A Perfect Spy

CHAPTER 12

It was the same dawn. It was time minus ten minutes. It was the moment Brotherhood had lain wakeful and alone for in his rotten flat that was becoming a solitary cell for him, staring at the images of his past in the restless London sky. It was an outdoor game being played by indoor people who didn’t know they were awake. How many times had he sat like this, in rubber boats, on arctic hillsides, pressing the headphones into his ears with kapok mittens to catch the whisper that meant life was not extinct? Here in the communications room on the top floor of the Head Office there were no headphones, no subzero winds to rip through sodden clothing and freeze the operator’s fingers off, no bicycle generator that some poor bastard had to pump at till his legs failed. No aerial that collapsed on you when you most needed it. No two-ton suitcase to be cached in iron-hard soil while the Huns were breathing down your neck. Up here we have dimpled grey-green boxes freshly dusted, with pretty pin-lights and shiny switches. And tuners and amplifiers. And dials to cut out atmospherics. And comfortable chairs for the barons here assembled to rest their candy arses on. And a mysterious compression of the air that clenches your scalp while you watch the green numerals sliding through their prison window as quickly as the later years of life: now I am forty, now I am forty-five, now I am seventy, now I am ten minutes to being dead.

On the raised platform two boys in headphones were patrolling the dials. They’ll never know what it was like, thought Brotherhood. They’ll go to their graves thinking life came out of a packet. Bo Brammel and Nigel sat below them like producers at a preview. Behind them a dozen shadows that Brotherhood had barely bothered with. He noticed Lorimer, Head of Operations. He saw Kate and thought thank heaven she’s alive. At the edge of the stage, Frankel was lugubriously reporting a string of failures. His mid-European accent has thickened.

“Nine-twenty yesterday morning local time, Prague Station has its chief cut-out dial the Watchman household from a callbox, Bo,” he said. “Number engaged. He makes five calls in two hours from round town. Still engaged. He tries Conger. Number out of order. Everybody vanished, everybody out of touch. Midday the Station sends a little girl they own to the canteen where Conger’s daughter goes for lunch. Conger’s daughter is conscious so maybe she knows where her father is. Our little girl is a sixteen-year-old kid, very small, very hardy. She hangs around two hours, checks both sittings, checks the queue. No daughter. She checks the attendance sheets at the factory gate, tells the guards she is the daughter’s room-mate. She’s so innocent they let her. Conger’s daughter is not reported present, is not reported sicklisted. Vanished.”

In the tension nobody spoke to anybody. Everyone spoke to himself. The room was still filling up. How many people does it take to give a network a decent burial? thought Brotherhood. Eight minutes to go.

Frankel continued his dirge. “Seven o’clock yesterday morning local time, Gdansk Station puts two of their local boys to mend a telegraph pole at the end of the street where Merryman lives. His house is in a cul-de-sac. He’s got no other way out. Every day normally he goes to work by car, leaves his house seven-twenty. But yesterday his car is not outside his house. Every other day it is parked outside his house. Not yesterday. From where the boys work they can see his front door. The front door stays closed. No Merryman, nobody at all leaves or enters that house by that door. Downstairs is curtained, no lights, no fresh tracks in the drive. Merryman’s good friend is an architect. Merryman likes to take a coffee with him sometimes on his way to work. This architect is not a Joe, he is not whitelisted.”

“Wenzel,” said Brotherhood.

“Wenzel is the architect’s name, Jack. One of the boys calls up Mr. Wenzel and tells him Merryman’s mother is ill. ‘Where can I get hold of him to give him this bad news?’ he says. Mr. Wenzel says try the laboratory, how ill? The boy says she’s maybe dying, Merryman ought to get to her fast. ‘Give him this message,’ the boy says. ‘Tell him please that Maximilian says he better get to his mother’s bedside fast.’ Maximilian, that’s the codeword for it’s all over. Maximilian means abort, means run, means get the hell out by any known means, don’t bother with customary procedures, run. The boy is resourceful. When he has ceased to speak to Mr. Wenzel, he calls the laboratory where Merryman works. ‘This is Mr. Maximilian. Where’s Merryman? It’s urgent. Tell him Maximilian got to speak to him about his mother.’ Merryman don’t come in today, they tell him. Merryman got a conference in Warsaw.”

Brotherhood was already objecting. “They wouldn’t say that,” he growled. “The labs don’t give out details of staff movements. They’re a top-secret installation, for Christ’s sake. Somebody’s playing games with us.”

“Sure, Jack. My own reaction entirely. You want I go on?”

A couple of heads turned to locate Brotherhood at the back of the room.

“When the line to Merryman went dead we instructed Warsaw to try to reach Voltaire direct,” Frankel continued. He paused. “Voltaire is sick.”

Brotherhood let out an angry laugh. “Voltaire? He hasn’t had a day’s sickness in his life.”

“His Ministry says he’s sick, Jack, his wife says he’s sick, his mistress says he’s sick. He ate some bad mushrooms, gone to hospital. He’s sick. Official. They all say the same.”

“I’ll say it’s official.”

“What do you want me to do, Jack? Tell me something I should do that you would do yourself and I have not done. Okay? It’s a blackout, Jack. Like a silence everywhere. Like a bomb fell.”

“You said you’d keep filling the letter boxes,” Brotherhood said.

“We filled for Merryman yesterday. Money and instructions. We filled.”

“So what happened?”

“Still there. Money and instructions so much he want. Fresh papers, maps, you name it. For Conger we put up two visuals, one for call us, one for evacuate. One curtain on a first floor, one light in a basement window. Is that correct, Jack? Does that accord with the agreed procedures?”

“It accords.”

“Okay. So he doesn’t answer. He doesn’t call, he doesn’t write, he doesn’t run.”

For five minutes there was no sound but the sounds of waiting: the sighing of soft chairs, the striking of lights and matches and the squeaky-soled footsteps of the boys. Kate glanced at Brotherhood and he smiled confidence back. Bo said, “We’re thinking of you, Jack,” but Brotherhood did not reply and he was certainly not thinking of Bo. A bell rang. From the platform a boy said, “Conger, sir, on schedule,” and trimmed some dials. A white pin-light winked above his head. The second boy dropped a switch. Nobody clapped, nobody got to his feet or cried, “they’re alive!”

“Conger operator’s come in and say he’s ready to send, Bo,” Frankel said gratuitously. Behind him, the boys were moving automatically, deaf to everything outside their headphones. “Now we make our first transmission. We use all tape, no handwriting. Conger does the same. Accelerated Morse, we unroll it both ends. Transmission takes maybe one and a half minutes, two. Unroll and decode takes maybe five…. See that?. . ‘We are ready to receive you. Talk.’—this is what we say to him. Now Conger is talking again. Watch the red light left, please. It burns, he’s talking — he’s finished.”

