The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Peters ignored the question.

'You know the alternative. You let us take care of you, let us arrange your safe passage, or you fend for yourself—with the certainty of eventual capture. You've no false papers, no money, nothing. Your British passport will have expired in ten days.'

'There's a third possibility. Give me a Swiss passport and some money and let me run. I can look after myself.'

'I am afraid that is not considered desirable.'

'You mean you haven't finished the interrogation. Until you have I am not expendable?'

'That is roughly the position.'

'When you have completed the interrogation, what will you do with me?' Peters shrugged. 'What do you suggest?'

'A new identity. Scandinavian passport perhaps. Money.'

'It's very academic,' Peters replied, 'but I will suggest it to my superiors. Are you coming with me?'

Leamas hesitated. Then he smiled a little uncertainly and asked, 'If I didn't, what would you do? After all, I've quite a story to tell, haven't I?'

'Stories of that kind are hard to substantiate. I shall be gone tonight. Ashe and Kiever...' He shrugged. 'What do they add up to?'

Leamas went to the window. A storm was gathering over the gray North Sea. He watched the gulls wheeling against the dark clouds. The girl had gone.

'All right,' he said at last, 'fix it up.'

'There's no plane east until tomorrow. There's a flight to Berlin in an hour. We shall take that. It's going to be very close.'

* * *

Leamas' passive role that evening enabled him once again to admire the unadorned efficiency of Peters' arrangements. The passport had been put together long ago—Centre must have thought of that. It was made out in the name of Alexander Thwaite, travel agent, and filled with visas and frontier stamps—the old, well-fingered passport of the professional traveler. The Dutch frontier guard at the airport just nodded and stamped it for form's sake—Peters was three or four behind him in the queue and took no interest in the formalities.

As they entered the 'passengers only' enclosure Leamas caught sight of a bookstall. A selection of international newspapers was on show: Figaro, Monde, Neue Züricher Zeitung, Die Welt, and half a dozen British dailies and weeklies. As he watched, the girl came around to the front of the kiosk and pushed an Evening Standard into the rack. Leamas hurried across to the bookstall and took the paper from the rack.

'How much?' he asked. Thrusting his hand into his trouser pocket he suddenly realized that he had no Dutch currency.

'Thirty cents,' the girl replied. She was rather pretty; dark and jolly.

'I've only got two English shillings. That's a guilder. Will you take them?'

'Yes, please,' she replied, and Leamas gave her the florin. He looked back. Peters was still at the passport desk, his back turned. Without hesitation Leamas made straight for the men's lavatory. There he glanced rapidly but thoroughly at each page, then shoved the paper in the litter basket and re-emerged. It was true: there was his photograph with the vague little passage underneath. He wondered if Liz had seen it. He made his way thoughtfully to the passengers' lounge. Ten minutes later they boarded the plane for Hamburg and Berlin. For the first time since it all began. Leamas was frightened.

11 Friends of Alec

The men called on Liz the same evening. Liz Gold's room was at the northern end of Bayswater. It had a sofa-bed in it, and a gas fire—rather a pretty one in charcoal gray, which made a modem hiss instead of an old- fashioned bubble. She used to gaze into it sometimes when Leamas was there, when the gas fire shed the only light in the room. He would lie on the sofa, and she would sit beside him and kiss him, or watch the gas fire with her face pressed against his. She was afraid to think of him too much now because she had forgot what he looked like, so she let her mind think of him for brief moments like running her eyes across a faint horizon, and then she would remember some small thing he had said or done, some way he had looked at her, or more often, ignored her. That was the terrible thing, when her mind dwelled on it: she had nothing to remember him by—no photograph, no souvenir, nothing. Not even a mutual friend—only Miss Crail in the library, whose hatred of him had been vindicated by his spectacular departure. Liz had been around to his room once and seen the landlord. She didn't know why she did it quite, but she plucked up courage and went. The landlord was very kind about Alec; Mr. Leamas had paid his rent like a gentleman, right till the end, then there'd been a week or two owing and a chum of Mr. Leamas' had dropped in and paid up handsome, no queries or nothing. He'd always said it of Mr. Leamas, always would, he was a gent. Not public school, mind, nothing arsy-tansy but a real gent. He liked to scowl a bit occasionally, and of course he drank a drop more than was good for him, though he never acted tight when he came home. But this little bloke who come round, funny little shy chap with specs, he said Mr. Leamas had particularly requested, quite particularly, that the rent owing should be settled up. And if that wasn't gentlemanly, the landlord was damned if he knew what was. Where he got the money from heaven knows, but that Mr. Leamas was a deep one and no mistake. He only did to Ford the grocer what a good many had been wanting to do ever since the war. The room? Yes, the room had been taken—a gentleman from Korea, two days after they took Mr. Leamas away.

That was probably why she went on working at the library—because there, at least, he still existed; the ladders, shelves, the books, the card index, were things he had known and touched, and one day he might come back to them. He had said he would never come back, but she didn't believe it. It was like saying you would never get better to believe a thing like that. Miss Crail thought he would come back: she had discovered she owed him some money—wages underpaid—and it infuriated her that her monster had been so unmonstrous as not to collect it. After Leamas had gone, Liz had never given up asking herself the same question; why had he hit Mr. Ford? She knew he had a terrible temper, but that was different. He had intended to do it right from the start as soon as he had got rid of his fever. Why else had he said good-bye to her the night before? He knew that he would hit Mr. Ford on the following day. She refused to accept the only other possible interpretation: that he had grown tired of her and said good-bye, and the next day, still under the emotional strain of their parting, had lost his temper with Mr. Ford and struck him. She knew, she had always known, that there was something Alec had got to do. He'd even told her that himself. What it was she could only guess.

First, she thought he had a quarrel with Mr. Ford, some deep-rooted hatred going back for years. Something to do with a girl, or Alec's family perhaps. But you only had to look at Mr. Ford and it seemed ridiculous. He was the archetypal petit-bourgeois, cautious, complacent, mean. And anyway, if Alec had a vendetta on with Mr. Ford, why did he go for him in the shop on a Saturday, in the middle of the weekend shopping rush, when everyone could see?

They'd talked about it in the meeting of her Party branch. George Hanby, the branch treasurer, had actually been passing Ford the grocer's as it happened, he hadn't seen much because of the crowd but he'd talked to a bloke who'd seen the whole thing. Hanby had been so impressed that he'd rung the Worker, and they'd sent a man to the trial—that was why the Worker had given it a middle-page spread, as a matter of fact. It was just a straight case of protest—of sudden social awareness and hatred against the boss class, as the Worker said. This bloke that Hanby spoke to (he was just a little, ordinary chap with specs, white-collar type) said it had been so sudden—spontaneous was what he meant—and it just proved to Hanby once again how incendiary was the fabric of the capitalist system. Liz had kept very quiet while Hanby talked: none of them knew, of course, about her and Leamas. She realized then that she hated George Hanby; he was a pompous, dirty-minded little man, always leering at her and trying to touch her.