A Perfect Spy (74 page)

But once again, his words had none of the confident ring they had possessed in the cosy barrack hut in Argyll where he and his colleagues had practised the skills of resisting interrogation.

“You have been watched from the moment you arrived here,” said Axel loudly. “All your movements and contacts have been observed by the protectors of the people. You have no alternative but to make an immediate admission of your guilt on all charges.”

“The free world will see this senseless act as the latest evidence of the brutality of the Czech régime,” Pym declared, with increasing strength. Axel nodded approvingly.

The streets were empty, the old houses also. They entered what had once been a rich suburb of patrician villas. Sprawling hedges hid the lower windows. The iron gateways, wide enough to ride a coach through, were blocked with ivy and barbed wire.

“Get out,” Axel commanded.

The evening was young and beautiful. The full moon shed a white, unearthly light. Watching Axel lock the car, Pym smelt hay and heard the clamour of insects. Axel guided him down a narrow path between two gardens until they came to a gap in the yew hedge to his right. Grabbing Pym's wrist, he led him through it. They were standing on the terrace of what had once been a great garden. A many-towered castle lifted into the sky behind them. Ahead, almost lost to a thicket of roses, stood a decrepit summerhouse. Axel wrestled with the door but it refused to yield.

“Kick it for me, Sir Magnus,” he said. “This is Czechoslovakia.”

Pym drove his foot against the panel. The door gave, they stepped inside. On a rusted table stood the familiar bottle of vodka and a tray of bread and gherkins. Grey stuffing was bleeding from the ripped covers of the wicker chairs.

“You are a very dangerous friend, Sir Magnus,” Axel complained as he stretched out his thin legs and surveyed his fine boots. “Why in God's name couldn't you have used an alias? Sometimes I think you have been put on earth in order to be my black angel.”

“They said I would be better being me,” Pym replied stupidly as Axel twisted the cap from the vodka bottle. “They call it natural cover.”

For a long time after that, Axel appeared unable to think of anything useful to say at all, and Pym did not feel it was his place to interrupt his captor's reverie. They were sitting legs parallel and shoulder to shoulder like a retired couple on the beach. Below them, squares of cornfield stretched towards a forest. A heap of broken cars, more than Pym had ever seen on the Czech roads, littered the lower end of the garden. Bats wheeled decorously in the moonlight.

“Do you know this was my aunt's house?” said Axel.

“Well, no, I didn't, actually,” said Pym.

“Well, it was. My aunt was a witty woman. She once described to me how she broke the news to her father that she wished to marry my uncle. ‘But why do you want to marry him?' said her father. ‘He has no money. He is very small and you are small too. You will have small children. He is like the encyclopedias you make me buy you every year. They look pretty but once you have opened them and seen inside, you don't bother with them any more.' He was wrong. Their children were large and she was happy.” He scarcely paused. “They want me to blackmail you, Sir Magnus. That is the only good news I have for you.”

“Who do?” said Pym.

“The aristos I work for. They think I should show you the photographs of the two of us coming out of the barn together in Austria, and play you the recordings of our conversations. They say I should wave the I.O.U. in your face that you signed to me for the two hundred dollars we tricked out of Membury for your father.”

“How did you answer them?” said Pym.

“I said I would. They don't read Thomas Mann, these guys. They're very crude. This is a crude country, as you no doubt noticed in your journeys.”

“Not at all,” said Pym. “I love it.”

Axel drank some vodka and stared into the hills. “And you people don't make it any better. Your hateful little department has been seriously interfering in the running of my country. What are you? Some kind of American butler? What are you doing, framing our officials, sowing suspicion, and seducing our intellectuals? Why do you cause people to be beaten unnecessarily, when a few years in prison would be enough? Do they teach you no reality over there? Have you no reality at all, Sir Magnus?”

“I didn't know the Firm was doing that,” said Pym.

“Doing what?”

“Interfering. Causing people to be tortured. That must be a different section. Ours is just a sort of postal service for small agents.”

Axel sighed. “Maybe they're not doing it. Maybe I have been brainwashed by our own stupid propaganda these days. Maybe I'm blaming you unfairly. Cheers.”

