A Perfect Spy

CHAPTER 13

The green cabinet stood in the centre of Pym’s room like a discarded fieldpiece that had once been its regiment’s pride. Its chrome was peeling from the handles, a heavy boot or fall had stove in one corner, so that the slightest touch could set it trembling and worrying. The chips had rusted into sores, the rust had spread to the screw holes and underneath the paint-work, causing it to lift in humiliating pimples. Pym walked round it with the awe and loathing of a primitive. It has arrived from Heaven. It is destined to return there. I should have put it in the incinerator with him so that he can show it to his Maker as he intended. Four dense drawers of innocence, the Gospel according to Saint Rick.

He gave the cabinet a push and heard a sagging sound from inside as the files slipped obediently to his command.

* * *

I should write you witches along his path, Tom. The full moon should be turning red and the owl doing whatever the owl did that was so unnatural when foul murder was afoot. But Pym is deaf and blind to them. He is Second Lieutenant Magnus Pym riding in his private train across occupied Austria, entering by way of that very border town where, long ago, in the less mature existence of a different Pym, E. Weber’s fictitious crock of gold had supposedly awaited Mr. Lapadi’s collection. He is a Roman conqueror on his way to taking up his first appointment. He is oven-fired against human frailty and his own destiny, as you may observe from the scowls of military abstinence he bestows upon the bare breasts of the Barbarian peasant women harvesting corn in the sunlit fields. His preparation has passed with the ease of an English Sunday, not that Pym ever asked for ease. The privileged English assets of good manners and bad learning have never been more to his advantage. Even his murky political affiliations at Oxford have turned out to be a blessing. “If the Pongos ask you whether you are now or ever have been a member of the clan, look ’em slap in the eye and tell ’em never,” the last of the Michaels advised him, over a sporting lunch beside the swimming-pool at the Lansdowne, as they watched the pure bodies of suburban girls wriggle through the disinfected water.

“Pongos?” said Pym, mystified.

“Licentious soldiery, old boy. The War Office. Wood from here up. The Firm is fixing your clearance direct. Tell them to mind their damn business.”

“Thanks terribly,” said Pym.

The same evening, glowing from the best of nine games of squash, Pym was led to the presence of a Very Senior Member of the service, in a plain, forgettable office not far from Rick’s newest Reichskanzlei. Was this the Colonel Gaunt who had first approached him? He’s higher, Pym was told. Don’t ask.

“We want to thank you,” said the Senior Member.

“I really enjoyed it,” said Pym.

“It’s a filthy job, mixing with those people. Somebody has to do it.”

“Oh, it’s not that bad, sir.”

“Look here. We’re leaving your name on the books. I can’t promise you anything, we’ve got a selection board these days. Besides, you belong to those chaps across the park and we make it a rule not to fish in one another’s preserves. All the same if you ever do decide that protecting your country at home is more to your liking than playing Mata Hari abroad, let us know.”

“I will, sir. Thank you,” said Pym.

The Very Senior Member was crisp and brown and ostentatiously nondescript like one of his own envelopes. He had the testy manners of a country solicitor, which was what he had been before answering the Great Call. Leaning across his desk he pulled a puzzled smile. “Don’t tell me if you don’t want. How ever did you get mixed up with that crowd in the first place?”

“The Communists?”

“No, no, no. Our sister service.”

“In Bern, sir. I was a student there.”

“In Switzerland,” said the great man, consulting a mental map.

“Yes, sir.”

“My wife and I went skiing near Bern once. Little place called Mürren. The British run it so there aren’t any cars. We rather liked it. What did you do for them?”

“Much the same as for you, sir, really. It was just a bit more dangerous.”

“In what way?”

“You don’t feel you have the protection out there. It’s eyeball to eyeball, I suppose.”

“Seemed such a peaceful spot to me. Well good luck to you, Pym. Look out for those chaps. They’re good but they’re slippery. We’re good but we’ve got a bit of honour left. That’s the difference.”

“He’s brilliant,” Pym told his guide. “He pretends to be completely ordinary but he sees right into you.”

His elation had not left him when a few days later he presented himself, suitcase in hand, at the guardroom of his basic-training regiment where for two months he reaped the plentiful rewards of his upbringing. While Welsh miners and Glaswegian cut-throats wept unashamedly for their mothers, went absent without leave and were carted off to a place of punishment, Pym slept soundly and wept for no one. Long before reveille had dragged his comrades smoking and cursing from their beds, he had polished his boots and belt-brasses and cap badge, made his bed and dressed his bedside locker, and was all ready, should anybody ask it of him, to take a cold shower, dress again, and read the first of the Day Hours with Mr. Willow before a disgusting breakfast. On the parade ground and the football ground he excelled. He neither took fright at being shouted at nor expected logic of authority.

“Where’s Gunner Pym?” the colonel barked one day, in the middle of a lecture on the battle of Corunna, and looked up angrily as if someone else had spoken. Every sergeant in the drill hall screamed Pym’s name until he stood.

“Are you Pym?”

“Sir!”

“See me after this lecture.”

“Sir!”

Company Headquarters lay on the other side of the parade ground. Pym marched there and saluted. The colonel’s aide-de-camp left the room.

“At ease, Pym. Sit down.”

The colonel spoke carefully, with a soldier’s mistrust of words. He had a soft honey-coloured moustache and the limpid gaze of an entirely stupid man.

“It has been put to me by certain people that, assuming you are commissioned, you would do well to attend a certain training course at a certain establishment, Pym.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I am therefore to submit a personal report on you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Which I shall do. Favourable, as a matter of fact.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You are keen. You are not cynical. You are not marred, Pym, by the luxuries of peace. You are somebody this country needs.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Pym.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If ever those people you’re mixed up with happen to be looking for a rather fit retired army colonel with a certain amount of je ne sais quoi, I trust you to remember me. I speak some French. I ride decently. I know my wines. Tell them that.”

“I shall, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Possessing little in the way of memory, the colonel had a habit of returning to conversations as if they were new to him.

“Pym.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pick your moment. Don’t rush in with it. They don’t like that. Be subtle. That’s an order.”

“I will, sir.”

“You know my name?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Spell it.”

Pym did.

“I’ll change it if they want. They’ve only to let me know. I hear you took a First, Pym.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Carry on.”

In the evenings, seated beside lonely men, Pym the ever-willing obliged by dictating letters of love to their girlfriends. Where the physical feat of writing eluded them, he acted as their amanuensis, adding personalised endearments to their specification. Sometimes, fired by his own rhetoric, he would burst into song on his own account, in the lyrical style of a Blunden or a Sassoon:

“Dearest Belinda,

“I cannot tell you what fun and simple human goodness are to be found among one’s working-class comrades. Yesterday — great excitement — we drove our twenty-five-pounders to a remote firing range Somewhere in England for our first Shoot, embussing before dawn and not reaching the r.v. till eleven. The slatted seats of a fifteen-hundredweight are designed to split the spine in several places. We had no cushions and only iron rations to munch. Yet the chaps whistled and sang in tremendous spirits all the way, acquitted themselves superbly and endured the journey back with only the most cheerful grumbles. I felt privileged to be one of them and am seriously considering refusing a commission. . ”

When a commission came his way, however, Pym contrived without difficulty to accept it, as witness the erogenous hillocks of khaki thread backed on green cloth, one to each shoulder of his battledress, whose existence he covertly confirms whenever the train enters another tunnel. The bare breasts of the peasant girls are his first since the election. With each new valley, he strains his disapproving gaze to see more of them and is seldom disappointed. “We’ll send you to Vienna first,” his commanding officer at the Intelligence Depot had said. “Chance to get the feel of the place before you’re pushed out into the field.”