“Wasn’t very long, was it?” Lorimer drawled, not to anyone in particular. Lorimer had buried agents before.

“Now we wait for the decode,” Frankel told his audience a little too brightly. “Three minutes, maybe five. Time to smoke a cigarette, okay? Everybody relax. Conger’s alive and well.”

The boys were transferring spools, resetting instruments.

“Let’s just be grateful he’s alive,” said Kate, and several heads turned sharply, remarking this unaccustomed display of feeling from a Fifth Floor lady.

The grey spools were rolling, one on to the other. For a moment they heard the unrhythmic piping of Morse code. It stopped.

“Hey,” said Lorimer softly.

“Run it through again,” said Brotherhood.

“What’s happened?” said Kate.

The boys rewound the spools and switched again to forward. The Morse resumed and stopped as before.

“Could it be a fault the other end?” Lorimer asked.

“Sure,” Frankel said. “Possible his winder’s on the blink, possible he hit some bad ionosphere. In a minute he comes through again. No problem.”

The taller of the two boys was pulling off his headphones. “Mind if we decode, Mr. Frankel?” he said. “Sometimes when they’ve got a hitch they tell us about it in the message.”

On a nod from Frankel he shifted a spool to a machine at the far end of the bank. The printer began chattering immediately. Nigel and Lorimer moved quickly towards the platform. The printer stopped. Nigel magisterially ripped out the sheet and held it for Lorimer and himself to read. Brotherhood was already striding down the aisle. Mounting the platform, he snatched the script from their unresisting hands.

“Jack, don’t,” said Kate under her breath.

“Don’t what?” Brotherhood said, suddenly out of patience with her. “Don’t care about my agents? Don’t do what exactly?”

“Tell them to print another copy, will you, Frankel?” Nigel said smoothly. “Then we can all look at it together without shoving.”

Brotherhood was holding the sheet before him. Nigel and Lorimer had meekly arranged themselves to either side of him and were reading it over his shoulder.

“Routine intelligence report, Bo,” Nigel announced reading aloud. “Promised length, three hundred and seven groups. Actual length so far forty-one. Subject, restationing of Soviet missile bases in mountains north of Pilsen. Subsource Mirabeau reporting ten days ago. Mirabeau in turn reporting her Soviet Army boyfriend codename Leo — Leo’s done us rather well in the past, I seem to remember. Message reads as follows: Subsource Talleyrand confirms empty low-loaders leaving area — message ends in midsentence. Obviously the winder. Unless, as you say, his signal hit freak conditions.”

Frankel was already giving orders to the taller boy. “Send them ‘Your signal garbled.’ Do it immediately. Tell them we want a rerun. Tell them if they can’t transmit now we’ll remain on standby till they can. Tell them we want a roll-call of all members of the network. You got set phrases for that or you want I draft something?”

“Tell them damn all,” Brotherhood ordered very loud. “And stop crying, everybody. No one’s hurt.”

He had thrust his hands into his raincoat pockets. He was halfway down the aisle. Nigel and Lorimer were still on stage, a pair of choirboys clutching their hymn sheet between them. Brammel sat stoically upright in the auditorium. Kate was staring at him, not stoical at all.

“You can tell them you want a roll-call or a rerun, you can tell them to abort, you can tell them to jump in the Vistula. It doesn’t make a dime of difference,” said Brotherhood.

“Poor man,” said Nigel to Lorimer. “They’re his Joes, you see. It’s the strain.”

“They’re not my Joes and they never were. You can have them with my blessing.” He looked around him for men with sense. “Frankel. For Christ’s sake. Lorimer. When this service catches someone else’s Joe, if it ever does these days, what does it do? If he’s willing to be played, we play him back. If he’s not we send him to the Tower. Is it different now? I wouldn’t know.”

“So?” said Nigel, humouring him.

“If we decide to play him back, we do it as naturally and as fast as we can. Why? Because we want to show the opposition that nothing has changed. We want it seamless. We don’t hide his car and close his house. We don’t let him or his daughter or anybody else vanish into thin air. We don’t ignore dead letter boxes or invent fatuous stories about people eating bad mushrooms. We don’t sandbag radio operators in the middle of their high-speed transmissions. That is the last, the very last thing we do. Unless.”

“I don’t read you, Jack, old boy,” Nigel said, whom Brotherhood had deliberately ignored. “I don’t think anybody does, to be truthful. I think you are very naturally upset and you are getting a bit metaphysical, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“Unless what, Jack?” said Frankel.

“Unless we want the opposition to know we’re rolling up their network.”

“But why would anybody want that, Jack?” Frankel asked earnestly. “Explain to us. Please.”

“Why not explain it another time?” said Nigel.

“There never was a bloody network. They owned those networks from day one. They paid the actors, wrote the script. They owned Pym and near enough they owned me. They owned all of you as well. You just haven’t woken up to it.”

“Then why do they bother to tell us anything at all?” Frankel objected. “Why send us a fake interrupted signal? Why rig the disappearance of the Joes?”

Brotherhood smiled. Not kindly, not with humour. But he did turn to Frankel and he did smile at him. “Because, old boy, they want us to think they’ve got Pym when they haven’t,” he said. “That is the only lie they’ve got left to sell us. They want us to call off the hunt and go home to our high tea. They want to find him for themselves. That’s the good news of the day. Pym is still on the run and they want him as much as we do.”

They watched him turn and stride down the aisle and slide the locks back on the padded door. Poor old Jack, they said to each other with their eyes as the light went up: his life’s work. Lost all his Joes and can’t face it. Dreadful to see him so cut up. Only Frankel seemed to wish he hadn’t gone.

“Have you ordered the rerun yet?” said Nigel. “I said have you ordered a rerun?”

“I’ll do it now,” said Frankel.

“Good man,” said Bo appreciatively from the stalls.

In the corridor, Brotherhood paused to light himself a cigarette. The door opened and closed again. It was Kate.

“I can’t go on,” she said. “It’s mad.”

“Well it’s going to get a damn sight madder,” snapped Brotherhood, still angry. “That was just the trailer.”

