At which point Smiley’s account breaks off, and it is Dr Riemeck who is speaking to us directly. George must have felt that his account, for all its length, was too precious to compress:
Comrade [deleted] is a highly intelligent woman of undoubted attraction, outwardly abrupt in the approved Party manner, highly resourceful, but in the privacy of a medical consultation intermittently childlike and defenceless. Though I am not given to off-the-cuff diagnoses of a patient’s mental condition, I would tentatively suggest a form of selective schizophrenia, rigidly controlled. That she is also a woman of personal courage and high principle should not be perceived as a paradox.
I inform Comrade [deleted] that she is not pregnant and therefore requires no abortion. She tells me she is surprised to hear this considering she has slept with two equally repugnant men in the same cycle. She asks if I have any alcohol. She says she is not an alcoholic but both her men drink heavily and she has acquired the habit. I offer her a glass of the French cognac given me by a Congolese minister of agriculture in gratitude for my medical services. Having swallowed it at one gulp, she interrogates me:
‘Friends told me you are a decent man and discreet. Are they right?’ she demands.
‘Which friends?’ I ask.
‘Secret friends.’
‘Why do your friends have to be secret?’
‘Because they are from the Organs.’
‘Which organs?’
I have annoyed her. She snaps at me. ‘The Stasi, Comrade Doctor. What do you think?’
I caution her. I may be a doctor but I have my responsibilities to the State. She prefers not to hear me. She has a right to choose, she says. In a democracy where all comrades are equal, she can choose between a sadistic shit of a husband who beats her up and refuses to admit that he’s homosexual, and a fat fifty-year-old swine of a boss who regards it as his good right to screw her in the back of his Volga staff car any time he feels like it.
She has twice in this conversation let fall the name Dr Emmanuel Rapp. She calls him the Rappschwein. I ask her whether this Rapp is any relation of Comrade Brigitte Rapp, who insists on consulting me for a range of illusory ailments. Yes, she confirms, Brigitte is the name of the swine’s wife. The connection is made. Frau Brigitte Rapp has already confided to me that she is married to a senior Stasi functionary who does as he pleases. I am therefore in the presence of Dr Emmanuel Rapp’s very angry personal assistant and – according to her – secret mistress. She says she has considered putting arsenic into Rapp’s coffee. She says she keeps a knife under the bed for the next time her homosexual husband assaults her. I advise her that these are dangerous fantasies and she should abandon them.
I ask her whether she speaks in these seditious terms to her husband or in the workplace. She laughs and assures me she does not. She has three faces, she says. In this she is lucky because in the GDR most people have five or six: ‘In the workplace, I am a devoted and diligent comrade, I am well dressed and have orderly hair at all times and especially at meetings, and I am also the sex-slave of an illustrious swine. At home, I am the hate-object of a sadistic warm brother (homosexual) more than ten years my senior for whom the sole aim of life is to become a member of the Majakowskiring elite and sleep with pretty young men.’ Her third identity is the one I see before me now: a woman who detests every aspect of life in the GDR except her son, and has found secret solace in God the Father and His saints. I ask her who else she has confided this third identity to apart from myself. Nobody. I ask her whether she hears voices. She is not aware of doing so, but if she heard anyone’s voice it would be God’s. I ask her whether she is indeed tempted to do herself harm, as she suggested to me earlier. She replies that she was recently minded to throw herself off a bridge, but was restrained by love of her son Gustav.
I ask her whether she has been tempted to commit other demonstrative or vengeful acts, and she replies that on one recent occasion, when Dr Emmanuel Rapp left his pullover on his chair one evening, she took a pair of scissors and hacked it to pieces, then gathered the pieces into a burn-bag for secret waste. When Rapp returned next morning and complained that he had mislaid his pullover, she helped him look for it. When he decided that someone had stolen it, she suggested culprits.
I ask her whether her vengeful feelings towards Comrade Dr Rapp have since abated. She retorts that they are stronger than ever, and the only thing she hates more than Rapp is the system that elevates swine like him to positions of power. Her hidden hatreds are alarming and it is something of a miracle to me that she contrives to conceal them from the ever-vigilant eye of her work comrades.
