Part 2 (1/2)

”And Guillam was on the case as well. He's in Satellites Four, on the first floor. I'm afraid everything's changed since your day.”

”Yes.”

”Spend a day or two with them. They know what I have in mind. Then I wondered if you'd care to stay with me for the weekend. My wife,” he added hastily, ”is looking after her mother, I'm afraid. It will be just you and I.”

”Thanks. I'd like to.”

”We can talk about things in comfort then. It would be very nice. I think you might make a lot of money out of it. You can have whatever you make.”

”Thanks.”

”That is, of course, if you're sure you want to no mental fatigue or anything?”

”If it's a question of killing Mundt, I'm game.”

”Do you really feel that?” Control inquired politely. And then, having looked at Leamas thoughtfully for a moment, he observed, ”Yes, I really think you do. But you mustn't feel you have to say it. I mean in our world we pa.s.s so quickly out of the register ol hate or love--like certain sounds a dog can't hear. All that's left in the end is a kind of nausea; you never want to cause suffering again. Forgive me, but isn't that rather what you felt when Karl Riemeck was shot? Not hate for Mundt, nor love for Karl, but a sickening jolt like a blow on a numb body. . . . They tell me you walked all night--just walked through the streets of Berlin. Is that right?”

”It's right that I went for a walk.”

”All night?”

”Yes.”

”What happened to Elvira?”

”G.o.d knows. . . . I'd like to take a swing at Mundt,” he said.

”Good. . . good. Incidentally, if you should meet any old friends in the meantime, I don't think there's any point in discussing this with them. In fact,” Control added after a moment, ”I should be rather short with them. Let them think we've treated you badly. It's as well to begin as one intends to continue, isn't it?”

* * 3 * Decline

It surprised no one very much when they put Leamas on the shelf. In the main, they said, Berlin had been a failure for years, and someone had to take the rap. Besides, he was old for operational work, where your reflexes often had to be as quick as those of a professional tennis player. Leamas had done good work in the war, everyone knew that. In Norway and Holland he had somehow remained demonstrably alive, and at the end of it they gave him a medal and let him go. Later, of course, they got him to come back. It was bad luck about his pension, decidedly bad luck. Accounts Section had let it out, in the person of Elsie. Elsie said in the canteen that poor Alec Leamas would only have 400 a year to live on because of his interrupted service. Elsie felt it was a rule they really ought to change; after all, Mr. Leamas had _done_ the service, hadn't he? But there they were with Treasury on their backs, not a bit like the old days, and what could they do? Even in the bad days of Maston they'd managed things better.

Leamas, the new men were told, was the old school; blood, guts and cricket and High School French. In Leamas' case this happened to be unfair, since he was bilingual in German and English and his Dutch was admirable; he also disliked cricket. But it was true that he had no degree.

Leamas' contract had a few months to run, and they put him in Banking to do his time. Banking Section was different from Accounts; it dealt with overseas payments, financing agents and operations. Most of the jobs in Banking could have been done by an office boy were it not for the high degree of secrecy involved, and thus Banking was one of several sections of the Service which were regarded as laying-out places for officers shortly to be buried.

Leamas went to seed.

The process of going to seed is generally considered to be a protracted one, but in Leamas this was not the case. In the full view of his colleagues he was transformed from a man honorably put aside to a resentful, drunken wreck--and all within a few months. There is a kind of stupidity among drunks, particularly when they are sober, a kind of disconnection which the un.o.bservant interpret as vagueness and which Leamas seemed to acquire with unnatural speed. He developed small dishonesties, borrowed insignificant sums from secretaries and neglected to return them, arrived late or left early under some mumbled pretext. At first his colleagues treated him with indulgence; perhaps his decline scared them in the same way as we are scared by cripples, beggars and invalids because we fear we could ourselves become them; but in the end his neglect, his brutal, unreasoning malice, isolated him.

Rather to people's surprise, Leamas didn't seem to mind being put on the shelf. His will seemed suddenly to have collapsed. The debutante secretaries, reluctant to believe that Intelligence Services are peopled by ordinary mortals, were alarmed to notice that Leamas had become definitely seedy. He took less care of his appearance and less notice of his surroundings, he lunched in the canteen which was normally the preserve of junior staff, and it was obvious that he was drinking. He became a solitary, belonging to that tragic cla.s.s of active men prematurely deprived of activity; swimmers barred from the water or actors banished from the stage.

