The Spy Who Came in From The Cold

A guard unlocked the door and called into the passage outside. In the total silence of the court they heard a woman’s answering voice, and her ponderous footsteps slowly approaching. Fiedler abruptly stood up and taking Liz by the arm, he guided her to the door. As she reached the door she turned and looked back toward Leamas but he was staring away from her like a man who cannot bear the sight of blood.

“Go back to England,” Fiedler said to her. “You go back to England.” Suddenly Liz began to sob uncontrollably. The wardress put an arm around her shoulder, more for support than comfort, and led her from the room. The guard closed the door. The sound of her crying faded gradually to nothing.

“There isn’t much to say,” Leamas began. “Karden’s right. It was a put-up job. When we lost Karl Riemeck we lost our only decent agent in the Zone. All the rest had gone already. We couldn’t understand it– Mundt seemed to pick them up almost before we’d recruited them. I came back to London and saw Control. Peter Guillam was there and George Smiley. George was in retirement really, doing something clever. Philology or something.

“Anyway, they’d dreamed up this idea. Set a man to trap himself, that’s what Control said. Go through the motions and see if they bite. Then we worked it out– backwards so to speak. ‘Inductive’ Smiley called it. If Mundt _were_ our agent how would we have paid him, how would the files look, and so on. Peter remembered that some Arab had tried to sell us a breakdown of the Abteilung a year or two back and we’d sent him packing. Afterwards we found out we’d made a mistake. Peter had the idea of fitting that in–as if we’d turned it down because we already knew. That was clever.

“You can imagine the rest. The pretense of going to pieces; drink, money troubles, the rumors that Leamas had robbed the till. It all hung together. We got Elsie in Accounts to help with the gossip, and one or two others. They did it bloody well,” he added with a touch of pride. “Then I chose a morning–a Saturday morning, lots of people about–and broke out. It made the local press–it even made the _Worker_, I think–and by that time you people had picked it up. From then on,” he added with contempt, “you dug your own graves.”

“Your grave,” said Mundt quietly. He was looking thoughtfully at Leamas with his pale, pale eyes. “And perhaps Comrade Fiedler’s.”

“You can hardly blame Fiedler,” said Leamas indifferently, “he happened to be the man on the spot; he’s not the only man in the Abteilung who’d willingly hang you, Mundt.”

“We shall hang you, anyway,” said Mundt reassuringly. “You murdered a guard. You tried to murder me.” –

Leamas smiled drily.

“All cats are alike in the dark, Mundt. . . . Smiley always said it could go wrong. He said it might start a reaction we couldn’t stop. His nerve’s gone–you know that. He’s never been the same since the Fennan Case–since the Mundt affair in London. They say something happened to him then–that’s why he left the Circus. That’s what I can’t make out, why they paid off the bills, the girl and all that. It must have been Smiley wrecking the operation on purpose, it must have been. He must have had a crisis of conscience, thought it was wrong to kill or something. It was mad, after all that preparation, all that work, to mess up an operation that way.

“But Smiley hated you, Mundt. We all did, I think, although we didn’t say it. We planned the thing as if it was all a bit of a game.. . it’s hard to explain now. We knew we had our backs to the wall: we’d failed against Mundt and now we were going to try to kill him. But it was still a game.” Turning to the Tribunal he said: “You’re wrong about Fiedler; he’s not ours. Why would London take this kind of risk with a man in Fiedler’s position? They counted on him, I admit. They knew he hated Mundt–why shouldn’t he? Fiedler’s a Jew, isn’t he? You know, you must know, all of you, what Mundt’s reputation is, what he thinks about Jews.

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