A Perfect Spy (10 page)

“Key?”

“Magnus must have taken it.”

Brotherhood lifted his head. “Harry!”

Harry kept his lock picks on a chain the way other men keep keys, and held his breath to help him listen while he probed.

“Does he do all his homework here or is there somewhere else?”

“Daddy left him his old campaign table. Sometimes he uses that.”

“Where is it?”

“Upstairs.”

“Where upstairs?”

“Tom's room.”

“Keep his documents there too, does he? . . . Firm's papers?”

“I don't think so. I don't know where.”

Harry walked out smiling with his head down. Brotherhood pulled open a drawer.

“That's for the book he was writing,” she said as he extracted a meagre file. Magnus keeps everything inside something. Everything must wear a disguise in order to be real.

“Is it though?” He was pulling on his glasses, one red ear at a time. He knows about the novel too, she thought, watching him. He's not even pretending to be surprised.

“Yes.” And you can put his bloody papers back where you got them from, she thought. She did not like how cold he had become, how hard.

“Gave up his sketching, did he? I thought you two were in that together.”

“It didn't satisfy him. He decided he preferred the written word.”

“Doesn't seem to have written much here. When did he switch?”

“On Lesbos. On holiday. He's not writing it yet. He's preparing.”

“Oh.” He began another page.

“He calls it a matrix.”

“Does he though?”—still reading—“I must show some of this to Bo. He's a literary man.”

“And when we retire—when he does—if he takes early retirement, he'll write, I'll paint and bookbind. That's the plan.”

Brotherhood turned a page. “In Dorset?”

“At Plush. Yes.”

“Well, he's taken early retirement all right,” he remarked not very nicely as he resumed his reading. “Wasn't there sculpture, too, at some point?”

“It wasn't practical.”

“I shouldn't think it was.”

“You encourage those things, Jack. The Firm does. You're always saying we should have hobbies and recreations.”

“What's the book about, then? Anything special?”

“He's still finding the line. He likes to keep it to himself.”

“Listen to this: ‘When the most horrible gloom was over the household; when Edward himself was in agony and behaving as prettily as he knew how.' Not even a main verb, far as I can make out.”

“He didn't write that.”

“It's in his handwriting, Mary.”

“It's from something he read. When he reads a book he underlines things in pencil. Then when he's finished it he writes out his favourite bits.”

From upstairs she heard a sharp snap like the cracking of timber or the firing of a pistol back in the days when she had been taught.

“That's Tom's room,” she said. “They don't need to go in there.”

“Get me a bag, dear,” Brotherhood said. “A bin bag will do. Will you find me one?”

She went to the kitchen. Why do I let him do this to me? Why do I let him march into my house, my marriage and my mind and help himself to everything he doesn't like? Mary was not usually compliant. Tradesmen did not rob her twice. In the English school, the English church, in the Diplomatic Wives Association, she was regarded as quite the little shrew. Yet one hard stare of Jack Brotherhood's pale eyes, one growl of his rich, careless voice, was enough to send her running to him.

It's because he's so like Daddy, she decided. He loves our kind of England and the rest can go hang.

It's because I worked for Jack in Berlin when I was an empty-headed schoolgirl with one small talent. Jack was my older lover at a time when I thought I needed one.

It's because he steered Magnus through his divorce for me when he was dithering and gave him to me “for afters” as he called it.

It's because he loves Magnus too.

Brotherhood was flipping the pages of her desk diary.

“Who's P?” he demanded, tapping a page. “ ‘ Twenty-fifth September, six-thirty p.m. P.' There's a P on the sixteenth too, Mary. That's not ‘P' for Pym, is it, or am I being stupid again? Who's this P he's meeting?”

She began to hear the scream inside herself and had no whisky left to quell it. Of all the entries, the dozens and dozens, and he has to pick that one. “I don't know. A Joe. I don't know.”

“You wrote it, didn't you?”

“Magnus asked me to. ‘Put down I'm meeting P.' He didn't keep a diary of his own. He said it was insecure.”

“And he made you write the entries for him.”

“He said if anybody looked, they wouldn't know which were his dates and which were mine. It was part of sharing.” She felt Brotherhood's stare. He's making me speak, she thought. He wants to hear the quaver in my voice.

“Sharing what?”

“His work.”

“Explain.”

“He couldn't tell me what he was doing, but he could show me that he was doing it and when.”

“Did he say that?”

“I could feel it.”

“What could you feel?”

“That he was proud! He wanted me to know!”

“Know what?”

Brotherhood could drive her mad even when she knew he meant to. “Know that he had another life! An important one. That he was being used.”

“By us?”

“By you, Jack. By the Firm! Who do you think—the Americans?”

“Why do you say that—the Americans? Did he have a thing about them?”

“Why should he? He served in Washington.”

“Needn't stop him. Might even encourage him. Did you know the Lederers in Washington?”

“Of course we did.”

“But better here, eh? I hear she's quite an armful.”

He was turning forward to the days yet to be endured. Tomorrow and the day after. To the weekend, which was already gaping at her like a hole in her shattered universe.

“Mind if I keep this?” he asked.

Mary damn well did mind. She possessed no spare diary and no spare life either. She snatched it back and let him wait while she copied out her future on a sheet of paper: Drinks Lederer . . . dinner Dinkels . . . Tom's school term ends.... She came to “meet P” and left it out.