“It sounds ideal, sir,” said Pym.

* * *

Austria in those days was a different country from the one we have come to love, Tom, and Vienna was a divided city like Berlin or your father. A few years later to everyone’s lasting amazement the diplomats agreed they wouldn’t bother with a sideshow while there was Germany to squabble over, so the occupying powers signed a treaty and went home, thus notching up the British Foreign Office’s one positive achievement in my lifetime. But in Pym’s day the sideshow was going great guns. The Americans had Salzburg as their capital, the French Innsbruck and the Brits Graz, and everyone had a piece of Vienna to play with. At Christmastime the Russians gave us wooden buckets of caviar and we gave the Russians plum puddings, and there was a story still going the rounds when Pym arrived that when the caviar was served to the men as a prelude to their dinner, a corporal of Argylls complained to the duty officer that the jam tasted of fish. The brains of British Vienna was a sprawling villa called Div. Int., and that was where Second Lieutenant Pym was launched upon his duties, which consisted of reading reports on the movements of everything from Soviet mobile laundries to Hungarian horse cavalry, and pushing coloured pins into maps. His most exciting map showed the Soviet Zone of Austria which began a mere twenty minutes’ drive from where he worked. Pym had only to look at its borders to feel intrigue and danger prickle on his skin. At other times, when he was tired or forgot himself, his eye would lift to the western tip of Czechoslovakia, to Karlovy Vary formerly Carlsbad, the charming eighteenth-century spa once favoured by Brahms and Beethoven. But he knew of no personal connection with the place and his interest was purely historical.

He lived an odd life those first months, for his destiny did not lie in Vienna, and it seems to me in fanciful moments now that the capital was itself waiting to release him to the sterner laws of nature. Too lowly to be taken seriously by his brother officers, prevented by protocol from mixing with the Other Ranks, too poor to revel in the swagman’s restaurants and nightclubs, Pym floated between his commandeered hotel room and his maps, much as he had floated round Bern in the days of his illegality. And I will admit now but never then that, more than once, listening to the Viennese chattering their zany German on the pavements, or taking himself to one of the struggling small theatres that were cropping up in cellars and bombed houses, he had a pang of nostalgic longing to turn his head and discover a good friend limping at his side. But he knew of none. It is merely my German soul reviving, he told himself; it is the German nature to feel incomplete. On other nights, the great secret agent would take himself on reconnaissance through the Soviet Sector disguised in a green Tyrolean hat he had bought specially for the purpose, to observe from beneath its brim the stubby Russian sentries with their submachine guns posted outside the Soviet headquarters at twenty-yard intervals down the street. If they challenged him Pym had only to show his military pass for their Tartar faces to crack in friendly recognition as they took a pace back in their soft leather boots and tossed up a grey-gloved hand in salute.

“English good.”

“But Russian good too,” Pym would insist with a laugh. “Russian very good, honestly.”

“Kamarad!”

“Tovarich. Kamarad,” the great internationalist responded.

He would offer a cigarette and take one. He would light them with his big-flamed American Zippo lighter obtained from one of the many clandestine merchants operating inside Div. Int. He would let it glow on the sentry’s features and his own. Then Pym in his goodheartedness had half an urge, though fortunately not the language, to explain that although he had spied on the Communists at Oxford, and was spying on them again in Vienna, he was still a Communist at heart and cared more for the snows and cornfields of Russia than ever he did for the musical cocktail cabinets and roulette wheels of Ascot.

And sometimes, very late, returning through empty squares to his monkish little bedroom with its army fire extinguisher and photograph of Rick, he would pause, and drink the clean night air in gusts until he was elated, and gaze down misted cobble streets, and pretend that he saw Lippsie walking towards him through the lamplight in her refugee’s headscarf, carrying her cardboard suitcase. And he would smile at her and valiantly congratulate himself that, whatever his outward longings, he was still living in the world inside his head.

He had been in Vienna three months when Marlene asked him for his protection. Marlene was a Czech interpreter and celebrated beauty.

“You are Mr. Pym?” she enquired one evening with a civilian’s delightful shyness as he descended the great staircase behind a bevy of high-ranking officers. She wore a baggy mackintosh nipped at the waist and a hat with little horns.

Pym confessed that he was.

“You are walking to the Weichsel Hotel?”

Pym said that he did so every evening.

“You allow I walk with you, please, once? Yesterday a man tried to rape me. You will guide me to my door? I am not trouble?”

Soon the intrepid Pym was guiding Marlene to her door each evening and collecting her from it in the mornings. His day unfolded between these radiant interludes. But when he invited her to have dinner with him after payday, he was summoned by a furious captain of Fusiliers who had charge of new arrivals.

“You are a lecherous little swine, do you hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Div. Int. subalterns do not, repeat not, fraternise in public with civilian personnel. Not unless they’ve put a lot more service in than you have. D’you hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know what a shit is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No, you don’t. A shit, Pym, is an officer whose tie is of a lighter khaki than his shirt. Have you seen your tie recently?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you seen your shirt?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Compare them, Pym. And ask yourself what sort of young officer you are. That woman isn’t even cleared above restricted.”

It’s all training, thought Pym, as he changed his tie. I’m being hardened for the field. Nevertheless it worried him that Marlene had asked him so many questions about himself and he wished that he had not been quite so frank in his replies.

Not long after this, Pym was mercifully deemed to have got the feel of the place. Before departing he was again summoned by the captain who showed him two photographs. One depicted a pretty young man with soft lips, the other a chubby drunk with a sneer.

“If you see either of these men you will report that information to a senior officer immediately, do you hear?”

“Who are they?”

“Hasn’t anyone taught you not to ask questions? If you can’t find a senior officer, arrest them yourself.”

“How?”

“Use your authority. Be courteous but firm. ‘You men are under arrest.’ Then bring them to the nearest senior officer.”

Their names, Pym learned a few days later from the Daily Express, were Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean and they were members of the British Foreign Service. For several weeks, he continued to look for them everywhere, but he never found them because they had already defected to Moscow.