“Cheers,” said Pym.

“So what will they find in your room?” Axel asked when he had lit himself a cigar and puffed at it several times.

“Pretty well everything, I suppose.”

“What's everything?”

“Secret inks. Film.”

“Film from your agents?”

“Yes.”

“Developed?”

“I assume not.”

“From the dead letter box in Pisek?”

“Yes.”

“Then I wouldn't bother to develop it. It's cheap pedlar material. Money?”

“A bit, yes.”

“How much?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“Codebooks?”

“A couple.”

“Anything I might have forgotten? No atom bomb?”

“There's a concealed camera.”

“Is that the talcum-powder tin?”

“If you peel the paper off the lid, it makes a lens.”

“Anything else?”

“A silk escape map. In one of my neckties.”

Axel drew on his cigar again, his thoughts seemingly far away. Suddenly he drove his fist on to the iron table. “We have got to get ourselves
out
of this, Sir Magnus!” he exclaimed angrily. “We have got to get ourselves
out.
We've got to rise in the world. We've got to help each other until we become aristos ourselves and we can kick the other bastards goodbye.” He stared into the gathering darkness. “You make it so difficult for me, you know that? Sitting in that prison, I had bad thoughts about you. You make it very, very difficult to be your friend.”

“I don't see why.”

“Oh, oh! He doesn't see why! He does not see that when the bold Sir Magnus Pym applies for a business visa, even the poor Czechs can look in their card index and discover there was a gentleman of the same name who was a Fascist imperialist militarist spy in Austria, and that a certain running dog named Axel was his fellow conspirator.” His anger reminded Pym of the days of his fever in Bern. His voice had acquired the same unpleasant edge. “Are you really so ignorant of the manners of the country you are spying on that you do not understand what it means these days for a man like me even to have been in the same continent as a man like you, let alone his fellow conspirator in a spying game? Do you really not know that in this world of whisperers and accusers, I may literally die of you? You've read George Orwell, haven't you? These are the people who can rewrite yesterday's weather!”

“I know,” said Pym.

“Do you also know then, that I may be fatally contaminated like all those poor agents and informers you are showering with money and instructions? Do you not know that you are delivering them to the scaffold, unless they belong to us already? You know at least what they will do with you, I assume, unless I make them hear me, these aristos of mine, if we can't satisfy their appetites by other means? They mean to arrest you and parade you before the world's press with your stupid agents and associates. They plan to have another show trial, hang some people. When they start to do that, it will be sheer oversight if they don't hang me too. Axel, the imperialist lackey who spied for you in Austria! Axel, the revanchist Titoist Trotskyist typist who was your accomplice in Bern! They would prefer an American but in the meantime they will stretch a point and hang an Englishman until they can get hold of the real thing.” He flopped back, his fury exhausted. “We've got to get
out
of this, Sir Magnus,” he repeated. “We've got to rise, rise,
rise.
I am sick of bad superiors, bad food, bad prisons and bad torturers.” He drew angrily on his cigar again. “It's time I looked after your career and you looked after mine. And this time properly. No bourgeois shrinking back from the big scoops. This time we are professionals, we make straight for the biggest diamonds, the biggest banks. I mean it.”

Suddenly, Axel turned his chair until it was facing Pym, then sat on it again and laughed, and tapped Pym smartly on the shoulder with the back of his hand to cheer him up.

“You got the flowers okay, Sir Magnus?”

“They were super. Someone handed them into our cab as we were leaving the reception.”

“Did Belinda like them?”

“Belinda doesn't know about you. I never told her.”

“Who did you say the flowers were from?”

“I said I'd no idea. Probably for another wedding altogether.”

“That was good. What's she like?”

“Super. We were childhood sweethearts together.”

“I thought Jemima was your childhood sweetheart.”

“Well, Belinda was too.”

“At the same time—both of them? That's quite a childhood you had,” Axel said with a fresh laugh as he refilled Pym's glass.

Pym managed to laugh too, and they drank together.