I ask her where she lives. She replies that she and her husband lived till recently in a Soviet-style apartment in the Stalinallee, where there was no special protection and she had only a ten-minute cycle ride to Stasi headquarters in the Magdalenenstrasse. Recently – whether through homosexual influence or money she doesn’t know, since her husband is secretive about the money that was left him by his father – they moved into a protected area in Berlin Hohenschönhausen set aside for government officials and higher civil servants. There are lakes and forest, which she loves, a playground for her son Gustav, and even a small private garden with a barbecue. In any other circumstances the house would be an idyll, but sharing it with her odious husband makes it a mockery. She is a passionate cyclist, still rides her bicycle to work, and reckons half an hour from door to door.
It is one a.m. I ask her what she will tell her husband Lothar when she gets home. She replies that she will tell him nothing and adds the following words:
‘When my darling Lothar is not raping me or getting drunk, he sits on the edge of the bed with GDR Foreign Office papers on his lap, growling and writing like a man who hates the whole world, not only his wife.’
I ask her whether these are secret papers that her husband brings home. She replies that they are extremely secret, and that he brings them home illegally because in addition to being a sexual pervert he is obsessively ambitious. She asks me whether, on the next occasion that she visits me, I will make love to her on the grounds that she has yet to make love to a man who is not a pig or a rapist. I believe she is joking but I am not certain. In any event I decline, explaining that I have made it a principle not to sleep with my patients. I leave her with the possible consolation of knowing that if I were not her doctor I would sleep with her. As she mounts her bicycle to depart, she informs me that she has placed her life in my hands. I reply that, as a doctor, I shall respect her confidences. She asks me for a second appointment. I offer her next Thursday at six in the evening.
Overcome by a wave of inner revulsion, I rise involuntarily to my feet.
‘Know where it is?’ Nelson enquires, without lifting his eyes from his book.
I lock myself in the toilet, remain there as long as I dare. When I resume my place at the table, Doris Gamp, alias Tulip, has arrived punctually for her second appointment, having cycled all the way to Köpenick with her son Gustav riding in a basket.
Riemeck again:
The mood of mother and son is merry and relaxed. The weather is beautiful, her husband Lothar has been summoned to a conference in Warsaw at short notice, he will not be back for two days, they are in high spirits. Tomorrow she and Gustav will bicycle to her sister Lotte, ‘the only other person in the world I love’, she informs me gaily. Entrusting the child to my dear mother, who wishes only that he were mine, I escort Comrade [deleted] to my attic surgery and play Bach loudly on the gramophone. Ceremoniously – I would say skittishly – she presents me with a box of chocolates which she says was given her by Emmanuel Rapp, and advises me not to eat them all at once. On opening the box I see that it contains, instead of Belgian chocolates, two cassettes of sub-miniature film. I sit on a stool beside her, her mouth close to my ear. I ask her what is in the sub-miniature film. She replies Stasi secret documents. I ask her how she obtained them and she replies that
she photographed them this very afternoon with the aid of Emmanuel Rapp’s own Minox camera in the wake of a particularly degrading sexual encounter. The act was barely consummated than the Rappschwein had scurried away to a meeting in House 2 for which he was already late. She was feeling vengeful and bold. The documents were strewn over his desk. His Minox camera lay in the drawer where he keeps it during the day.
‘Stasi officers are supposed to be secure in their habits at all times,’ she tells me, adopting the tone of a Stasi apparatchik. ‘The Rappschwein is so arrogant that he believes he is superior to Service regulations.’
‘And the cassettes?’ I ask her. How will she account for them?
The Rappschwein is infantile, therefore his whims must be gratified instantly, she says. It is totally forbidden even for officers of rank to keep special equipment such as secret cameras or recording devices in their personal safes, but Rapp ignores this edict, as others. Furthermore, on leaving the room in such haste he actually left the safe door ajar, another flagrant breach of security, enabling her to bypass the wax-lock.