Some said he had made a mistake in Berlin, and that was why his network had been rolled up; no one quite knew. All agreed that he had been treated with unusual harshness, even by a personnel department not famed for its philanthropy. They would point to him covertly as he went by, as men will point to an athlete of the past, 'and say: ”That's Leainas. He made a mistake in Berlin. Pathetic the way he's let himself go.”

And then one day he had vanished. He said goodbye to no one, not even, apparently, Control. In itself that was not surprising. The nature of the Service precluded elaborate farewells and the presentation of gold watches, but even by these standards Leamas' departure seemed abrupt. So far as could be judged, his departure occurred before the statutory termination of his contract. Elsie, of Accounts Section, offered one or two crumbs of information: Leamas had drawn the balance of his pay in cash, which if Elsie knew anything, meant he was having trouble with his bank. His severance pay was to be paid at the turn of the month, she couldn't say how much but it wasn't four figures, poor lamb. His National Insurance card had been sent on. Personnel had an address for him, Elsie added with a sniff, but of course they weren't revealing it, not Personnel.

Then there was the story about the money. It leaked out--no one, as usual, knew where from--that Leamas' sudden departure was connected with irregularities in the accounts of Banking Section. A largish sum was missing (not three figures but four, according to a lady with blue hair who worked in the telephone room) and they'd got it back, nearly all of it, and they'd stuck a lien on his pension. Others said they didn't believe it--if Alec had wanted to rob the till, they said, he'd know better ways of doing it than fiddling with H. Q. accounts. Not that he wasn't capable of it--he'd just have done it better. But those less impressed by Leamas' criminal potential pointed at his large consumption of alcohol, at the expense of maintaining a separate household, at the fatal disparity between pay at home and allowances abroad, and above all at the temptations put in the way of a man handling large sums of hot money when he knew that his days in the service were numbered. All agreed that if Alec had dipped his hands in the till he was finished for all time--the Resettlement people wouldn't look at him and Personnel would give him no reference--or one so icy cold that the most enthusiastic employer would s.h.i.+ver at the sight of it. Peculation was the one sin Personnel would never let you forget--and they never forgot it themselves. If it was true that Alec had robbed the Circus, he would take the wrath of Personnel with him to the grave--and Personnel would not so much as pay for the shroud.

For a week or two after his departure, a few people wondered what had become of him. But his former friends had already learned to keep clear of him. He had become a resentful bore, constantly attacking the Service and its administration, and what he called the ”Cavalry boys” who, he said, managed its affairs as if it were a regimental club. He never missed an opportunity of railing against the Americans and their intelligence agencies. He seemed to hate them more than the Abteilung, to which he seldom, if ever, referred. He would hint that it was they who had compromised his network; this seemed to be an obsession with him, and it was poor reward for attempts to console him, it made him bad company, so that those who had known and even tacitly liked him, wrote him off. Leamas' departure caused only a ripple on the water; with other winds and the changing of the seasons it was soon forgotten.

His flat was small and squalid, done in brown paint with photographs of Clovelly. It looked directly onto the gray backs of three stone warehouses, the windows of which were drawn, for aesthetic reasons, in creosote. Above the warehouse there lived an Italian family, quarreling at night and beating carpets in the morning. Leamas had few possessions with which to brighten his rooms. He bought some shades to cover the light bulbs, and two pairs of sheets to replace the Hessian squares provided by the landlord. The rest Leamas tolerated: the flower pattern curtains, not lined or hemmed, the fraying brown carpets and the clumsy dark wood furniture, like something from a seamen's hostel. From a yellow crumbling geyser he obtained hot water for a s.h.i.+lling.