* * *

So which of us is responsible, Tom, tell me? Is it Pym’s wistful soul or God’s wry humour that contrives to deal him a spell of Paradise before every Fall? I told you of the Ollingers in Bern that it was given to us once only in a lifetime to know a truly happy family, but I had forgotten Major Harrison Membury, formerly of the British Library in Nairobi and one-time officer in the Education Corps, who had strayed by a delicious caprice of military logic into the ragtag ranks of Field Security. I had forgotten his beautiful wife and their many grimy daughters who were Fräulein Ollingers in the making, except that they kept goats and a boisterous piglet in preference to making music, which made mayhem of their military hiring, to the rage of the garrison Administration officer, who was powerless because the Memburys were Intelligence and immune. I had forgotten Number 6 Field Interrogation Unit, Graz, a pink baroque villa in a wooded cleft of hills a mile from the city’s edge. Bunches of telephone cable led into it, aerials desecrated the spired roof. It had a gateway with a gatehouse and a wild-eyed blond mess waiter called Wolfgang who rushed down the steps in a pressed white coat to hand you out of your jeep. But the best thing about it as far as Membury was concerned was the lake, which he spent his days stocking, for he was mad on fish and lavished a sizable part of our secret imprest on encouraging rare breeds of trout. You must imagine a big, genial man, quite strengthless, with the elegant gestures of an invalid. And of a dreamy religious eye and disposition. A civilian to his soft fingertips if ever I met one, yet when I see him now it is always in army battledress with worn suède boots and a webbing belt either above his belly or below it, standing amid the dragonflies at the edge of his beloved lake in the heat of a scorching afternoon, exactly as Pym discovered him on the day he reported for duty, poking a thing like a shrimping net into the water while he muttered shy imprecations against a marauding pike.

“Oh my goodness. You’re Pym. Yes, well, so glad you’ve come. Look here, I’m going to clear away the weed and drag the whole bed to see exactly what we’ve got. What do you think of that?”

“It sounds great, sir,” said Pym.

“I’m so glad. Are you married?”

“No, sir.”

“Marvellous. Then you’ll be free at weekends.”

And I think of him for some reason as one of a pair of brothers, though I don’t recall ever hearing he had a brother. His home-based staff consisted of a sergeant whom I barely remember and a cockney driver called Kaufmann who had a degree in Economics at Cambridge. His second in command was a pink-cheeked young banker named Lieutenant McLaird who was returning to the City. In the cellars, dutiful Austrian clerks tapped telephones, steamed open mail and dumped their unread product in a row of army dustbins which were emptied by the Graz authorities punctiliously once a week because it was a nightmare of Membury’s that some fish-hating vandal would tip them in the lake. On the ground floor he kept his stable of locally recruited lady interpreters who ranged from the maternal to the nubile, and Membury, when he remembered their existence, admired them all. And finally he had his wife Hannah, a painter of trees, and Hannah, as is so often the way with the wives of very large men, was as fragile as a wisp. Hannah made painting attractive to me, and I remember her best seated at her easel in a low white dress while the girls roll shrieking down a grass bank and Membury and myself in bathing costumes toil in the brown water. Even today it is impossible to imagine her as the mother of all those daughters.

The rest of Pym’s life could scarcely have been more to his liking. For commodities he had Naafi whisky at seven shillings a bottle and cigarettes at twelve shillings a hundred. He could barter or, if he preferred, convert them without effort into the local currency, though it was safest to rely on the services of an elderly Hungarian Rittmeister who sat around Registry reading secret files and gazing lovingly at Wolfgang, much as Mr. Cudlove liked to gaze at Ollie. All of it was familiar, all of it was necessary to Pym for the continuation of his unlived orthodox childhood. On Sundays, he escorted the Memburys to mass and over lunch looked down the front of Hannah’s dress. Membury is a genius, Pym exulted as he moved his desk into the great man’s ante-room. Membury is Renaissance Man made spy. Within weeks he had his own imprest. Within a few more he had a second pip for Wolfgang to sew on his shoulder, for Membury said he looked silly with only one.

And he had his Joes.

“This is Pepi,” McLaird explained with a droll smile, over a discreet dinner out of town. “Pepi fought the Reds for the Germans and now he’s fighting them for us. You’re a fanatic anti-Communist, aren’t you, Pepi? That’s why he takes his motorbike into the Zone and sells pornographic photographs to the Russian soldiery. Four hundred Players Medium a month. In arrears.”

“This is Elsa,” McLaird said, presenting a dumpy Carinthian housewife with four children, in the grill-room of the Blue Rose. “Her boyfriend runs a café in St. Pölten. Sends her the registration numbers and insignia of the Russian lorries that go past his window, doesn’t he, Elsa? All in secret writing on the back of his love letters. Three kilos of medium-roast coffee a month. In arrears.”

There were a dozen of them and Pym set to work immediately to develop and welfare them in every way he knew. Today when I play them through my memory they are as fine a bunch of neverwozzers as ever came the way of an aspiring spymaster. But to Pym they were simply the best scouts ever and he would see them right if it killed him.

And I have left till last Sabina, Jack, who like her friend Marlene in Vienna was an interpreter, and like Marlene was the most beautiful girl in the world, plucked straight from the pages of Amor and Rococo Woman. She was small like E. Weber, with broad, fluid hips and intense demanding eyes. Her breasts in summer or winter were high and very strong and, like her buttocks, pushed their way through the most workaday clothes, insistently demanding Pym’s attention. Her features were those of a gloomy Slav elf haunted by sadness and superstition but capable of amazing bursts of sweetness, and if Lippsie had been reincarnated and made twenty-three again, she could have done a great deal worse than take Sabina’s form.

“Marlene says you are respectable,” she informed Pym with contempt as she clambered aboard Corporal Kaufmann’s jeep, not bothering to conceal her Rococo legs.

“Is that a crime?” Pym asked.

“Don’t worry,” she replied ominously, and away they drove to the camps. Sabina spoke Czech and Serbo-Croat as well as German. In her spare time she was studying economics at Graz University, which gave her an excuse to talk to Corporal Kaufmann.

“You are believing in mixing agararian economy, Kaufmann?”

“I don’t believe in any of it.”

“You are Keynesian?”

“I wouldn’t be one with my own money, I’ll tell you that,” said Kaufmann.

Thus the conversation went back and forth while Pym searched for ways of brushing carelessly against her white shoulder, or causing her skirt to open a fraction further to the north.

Their destination on these journeys was the camps. For five years the refugees of Eastern Europe had been pouring into Austria through every fast-closing gap in the barbed wire: crashing frontiers in stolen cars and lorries, across minefields, clinging to the underneath of trains. They brought their hollow faces and their shorn children and their puzzled old and their frisky dogs, and their Lippsies in the making, to be corralled and questioned and decided over in their thousands, while they played chess on wooden packing cases and showed each other photographs of people they would never see again. They came from Hungary and Rumania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and sometimes Russia, and they hoped they were on their way to Canada and Australia and Palestine. They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects. All passed across Pym’s vision as he rode in his jeep from camp to camp with Kaufmann and Sabina, questioning, grading and recording, then hastening home to Membury with his booty.