Then Axel began speaking, kindly and gently without irony or bitterness, and it seems to me that he spoke for about thirty years because his words are as loud in my ear now as they ever were in Pym's then, never mind the din of the cicadas and the cheeping of the bats.

“Sir Magnus, you have in the past betrayed me but, more important, you have betrayed yourself. Even when you are telling the truth, you lie. You have loyalty and you have affection. But to what? To whom? I don't know all the reasons for this. Your great father. Your aristocratic mother. One day maybe you will tell me. And maybe you have put your love in some bad places now and then.” He leaned forward and there was a kindly, true affection in his face and a warm long-suffering smile in his eyes. “Yet you also have morality. You search. What I am saying is, Sir Magnus: for once nature has produced a perfect match. You are a perfect spy. All you need is a cause. I have it. I know that our revolution is young and that sometimes the wrong people are running it. In the pursuit of peace we are making too much war. In the pursuit of freedom we are building too many prisons. But in the long run I don't mind. Because I know this. All the junk that made you what you are: the privileges, the snobbery, the hypocrisy, the churches, the schools, the fathers, the class systems, the historical lies, the little lords of the countryside, the little lords of big business, and all the greedy wars that result from them, we are sweeping that away for ever. For your sake. Because we are making a society that will never produce such sad little fellows as Sir Magnus.” He held out his hand. “So. I've said it. You are a good man and I love you.”

And I remember that touch always. I can see it any time by looking into my own palm: dry and decent and forgiving. And the laughter: from the heart as it always was, once he had ceased to be tactical and become my friend again.

H
ow appropriate, Tom, that looking back over all the years that follow our meeting in the Czech summerhouse, I see nothing but America, America, her golden shores glittering on the horizon like the promise of freedom after the repressions of our troubled Europe, then leaping towards us in the summer joy of our attainment! Pym still has more than a quarter of a century in which to serve his two houses according to the best standards of his omnivorous loyalty. The trained, married, case-hardened, elderly adolescent has still to become a man, though who will ever break the genetic code of when a middle-class Englishman's adolescence ends and his manhood takes over? Half a dozen dangerous European cities, from Prague to Berlin to Stockholm to the occupied capital of his native England, lie between the two friends and their goal. Yet it seems to me now they were no more than staging places where we could provision and refurbish and watch the stars in preparation for our journey. And consider for a moment the dreadful alternative, Tom: the fear of failure that blew like a Siberian wind on our unprotected backs. Consider what it would have meant, to two men such as ourselves, to have lived out our lives as spies without ever having spied on America!

It must be said quickly, lest there is any doubt of it left in your mind, that after the summerhouse, Pym's path was set for life. He had renewed his vow and in the terms your Uncle Jack and I have always lived by, Tom, there was no way out. Pym was owned and hooked and pledged. Finish. After the barn in Austria, well, yes, there had been a little latitude still, though never any prospect of redemption. And you have seen how, if feebly, he did try to jump clear of the secret world and brave the hazards of the real one. Not with any conviction, true. But he made a stab at it, even if he knew he would be about as much use out there as a beached fish dying of too much oxygen. But after the summerhouse, God's brief to Pym was clear: no more dithering; stay put in your proper station, in the element to which nature has appointed you. Pym needed no third telling.

“Make a clean breast of it,” I hear you cry, Tom. “Hurry home to London, go to Personnel, pay the penalty, begin again!” Well now, Pym thought of that, naturally he did. On the drive back to Vienna, on the aeroplane home, on the bus to London from Heathrow, Pym did a lot of energetic agonising along those lines, for it was one of the occasions when the whole of his life was pinned up in a vivid strip cartoon inside his skull. Begin where? he asked himself, not unreasonably. With Lippsie, whose death, in his gloomier hours, he was still determined to take upon himself? With Sefton Boyd's initials? With poor Dorothy whom he had driven off her head? With Peggy Wentworth, screaming her dirt at him, another victim for sure? Or with the day he first picked the locks of Rick's green cabinet or Membury's desk? How many of the systems of his life exactly are you proposing that he bare to the guilt-bestowing gaze of his admirers?