* * *

It was night once more and Mary had got through another day without throwing herself politely from a top-floor window or scrawling filthy words on the dining-room walls. Seated on her bed still moderately sober, she stared at the book and then at the phone. The phone had a second wire fed into it. The wire led to a grey box and seemed to stop. Since my time, she thought. Can’t be doing with these modern gadgets. She poured another generous tot of whisky and set the glass on the table at her elbow in order to end the argument she had been having with herself for the last ten minutes. There you are, damn you. If you want one, have one. If you don’t, leave the bloody thing where it is. She was fully dressed. She was supposed to have a headache but the headache was a lie to escape the excruciating company of Fergus and the girl Georgie who had begun to treat her with the deference of warders before her hanging. “How about a nice game of Scrabble, Mary?. . Not in the mood are we? Never mind…. I say, that shepherd’s pie did go down a treat, didn’t it, Georgie? I haven’t had a shepherd’s pie like that since my nan went. Do you think it’s the freezing that does it? Sort of ripens it, does it, the freezing?” At eleven o’clock, screaming inside, she had left them to the washing-up and brought herself up here to the book and to the note that had accompanied it. A deckled card. Silver-edged, my wedding anniversary. In a deckled envelope. Vile cherub blowing trumpet top left.

“Dear Mary,

“So sorry to hear about M’s calamity. Picked this up for pennies this morning and wondered whether you would like to bind it for me, same as all the others, full hide, buckram and the title printed in gold capitals between the first and second band on the spine. The end-papers look kind of new to me, maybe just rip them out? Grant’s away too so I guess I know how you feel. Could you do it quickly, as a surprise for him? Usual fee, of course!

“My love, darling,

Bee”

Keeping her hand away from the whisky and her mind clear of thoughts of a certain moustached phantom, Mary applied her training to the note. The handwriting was not Bee Lederer’s. It was a forgery and to anyone who knew the game a dismal one. The writer had paid lip-service to Bee’s all-American copperplate but the Germanic influence was clear in the spiky “u”s and “n”s and the “t”s without tails. “Whether” instead of “if,” she thought: when did an American write “whether”? The spelling wasn’t Bee’s either: a word like “calamity.” Bee couldn’t spell for toffee. She doubled every consonant on sight. Her letters to Mary in Greece, penned on similar stationery, had contained such family gems as menipullate and phallassy. As to “full hide”: Mary had bound just three books for Bee, and Bee hadn’t known from green apples how she wanted them, except she thought they looked great on Grant’s shelf, just like the old libraries you have in England. Full hide, buckram, the placing of the lettering: these were the writer talking, not Bee. And if Bee suspected that the end-papers might not be original — well bully for Bee because a month ago she had asked Mary wherever had she bought that cute wallpaper stuff she stuck on the inside of her covers?

The note was so bad, Mary concluded — and so unlike Bee — that it was almost deliberately bad: good enough to fool Fergus when it was delivered to the door this afternoon, bad enough to be a signal to Mary that it meant something different.

Something she had been warned of, for instance.

She had read the clues from the moment she opened the door to the vanman, while Fergus the idiot lurked in the coat cupboard with a bloody great Howitzer in his hand in case the vanman turned out to be a Russian in disguise — which perhaps on reflection he was, because Bee had never used a private delivery service in her life. Bee would have dropped the book in herself on the way back from Becky’s school, coo-eeing through the letter box. Bee would have buttonholed Mary at the International Ladies on Tuesday, leaving her to hump the damn thing home as best she could.

“Mind if I read the card, Mary?” Fergus had said. “It’s just routine, only you know what they’re like in London. Bee. That’ll be Mrs. Lederer, wife of the American gentleman?”

“That’s who it will be,” Mary had confirmed.

“Well it’s a nice book, I will say. In English too. Looks really old, it does.” He was turning through it with practised fingers, pausing at pencil marks, holding occasional pages to the light.

“It’s 1698,” Mary had said, pointing to the Roman numerals.

“My goodness, you can read that stuff.”

“Can I have it back now, please?”

The grandfather clock in the hall was striking twelve. Fergus and Georgie were by now no doubt lying blissfully in each other’s arms. Over the interminable days of her secret imprisonment Mary had watched their romance ripen. Tonight when she came down to dinner Georgie had the indisguisable glow of someone who had been screwing minutes before. In a year’s time the two of them would become yet another his-and-hers couple in one of the resources sections where the Other Ranks held sway: surveillance, microphone installation, sweeping, steaming mail. A year later when they had pooled their fiddled overtime and their cooked-up mileage and inflated their out-of-town subsistence they would make a down payment on a house in East Sheen, have two children and become eligible for the Firm’s subsidised education scheme. I’m being a jealous bitch, thought Mary, unrepentant. Right now, I wouldn’t mind an hour with Fergus myself. She picked up the receiver and waited.

“Who are you ringing, Mary?” said Fergus’s voice immediately.

Wherever he was in his love-life just then, Fergus was very awake indeed when it came to cutting in on Mary’s outgoing phone calls.

“I’m lonely,” Mary replied. “I want to have a chat with Bee Lederer. Anything wrong with that?”

“Magnus is still in London, Mary. He’s been delayed.”

“I know where he is. I know the story. I am also grown up.”

“He’s been contacting you regular by phone, you’ve had nice chats with him, he’ll be back in a day or two. Head Office has nabbed him for a briefing while he’s over there. That’s all that happened.”

“I’m all right, Fergus. I’m word perfect.”

“Would you normally ring her as late as this?”

“If both Magnus and Grant are away, yes I would.”

Mary heard a click and then the dialling tone. She dialled the number and Bee started moaning at once. She was having her damned period, she said, a real bastard, cramps, the bends, you name it. It always grabbed her this way in winter, specially when Grant wasn’t there to service her. Giggle. “Oh shit, Mary, I really miss it. Does that make me a whore?”

“I’ve had a lovely long letter from Tom,” said Mary. A lie. It was a letter and it was long but it was not lovely. It was an account of the great time Tom had had with Uncle Jack last Sunday and it had made Mary’s flesh creep.

Bee declared that Becky just adored Tom so much it was indecent. “Can you imagine what is going to happen the day those kids wake up and discover la différence?”

Yes, I can, thought Mary. They’re going to hate each other’s guts. She took Bee through her day. Hell, just screwing around, said Bee. She’d had a squash date with Cathie Krane from the Canadian Embassy but they’d agreed on a coffee instead because of Bee’s condition. Salad at the Club, and Jesus somebody really ought to teach these damned Austrians how to make a decent salad. This afternoon a cruddy Bring and Buy at the Embassy in aid of the Contras in Nicaragua and who gives a fly’s elbow about the Contras in Nicaragua?

“You should go out and buy yourself something,” Mary suggested. “A dress or an antique or something.”

“Listen, I can’t even move. You know what he did, the little runt? He turned the Audi in for servicing on his way to the airport. I don’t get the car, I don’t get a lay.”

“I’d better ring off,” Mary said. “I’ve got a feeling Magnus is going to pull one of his dead-of-night calls and there’ll be all hell if the number is engaged.”

“Yeah, how’s he taken it?” said Bee vaguely. “Is he all weepy or is he sort of reconciled? Some men, I think they really want to castrate their fathers all their lives. You should hear Grant sometimes.”