At first his sensitivity was offended by so much misery and he had a hard time disguising his concern for everyone he spoke to: yes, I will see you to Montreal if it kills me; yes, I will send word to your mother in Canberra that you are safely here. At first Pym was also embarrassed by his lack of suffering. Everyone he questioned had had more experience in a day than he had in his whole young life and he resented them. Some had been crossing borders since they were children. Others spoke of death and torture so casually that he became indignant at their unconcern, until his disapproval sparked their anger and they flung back at him with mockery. But Pym the good labourer had work to do, and a commanding officer to please and, when he armed himself, a quick and covert mind to do it with. He had only to consult his own nature to know when someone was writing in the margin of his memory and excluding the main text. He knew how to make small talk while he was watching, and how to read the signals that came back to him. If they described a night crossing over the hills, Pym crossed with them, lugging their Lippsie suitcases and feeling the icy mountain air cutting through their old coats. When one of them told a lie direct, Pym rapidly took back-bearings on likely versions of the truth with the aid of his mental compass. Questions teemed in him and, budding lawyer that he was, he learned quickly to shape them into a pattern of accusation. “Where do you come from? What troops did you see there? What colour shoulder boards did they wear? What did they drive around in, what weapons did they have? Which route did you take, what guards, obstructions, dogs, wire, minefields did you meet along your way? What shoes were you wearing? How did your mother manage, your grandmother, if the mountain pass was so steep? How did you cope with two suitcases and two small children when your wife was so heavily pregnant? Is it not more likely that your employers in the Hungarian secret police drove you to the border and wished you luck as they showed you where to cross? Are you a spy and if so, would you not prefer to spy for us? Or are you merely a criminal, in which case you would surely like to take up spying, rather than be tossed back across the border by the Austrian police?” Thus Pym drew from his own criss-cross lives in order to unravel theirs, and Sabina with her scowls and moods and occasional gorgeous smiles became the sultry voice in which he did it. Sometimes he let her translate into German for him, in order to give himself the secret advantage of hearing everything twice.

“Where you learn to play these stupid games?” she asked him sternly one evening as they danced together at the Hotel Wiesler, to the disapproval of the army wives.

Pym laughed.

On the brink of manhood, with Sabina’s thigh riding against his own, why should he owe anything to anybody? So he invented a story for her about this cunning German he’d known at Oxford who had turned out to be a spy.

“We had a rather weird battle of wits,” he confessed, drawing upon hastily created memories. “He used all the tricks in the book and to start with I was as innocent as a babe and believed everything he told me. Gradually the contest got a bit more even.”

“He was Communist?”

“As it turned out, yes. He made a show of hiding it, but it slipped out when you really went for him.”

“He was hommsexual?” Sabina asked, voicing an ever-ready suspicion as she squirmed more deeply into him.

“Not so far as I could see. He had women in regiments.”

“He slept only with military women?”

“I meant he had large quantities of them. I was using a metaphor.”

“I think he was wishing to disguise his hommsexuality. This is normal.”

Sabina spoke of her own life as if it belonged to someone she hated. Her stupid Hungarian father had been shot at the border. Her fool mother had died in Prague attempting to produce a baby for a worthless lover. Her older brother was an idiot and studying to be a doctor in Stuttgart. Her uncles were drunkards and had got themselves shot by the Nazis and the Communists.

“You want I give you Czech lesson Saturday?” she asked him one evening in an even stricter tone than usual, as they drove home three abreast.

“I would like that very much,” Pym replied, holding her hand at her side. “I’m really beginning to enjoy it.”

“I think we make love this time. We shall see,” she said severely, at which Kaufmann nearly drove into a ditch.

Saturday came and neither Rick’s shadow nor Pym’s terrors could prevent him from ringing Sabina’s doorbell. He heard a footstep softer than her usual practical tread. He saw the light-spots of her eyes regard him through the eye-slit in the door, and did his best to smile in a rugged, reassuring manner. He had brought enough Naafi whisky to banish the guilt of ages, but Sabina had no guilt and when she opened the door to him she was naked. Incapable of speech he stood before her clutching his carrier bag. In a daze he watched her reset the security chain, take the bag from his lifeless hands, stalk to the sideboard and unpack it. The day was warm but she had lit a fire and turned back the bedcovers.

“You have had many women, Magnus?” she demanded. “Women in regiments like your bad friend?”

“I don’t think I have,” said Pym.

“You are hommsexual like all English?”

“I’m really not.”

She led him to the bed. She sat him down and unbuttoned his shirt. Severely, like Lippsie when she needed something for the laundry van outside. She unbuttoned the rest of him and arranged his clothes over a chair. She guided him on to his back and spread herself over him.

“I didn’t know,” said Pym aloud.

“Please?”

He started to say something, but there was too much to explain and his interpreter was already occupied. He meant: I didn’t know, for all my longing, what I was longing for till now. He meant: I can fly, I can swim on my front and on my back and on my side and on my head. He meant: I’m whole and I’ve joined the men at last.

* * *

It was a balmy Friday afternoon in the villa six days later. In the gardens below the windows of Membury’s enormous office, the Rittmeister in his lederhosen was shelling peas for Wolfgang. Membury sat at his desk, his battledress unbuttoned to the waist while he drafted a questionnaire for trawler captains that he proposed to send in hundreds to the major fishing fleets. For weeks now he had set his heart on tracing the winter routes of sea trout, and the unit’s resources had been hard pressed to accommodate him.

“I’ve had a rather rum approach made to me, sir,” Pym began delicately. “Somebody claiming to represent a potential defector.”

“Oh but how interesting for you, Magnus,” Membury said politely, prising himself with difficulty from his preoccupations. “I hope it’s not another Hungarian frontier guard. I’ve rather had my fill of them. So has Vienna, I’m sure.” Vienna was a growing worry to Membury, as Membury was to Vienna. Pym had read the painful correspondence between them that Membury kept safely locked at all times in the top left drawer of his flimsy desk. It might be only a question of days before the captain of Fusiliers arrived in person to take charge.

“He’s not Hungarian, actually, sir,” said Pym. “He’s Czech. He’s attached to HQ Southern Command based outside Prague.”

Membury tilted his large head to one side as if shaking water out of his ear. “Well that’s heartening,” he remarked doubtfully. “Div. Int. would give their eye-teeth for some good stuff about Southern Czecho. Or anywhere else in Czecho for that matter. The Americans seem to think they have a monopoly of the place. Somebody said as much to me on the telephone only the other day, I don’t know who.”

The telephone line to Graz ran through the Soviet Zone. In the evenings Russian technicians could be heard on it, singing drunken Cossack music.

“According to my source he’s a disgruntled clerk sergeant working in their strongroom,” Pym persisted. “He’s supposed to be coming out tomorrow night. If we’re not there to receive him he’ll go to the Americans.”

“You didn’t hear of him through the Rittmeister, did you?” said Membury nervously.

With the skill of long habituation, Pym entered the risky ground. No, it was not the Rittmeister, he assured Membury. At least it didn’t sound like the Rittmeister. The voice sounded younger and more positive.

Membury was confused. “Could you possibly explain?” he said.

Pym did.

It was just an ordinary Thursday evening, he said. He’d been to the movies to see Liebe 47, and on his way back he thought he’d drop in at the Weisses Ross for a beer.

“I don’t think I know the Weisses Ross.”

“It’s just another pub, sir, really, but the Czech émigrés use it a lot and everyone sits at long tables. I’d been there literally two minutes when the waiter called me to the phone. ‘Herr Leutnant, fur Sie.’ They know me a bit there so I wasn’t too surprised.”

“Good for you,” said Membury, impressed.

“It was a man’s voice, speaking High German. ‘Herr Pym? Here is an important message for you. If you do exactly as I tell you, you will not be disappointed. Have you pen and paper?’ I had, so he started reading to me at dictation speed. He checked it back with me and rang off before I could ask him who he was.”

From his pocket Pym produced the very sheet of paper, torn from the back of a diary.

“But if this was last night, why on earth didn’t you tell me earlier?” Membury objected, taking it from him.

“You were at the Joint Intelligence Committee meeting.”