“Why's this drawer empty?” he asked.

“I didn't know it was.”

“So what was it full of?”

“Old photographs. Mementoes. Nothing.”

“How long's it been empty?”

“I don't know, Jack. I don't know! Get off my back, will you?”

“Did he put papers in his suitcase?”

“I didn't watch him pack.”

“Did you hear him down here while he was packing?”

“Yes.”

The telephone rang. Mary's hand shot out to take it, but Brotherhood was already grasping her wrist. Still holding her, he leaned towards the door and yelled for Harry while the phone went on ringing. It was rising four a.m. already. Who the hell calls at four in the morning except Magnus? Inside herself Mary was praying so loud she hardly heard Brotherhood's shout. The phone kept calling her, and she knew now that nothing mattered except Magnus and her family.

“It might be Tom!” she shouted while she struggled. “Let go, damn you!”

“It might be Lederer, too.”

Harry must have flown downstairs. She counted two more rings before he was standing in the doorway.

“Trig this call,” Brotherhood ordered, loud and slow. Harry vanished. Brotherhood released Mary's hand. “Make it very, very long, Mary. Spread it right out. You know how to play those games. Do it.”

She lifted the phone and said, “Pym residence.”

Nobody answered. Brotherhood was conducting her with his powerful hands, willing her, pressing her to talk. She heard a metallic ping and crammed her hand over the mouthpiece. “It could be a call code,” she breathed. She held up one finger for one ping. Then a second. Then a third. It was a call code. They had used them in Berlin: two for this, three for that. Private and prearranged between the Joe and base. She opened her eyes to Brotherhood to say what shall I do? He shook his head to say I don't know either.

Speak, he mouthed.

Mary drew a deep breath. “Hullo? Speak up, please.” She took refuge in German. “This is the residence of Counsellor Magnus Pym of the British Embassy. Who is that? Will you speak, please? Mr. Pym is not here at the moment. If you wish to leave a message, you may do so. Otherwise, please call later. Hullo?”

More, Brotherhood was urging. Give me more. She recited her telephone number in German and again in English. The line was open and she could hear a noise like traffic and a noise like scratchy music played at half speed, but no more pings. She repeated the number in English. “Speak up, please. The line is dreadful. Hullo. Can you hear me? Who's that calling, please? Do—please—speak—up.” Then she couldn't help herself. Her eyes closed and she screamed, “Magnus, for God's sake say where you are!” But Brotherhood was miles ahead of her. With a lover's knowledge he had felt her outburst coming and clapped his hand over the cradle.

“Too short, sir,” Harry lamented from the doorway. “I'd need another minute at the least.”

“Was it foreign?” Brotherhood said.

“Could be foreign, could be next door, sir.”

“That was naughty, Mary. Don't do those things again. We're on the same side in this and I'm boss.”

“Someone's kidnapped him,” she said. “I know they have.”

Everything froze: herself, his pale eyes, even Harry in the doorway. “Well, well,” said Brotherhood at last. “That would make you feel better, would it? A kidnapping? Now why do you say that, dear? What's worse than kidnapping, I wonder?”

Trying to meet his gaze Mary experienced a violent time warp. I don't know anything. I want Plush. Give me back the land that Sam and Daddy died for. She saw herself as a school-leaver seated in front of the careers mistress in the middle of her last term. A second woman is with her, London and tough. “This lady is a recruiting officer for the Foreign Service, dear,” says the careers mistress. “A special bit of it,” says the tough woman. “She's terribly impressed by the way you
draw,
dear,” says the careers mistress. “She so admires your draughtsmanship, as we all do. She wonders whether you'd be interested in taking your folder to London for a day or two, so that some other people can look at it.” “It's for your country, dear,” the tough woman says with meaning, to the child of English patriots.

She remembered the training house in East Anglia, girls like herself, our class. She remembered the jolly lessons in copying and engraving and colouring, in papers and cardboards and linens and threads, how to make watermarks and how to alter them, how to cut rubber stamps, how to make paper look older and how to make it look younger, and she tried to remember just when it was exactly that they had realised they were being taught to forge documents for British spies. And she saw herself standing before Jack Brotherhood in his rickety upstairs office in Berlin, not a stone's throw from the Wall, Jack the Stripper, Jack the Stoat, Jack the Black and all the other Jacks he was known as. Jack who had charge of Berlin Station and liked to meet all newcomers personally, particularly if they were pretty girls of twenty. She remembered his bleached gaze running slowly over her body while he guessed her shape and sexual weight and she remembered again hating him on sight, as she was trying to hate him now as she watched him flip through a folder of family correspondence he had pulled from the desk.

“You realise half of those are Tom's letters from boarding-school, I suppose,” she said.

“Why doesn't he write to both of you?”

“He does write to both of us, Jack. Tom and I have one correspondence. Magnus and Tom have a separate correspondence.”

“No interconsciousness,” said Brotherhood, using a bit of trade talk he had taught her in Berlin. He lit one of his fat yellow cigarettes and watched her theatrically through the flame. There's a poseur in all of them, she thought. Magnus and Grant included.

“You're absurd,” she said in nervous anger.

“It's an absurd situation and Nigel will be here any minute to make it more absurd still. What caused it?” He opened another drawer.

“His father. If it's a situation at all.”

“Whose camera's this?”

“Tom's. But we all use it.”