He needed a job. He had no money, none at all. So perhaps the stories of embezzlement were true. The offers of resettlement which the Service made had seemed to Leamas lukewarm 'and peculiarly unsuitable. He tried first to get a job in commerce. A firm of industrial adhesive manufacturers showed interest in his application for the post of a.s.sistant manager and personnel officer. Unconcerned by the inadequate reference with which the Service provided him, they demanded no qualifications and offered him six hundred a year. He stayed for a week, by which time the foul' stench of decaying fish oil had permeated his clothes and hair, lingering in his nostrils like the smell of death. No amount of was.h.i.+ng would remove it, so that in the end Leamas had his hair cut short to the scalp and threw away two of his best suits. He spent another week trying to sell encyclopedias to suburban housewives, but he was not a man that housewives liked. or understood; they did not want Leamas, let alone his encyclopedias. Night after night he returned wearily to his flat, his ridiculous sample under his arm. At the end of a week he telephoned the company and told them he had sold nothing. Expressing no surprise, they reminded him of his obligation to return the sample if he discontinued acting on their behalf, and rang off. Leamas stalked out of the telephone booth in a fury leaving the sample behind him, went to a pub and got' very drunk at a cost of twenty-five s.h.i.+llings, which he could not afford. They threw him out for shouting at a woman who tried to pick him up. They told him never to come back, but they'd forgotten all about it a week later. They were beginning to know Leamas there.

They were beginning to know him elsewhere too, the gray shambling figure from the Mansions. Not a wasted word did he speak, not a friend, neither man, woman nor beast, did he have. They guessed he was in trouble, run away from his wife like as not. He never knew the price of anything, never remembered it when he was told. He patted all his pockets whenever he looked for change, he never remembered to bring a basket, always buying shopping bags. They didn't like him in the Street, but they were almost sorry for him. They thought he was dirty, too, the way he didn't shave weekends and his s.h.i.+rts all grubby. A Mrs. McCaird from Sudbury Avenue cleaned for him for a week, but having never received a civil word from him withdrew her labor. She was an important source of information in the Street, where tradesmen told one another what they needed to know in case he asked for credit. Mrs. McCaird's advice was against credit. Leamas never had a letter, she said, and they agreed that that was serious. He'd no pictures and only a few books; she thought one of the books was dirty but couldn't be sure because it was in foreign writing. It was her opinion he had a bit to live on, and that that bit was running out. She knew he drew Benefit on Thursdays. Bayswater was warned, and needed no second warning. They heard from Mrs. McCaird that he drank like a fish: this was confirmed by the bartender. Bartenders and charwomen are not in the way of accommodating their clients with credit, but their information is treasured by those who are.

* * 4 * Liz

Finally he took the job in the library. The Labour Exchange put him on to it each Thursday morning as he drew his unemployment benefit, and he'd always turned it down.

”It's not really your cup of tea,” Mr. Pitt said, ”but the pay's fair and the work's easy for an educated man.”

”What sort of library?” Leamas asked.

”It's the Bayswater Library for Psychic Research. It's an endowment. They've got thousands of volumes, all sorts, and they've been left a whole lot more. They want another helper.”

He took his dole and the slip of paper. ”They're an odd lot,” Mr. Pitt added, ”but then you're not a stayer anyway, are you? I think it's time you gave them a try, don't you?”

It was odd about Pitt. Leamas was certain he'd seen him before somewhere. At the Circus, during the war.

The library was like a church hall, and very cold. The black oil stoves at either end made it smell of paraffin. In the middle of the room was a cubicle like a witness box and inside it sat Miss Crail, the librarian.

It had never occurred to Leamas that he might have to work for a woman. No one at the Labour Exchange had said anything about that.

”I'm the new help,” he said; ”my name's Leamas.”

Miss Crail looked up sharply from her card index, as if she had heard a rude word. ”Help? What do you mean, help?”

”a.s.sistant. From the Labour Exchange. Mr. Pitt.” He pushed across the counter a form with his particulars entered in a sloping hand. She picked it up and studied it.

”You are Mr. Leamas.” This was not a question, but the first stage of a laborious fact-finding investigation. ”And you are from the Labour Exchange.”

”No. I was sent by the Exchange. They told me you needed an a.s.sistant.”

”I see.” A wooden smile.

At that moment the telephone rang: she lifted the receiver and began arguing with somebody, fiercely. Leamas guessed they argued all the time; there were no preliminaries. Her voice just rose a key and she began arguing about some tickets for a concert. He listened for a minute or two and then drifted toward the bookshelves. He noticed a girl in one of the alcoves, standing on a ladder sorting large volumes.

”I'm the new man,” he said, ”my name's Leamas.”