“Oh my hat, so I was. He asked for you by name,” Membury remarked with pride, still looking at the paper. “‘ Only Lieutenant Pym will do.’ That’s rather flattering, I must say.” He pulled at a protruding ear. “Well look here, you take jolly good care,” he warned, with the sternness of a man who could refuse Pym nothing. “And don’t go too near the border in case they try and haul you over.”

* * *

This was not by any means the first advance tip-off of a defector’s arrival that had come Pym’s way in recent months, not even the sixth, though it was the first that had been whispered to him by a naked Czech interpreter in a moonlit orchard. Only a week before, Pym and Membury had sat out a night in the Carinthian lowlands waiting to receive a captain of Rumanian Intelligence and his mistress who were supposedly approaching in a stolen aeroplane crammed with priceless secrets. Membury had the Austrian police close off the area, Pym fired coloured Very lights into the empty air as they had been instructed in secret messages. But when dawn came no aeroplane had arrived.

“What are we supposed to do now?” Membury had complained with pardonable irritation as they sat shivering in the jeep. “Sacrifice a bloody goat? I do wish the Rittmeister were more precise. It makes one look so silly.”

A week before that, disguised in green loden coats, they had taken themselves to a remote inn on the zonal border in search of a Heimkehrer from a Soviet uranium mine who was expected any moment. As they pushed open the door the conversation in the bar stopped dead and a score of peasants gawped at them.

“Billiards,” Membury ordered with rare decisiveness, from under his hand. “There’s a table over there. We’ll get a game going. Fit in.”

Still in his green loden, Membury stooped to play his ball, only to be interrupted by the resounding clang of heavy metal striking the tiled floor close at hand. Glancing down, Pym saw his commanding officer’s.38 service revolver lying at his large feet. He had recovered it for him in a moment, never quicker. But not quick enough to prevent the stampede to the door as the terrified peasants scattered in the darkness and the landlord locked himself in the cellar.

* * *

“Can I go back now, sir?” said Kaufmann. “I’m not a soldier at all, you see. I’m a coward.”

“No you can’t,” said Pym. “Now be quiet.”

The barn stood by itself as Sabina had said it would, at the centre of a flat field lined with larches. A yellow path led to it; behind it lay a lake. Behind the lake a hill and on the hill, as the evening darkened, a single watchtower overlooked the valley.

“You will wear civilian clothes and park your car at the crossroads to Klein Brandorf,” Sabina had whispered to his thighs as she kissed and fondled and revived him. The orchard had a brick wall and was occupied by a family of large brown hares. “You will leave sidelights burning. If you cheat and bring protection he will not appear. He will stay in the forest and be angry.”

“I love you.”

“There is a stone, painted white. This is where Kaufmann must stand. If Kaufmann passes the white stone, he will not appear, he will stay in the forest.”

“Why can’t you come too?”

“He does not wish it. He wishes only Pym. Perhaps he is hommsexual.”

“Thanks,” said Pym.

The white stone glinted ahead of them.

“Stay here,” Pym ordered.

“Why?” said Kaufmann.

Evening mist lay in strips across the field. The surface of the lake popped with rising fish. With the sun setting, the larches threw mile-long shadows across the golden meadow. Sawn logs lay beside the barn door, boxes of geraniums adorned the windows. Pym thought again of Sabina. Her enfolding flanks, the broad spaces of her back. “What I tell you I have not told to any Englishman. In Prague I have a younger brother who is called Jan. If you tell this to Membury he will already dismiss me immediately. The British do not allow us to have close family inside a Communist country. Do you understand?” Yes, Sabina, I understand. I have seen the moonlight on your breasts, your moisture is on my lips, it is sticking to my eyelids. I understand. “Listen. My brother sends me this message for you. Only for Pym. He trusts you because of me and because I have told him only good things about you. He has a friend who wishes to come out. This friend is very gifted, very brilliant, top access. He will bring you many secrets about the Russians. But first you must invent a story for Membury to explain how you received this information. You are clever. You can invent many stories. Now you must invent one for my brother and his friend.” Yes, Sabina, I can invent. For you and your beloved brother I can invent a million stories. Get me my pen, Sabina. Where did you put my clothes? Now tear me a piece of paper from your diary and I will invent a story about a strange man who telephoned me at the Weisses Ross and made me an irresistible proposal.

Pym unbuttoned his loden. “Always draw across the body,” his weapons instructor had advised at the sad little depot in Sussex where they had taught him how to fight Communism. “It gives you better protection when the other laddie shoots first.” Pym was not sure this was good advice. He reached the door and it was closed. He walked round the barn, trying to find a place to peep in. “His information will be good for you,” Sabina had said. “It will make you very famous in Vienna, Membury also. Good intelligence from Czechoslovakia is extremely rare at Div. Int. Mostly it comes from the Americans and is therefore corrupt.”

The sun had set and the dusk was gathering fast. From across the lake Pym heard the yelping of a fox. Rows of chicken coops stood at the back of the barn and the straw in them was clean. Chickens in no-man’s-land, he thought frivolously. Stateless eggs. The chickens tucked their necks at him and blew out their feathers. A grey heron lifted from the lake and set course toward the hills. He returned to the front of the barn.

“Kaufmann!”

“Sir?”

A hundred metres lay between them but their voices were as close as lovers in the evening stillness.

“Did you cough?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, don’t.”

“I expect I was sobbing, sir.”

“Keep guard, but whatever you see, don’t come any nearer unless I order you.”

“I’d like to desert, if I may, sir. I’d rather be a defector than this, honestly. I’m a sitting target. I’m not a human being at all.”

“Do some mental sums or something.”

“I can’t. I’ve tried. Nothing comes.”

Pym lifted the door latch, stepped inside and smelt cigar smoke and horse. St. Moritz, he thought, lightheaded in his apprehension. The barn was cavernous and beautiful and raised at one end like an old ship. On the dais stood a table and on the table, to Pym’s surprise, a lighted oil lamp. By its glow he admired the ancient beams and roof. “Wait inside and he will come,” Sabina had said. “He will want to see you go in first. My brother’s friend is very cautious. Like many Czechs, he has a great and cautious mind.” Two high-backed wooden chairs were pulled to the table and magazines were strewn on it like in a dentist’s waiting-room. Must be where the farmer does his paperwork. At the end of the barn, he noticed a rustic ladder leading to a loft. At the weekend I’ll bring you here. I’ll bring wine and cheese and bread, and blankets in case it’s prickly, and you can wear your flouncy skirt with nothing underneath. He climbed halfway up the ladder and peered over. Sound floor, dry hay, no sign of rats. An admirable location for rustic Rococo. He returned to the ground floor and made his way towards the dais where the light burned, intending to settle down in one of the chairs. “You must be patient, if necessary all night,” Sabina had said. “Crossing the border is extremely dangerous now. It is late summer and the doubters are coming over before the passes close. Therefore they have many guards and spies.” A stone pathway ran between two cattle drains. His feet echoed thickly in the roof. The echo stopped, his feet with it. A slender figure was seated at the head of the table. He was leaning alertly forward, posing for something. He held a cigar in one hand and an automatic pistol in the other. His gaze, like the barrel of the automatic, was fixed on Pym.