“I’ll know when he’s back,” said Mary. “Before he left he hardly spoke a word.”

“Too cut up, huh? Grant never gets cut up about anything, the creep.”

“It hit him badly at first,” Mary confessed. “He sounds much better now.” She had scarcely rung off before the phone gave its in-house buzz.

“Why didn’t you mention the beautiful book she sent you, Mary?” Fergus complained. “I thought that was why you’d be ringing.”

“I told you why I was ringing. I was ringing because I was lonely. Bee Lederer sends me about fifteen books a week. Why should I talk to her about a bloody book to please you?”

“I wasn’t meaning to offend, Mary.”

“She didn’t mention the book so why should I? She gave me all the necessary instructions in her bloody note.” I’m protesting too much, she thought, cursing herself. I’m putting questions in his mind. “Listen, Fergus. I’m tired and liable to bite, okay? Leave me alone and go back to what you both do best.”

She picked up the book. Nothing, not a book on earth, could have authenticated the sender so perfectly. “De Arte Graphica. The Art of Painting by C. A. DU FRESNOY with REMARKS. Translated into English together with an Original Preface containing a Parallel between Painting and Poetry. By Mr. DRYDEN.” She drained the glass of whisky. It was the same book. She had no doubt. The same book Magnus brought to me in Berlin when I still belonged to Jack. Came bounding up the stairs with it. Knocking on the steel door of Special Ordnance which was our cover while he clutched it in his hand. “Hey, Mary, open up!” It was before we had become lovers. Before he had started to call me Mabs. “Listen I want you to do a rush job for me. Can you put a CD into the binding of this? It’s to take one standard sheet of code cloth. Can you do it by tonight?” Then I staged a misunderstanding because we were already flirting. I pretended I hadn’t heard of CDs except on diplomatic cars, which allowed Magnus to explain to me in his earnest way that CD meant concealment device and Jack Brotherhood had told him Mary was the best person for the job. “We’re using a bookshop as a dead letter box,” Magnus explained. “I’ve got this Joe who’s an antiquarian-book fiend.” Case officers were not usually so generous about their operations.

And I took off the end-paper, she remembered as she began gently prodding the covers. I scraped away a patch of cover board until I was nearly at the hide. Other people would have taken off the hide and gone under it from the front. Not our Mary. For Magnus nothing but perfection would do. Next night he gave me dinner. The night after that we went to bed together. Next morning I told Jack what had happened and he was gallant and sweet and said we were both very lucky, and that he’d withdraw from the field and let us get on with it, if that was what I wanted. I said it was. And I told Jack in my happiness that what had brought me and Magnus together was de Arte Graphica, a Parallel between Painting and Poetry, which was rather extraordinary when you remembered that I was mad about painting and Magnus was hell-bent on writing the great novel of his life.

“Where are you going, Mary?” Fergus said, looming before Mary in the corridor. She had the book in her hand. She shoved it at him. “I can’t sleep. I’m going down to the cellar to fool around with this. Now go back to your nice lady and leave me alone.”

Closing the cellar door she went quickly to the workbench. In minutes Georgie is going to saunter in with a nice cup of tea for me in order to make sure I haven’t defected or cut my wrists. Filling a bowl with warm water she damped a rag and set to work soaking off the end-paper. The writer of the note knew what he was talking about. On a book of that age the original glue was animal and would have crystallised. Mary, when she had doctored it for Magnus, had used animal glue too. But the new paper had been stuck on with flour paste which responded quickly to water. She was using a cloth and scrubbing. Normally she would have used blotting paper and a pressing tin. The end-paper came away. The board remained. Taking a scalpel she began scuffing it with the blade. If they’ve used rope board, I’ve had it. Rope board was made of real old rope taken from a man-of-war. It was tarred and twisted and packed solid. To scrape into it would take hours. She need not have worried. It was modern millboard and disintegrated like dry earth. She kept scuffing and suddenly the code cloth lay before her, flat against the inside of the hide, exactly where she had put it for Magnus. Except that this one had capital letters instead of figure groups. This one began “Dear Mary.” She stuffed it quickly down her front, retrieved the scalpel, and set about removing the rest of the end-paper as if she were going to rebind from the beginning, full hide as Bee had requested.

“I just thought I had to come and see how you do it,” Georgie explained, sitting down beside her. “I really need a hobby like that myself, Mary. I just don’t ever seem able to relax.”

“Poor you,” said Mary.

* * *

It was night and Brotherhood was angry. Though he was out in the streets and away from the Firm and the Firm’s ken, though he had work to do and action to relieve him, he was angry. His anger had been mounting for two days. This morning’s outburst about the Joes was not the start of it. It had been kindled yesterday, like a slow-burning fuse, as he was leaving the conference room in St. John’s Wood after perjuring himself to save Brammel’s neck. It had stuck with him like a faithful friend through his meeting with Tom and his excursion to Reading station: Pym has broken the moral laws. He has outlawed himself by choice. It had touched flashpoint in the signals room this morning and gathered more heat with every pointless conference and frittered hour since. From his position of half-pitied and wholly blamed has-been, Brotherhood had listened to his own arguments being used against him and had looked on as, under his very eyes, his old defence of Pym had been adopted and updated into a policy of institutionalised inertia.

“But, Jack, it’s all so circumstantial — you said so yourself,” Brammel brayed, never stronger than when demonstrating that two positives made a negative. “‘ If you run any succession of coincidences through a computer, you will find that everything looks possible and most things look highly likely.’ Who said that, pray? I’m quoting you deliberately, Jack. We’re sitting at your feet, remember? Good heavens, I never thought I’d have to defend Pym against you!”

“I was wrong,” said Brotherhood.

“But who says you were? Only you, I think. So Pym has a Czech code pad in his chimney place,” Brammel conceded. “He has a camera we didn’t know about with a document-copying attachment or whatever. Good heavens, Jack, think of all the bits of equipment you’ve picked up in your time, just in the ordinary way of playing agents back and forth! Gold bars, cameras, microdot lenses, concealment devices, I don’t know what. You could have started your own pawnbroker’s shop with them. All right I grant you he should have turned the stuff in. I see him as being rather in the position of a police detective who has taken a lot of swag off one of his informants. He shoves it in a drawer — or in the fireplace — hides it from his family and one day it’s all discovered. But it doesn’t make him a burglar. It makes him an efficient policeman who’s been cavalier or at worst careless.”

“He’s not careless,” said Brotherhood. “He’s not a risk taker.”

