On Contamination and the Uses of Proximity

We met in Bern. David had suggested it — a café near the Kornhausbrücke, the kind of place with bentwood chairs and a view of the Aare that would have suited a dead drop in one of his novels. Patricia had arrived the day before and was already established at a corner table when I came in, reading a Swiss-German newspaper she almost certainly could not read with any fluency, holding it like a prop. She looked up when David entered and did not smile, which I had come to understand as her version of warmth.

David ordered coffee, black, and asked for a glass of water on the side. Patricia was drinking something clear with a wedge of lemon she had not touched. I had a milky tea I was already regretting.

“The question,” David said, settling into his chair with the careful posture of a man whose back troubled him, “is whether you’re writing about espionage or about proximity. Because they’re quite different stories.”

“I want both,” I said. “An intelligence officer running a source — a real operation, with product and tradecraft and the institutional machinery around it — but the heart of the story is the relationship between handler and source. How handling someone becomes a kind of intimacy that contaminates both parties.”

Patricia set down her newspaper. “Contamination. That’s the word people use when they mean something more interesting. They mean pleasure. The handler enjoys the deception. The source enjoys being handled. No one wants to say this because it sounds perverse, but the perversity is the engine.”

David shifted. “I’d push back on that. In my experience — and I mean the experience of people I’ve known, not the experience of fiction — the pleasure, if you can call it that, is institutional. The handler doesn’t enjoy the person. He enjoys the operation. The source is a mechanism. When the mechanism breaks, you replace it. The handler feels nothing about the person because the institution has arranged things so that personal feeling is operational noise.”

“That’s a comfortable story for institutions to tell,” Patricia said. “That the handler felt nothing. But if the handler felt nothing, why does the handler drink? Why does the handler’s marriage fail? Something is being felt. Something personal is happening inside the professional act. Your man Leamas — he felt something for the girl. That wasn’t operational noise. That was the one unmanaged variable.”

I watched David consider this. He turned his coffee cup in its saucer — a slow, deliberate rotation, the gesture of a man buying time.

“Leamas felt something for the girl because Control needed him to,” he said finally. “That’s the cruelty of it. Even his genuine feeling was instrumentalized. He fell in love inside an operation designed to exploit his falling in love. Whether the love was real is almost beside the point. It was used.”

“But it was real,” I said. “That’s what makes it devastating. Both things are true simultaneously — it was genuine and it was used. The institution didn’t create the feeling. It just found a way to spend it.”

Patricia picked up the lemon wedge from her glass and squeezed it between two fingers, watching the juice run across her knuckles. “This is what interests me. Not whether feelings are genuine or manufactured but whether the distinction matters. In my book — the one with the two men on the train — the interesting thing is not that Bruno commits the murder. It’s that Guy, who wants to be innocent, cannot be innocent. Not because he did anything. Because proximity to the act has already changed him. He is contaminated by knowledge. By the fact that someone acted on his behalf, whether he asked for it or not.”

“That’s where these two stories meet,” I said, too eagerly, and I saw David’s eyebrow lift by a fraction. “The handler and the source. The handler acts — recruits, directs, exploits — and tells himself it’s professional. The source acts — betrays his own country, his colleagues, sometimes his family — and tells himself it’s principled, or necessary, or that he was coerced. But the truth is that each one has made the other into something they weren’t before the relationship began. The handler is now someone who uses people. The source is now someone who has been used. And neither can undo it.”

David drank his coffee. “You’re describing a marriage.”

Patricia almost laughed. Not quite. The corner of her mouth moved. “Every good espionage story is about a marriage. A marriage with a power imbalance and an exit clause that only one party knows about.”

“The exit clause,” David said, setting down his cup with a click that sounded more final than it should have. “That’s the structural question. In my book, the exit clause is that Control has arranged for Leamas to die. The mission succeeds precisely because Leamas doesn’t survive it. The institution solves the problem of the handler who knows too much by making the handler expendable. Clean. Efficient. Morally catastrophic.”

“And in mine,” Patricia said, “there is no exit clause. Guy can never be free of Bruno. Even after Bruno is dead — especially after Bruno is dead — the contamination is permanent. There is no institutional mechanism that makes it clean. It stays dirty forever.”

I leaned forward. “What if our story has both? An institutional exit clause that the protagonist only discovers when it’s too late — the le Carré architecture — but combined with a personal contamination that no exit clause can address? The operation ends. The handler survives, or doesn’t. But the thing that happened between handler and source, the moral fact of having used and been intimate with another person in a way that was simultaneously genuine and operational — that never resolves.”

David was quiet for a moment. Through the café window, the Aare moved below us, that impossible green. “The danger,” he said, “is that you make it too symmetrical. The handler and the source as mirror images. That’s neat. That’s a diagram. Life isn’t a diagram.”

“He’s right,” Patricia said. “The doubling shouldn’t be clean. It should be off by just enough that the reader feels seasick. One of them should be worse than the other. One of them should want something the other can’t understand wanting. The mirror should be warped.”

“So who’s worse?” I asked.

They both spoke at once, then stopped. David gestured for Patricia to continue.

“The handler,” she said. “Obviously. The handler has the power. The handler chose this work. The source may have been recruited under duress, or through vanity, or through ideological conviction that curdled over time. The source can at least claim he was acted upon. The handler cannot claim that. The handler is the actor.”

David shook his head slowly. “I disagree. Or rather — I agree that the handler has more institutional power, but I think the source is often worse in a more intimate way. The source betrays people who trust him. Colleagues. Friends. The handler betrays an abstraction — a source, an asset, a code name in a file. The source betrays actual human beings who ate lunch with him and invited him to their children’s christenings. The betrayal is closer. More personal. More damaging.”

“So neither is innocent,” I said.

