A Perfect Spy (73 page)

 

The countryside was Austrian and beautiful. Many barns lay beside many lakes. In Plzeň Pym toured a despondent factory in the company of square-faced men. In the evening he kept the safety of his hotel, watched by a pair of secret policemen who drank one coffee apiece until he went to bed. His next calls were in the north. On the road to Ústí he saw army lorries and memorised their unit insignia. To the east of Ústí lay a factory that the Firm suspected of producing isotope containers. Pym was unclear what an isotope was, or what it should be contained in, but he drew a sketch of the main buildings and hid it in his typewriter. Next day he continued to Prague and at the arranged hour sat himself in the famous Tyn church, which has a window looking into Kafka's old apartment. Tourists and officials wandered about unsmiling.

“So K. began to move off slowly,”
Pym read as he sat in the south aisle, third row from the altar, pretending to study his guidebook.
“K. felt forlorn and isolated as he advanced between the rows of empty pews, with the priest's eyes fixed on him for all he knew. . . .”

Needing a rest, Pym knelt down and prayed. With a grunt and a puff, a heavy man shuffled in beside him and sat down. Pym smelt garlic and thought of Sergeant Pavel. Through a crack in his fingers, he identified the recognition signals: smear of white paint on left fingernail, splash of blue on left cuff, a mass of disgraceful black hair, black coat. My contact is an artist, he realised. Why didn't I think of that before? But Pym did not sit back, he did not ease the little package from his pocket as a prelude to laying it between them on the pew. He remained kneeling and soon discovered why he had done so. The sound of trained feet was crunching towards him down the aisle. The footsteps stopped. A male voice said, “Come with us, please,” in Czech. With a sigh of resignation, Pym's neighbour clambered wearily to his feet and followed them out.

“Sheer coincidence,” Pym's controller assured him, much amused, when he got back. “He's already been on to us. They were pulling him in for a routine questioning. He comes up for one every six weeks. Never even crossed their minds he might be making a clandestine pickup. Let alone with a chap your age.”

“You don't think he's—well, told them?” Pym said.

“Old Kyril? Blown
you?
You must be joking. Don't worry. We'll give you another shot in a few weeks' time.”

Rick was not pleased to hear of Pym's contribution to the British export drive, and told him so on one of his secret visits from Ireland, where he had established his winter quarters while he cleared up certain misunderstandings with Scotland Yard, and fought his way into the crowded new profession of West End property evictions.

“Working as a commercial traveller—my own boy?” he exclaimed, to the alarm of the adjoining tables. “Selling electric shavers to a bunch of foreign Communists? We
did
all that, son. It's over. What did I pay your education for? Where's your patriotism?”

“They're not electric shavers, Father. I sell alternators, oscillators and sparking plugs. How's your glass?”

Hostility towards Rick was a new and giddying notion for Pym. He vented it cautiously, but with growing excitement. If they ate a meal, he insisted on paying in order to savour Rick's disapproval at seeing his own boy put down good money where a signature would have done the trick.

“You're not mixed up with some racket out there, are you?” said Rick. “The doors of tolerance only open a certain distance, you know, son. Even for you. What are you up to? Tell us.”

The pressure on Pym's arm was suddenly dangerous. He made a joke of it, smiling broadly. “Hey, Father, that hurts,” he said, awfully amused. It was Rick's thumbnail that he was most aware of, boring into an artery. “Could you possibly stop doing that, Father?” he said. “It really is uncomfortable.” Rick was too busy pursing his lips and shaking his head. He was saying it was a damned shame when a father who had given up everything for his own son was treated like a “poor ayah.” He meant pariah but the notion had never properly formed in him. Placing his elbow on the table, Pym relaxed his whole arm and let it ride about with Rick's pressure—flop one way, flop the other. Then abruptly stiffened it and, exactly as he had been taught, smacked the fat of Rick's knuckles on to the table-edge, causing the glasses to jump and the cutlery to dance and slide off the table. Taking back his bruised hand, Rick turned away to bestow a resigned smile on his subjects feasting around him. Then with his good hand he lightly pinged the edge of his Drambuie glass to indicate that he required another nice touch. Just as, by unlacing his shoes, he used to let it be known that somebody should fetch his bedroom slippers. Or by rolling on to his back, after a lengthy banquet, and spreading his knees, he declared a carnal appetite.

 

Yet, as ever, nothing is one thing for long with Pym, and soon a strange calm begins to replace his early nervousness as he continues his secret missions. The silent, unlit country that at first sight appeared so threatening to him becomes a secret womb where he can hide himself, rather than a place of dread. He has only to cross the border for the walls of his English prisons to fall away: no Belinda, no Rick—and very nearly no Firm either. I am the travelling executive of an electronic company. I am Sir Magnus, roving free. His solitary nights in unpeopled provincial towns, where at first the yapping of a dog had been enough to bring him sweating to his window, now inspire him with a sense of protection. The air of universal oppression that hangs over the entire country enfolds him in its mysterious embrace. Not even the prison walls of his public school had given him such a sense of security. On car and train rides through river valleys, over hills capped by Bohemian castles, he drifts through realms of such inner contentment that the very cattle seem to be his friends. I shall settle here, he decides. This is my true home. How foolish of me to have supposed that Axel could ever leave it for another! He begins to relish his stilted conversations with officials. His heart leaps when he unlocks a smile from their faces. He takes pride in his slowly filling order book, feels a fatherly responsibility for his oppressors. Even his operational detours, when he is not blocking them from his mind, can be squeezed beneath the broad umbrella of his munificence: “I am a champion of the middle ground,” he tells himself, using an old phrase of Axel's, as he prises a loose stone from a wall, fishes out one package and replaces it with another. “I am giving succour to a wounded land.”