“All right, so now he is. The fellow’s had a nervous breakdown, he’s acting clean out of character, he’s hidden himself away somewhere, he’s putting out the usual cries for help,” Brammel reasoned, in a note of saintly tolerance. “Probably a girlfriend, knowing him. We shall find out soon enough. But look at the scenario, Jack. His father dies. He’s the artistic type of officer, always wanting to write the great novel, paint, sculpt, take sabbaticals, I don’t know what. He’s hit a menopausal age in life. He’s been living under a cloud of suspicion for far too long. Do you wonder he’s had a bit of a crack-up? Be a wonder if he hadn’t, if you ask me. All right, I don’t condone it. And I shall want to know why he took that burnbox, though you tell me he knew everything that was in it anyway and wrote most of it himself, so what’s the difference? And when we find him, I may pull him out of the field for a while. There is still no justification for me to raise a public hue and cry. To go to my Minister and say ‘We’ve found another one.’ Least of all to the Americans. Bang go the barter treaties. Bang goes the intelligence pooling and the private line to Langley that often means so much more than normal diplomatic links. Do you want me to risk all that until we know?”

“Bo feels you should stop flying solo,” Nigel said when they were back on the servants’ side of Brammel’s door. “I’m afraid I agree. From now on you’ll make no field enquiries without my personal authority. You’re to remain on call and you’re to start nothing. Is that clear?”

It is clear, thought Brotherhood, examining the house from across the road. It is clear that the rewards of my old age are dangerously threatened. He tried to remember who it was in mythology who was cursed to live long enough to witness the consequences of his bad advice. The house was in the best of Chelsea’s many beautiful backwaters, set at the end of a long garden only partly visible above the gate. An air of decadence pervaded its genteel shabbiness, an unworldly languor inhabited its flaking stucco. Brotherhood walked past it several times, checking the upper windows, studying the skyline for sight of a church, for Pym’s mental substitutions were becoming rooted in his mind like spy talk. On the fourth floor a dormer window was lit and curtained. As he watched he saw a figure pass across it, too quickly and too far away for him to tell whether it was man or woman.

He took a last look up and down the road. A brass bellpush was set into the gatepost. He pressed it and waited but not long. He shoved the gate, it creaked and opened, he stepped inside and closed it after him. The garden was a secret patch of English countryside walled on three sides. Nothing overlooked it. The sounds of traffic ceased miraculously. The flagstone path was slippery with unswept leaves. Home, he rehearsed again. Home in Scotland, home in Wales. Home by the sea. Home as an upper window and a church. Home as an aristocratic mother who took him visiting great houses. He passed the statue of a draped woman, one stone breast offered to the autumn night. Home as a series of concentric fantasies, all with the same truth at the centre. Who had said that? — Pym or himself? Home as promises to women he didn’t love. The front door was opening as he reached it. A young manservant was watching him approach. His monkey jacket had a regimental cut. Behind him, unrestored gilt mirrors and a chandelier glinted against dark wallpaper. “He’s got a boy name of Stegwold living there,” Superintendent Bellows of police liaison had reported. “If you were old enough, I’d read you his record of convictions.”

“Sir Kenneth in, son?” said Brotherhood pleasantly as he wiped his shoes on the mat and shook off his raincoat.

“I don’t know, do I? Who shall I say?”

“Mr. Marlow, son, and I’d like ten minutes with him alone on a mutual matter.”

“From?” said the boy.

“His constituency, son,” said Brotherhood just as pleasantly.

The boy tripped quickly upstairs. Brotherhood’s gaze skimmed the hall. Hats, idiosyncratic. Coaching overcoat, green with age. One Guards bowler, ditto. Army service cap with Colds-tream badge. Blue china urn stuffed with ancient golf clubs, walkingsticks and warped tennis racquets. The boy came mincing down the stairs again, trailing one hand on the banisters, unable to resist an entrance.

“He’ll see you now, Mr. Marlow,” he said.

The stairs were lined with portraits of rude men. In a dining-room, two places were laid with enough silver for a banquet. A decanter, cold meats, and cheeses lay on the sideboard. It was not till Brotherhood noticed a couple of dirty plates that he realised the meal was already over. The library smelled of mildew and the fumes of paraffin from a stove. A gallery ran along three walls. Half the balustrade was missing. The stove had been shoved into the fireplace and in front of it stood a clothes-horse hung with socks and underpants. In front of the clothes-horse stood Sir Kenneth Sefton Boyd. He wore a velvet smoking jacket and an open-necked shirt and old satin slippers with gold-stitched monograms worn away. He was burly and thick-necked, with uneven pads of flesh round his jaw and eyes. His mouth was bent to one side as if by a clenched fist. He spoke with the bent side while the other stayed still.

“Marlow?”

“How do you do, sir,” said Brotherhood.

“What do you want?”

“I’d like to speak to you alone if I may, sir.”

“Policeman?”

“Not quite, sir. Something like.”

He handed Sir Kenneth a card. This is to certify that the bearer is engaged in enquiries affecting the national security. For confirmation please ring Scotland Yard extension so-and-so. The extension led to Superintendent Bellows’s department, which knew all Brotherhood’s names. Unimpressed, Sir Kenneth handed the card back.

“So you’re a spy.”

“Of a sort, I suppose. Yes.”

“Want a drink? Beer? Scotch? What do you want to drink?”

“A scotch would be very welcome, sir, now you mention it.”

“Scotch, Steggie,” said Sir Kenneth. “Get him a scotch, will you? Ice? Soda? What do you want in your scotch?”

“A little water would be welcome.”

“All right. Give him water. Bring him a jug. Put it on the table. Over there by the tray. Then he can help himself. You can go away. And top mine up, while you’re about it. Want to sit down, Marlow? Over there do you?”

“I thought we were going to the Albion,” said Steggie from the door.

“Can’t now. Got to talk to this chap.”

Brotherhood sat. Sir Kenneth sat opposite him; his gaze was yellowed and unresponsive. Brotherhood had seen dead men whose eyes were more alive. His hands had fallen into his lap and one of them kept flipping like a beached fish. On the table between them lay a backgammon board with the pieces in mid-battle. Who was he playing with? thought Brotherhood. Who dined with him? Who was sharing his music with him? Who warmed my chair before I sat in it?

“You surprised to see me, sir?” said Brotherhood.

“Take a bit more than that to surprise me, old boy.”

“Anyone else been here recently, making funny enquiries? Foreign gentlemen? Americans?”

“Not that I know of. Why should they?”

“There’s a bunch going round from our own vetting side as well, I’m told. I wondered whether any of them had been here. I tried to find out before I left the office but there’s a lack of coordination, it’s all moving so fast.”

“What is?”

“Well, sir, it seems that your old school friend Mr. Magnus Pym has disappeared. They’re looking into everyone who might have knowledge of his whereabouts. That will include you naturally.”

Sir Kenneth’s eye lifted to the door.

“Something out there bothering you, sir?” said Brotherhood.

