The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré Read Free Book Online

grocer.
    “Don’t be bloody silly, ”
said Leamas, “I’ve been coming here for four months.”The grocer colored. “We always
ask for a banker’s reference before giving credit,” he said, and Leamas
lost his temper.
    “Don’t talk bloody cock!” he shouted.
“Half your customers have never seen the inside of a bank and never bloody
well will” This was heresy beyond bearing, since it was true.
    “I don’t know you,” the grocer repeated
thickly, “and I don’t like you. Now get out of my shop.” And he tried
to recover the parcel which unfortunately Leamas was already holding.
    Opinions later differed as to what happened next.
Some said the grocer, in trying to recover the bag, pushed Leamas; others say
he did not. Whether he did or not, Leamas hit him, most people think twice,
without disengaging his right hand, which still held the shopping bag. He
seemed to deliver the blow not with his fist but with the side of his left
hand, and then, as part of the same phenomenally rapid movement, with the left
elbow; and the grocer fell straight over and lay as still as a rock. It was
said in court later, and not contested by the defense, that the grocer had two
injuries—a fractured cheekbone from the first blow and a dislocated jaw from
thesecond. The coverage in the
daily press was adequate, but not over-elaborate .

6
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    At night he lay on his bunk listening to the sounds
of the prisoners. There was a boy who sobbed and an old lag who sang “On Ilkley
Moor bar t’at,” beating out the time on his food tin. There was a warder
who shouted, “Shut up, George, you miserable sod,” after each verse,
but no one took any notice. There was an Irishman who sang songs about the IRA, though the others said he was in for rape.
    Leamas took as much exercise as he could during
the day in the hope that hewould
sleep at night; but it was no good. At night you knew you were in prison: at
night there was nothing, no trick of vision or self-delusion which saved you from
the nauseating enclosure of the cell. You could not keep out the taste of
prison, the smell of prison uniform, the stench of prison sanitation heavily
disinfected, the noises of captive men. It was then, at night, that the
indignity of captivity became urgently insufferable, it was then that Leamas longed to walk in the friendly sunshine of a London park. It was then
that he hated the grotesque steel cage that held him, had toforce back the urge to fall upon the
bars with his bare fists, to split the skulls of his guards and burst into the
free, free space of London. Sometimes he thought of Liz. Hewould direct his mind toward her
briefly like the shutter of a camera, recall for a moment the soft-hard touch
of her long body, then put her from his memory. Leamas
was not a man accustomed to living on dreams.
    He was contemptuous of his cellmates, and they
hated him. They hated himbecause
he succeeded in being what each in his heart longed to be: a mystery. He
preserved from collectivization some discernible part of his personality; he
could not be drawn at moments of sentiment to talk of his girl, his family or
his children. They knew nothing of Leamas; they waited, but he did not come to
them. New prisoners arelargely
of two kinds—there are those who for shame, fear or shock wait in fascinated horror
to be initiated into the lore of prison life, and there are those who trade on
their wretched novelty in order to endear themselves to the community. Leamas
didneither of these things. He
seemed pleased to despise them all, and they hated himbecause, like the world outside, he did not need them.
    After about ten days they had had enough. The
great had had no homage, thesmall had had no comfort, so they crowded him in the dinner
queue. Crowding is a prison ritual akin to the eighteenth century practice of
jostling. It has the virtue of anapparent
accident, in which the prisoner’s mess tin is upturned and its contents spilton his uniform. Leamas was