium, do you suppose Comrade Mundt threw his away unread? And when, after Leamas had arrived in our country and Fiedler embarked on his own interrogation, no further reports were forthcoming, do you suppose Comrade Mundt was then so obtuse that he did not know what Fiedler was hatching? When the first reports came in from Peters in The Hague, Mundt had only to look at the dates of Leamas’ visits to Copenhagen and Helsinki to realize that the whole thing was a plant–a plant to discredit Mundt himself. Those dates did indeed coincide with Mundt’s visits to Denmark and Finland: they were chosen by London for that very reason. Mundt had known of those ‘earlier indications’ as well as Fiedler–remember that. Mundt too was looking for a spy within the ranks of the Abteilung. . . .
“And so by the time Leamas arrived in Democratic Germany, Mundt was watching with fascination how Leamas nourished Fiedler’s suspicions with hints and oblique indications–never overdone, you understand, never emphasized, but dropped here and there with perfidious subtlety. And by then the ground had been prepared–the man in the Lebanon, the miraculous scoop to which Fiedler referred, both seeming to confirm the presence of a highly placed spy within the Abteilung. . . .