Sir Kenneth rose, went to the door and pulled it open. Brotherhood heard a scuffle of footsteps on the stairs but he was too late to see who it was, though he jostled Sir Kenneth aside in his haste to look.

“Steggie, I want you to go to the Albion ahead of me,” Sir Kenneth called into the well. “Go now. I’ll join you later. I don’t want him hearing this stuff,” he told Brotherhood as he closed the door. “What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.”

“With his record I don’t blame you,” said Brotherhood. “Mind if I look upstairs now we’re standing?”

“Yes, I damn well do. And don’t lay hands on me again. I don’t fancy you. Got a warrant?”

“No.”

Resuming his chair, Sir Kenneth took a spent matchstick from the pocket of his smoking jacket and set to work on his fingernails with its charred end. “Get a warrant,” he advised. “Get a warrant and I might let you look. Other hand I mightn’t.”

“Is he here?” said Brotherhood.

“Who?”

“Pym.”

“Don’t know. Didn’t hear. Who’s Pym?”

Brotherhood was still standing. He was unnaturally pale, and it took him a moment to steady his voice before he spoke again.

“I’ve got a deal for you,” he said.

Sir Kenneth still did not hear.

“Hand him over to me. You go upstairs. Or you ring him. You do whatever you’ve agreed to do between you. And you hand him over to me. In return I’ll keep your name out of it, and Steggie’s name out of it. The alternative is ‘Baronet M.P. shelters very old friend on the run.’ It’s also a serious possibility that you will be charged as an accomplice. How old is Steggie?”

“Old enough.”

“How old was he when he started here?”

“Look it up. Don’t know.”

“I’m Pym’s friend too. There are worse people than me coming looking for him. Ask him. If he agrees, I agree. I’ll keep your name out of it. Just give him to me and you and Steggie need never hear from him or me again.”

“Sounds to me as though you’ve more to lose than we have,” said Sir Kenneth, surveying the results of his manicure.

“I doubt it.”

“Question of what we’ve all got left, I suppose. Can’t lose what you haven’t got. Can’t miss what you don’t care about. Can’t sell what isn’t yours.”

“Pym can, apparently,” said Brotherhood. “He’s been selling his nation’s secrets by the looks of it.”

Sir Kenneth continued to admire his fingernails. “For money?”

“Probably.”

Sir Kenneth shook his head. “Didn’t care about money. Love was all he cared about. Didn’t know where to find it. Clown really. Tried too hard.”

“Meanwhile he’s wandering around England with a lot of papers that aren’t his to give away, and you and I are supposed to be patriotic Englishmen.”

“Lot of chaps do a lot of things they shouldn’t do. That’s when they need their chums.”

“He wrote to his son about you. Do you know that? Some drivel about a penknife. Does that ring a bell?”

“Matter of fact it does.”

“Who’s Poppy?”

“Never heard of her.”

“Or him?”

“Nice thought, but no.”

“Wentworth?”

“Never been there. Hate the place. What about it?”

“There was a girl called Sabina he apparently got caught up with in Austria. He ever mention her?”

“Not that I remember. Pym got caught up with a lot of girls. Not that it did him much good.”

“He rang you, didn’t he? On Monday night, from a callbox.”

With startling abruptness, Sir Kenneth flung up one arm in pleasure and gave a hoot of merriment. “Pissed out of his skull,” he declared, very loud. “Ossified. Haven’t heard him so pissed since Oxford when six of us put away a case of his father’s port. Pretended some queen from Merton gave it to him, I don’t know why. There weren’t any queens in Merton in those days. Not rich ones. We were all at Trinity.”

* * *

It was after midnight. Back in the confinement of his Shepherd Market flat with the pigeons on the parapet Brotherhood poured himself another vodka and added orange juice from a carton. He had thrown his jacket on the bed, his pocket tape-recorder lay before him on the desk. He was jotting as he listened.

“. . don’t go to Wiltshire a lot as a rule while Parliament’s in session but Sunday was my second wife’s birthday and our boy was down from school so I went and did my stuff and thought I’d stay on for a day or two and see what gives in the constituency. . ”

Forward again: “. . don’t normally answer the phone in Wiltshire but Monday’s her bridge night and I was in the library playing a game of backgammon so when the phone rang I thought I might as well take it rather than spoil her four. Half past eleven it must have been but Jean’s bridge nights go on for ever. Chap’s voice. Must be her boyfriend, I thought. Bloody cheek, really, this time of night. ‘Hullo? Sef? That Sef?’ ‘Who the hell’s that?’ I said. ‘It’s me. Magnus. My father’s died. Over here to bury him.’ I thought, Poor old chap. Nobody likes to have his old man die on him. . That right for you? More water? Help yourself.”

Brotherhood hears himself roar “Thanks” as he leans towards the water jug. Then the sounds of a flood as he pours.

“‘ How’s Jem?’ he says. Jemima’s my sister. They had a dingdong once, never came to much. Married a florist. Extraordinary thing. Chap grows flowers all along the road to Basing-stoke. Puts his name up on a board. Doesn’t seem to bother her. Not that she sees much of him. Navigational problems, our Jem. Same as me.”

Forward again: “. . pissed. Couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or crying. Poor chap, I thought. Drowning his sorrows. I’d do the same. Next thing I know, he’s prosing on about our private school. I mean Christ, we’d done two or three schools together, Oxford, not to mention a couple of holidays, yet all he wants to talk about forty years later, on the blower middle of the night, party going on, is how he carved my initials in the staff loo at our private and got me flogged for it. ‘Sorry I carved your initials, Sef.’ All right. He did it. He carved’em. I never doubted he carved ’em. Cocked it up too. He would. Know what he did? Bloody fool put a hyphen between the ‘S’ and the ‘B’ where we don’t have one. I told old Grimble, the headmaster. ‘Why would I put a hyphen in?’ I said. ‘Not how I spell my name,’ I said. ‘No hyphen in it. Look at the school list.’ Not a blind bit of difference, flogged me. Way it goes, you see. No justice. I don’t know I minded much. Everybody flogged everybody in those days. Besides, I wasn’t very nice to him myself. Always ragging him about his people. Father was a con man, you know. Nearly ruined my aunt. Had a go at my mother too. Tried to bed her but she was too fly. Some scheme to build a new airport in Scotland somewhere. He’d squared the locals, all he needed was buy the land, get the formal permission, make a fortune. Cousin of mine owns half Argyll. I asked him about it. Hokum, the whole thing. Extraordinary. I stayed with ’em once. Tarts’ parlour in Ascot. All these crooks hanging about and Magnus calling them ‘sir’. Father tried to get into Parliament once. Pity he didn’t. He’d have been good company. . ”

