The Looking Glass War by John le Carré Page A

wretched man had been to every Allied office in North Germany, but no one would look at him. Jimmy Gorton had a chat with him.’ Implicit in Leclerc’s way of describing things was an assumption that Gorton was the only intelligent man among a lot of fools. He crossed to his desk, took a cigarette from the silver box, lit it, picked up a file with a heavy red cross on the cover and laid it noiselessly on the table in front of them. ‘This is Jimmy’s report,’ he said. ‘It’s a first-class bit of work by any standard.’ The cigarette looked very long between his fingers. ‘The defector’s name,’ he added inconsequentially, ‘was Fritsche.’
    ‘Defector?’ Haldane put in quickly. ‘The man’s a low-grade refugee, a railwayman. We don’t usually talk about men like that defecting. ’
    Leclerc replied defensively, ‘The man’s not only a railwayman. He’s a bit of a mechanic and a bit of a photographer.’
    McCulloch opened the file and began methodically turning over the serials. Sandford watched him through his gold-rimmed spectacles.
    ‘On the first or second of September – we don’t know which because he can’t remember – he happened to be doing a double shift in the dumping sheds at Kalkstadt. One of his comrades was sick. He was to work from six till twelve in the morning, and four till ten at night. When he arrived to report for work there were a dozen Vopos, East German people’s police, at the station entrance. All passenger traffic was forbidden. They checked his identity papers against a list and told him to keep away from the sheds on the eastern side of the station. They said,’ Leclerc added deliberately, ‘that if he approached the eastern sheds he was liable to be shot.’
    This impressed them. Woodford said it was typical of the Germans.
    ‘It’s the Russians we’re fighting,’ Haldane put in.
    ‘He’s an odd fish, our man. He seems to have argued with them. He told them he was as reliable as they were, a good German and a Party member. He showed them his union card, photographs of his wife and Heaven knows what. It didn’t do any good, of course, because they just told him to obey orders and keep away from the sheds. But he must have caught their fancy because when they brewed up some soup at ten o’clock they called him over and offered him a cup. Over the soup he asked them what was going on. They were cagey, but he could see they were excited. Then something happened. Something very important,’ he continued. ‘One of the younger ones blurted out that whatever they had in the sheds could blow the Americans out of West Germany in a couple of hours. At this point an officer came along and told them to get back to work.’
    Haldane coughed a deep, hopeless cough, like an echo in an old vault.
    What sort of officer, someone asked, was he German or Russian?
    ‘German. That is most relevant. There were no Russians in evidence at all.’
    Haldane interrupted sharply. ‘The refugee saw none. That’s all we know. Let us be accurate.’ He coughed again. It was very irritating.
    ‘As you wish. He went home and had lunch. He was disgruntled at being ordered around in his own station by a lot of young fellows playing soldiers. He had a couple of glasses of schnapps and sat there brooding about the dumping shed. Adrian, if your cough is troubling you … ?’ Haldane shook his head. ‘He remembered that on the northern side it abutted with an old storage hut, and that there was a shutter-type ventilator let into the party wall. He formed the notion of looking through the ventilator to see what was in the shed. As a way of getting his own back on the soldiers.’
    Woodford laughed.
    ‘Then he decided to go one further and photograph whatever was there.’
    ‘He must have been mad,’ Haldane commented. ‘I find this part impossible to accept.’
    ‘Mad or not, that’s what he decided to do. He was cross because they wouldn’t trust him. He felt he had a right to know