Yet even with all this preliminary self-conditioning, it takes another six journeys on Pym's part before he can coax Axel out of the shadows of his perilous existence.

 

“Mr. Canterbury! Are you all right, Mr. Canterbury? Answer!”

“Of course I'm all right, Miss D. I'm always all right. What is it?”

Pym pulled back the door. Miss Dubber was standing in the darkness, her hair in papers, holding Toby for protection.

“You thump so, Mr. Canterbury. You grind your teeth. An hour ago you were humming. We're worried that you're ill.”

“Who's
we?”
said Pym sharply.

“Toby and me, you silly man. Do you think I've got a lover?”

Pym closed the door on her and went swiftly to the window. One parked van, probably green. One parked car, white or grey, Devon registration. An early milkman he had not seen before. He returned to the door, put his ear to it and listened intently. A creak. A slippered footstep. He pulled the door open. Miss Dubber was halfway down the corridor.

“Miss D?”

“Yes, Mr. Canterbury?”

“Has anybody been asking you questions about me?”

“Why should they, Mr. Canterbury?”

“I don't know. Sometimes people just do. Have they?”

“It's time you slept, Mr. Canterbury. I don't mind how much the country needs you, it can always wait another day.”

 

The town of Strakonice is more famous for its manufacture of motorcycles and Oriental fezzes than for any great cultural gem. Pym made his way there because he had filled a dead letter box in Pisek, nineteen kilometres to the north-east, and Firm tradecraft required he should not register his presence in a target town where a dead letter box was waiting to be cleared. So he drove to Strakonice feeling flat and bored, which was how he always felt after a bit of Firm's business, and booked himself into an ancient hotel with a grand staircase, then drifted round the town trying to admire the old butchers' shops on the south side of the square, and the Renaissance church which, according to his guidebook, had been changed to baroque; and the church of St. Wenceslaus which, though originally Gothic, had been altered in the nineteenth century. Having exhausted these excitements, and feeling even wearier from the long heat of the summer's day, he trudged up the stairs to his bedroom thinking how pleasant it would be if they were leading him to Sabina's apartment in Graz, in the days when he had been a penniless young double agent without a care in the world.

He put his key in the keyhole but it was not locked. He was not unduly surprised by this for it was still the evening hour when servants turned back bedcovers, and secret policemen took a last look round. Pym stepped inside and discerned, half hidden behind a sloping shaft of sunlight from the window, the figure of Axel, waiting as the old wait, his domed head propped against the chair's back, pitched a little sideways so that he could make out, among the lights and shades, who was coming in. And not in all the Firm's unarmed combat lessons, and dagger-play lessons, and close-contact shooting lessons, had anybody thought to teach Pym how to terminate the life of an emaciated friend seated behind a sunbeam.

Axel was prison-pale and a stone lighter. Pym could not have supposed, from his parting memory of him, that he had more flesh to give. But the purgers and interrogators and gaolers had managed to find it, as they usually do, and they had helped themselves to it in handfuls. They had taken it from his face, his wrists, his finger-joints and ankles. They had drained the last blood from his cheeks. They had also helped themselves to one of his teeth, though Pym did not discover this immediately, because Axel had his lips tight shut, and one twiglike forefinger raised to them in warning while he waved the other at the wall of Pym's hotel bedroom, indicating microphones at work. They had smashed his right eyelid too, which drooped over its parent eye like a cocked hat, adding to his piratical appearance. But his coat, for all that, still hung over his shoulders like a musketeer's cape, his moustache flourished, and he had inherited a marvellous pair of boots from somewhere, rich as timber, with soles like the running-boards of a vintage car.

“Magnus Richard Pym?” he demanded with theatrical gruffness.

“Yes?” said Pym after a couple of unsuccessful attempts to speak.

“You are charged with the crimes of espionage, provocation of the people, incitement to treason and murder. Also sabotage on behalf of an imperialist power.”

Still slouched languidly in his chair, Axel drove his hands together with improbable vigour, producing a thwack that echoed round the great bedroom, and no doubt impressed the microphones. After it, he offered the prolonged grunt of a man coming to terms with a heavy punch in the stomach. Delving in his jacket pocket, he then detached a small automatic pistol from the lining and, finger to his lips again, waved it about so that Pym got a healthy sight of it.

“Face the wall!” he barked, clambering with difficulty to his feet. “Place your hands on your head, you Fascist swine! March.”

Laying a hand gently round Pym's shoulder, Axel guided him towards the door. Pym stepped ahead of him into the gloomy corridor. Two burly men in hats ignored him.

“Search his room!” Axel commanded them. “Find what you can but do not remove anything! Pay attention to the typewriter, his shoes and the lining of his suitcase. Do not leave his room until you receive orders from me personally. Walk slowly down the stairs,” he told Pym, prodding him in the small of the back with the gun.

“This is an outrage,” Pym said lamely. “I demand to see a British consul immediately.”

At the reception desk the female concierge sat knitting like a hag at the guillotine. Axel prodded Pym past her to a waiting car outside. A yellow cat had taken shelter underneath it. Pulling open the passenger door, Axel nodded Pym to get in and, having shooed the cat into the gutter, climbed in after him and started the engine.

“If you collaborate completely you will not be harmed,” Axel announced in his official voice, indicating a patch of crude perforations in the dashboard. “If you attempt to escape you will be shot.”

“This is a ridiculous and scandalous act,” Pym muttered. “My government will insist that those responsible be punished.”