“Keep walking towards me, Sir Magnus,” Axel urged in a tone of considerable anxiety. “Put your arms up and for heaven’s sake don’t go imagining you are a great cowboy or a war hero. Neither of us is a member of the shooting classes. We put our guns away and we have a nice chat. Be reasonable. Please.”

* * *

It would take our Maker himself, Tom, with help from all of us, to describe the range of thoughts and emotions charging at that moment through Pym’s poor head. His first response, I am sure, was disbelief. He had encountered Axel very often in the last few years and this was merely another example of the phenomenon. Axel watching him in his sleep, Axel standing at his bedside with his beret on—“Let’s take another look at Thomas Mann.” Axel laughing at him for his addiction to Old High German and remonstrating with him for his bad habit of protesting loyalty to everyone he met: to the Oxford Communists, to all women, to the Jacks and Michaels and to Rick. “You are a serious fool, Sir Magnus,” he had warned him once, when Pym returned to his rooms after a particularly deft night of juggling girls and social opposites. “You think that by dividing everything you can pass between.” Axel had limped at his side along the Isis towpath and watched him dash his knuckles against the wall in order to impress Jemima. At the election Pym could not have told you how often Axel’s glistening white dome had popped up in the audience, or his long, restive hands flapped in sarcastic applause. With Axel so much upon his conscience, therefore, Pym knew for a fact that Axel did not exist. And with this certainty in his head it was perfectly reasonable that his next response to seeing Axel was downright indignation that someone so thoroughly forbidden, someone who had been literally, for whatever reason, banished out of sight or mention over the borders of Pym’s kingdom, should presume to be sitting here, smoking and smiling and pointing a pistol at him — at me, Pym, a bulletproof, fornicating member of the British Occupational classes gifted with supernatural powers. And after that, of course, paradoxical as ever, Pym was more exultant, more thrilled and more happy to see Axel than anyone since the day Rick rode round the corner on his bicycle singing “Underneath the Arches.”

Pym walked then ran to Axel’s side. He kept his arms above his head as Axel ordered him. He waited impatiently while Axel flashed his army revolver from his waistband and laid it with his own respectfully at the further end of the table. Then at last he dropped his arms far enough to fling them round Axel’s neck. I don’t remember that they had ever embraced before or did so afterwards. But I remember that evening as the last of childish sentiments between them, the last day of Bern, because I see them hugging and laughing chest to chest, Slav style, before they hold one another at a distance to see what damage the years of separation have done to each of them. And we may assume from contemporary photographs and from my own memories of the mirror in those days, which still played a large part in the young officer’s contemplations, that Axel saw the typical, uncut Anglo-Saxon features of a good-looking, fair young man still trying hard to put on the mantle of experience, whereas in Axel’s face Pym witnessed at once a hardening, a hollowing-out, a shaping that was there for ever. Axel would look like this for the rest of his days. Life had had its say. He had the manly, human face that he deserved. The softer contours had gone, leaving an etched jauntiness and assurance. His hairline had retreated but consolidated. Streaks of grey had joined the black, giving it a practical and military appearance. The clown’s moustache, the clown’s hooped eyebrows had acquired a sadder humour. But the twinkling dark eyes, peering beneath their languid eyelids, were as merry as ever, while everything around them seemed to give depth to their perception.

“You look well, Sir Magnus!” Axel declared exuberantly, still holding him. “You are a fine fellow, my God. We should buy you a white horse and give you India.”

“But who are you?” Pym cried in equal excitement. “Where are you? What are you doing here? Should I arrest you?”

“Maybe I arrest you. Maybe I did already. You put your hands up, do you remember? Listen. We are in no-man’s-land here. We can arrest each other.”

“You’re under arrest,” Pym said.

“You too,” said Axel. “How’s Sabina?”

“Fine,” Pym said with a grin.

“She knows nothing, you understand? Only what her brother told her. You will protect her?”

“I promise I will,” Pym said.

Here a slight pause as Axel pretended to clap his hands over his ears. “Don’t promise, Sir Magnus. Just don’t promise.”

For a frontier crosser Axel had come well equipped, Pym noticed. There was not a trace of mud on his boots, his clothes were pressed and official-looking. Releasing Pym, he grabbed a briefcase, plonked it on the table and drew from it a pair of glasses and a bottle of vodka. Then gherkins, sausage and a loaf of the black bread he used to send Pym out to buy in Bern. They toasted each other gravely, the way Axel had taught him. They refilled their glasses and drank again, a drink for each man. And it is my recollection that by the time they separated they had finished the bottle, for I remember Axel chucking it out into the lake to the outrage of about a thousand moorhens. But if Pym had drunk a case of the stuff it would not have affected him, such was the intensity of his feeling. Even while they began to talk, Pym kept secretly blinking into corners to make sure everything was how it was when he had last looked, so eerily similar at times was the barn to the Bern attic, right down to the soft wind that used to whirr in the skylights. And when he heard the fox again in the distance, he had the certain feeling it was Bastl barking on the wooden staircase after everyone had gone. Except that, as I say, those sentimental days were over. Magnus had killed them dead; the manhood of their friendship was beginning.

* * *

Now it is the way of old friends when they bump into each other, Tom, to put aside the immediate cause of their meeting until last. They prefer as a prelude to account for the years between, which gives a kind of tightness to whatever they have met to discuss. And that is what Pym and Axel did, though you will understand, now that you are familiar with the workings of Pym’s mind, that it was he and not Axel who led this passage of the conversation, if only in order to show to himself as well as to Axel that he was totally without sin in the tricky matter of Axel’s disappearance. He did it well. He was a polished performer these days.

“Honestly, Axel, nobody ever went out of my life so abruptly,” he complained in a tone of jocular reproach as he sliced sausage, buttered the bread and generally occupied himself with what actors call business. “You were there all safely tucked up in the evening, we’d got a bit drunk, said good night. Next morning I hammered on your wall, no answer. I go downstairs and walk into poor old Frau O crying her heart out. ‘Where’s Axel? They’ve taken away our Axel! The Fremdenpolizei carried him down the stairs and one of them kicked Bastl.’ From all they said, I must have been sleeping like the dead.”

Axel smiled his old warm smile. “If we only knew how the dead sleep,” he said.

“We held a sort of wake, hung around the house, half expecting you to come back. Herr Ollinger made some useless phone calls and got absolutely nowhere, naturally. Frau O remembered she had a brother in one of the Ministries, he was no good. In the end I thought, To hell with it, what have we got to lose? So I went down to the Fremdenpolizei myself. Passport in hand. ‘My friend’s missing. Some men dragged him from the house early this morning, said they came from you. Where is he?’ I banged the table a bit and got nowhere. Then two rather creepy gentlemen in raincoats took me into another room and told me that if I made any more trouble the same thing would happen to me.”

“That was brave of you, Sir Magnus,” said Axel. Reaching out a pale fist he tapped Pym lightly on the shoulder to say thanks.

“No, it wasn’t. Not really. I mean I did have somewhere to go. I was British and I had rights.”

“Sure. And you knew people at the Embassy. That’s true also.”

“And they’d have helped me out too. I mean they tried to. When I went to them.”

“You did?”