I ask her: what is a wax-lock? She explains that on Stasi safes there is an elaborate lock which is capped by a coating of soft wax. On closing the safe, the rightful owner makes his own imprint in the wax, using the Stasi-issued key and its attached signet [Petschaft] that he keeps on his person at all times. Each Petschaft is numbered, individually crafted and unique to itself. As to cassettes, he has cardboard boxes full of them, a dozen at a time. He keeps no count of them, and uses his Minox like a toy for many unofficial and dissolute purposes. For instance he has tried many times to persuade her to pose naked for him, but she has always refused. He also keeps bottles of vodka and slivovitz in his safe, since like many Stasi bigwigs he drinks heavily, and when drunk speaks indiscreetly. I ask her how she succeeded in smuggling the sub-miniature film out of Stasi headquarters and she giggled and replied that a doctor like me should know.
However she insists that, despite the Stasi’s obsession with internal security, those with the correct passes are not subject to physical searches. For instance, Comrade [deleted] has a pass entitling her to move at will between Houses 1 and 3 of the Stasi complex. I ask her what she expects me to do with the cassettes now that she has compromised me with them, and she replies that I should kindly pass them to British Intelligence. I ask why not American, and she is shocked. She is a Communist, she says. Imperialist America is her enemy. We return downstairs. Gustav is playing dominoes with my dear mother. She reports that he is a delightful child, and very good at dominoes, and she would like to steal him.
Covert’s technical arm, always on the lookout for an excuse to join the feast, chimes in:
Berlin Covertech to H/Covert Berlin [Leamas].
Re your Head Agent MAYFLOWER:
You report his attic surgery in Köpenick contains old-style radio. Tech Ops to adapt as recording device?
You report that Mayflower owns an Exakta single-lens reflex camera that is Stasi-approved for recreational use. He also owns a sunlamp for therapeutic use and, from his student days, a microscope. Since he already has the basic components, should he be instructed in the manufacture of microdots?
Köpenick is a rural, densely wooded area, ideal for cachement of W/T and other operational equipment. Stay-behind team to reconnoitre and report?
Wax-locks. In the course of Tulip’s dalliances with Emmanuel Rapp, might she have occasion to take an impression of his personal safe key and attached signet [Petschaft]? Technical stores have a wide variety of CDs [concealment devices] for containing suitable plasticine-type substances.
The inner revulsion returns. In the course of her dalliances? They weren’t Tulip’s bloody dalliances, they were the Rappschwein’s, damn you! Tulip submitted to them because she knew if she didn’t she’d be out on her ear on trumped-up disciplinary charges, and Gustav would never get to that elite school she dreamed of. And all right, she was a passionate woman and easily aroused. That does not mean she enjoyed herself either with the Rappschwein or with her husband!
But in Berlin, Alec Leamas has no such concerns:
H/Covert Berlin [Leamas] to H/Covert Marylebone [Smiley]. DO letter, copy to file.
Dear George,
A perfect pour!
Happy to report that the impression of Emmanuel Rapp’s Petschaft and key, covertly taken by sub-source Tulip, has produced a clean facsimile with sharp lettering and numerals. The cowboys in Tech have advised that, for safety’s sake, she should apply a slight twist as she withdraws the Petschaft from the wax. So doubles all round!
Yours in the faith,
Alec
P.S. Attached: Tulip’s PP, as per HO regs, for COVERT’S EYES ONLY!! AL
PP for Personal Particulars. PP for the shorthand of any human life in which the Service has a passing interest. PP for penance. PP for pain.
Full name of sub-agent: Doris Carlotta Gamp.
Date and place of birth: Leipzig 21.X.’29.
Education: Graduated Jena and Dresden universities in Political and Social Sciences.
One sister: Lotte, elementary school teacher in Potsdam, unmarried.
CV and other personal particulars: Age 23, recruited as junior filing clerk, Stasi HQ, East Berlin. Access restricted to Confidential and below. After six-month probationary period, access raised to Secret. Assigned section J3, responsible for processing and evaluating reports from overseas stations.
One year into employment, forms relationship with forty-one-year-old Lothar Quinz, held to be a rising star of GDR Foreign Service. Pregnancy and civil marriage follow.