Forward again: “. . banging in the cash. I asked him where he was, he said London but he had to use phone boxes, he was being followed. I said, ‘Whose initials have you been carving now?’ Joke actually, but he didn’t see it. I was sorry about his old man, you see. Didn’t want him moping. Dramatic chap, always has been. Nothing going on in his life unless he’s got some frightful problem on his hands. You could have sold him the Egyptian pyramids long as you said they were falling down. I said, give me the number of your phone, I’ll ring you back. He said somebody must have told me to say that. I said, ‘Absolute bilge, hell are you talking about? Half my friends are on the run.’ He said his father was dead and he was looking at his life for the first time. Fundamental. Always has been. Then he went back to these initials he’d carved. ‘I’m really sorry, Sef.’ I said, ‘Look here, old boy, I always knew it was you and I don’t think we should go through life wearing hairshirts about what we did at our private. Do you need cash? Want a bed? Take a cottage on the estate.’ ‘I’m really sorry, Sef. Really sorry.’ I said, ‘You tell me what I can do, I’ll do it. I’m in the book in London, give me a buzz if I can help.’ Well, I mean damn it, he’d been on for twenty minutes. I put the phone down and half an hour later he’s back. ‘Hullo, Sef. Me again.’ Jean was pretty shirty this time. Thought it was Steggie having a tantrum. ‘Got to talk to you, Sef. Listen to me.’ Well, you can’t ring off on an old chum when he’s down, can you?”

Brotherhood heard Sir Kenneth’s clock chime twelve. He was jotting fast. Concentric fantasies, he repeated to himself, defining the truth at the centre. He had reached the passage he was waiting for.

“. . said he was in secret work. That didn’t surprise me, who isn’t these days?. . Said there was this Englishman he worked for, called him the Brotherhood. I don’t think I listened to all of it, to be honest. There was the Brotherhood and there was this other chap. Said he was working for both of ’em. They were like two parents for him. Kept him going. I said bully for you, if they keep you going, you stick to them. Said he had to write this book about them, put the record right. What record? God knows. He’d write to the Brotherhood, write to the other chap, then he’d take himself off to a secret place and do his number.” Brotherhood heard his own patient murmur in the background. “. . Well maybe I got that one a bit wrong then. Maybe he was going to hunker down in his secret place first and write to them from there. I wasn’t listening to all of it. Drunks bore me. I’m one myself.”

Prompt from Brotherhood.

Long pause.

Renewed prompt from Brotherhood.

Sir Kenneth indistinct: “Said he was his runner.”

“Who was whose runner?”

“Pym was t’other chap’s runner. Not the Brotherhood’s. The other fellow’s. Said he’d crippled him somehow. Pissed, I told you.”

Brotherhood again, riding him a little harder: “. . name for this person?”

“Don’t think so. Don’t think it stuck. Sorry. No, it didn’t.”

“And the secret place? Where was that?”

“Didn’t say. His business.”

Brotherhood let the tape continue. Avalanche as Sefton Boyd lights himself a cigarette. Cannon-blast of the front door being slammed open and shut again, signalling Steggie’s petulant return.

Brotherhood and Sir Kenneth are on the landing.

“What’s that, old boy?” Sir Kenneth very loud.

“I said, so where do you think he might be?” says Brotherhood.

“Upstairs, old boy. That’s what you said.” In his memory’s eye, Brotherhood sees Sir Kenneth’s pouch face approach close to his own, smiling its downward twist. “Get a warrant, maybe you can have a look. Maybe you can’t. Don’t know. Have to see.”

Brotherhood heard his own heels clumping down Sir Kenneth’s stairs. He heard himself reach the hall and Steggie’s lighter footsteps mingle with his own. He heard Steggie’s pointed “Good night” and the clatter of bolts as he unlocks the door for him. Followed by Steggie’s muffled shriek as Brotherhood hauls him out of the house, one hand over his mouth, the other at the back of his head. Then the thump as he taps Steggie’s head against the plaster pillar of Sir Kenneth’s gracious porch, and his own voice, very near to Steggie’s ear.

“Have they done this before to you, have they? Put you up against a wall?”

A whimper for an answer.

“Who else is living in the house, son?”

“No one.”

“Who was on the top floor this evening, back and forth in front of the window?”

“Me.”

“Why?”

“It’s my room!”

“I thought you two would share the bridal chamber.”

“I’ve still got my own room, haven’t I? I’m entitled to my privacy, same as he is.”

“Nobody else in the house at all?”

“No!”

“Not all week?”

“No. I told you. Hey, stop!”

“What’s the matter?” says Brotherhood, already halfway down the path.

“I haven’t got my key. How do I get back in?”

A clang as Brotherhood slams the gate.

* * *

He phoned Kate. No answer.

He phoned his wife. No answer.

He phoned Paddington and wrote down the times and places along the route of the night sleeper from Paddington to Penzance via Reading.

For an hour he tried to sleep, then returned to his desk, pulled Langley’s folder towards him and stared yet again at the eaten-out features of Herr Petz-Hampel-Zaworski, Pym’s presumed controller, lately of Corfu. “. . Real name unknown. . query member Czech archaeological team visiting Egypt 1961 (Petz). . query 1966 att. Czech Military Mission East Berlin (Hampel). . height 6 ft., stoops, limps slightly with left leg. .”

“There was the Brotherhood and there was this other chap,” Sefton Boyd had said. “They were like two parents for him. Said he was his runner.”

“You brought it on yourselves,” he heard Belinda say. “You invented him.”

He continued to stare at the photograph. The down-turned eye-lids. The down-turned moustache. The twinkly eyes. The hidden Slav smile. Who the devil are you? Why do I recognise you when I have never set eyes on you?

* * *

Grant Lederer had never stood so high in the world, or felt so rounded as a human being. Justice lives! he assured himself in the perfect peacefulness of his triumph. My masters are worthy of their authority. A noble service has tried me to the limit and found me worthy of my hire. All round him the sealed operations room on the sixth floor of the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square was filling up with people he had not known existed. They came from the remote corners of London Station, yet each as he entered appeared to bestow a glance of kinship on him. As fine a looking bunch of Americans as you’d wish to meet, he thought. The Agency really knows how to pick us these days. They had hardly settled before Wexler began speaking.

“Time to wrap this thing up,” he said grimly as the door was locked. “Meet Gary, everybody. Gary’s head of SISURP. He’s here to report an important breakthrough on Pym and discuss action.”