“Absolutely. Later, of course. Not immediately. Rather as a last resort. But they had a go…. So anyway, back I went to the Länggasse and we — honestly, we buried you. It was awful. Frau O was up in your room still crying, trying to sort out whatever you’d left behind without looking at it. Which wasn’t much. The Fremdenpolizei seemed to have pinched most of your papers. I took your library books back. Your gramophone records. We hung your clothes in the cellar. Then we sort of wandered round the house as if it had been bombed. ‘To think this could happen in Switzerland,’ we kept saying. Really just like a death.”

Axel laughed. “It was good of you to mourn me at least. Thank you, Sir Magnus. Did you hold a funeral service also?”

“With no body and no forwarding address? All Frau O wanted to do was look for the culprit. She was convinced you’d been informed against.”

“Who did she think did it?”

“Everyone in turn really. The neighbours. The shopkeepers. Maybe someone from the Cosmo. One of the Marthas.”

“Which one did she choose?”

Pym picked the prettiest and frowned. “I seem to remember there was a leggy blonde one who was reading English.”

“Isabella? Isabella informed against me?” said Axel incredulously. “But she was in love with me, Sir Magnus. Why would she do that?”

“Maybe that was the reason,” said Pym boldly. “She came round a few days after you’d gone, you see. Asked for you. I told her what had happened. She howled and wept and said she was going to kill herself. But when I mentioned to Frau O that she’d called, she promptly said, ‘Isabella is the one. She was jealous of his other women so she informed against him.’”

“What did you think?”

“Seemed a bit far-fetched to me, but then everything else did too. So yes, maybe Isabella did it. She did seem a bit crazy sometimes, to be honest. I could sort of imagine her doing something awful out of jealousy — on an impulse, you know — then persuading herself she hadn’t done it in the first place. It’s a sort of syndrome, isn’t it, with jealous people?”

Axel took his time to reply. For a defector in the throes of negotiating his terms, Pym reflected, he was remarkably relaxed. “I don’t know, Sir Magnus. I don’t have your gifts of imagination sometimes. Do you have any other theories?”

“Not really. It could have happened so many ways.”

In the silence of the night, Axel replenished their glasses, smiling broadly. “You all seem to have thought about it far more than I have,” he confessed. “I’m very touched.” He lifted his palms, Slav style, languidly. “Listen. I was illegal. I was a bum. No money, no papers. On the run. So they caught me, they threw me out. That’s what happens to illegals. A fish gets a hook in its throat. A traitor gets a bullet in his head. An illegal gets marched across the border. Don’t frown so much. It’s over. Who gives a damn who did it? To tomorrow!”

“Tomorrow,” Pym said, and they drank. “Hey — how did the great book go by the way?” he asked in the secret euphoria of his absolution.

Axel laughed louder. “Go? My God, it went! Four hundred pages of immortal philosophising, Sir Magnus. Imagine the Fremdenpolizei wading their way through that!”

“You mean they kept it — stole it? That’s outrageous!”

“Maybe I was not too polite about the good Swiss burghers.”

“But you’ve written it again since?”

Nothing could quench his laughter. “Written it again? It would have been twice as bad next time. Better we bury it with Axel H. You still have Simplicissimus? You haven’t sold him?”

“Of course not.”

A pause intervened. Axel smiled at Pym. Pym smiled at his hands, then raised his eyes to Axel.

“So here we both are,” said Pym.

“That’s right.”

“I’m Lieutenant Pym and you’re Jan’s intelligent friend.”

“That’s right,” Axel agreed, still smiling.

* * *

Having thus, in his own estimation, skilfully circumvented the one awkwardness that might have stood between them, the intelligence predator in Pym now artfully advanced upon the pertinent question of what had become of Axel since his eviction, and what his access had been, and so by extension — as Pym hoped — what cards he held, and what price he proposed to put on them as a reward for favouring the British over the Americans or even — dreadful thought — the French. In this he met at first with no unpleasant inhibition on Axel’s part since, doubtless out of deference to Pym’s position of authority, he seemed resigned to take the passive rôle. Nor could Pym fail to notice that his old friend in rendering account of himself assumed the familiar meekness of the displaced person in the presence of his betters. The Swiss had marched him across the German border, he said — and for ease of reference he mentioned the frontier point in case Pym wished to check. They had handed him over to the West German police who, having dealt him a ritual beating, handed him to the Americans, who beat him again, first for escaping, then for returning, and finally of course for being the red-toothed war criminal that he was not, but whose identity he had unwisely purloined. The Americans put him in prison while they prepared a fresh case against him, they brought in fresh witnesses who were too frightened not to identify him, they set a date to try him, and still Axel could reach nobody who would vouch for him or say he was just Axel from Carlsbad and not a Nazi monster brother. Worse still, as the rest of the evidence began to look increasingly thin, said Axel with an apologetic smile, his own confession became increasingly important, so they had naturally beaten him harder in order to obtain it. No trial was held, however. War crimes, even fictitious ones, were becoming out of date, so one day the Americans had thrown him on another train and handed him over to the Czechs who, not to be out-done, beat him for the double crime of having been a German soldier in the war and an American prisoner after it.

“Then one day they stopped beating me and let me out,” he said, smiling and opening his hands once more. “For this, it seems, I had my dear dead father to thank. You remember the great Socialist who had fought in the Thälmann brigade in Spain?”

“Of course I do,” said Pym, and it occurred to him as he watched Axel’s quick hands gesticulating and his dark eyes twinkling that Axel had put aside the German in him and put on the Slav for good. “I had become an aristocrat,” he said. “In the new Czechoslovakia I was Sir Axel suddenly. The old Socialists had loved my father. The new ones had been my friends at school and were already in the Party apparatus. ‘Why do you beat up Sir Axel?’ they asked my guards. ‘He’s got a good brain, stop hitting him and let him out. Okay, so he fought for Hitler. He’s sorry. Now he’ll fight for us, won’t you, Axel?’ ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Why not?’ So they sent me to university.”

“But what did you study?” said Pym amazed. “Thomas Mann? Nietzsche?”

“Better. How to use the Party to advance oneself. How to rise in the Youth Union. Shine in the committees. How to purge the faculties and students, climb over the backs of friends and the reputation of one’s father. Which arses to kick and which to kiss. Where to talk too much and where to shut your mouth. Maybe I should have learned that earlier.”

Feeling he was close to the heart of things, Pym wondered whether it was time for him to take notes but decided not to destroy Axel’s flow.

“Somebody had the nerve to call me a Titoist the other day,” Axel said. “Since ’49 it’s the latest insult.” Pym secretly wondered whether this was why Axel had come over. “Know what I did?”

“What?”

“I informed against him.”

“No! What for?”

“I don’t know. Something bad. It’s not what you say, it’s who you say it to. You should know that. You’re a big spy, I hear. Sir Magnus of the British Secret Service. Congratulations. Is Corporal Kaufmann all right out there? Maybe you should take him something?”

“I’ll deal with him later, thank you.”

There was a hiatus while each in his separate way savoured the effect of this disciplinary note. They drank another toast, shaking their heads at one another over their luck. But inside himself Pym was less at ease than he let on. He had a sense of slipping standards and complicated undertones.

“So what work have you actually been up to these last days?” Pym asked, struggling to reclaim the ascendancy. “How does a sergeant from HQ Southern Command come to be wandering round the Soviet Zone of Austria, planning his defection?”

