power as second man in the Abteilung and effective head of operations. Mundt was hated even within his own department. Leamas knew that from the evidence of defectors, and from Riemeck, who as a member of the SED Präsidium sat on security committees with Mundt, and dreaded him. Rightly as it turned out, for Mundt had killed him.
Until 1959 Mundt had been a minor functionary of the Abteilung, operating in London under the cover of the East German Steel Mission. He returned to Germany in a hurry after murdering two of his own agents to save his skin and was not heard of for more than a year. Quite suddenly he reappeared at the Abteilung's headquarters in Leipzig as head of the Ways and Means Department, responsible for allocating currency, equipment and personnel for special tasks. At the end of that year came the big struggle for power within the Abteilung. The number and influence of Soviet liaison officers were drastically reduced, several of the old guard were dismissed on ideological grounds and three men emerged: Fielder as head of counterintelligence, Jahn took over from Mundt as head of facilities, and Mundt himself got the plum—deputy director of operations—at the age of forty-one. Then the new style began. The first agent Leamas lost was a girl. She was only a small link in the network; she was used for courier jobs. They shot her dead in the street as she left a West Berlin cinema. The police never found the murderer and Leamas was at first inclined to write the incident off as unconnected with her work. A month later a railroad porter in Dresden, a discarded agent from Peter Guillam's network, was found dead and mutilated beside a railroad track. Leamas knew it wasn't coincidence any longer. Soon after that two members of another network under Leamas' control were arrested and summarily sentenced to death. So it went on: remorseless and unnerving.
And now they had Karl, and Leamas was leaving Berlin as he had come—without a single agent worth a farthing. Mundt had won.
Leamas was a short man with close-cropped, iron gray hair, and the physique of a swimmer. He was very strong. This strength was discernible in his back and shoulders, in his neck, and in the stubby formation of his hands and fingers.
He had a utilitarian approach to clothes, as he did to most other things, and even the spectacles he occasionally wore had steel rims. Most of his suits were of artificial fiber, none of them had waistcoats. He favored shirts of the American kind with buttons on the points of the collars, and suede shoes with rubber soles.
He had an attractive face, muscular, and a stubborn line to his thin mouth. His eyes were brown and small; Irish, some said. It was hard to place Leamas. If he were to walk into a London club the porter would certainly not mistake him for a member; in a Berlin night club they usually gave him the best table. He looked like a man who could make trouble, a man who looked after his money; a man who was not quite a gentleman.
The stewardess thought he was interesting. She guessed that he was North of England, which he might well have been, and rich, which he was not. She put his age at fifty, which was about right. She guessed he was single, which was half true. Somewhere long ago there had been a divorce; somewhere there were children, now in their teens, who received their allowance from a rather odd private bank in the City.
'If you want another whisky,' said the stewardess, 'you'd better hurry. We shall be at London airport in twenty minutes.'
'No more.' He didn't look at her; he was looking out of the window at the gray-green fields of Kent.
Fawley met him at the airport and drove him to London.
'Control's pretty cross about Karl,' he said, looking sideways at Leamas. Leamas nodded.
'How did it happen?' asked Fawley.
'He was shot. Mundt got him.'
'Dead?'
'I should think so, by now. He'd better be. He nearly made it. He should never have hurried, they couldn't have been sure. The Abteilung got to the checkpoint just after he'd been let through. They started the siren and a
'Poor bastard.'
'Precisely,' said Leamas.
Fawley didn't like Leamas, and if Leamas knew he didn't care. Fawley was a man who belonged to clubs and wore representative ties, pontificated on the skills of sportsmen and assumed a service rank in office correspondence. He thought Leamas suspect, and Leamas thought him a fool.
'What section are you in?' asked Leamas.
'Personnel.'
'Like it?'
'Fascinating.'
'Where do I go now? On ice?'
'Better let Control tell you, old boy.'
'Do you know?'
'Of course.'
'Then why the hell don't you tell me?'
'Sorry, old man,' Fawley replied, and Leamas suddenly very nearly lost his temper. Then he reflected that Fawley was probably lying anyway.
'Well, tell me one thing, do you mind? Have I got to look for a bloody flat in London?'
Fawley scratched at his ear: 'I don't think so, old man, no.'
'No? Thank God for that.'
They parked near Cambridge Circus, at a parking meter, and went together into the hall.
'You haven't got a pass, have you? You'd better fill in a slip, old man.'
'Since when have we had passes? McCall knows me as well as his own mother.'
'Just a new routine. Circus is growing, you know.'
Leamas said nothing, nodded at McCall and got into the lift without a pass.
Control shook his hand rather carefully, like a doctor feeling the bones.
'You must be awfully tired,' he said apologetically, 'do sit down.' That same dreary voice, the donnish bray.
Leamas sat down in a chair facing an olive-green electric fire with a bowl of water balanced on the top of it.
'Do you find it cold?' Control asked. He was stooping over the fire rubbing his hands together. He wore a cardigan under his black jacket, a shabby brown one. Leamas remembered Control's wife, a stupid little woman called Mandy who seemed to think her husband was on the Coal Board. He supposed she had knitted it.
'It's so dry, that's the trouble.' Control continued. 'Beat the cold and you parch the atmosphere. Just as dangerous.' He went to the desk and pressed some button. 'We'll try and get some coffee,' he said, 'Ginthe's on leave, that's the trouble. They've given me some new girl. It really is too bad.' He was shorter than Leamas remembered him; otherwise, just the same. The same affected detachment, the same fusty conceits; the same horror of drafts; courteous according to a formula miles removed from Leamas' experience. The same milk-and- white smile, the same elaborate diffidence, the same apologetic adherence to a code of behavior which he pretended to find ridiculous. The same banality.
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