Six months into marriage, Quinz née Gamp gives birth to a son, names him Gustav after father. Unknown to her husband, she has boy christened by eighty-seven-year-old retired Russian Orthodox priest and starets (holy wanderer), a self-styled Rasputin attached to Red Army barracks in Karlshorst. How the supposed conversion to Russian Orthodoxy occurred is not otherwise known. To escape Quinz’s notice, Gamp told him she was visiting her sister in Potsdam, and made the journey to Rasputin by bicycle with Gustav in the basket.
10 June 1957, at end of her fifth year of employment, again promoted, this time to assistant to Emmanuel Rapp, KGB-trained director of overseas operations.
To retain Rapp’s patronage, also obliged to provide him with sexual favours. When she complains of this to her husband, he tells her the wishes of a comrade of Rapp’s importance should not be denied. She believes that this is an attitude shared by her Stasi colleagues. According to Tulip, they are aware of the affair, and aware that it constitutes a gross infringement of Stasi discipline. But they also fear that, given the extent of Rapp’s power, if they report it they will suffer the consequences.
Operational experience to date:
On joining Stasi, attended indoctrination course for all junior staff. Unlike most of her colleagues, has good spoken and written Russian. Selected for additional training in conspiratorial methods, covert meetings, recruitment and deception. Also instructed in secret writing (carbon and fluids), clandestine photography (sub-miniature, microdot), surveillance, counter-surveillance, basic W/T. Aptitude rated ‘good to excellent’.
As Emmanuel Rapp’s PA and ‘golden girl’ (Rapp’s description), regularly accompanies him to Prague, Budapest and Gdansk where he attends KGB-organized intelligence conferences of East Bloc liaison services. Twice employed at such conferences as stenographer of record. Despite her antipathy to him, dreams of accompanying Rapp to Moscow to see Red Square at night.
Concluding Comments by Case Officer:
H/Covert Berlin to H/Covert Marylebone [no doubt with the assistance of Stas de Jong]
Sub-source Tulip’s relationship with this Service is conducted exclusively through Mayflower. He is her medical doctor, handler, confidant, personal confessor and best pal in that order. So what we’ve got is a one-dog girl in thrall to our head ag
ent, and for my money that’s how things should stay. As you know, we recently supplied her with her own Minox, built into the fastener of her shoulder bag, and cassettes in the base of a talc tin. She is also as of now the proud possessor of a duplicate key and Petschaft for the wax-lock on Rapp’s safe.
It is gratifying therefore that Mayflower reports that Tulip shows no disturbing signs of strain. To the contrary, he says her morale has never been higher, she appears to relish danger, and his only concern is that she will become over-confident and take needless risks. For as long as the two of them are able to meet naturally in Berlin under medical cover, he is not greatly concerned.
However, an entirely different operational problem arises when she is escorting Rapp to conferences outside the GDR. Since dead letter boxes are no answer to ad hoc requirements, can Covert consider putting a blind courier on standby to service Tulip at short notice in non-German Bloc cities?
I turn a page. My hand is steady. Under stress it always is. This is normal operational discourse between Covert headquarters and Berlin.
George Smiley to Alec Leamas in Berlin, personal, handwritten note, copy to file:
Alec. In anticipation of Emmanuel Rapp’s forthcoming visit to Budapest, please arrange for the attached photograph of Peter Guillam, who will be acting as her blind courier, to be shown to sub-source Tulip asap.
Best, G
George Smiley to Peter Guillam, handwritten note, copy to file:
Peter. This will be your lady in Budapest. Study her well!
Bon voyage, G
‘Say something?’ Nelson asked sharply, looking up from his book.
‘Nothing. Why?’
‘Must have been out in the street.’
*
When you’re examining the features of an unknown woman for operational purposes, carnal thoughts are on hold. You’re not looking for charm. You’re wondering whether she’ll be wearing her hair short or long, tinted, under a hat or free, and what her face has to offer in the way of distinguishing features: broad brow, high cheekbones, small or large eyes, whether they are round or naturally attenuated. After the face, you’ll be looking at the shape and size of the body and trying to work out how it would look if it was wearing something more recognizable than the standard Party trouser suit and clunky lace-up shoes. You’re not looking for its sex appeal, except insofar as it may draw the eye of an impressionable watcher. My sole concern at this stage was how the owner of this face and this body was going to perform opposite a blind courier on a hot summer’s day in the closely watched streets of Budapest.