SISURP, Lederer had recently learned, was the acronym for Surveillance Intelligence, Southern Europe. Gary was your typical Kentuckian — tall, spare and amusing. Lederer already admired him intensely. An aide sat at his elbow with a heap of papers, but Gary did not refer to them. Our quarry, he said baldly, was Petz-Hampel-Zaworski, now known to the indoctrinated familiarly as PHZ. A SISURP team picked him up Tuesday 10:12 a.m. emerging from the Czech Embassy in Vienna. Lederer listened enthralled as Gary noted each tiny detail of PHZ’s day. Where PHZ took his coffee. Where PHZ took his leaks. The bookshops where PHZ browsed. Who PHZ lunched with. Where. What he ate. PHZ’s limp. His ready smile. His charm, particularly with women. His cigars, where he lit them, bought them. PHZ’s ease of association, his apparent unawareness that he was being observed by a field force eighteen strong. The two occasions when “wittingly or otherwise” PHZ placed himself in the vicinity of Mrs. Mary Pym. On one of these occasions, said Gary, eye contact was confirmed. On the other, surveillance was inhibited by the presence of a British pair believed to be the escorts of Mrs. Pym. And thence at last to the crowning moment of the operation and the high point of Grant Lederer’s brilliant marriage and dazzling career so far, when at 8 a.m. local time today three members of Gary’s team found themselves stuck in the rear pews of the English church in Vienna, while twelve more were staked out around the outside of it — mobile units, necessarily, because this was diplomatic-land where loiterers were not well regarded — and PHZ and Mary Pym were placed either side of the aisle. Lederer’s cue had arrived. Gary was looking expectantly towards him.

“Grant, I guess you should take over here. We’re a little out of our depth,” he said, with pleasing gruffness.

As heads at the table shifted in curiosity, Lederer felt the warmth of their interest bear him to new heights. He began speaking at once. Modestly.

“Well hell, I mean I see this whole thing as Bee’s achievement and not mine. Bee is Mrs. Lederer,” he explained to an older man across the table from him, then realised too late that it was Carver, Head of London Station, never a Lederer fan. “She’s Presbyterian. Her parents were Presbyterian too. Mrs. Lederer latterly has been able to reconcile her spirituality with organised religion and has been attending regularly at the Christchurch Anglican church, Vienna, known as the English church, and frankly just the sexiest little church you ever saw. Right, Gary? Cherubs, angels — more like a religious boudoir than a regular church at all. You know, Mick, if anybody’s name is going up in lights at Langley over this, I guess it should be Bee’s,” he added, still somehow not quite able to get to his story.

The rest came out faster. It was Bee after all and not the surveillance team who had managed to slide out into the aisle after PHZ and stand in line right behind him as he and Mary queued for the Sacrament. It was Bee who from a distance of maybe five feet had watched as PHZ leaned forward and whispered real words into Mary’s ear, and watched again as Mary first leaned back to catch them, then went ahead with her devotions as if nothing in the world had happened.

“So I mean it was actually my wife, my helpmate throughout all of this long operation, who witnessed the spoken contact.” He shook his head in marvel. “And it was Bee again who, the first moment the service ended, raced back to our apartment to phone me right here at the Embassy and describe the whole amazing occurrence, using the domestic codewords the two of us had hashed out together for just such a contingency. And I mean Bee did not even know that an Agency surveillance team was present in that church at all. She just went because Mary was going, as much as anything. Yet she scooped SISURP single-handed by like six hours, more. Harry,” said Lederer a little breathlessly, finding Wexler as he put the finishing touch to his narrative, “my only regret is that Mrs. Lederer never learned to lip-read.”

Lederer had not expected applause. It was in the nature of the community he had joined that there should be none. The pregnant silence struck him as a more fitting tribute.

Artelli the cryptographer was the first to break it. “Here at the Embassy,” he repeated, not quite as a question.

“Pardon me?” said Lederer.

“Your wife called you here at the Embassy? From Vienna? Directly after the happening in the church? On the open phone from your apartment?”

“Yes, sir, and I took her news straight upstairs to Mr. Wexler. He had it on his desk by nine a.m.”

“Nine-thirty,” Wexler said.

“And what were these domestic codewords that she used, please?” said Artelli while he wrote.

Lederer was happy to explain: “Well really what we did in fact was borrow the names of Bee’s aunts and uncles. We have always considered there was a similarity in the psychological profiles of Mary Pym and Bee’s Aunt Edie. So we kind of worked it up from there. ‘You know what Aunt Edie did in church today?’. . Bee is very subtle.”

“Thanks,” said Artelli.

Next Carver spoke, and his question did not seem entirely friendly.

“You mean your wife is conscious to this operation, Grant? I thought the Pym case was strictly a no-wives thing. Harry, didn’t we make a ruling on that a little while back?”

“Strictly it is no wives,” Lederer agreed handsomely. “However since Mrs. Lederer has effectively been out in the field with me on this one it would be somewhat illusory to suppose she would not be aware of the general level of suspicion in relation to the Pyms. Well, to Magnus anyway. And I may add that it was always Bee’s contention that somewhere at the bottom of this heap we are going to find Mary playing a very deep and laid-back rôle. Mary is a rôle-player.”

Carver again. “Is Mrs. Lederer also conscious to PHZ? He’s a pretty hot addition to the cast, Grant. He could be a big fish. But she’s in on that, huh?”

There was nothing Lederer could do to stop the colour rushing to his face, or his voice developing its strident edge: “Mrs. Lederer had an instinct regarding that encounter and she acted on it. You want to censure her for that, Carver, you censure me first, okay?”

Artelli again, with his damned French drawl. “What was your domestic codename for PHZ?”

“Uncle Bobby,” Lederer snapped.

“But then Bobby is more than instinct, Grant,” Carver objected. “Bobby is an agreed thing between you. How could you have agreed Bobby if you hadn’t given her the story on Petz-Hampel-Zaworski?”

Wexler had taken back the meeting. “Okay, okay, okay,” he growled unhappily. “Cope with that later. Meantime what do we do? SISURP splits and stays with the both of them. PHZ and Mary. That right, Gary? Wherever they go.”

“I’m calling for fresh horses right now,” said Gary. “Should have two full teams by this time tomorrow.”

“Next question, what the hell do we tell the Brits and when and how?” said Wexler.

“Looks like we told them already,” said Artelli, with a lazy glance at Lederer. “That’s unless the Brits have given up tapping U.S. Embassy telephone lines these days, which I tend to doubt.”

* * *

Justice lives, but justice, as Grant Lederer discovered before morning, also dies. His health was found to have suffered a sudden lapse, his appointment in Vienna terminated for him in his absence. His wife, far from receiving the commendations Lederer dreamed of, was ordered to follow him back to Langley, Virginia, at once.

“Lederer overheats and overrelates,” wrote one of the Agency’s ever-expanding team of house psychiatrists. “He requires a less hysterical environment.”

The prescribed calm was eventually found for him in Statistics, and it drove him nearly mad.