“Neither is innocent,” David agreed. “But they are guilty of different things, in different registers, and the story should not pretend otherwise.”

Patricia leaned back. “I want the reader to like one of them. Genuinely like. And then I want the reader to realize, very late, that the one they liked did the worse thing.”

“Which one do they like?” I asked.

“Whichever one seems more honest. People mistake honesty for goodness. It’s a profitable confusion.”

David rubbed his jaw. “Where are we setting this? The setting in an espionage story isn’t decorative. It determines what kind of betrayal is possible. Cold War Berlin is a different moral universe than post-9/11 Kabul.”

I had been thinking about this. “Somewhere in the early 1980s. Late Cold War. The certainties have calcified — the ideological commitments are more habit than conviction, which makes the betrayals both pettier and more corrosive. Not Berlin, though. Somewhere less grand. A secondary theatre where the operations are smaller and the handlers are closer to their sources because there’s less institutional apparatus between them.”

“Vienna,” David said immediately. “Or the Balkans.”

Patricia frowned. “Not Vienna. Vienna is a stage set. Somewhere more ordinary. Where espionage happens in the same streets where people buy vegetables and argue about parking.”

“The Netherlands,” David said. “Or Belgium. Espionage in the Benelux countries is mundane in exactly the right way. Small stations, skeleton staff, operations run out of commercial premises. The handler and the source might live in the same neighborhood. They might use the same dry cleaner.”

“That intimacy,” Patricia said. “That forced, operational intimacy that becomes real. The handler drives past the source’s house on the way to work. Sees the light on in the kitchen. Knows the source’s wife’s name. Knows what the source drinks. Knows the source is afraid of his father. All of this is operational intelligence, gathered for professional purposes, and all of it is also knowledge. Human knowledge. The kind that makes you responsible.”

David signaled the waiter for more coffee. “There’s a practical dimension here that fiction usually botches. The handler meets his source in operational settings — a park bench, a rented flat, a car parked near a canal. These are controlled environments. Everything is managed. The conversation has an agenda. And yet — you’re sitting across from someone who is risking his life because you asked him to. You’re pouring him coffee. You’re listening to his complaints about his supervisor, his worries about his daughter’s school, his irritation that his wife bought the wrong car. You tell yourself this is access maintenance. Building rapport. Professional craft. But it’s also a Tuesday afternoon, and you’re having coffee with someone who trusts you, and next week you’re going to ask him to photograph documents that, if discovered, will put him in prison for twenty years.”

“And you’ll do it because you’ve been asked to,” I said.

“You’ll do it because you’re good at it,” David corrected. “That’s worse.”

Patricia was watching a pigeon on the windowsill outside. “The source trusts the handler. The handler trusts the institution. The institution trusts nothing. That’s the chain, and the interesting link is the second one, because it’s the only one that’s voluntary.”

“Is it?” David said.

Patricia turned from the window. “You’ve written about men who couldn’t leave the Service even when it had used them terribly. What kept them?”

“Habit,” David said. “Structure. The knowledge that they knew how to do this one thing, and outside they’d be ordinary. I’ve always thought espionage attracts people who are afraid of being ordinary. The secrecy gives them a self they can’t have without it.”

“There,” Patricia said, with visible satisfaction. “That’s the source’s motivation too. The source becomes a spy because espionage makes him significant. It gives him a secret self. And the handler knows this — exploits this — because the handler has the same need. They are the same creature wearing different uniforms.”

I felt the meeting tilting toward something I hadn’t planned. “So the doubling isn’t just thematic. It’s structural. The handler and the source are mirrors of each other’s weakness.”

“Not mirrors,” Patricia said again. “Warped mirrors. The same need, expressed differently. Producing different damage.”

I was writing furiously. “And the operation — what’s the shape of it?”

David held up his hand. “Don’t ask me to plot for you. That’s your problem. But I’ll tell you the principle. The best espionage plots are not about what happens. They’re about what the protagonist thought was happening, versus what was actually happening, and the gap between those two narratives. The gap is the story.”

“The gap is where the reader lives,” Patricia agreed. “In that uncomfortable space where they know more than the character but not enough to feel safe. I’ve always thought suspense is not about withholding information. It’s about making the reader complicit in the protagonist’s wrong assumptions.”

The café was emptying around us. A waiter stood near the bar, polishing glasses with the exaggerated patience of someone who wanted to close. David had not touched his water. Patricia had begun tearing her cocktail napkin into precise, uniform strips.

“One more thing,” David said. “Your protagonist. Don’t make him sympathetic through suffering. That’s the lazy way. Make him sympathetic through competence. He’s good at his job. Professionally, he is admirable. Methodical, patient, thorough. And his competence is precisely what makes him complicit. He’s too good at his job to see that his job is the problem.”

Patricia nodded. “And give him one thing he cannot control. One genuine human response that the operation can’t metabolize. Not love — that’s too large, too romantic. Something smaller. Guilt about a specific moment. A conversation he replayed. A look on someone’s face that he catalogued as operational intelligence but that kept him up at night for reasons he wouldn’t let himself name.”

“Is this the source’s face?” I asked.

“Obviously,” Patricia said.

“Not obviously,” David said. “It could be his own face in the mirror. The morning he realized he’d become good at something no decent person should be good at.”

They looked at each other across the table. Not quite an impasse — something more like mutual recognition. Two writers who had spent their careers circling the same territory from opposite directions, arriving at the same bleak coordinate by different routes.

I closed my notebook. The waiter had stopped polishing and was now simply staring.

“I have one question,” I said. “For both of you. Does he know what he’s done? At the end?”

David said, “He knows enough to be ruined.”

Patricia said, “He has always known. The ruin is admitting it.”

Neither corrected the other.