Axel was lighting himself a fresh cigar so Pym had to wait a minute for his answer.

“A sergeant I don’t know. In my unit we have only aristos. Like you, I am also a great spy, Sir Magnus. It’s a boom industry these days. We did well to select it.”

Needing suddenly to tend his outward appearance, Pym smoothed his hair back in a reflective gesture he was working on. “But you are still proposing to come over to us — assuming that we can offer you the right sort of terms of course?” he asked, with hard-edged courtesy.

Axel waved away such a stupid idea. “I’ve paid my ticket same as you. So it’s not perfect but it’s my country. I’ve crossed my last frontier. They’ve got to put up with me.”

Pym had a sensation of dangerous disconnection. “Then why are you here — if you don’t want to defect — if I may ask.”

“I heard about you. The great Lieutenant Pym of Div. Int., more latterly of Graz. Linguist. Hero. Lover. I was so excited to think of you spying on me. And me spying on you. It was so beautiful to think we were back in our old attic together, just that little thin wall between us — knock, knock! ‘I’ve got to get in touch with this fellow,’ I thought. Shake his hand. Give him a drink. Maybe we can set the world to rights, same as we used to in the old days.”

“I see,” said Pym. “Great.”

“ ‘Maybe we can put our heads together. We are reasonable men. Maybe he doesn’t want to fight any more wars. Maybe I don’t. Maybe we are tired of being heroes. Good men are scarce,’ I thought. ‘How many people in the world have shaken hands with Thomas Mann?’”

“Nobody but me,” said Pym with a burst of real laughter and they drank again.

“I owe you so much, Sir Magnus. You were so generous. I never knew a better heart. I yelled at you, cursed you. What did you do? Held my head when I threw up. Cooked me tea, cleaned the vomit and the shit off me, fetched me books — back and forth to the library — read to me all night. I owe this man, I thought. I owe this man a step or two forward in his career. I should make him a gesture that is painful to me. If I can help him achieve a position of influence in the world, that’s rare, that’s already good. For the world as well as for him. Not many good men achieve a position of influence today. So I’ll play a little trick and go and see him. And shake his hand. And say, thank you, Sir Magnus. And take him a gift to pay my debt to him and help him in his career, I thought. Because I love this man, do you hear?”

He had brought no straw hat filled with coloured packages but from the briefcase at his side he drew a folder and handed it to Pym across the table.

“You have landed a great coup, Sir Magnus,” he declared proudly as Pym lifted the cover. “Took me a lot of spying to get it for you. A lot of risks. Never mind. It’s better than Grimmelshausen, I think. If they ever find out what I’ve done, I can bring you my balls as well.”

* * *

Pym closes his eyes and opens them again, but it is the same night in the same barn. “I’m a little fat Czech sergeant who loves his vodka,” Axel is explaining while Pym continues in a dream to turn the pages of his gift. “I’m a good soldier Schweik. Did we read that book? My name is Pavel. Hear me? Pavel.”

“Of course we read it. It was great. Is this genuine, Axel? It isn’t a joke or anything?”

“You think fat Pavel takes a risk like this to bring you a joke? He has a wife who beats him, kids who hate him, Russian bosses who treat him worse than a dog. Are you listening?”

With half his head, yes, Pym is listening. He is reading too.

“Your good friend Axel H, he doesn’t exist. You never met him tonight. In Bern long ago, sure, you met a sickly German soldier who was writing a great book and maybe his name was Axel, what’s a name? But Axel vanished. Some bad guy informed against him, you never knew what happened. Tonight you are meeting fat Sergeant Pavel of Czech Army Intelligence who likes garlic and screwing and betraying his superiors. He speaks Czech and German, and the Russians use him as a dogsbody because they don’t trust the Austrians. One week he’s hanging around their headquarters in Wiener Neustadt playing messenger boy and interpreter, the next he’s freezing his arse off on the zonal border looking for small spies. The week after that he’s back in his garrison in Southern Czecho being kicked around by more Russians.” Axel is tapping Pym’s arm. “See this? Pay attention. Here’s a copy of his paybook. Look at it, Sir Magnus. Concentrate. He brought it for you because he doesn’t expect anybody ever to believe anything he says unless it is accompanied by Unterlagen. You remember Unterlagen? Papers? They are what I didn’t have in Bern. Take it with you. Show it to Membury.”

Reluctantly Pym lifts his eyes from his reading long enough to notice the wad of glossy paper Axel is holding up for him to admire. A photocopy in those days is a big matter: plate photographs, tied into a looseleaf book with bootlaces through the holes. Axel presses it upon Pym and again rouses him sufficiently from the material in the folder to make him study the portrait of the bearer: a piggy, part-shaven little man with puffy eyes and a pout.

“That is me, Sir Magnus,” Axel says, and bangs Pym on the shoulder quite hard to assure his attention, exactly as he used to in Bern. “Look at him, will you? He’s a greedy, grubby fellow. Farts a lot, scratches his head, steals his Commandant’s chickens. But he doesn’t like his country to be occupied by a bunch of sweating Ivans who swagger round the streets of Prague and tell him he’s a stinking little Czech, and he doesn’t like being packed down to Austria at somebody’s whim to play toady to a lot of drunk Cossacks. So he’s brave too, you follow me? He’s a brave little greasy coward.”

Pym again pauses in his reading, this time to register a bureaucratic complaint which later causes him some shame. “It’s all very well inventing this delightful character, Axel, but what am I to do with him?” he reasons in an aggrieved tone. “I’m supposed to produce a defector, not a paybook. They want a warm body back there in Graz. I haven’t got one, have I?”

“You idiot!” cries Axel, pretending to be exasperated by Pym’s obtuseness. “You guileless English baby! Have you never heard of a defector in place? Pavel is a defector! He’s defecting but staying where he is. In three weeks’ time he’ll come here again, bring you more material. He’ll defect not just once but if you are sensible twenty times, a hundred. He’s an intelligence clerk, a courier, a low-grade fieldman, a bottlewasher, a coding sergeant and a pimp. Don’t you understand what that means in terms of access? He will bring you wonderful intelligence again and again. His friends in the frontier unit will help him cross. Next time we meet you will have Vienna’s questions for him. You will be at the centre of a fantastic industry: ‘Can you get us this, Pavel? What does this mean, Pavel?’ If you’re polite to him, if you come alone, bring him a nice present, maybe he’ll answer them.”

“And will it be you — will I see you?”

“You will see Pavel.”

“And will you be Pavel?”

“Sir Magnus. Listen.” Pushing aside the briefcase that lay between them, Axel bangs his glass beside Pym’s and yanks his chair so close that his shoulder is nudging against Pym’s shoulder and his mouth is at Pym’s ear. “Are you being very, very attentive now?”

“Of course I am.”

“Because I think you are so fantastically stupid you better not play this game at all. Listen.” Pym is grinning exactly as he used to grin when Axel was explaining why he was a Trottel for not understanding Kant. “What Axel is doing for you tonight, he can never undo in his whole life. I am risking my bloody neck for you. Like Sabina gave you her brother, Axel gives you Axel. Do you understand? Or are you too shit-stupid to recognise that I am putting my future in your hands?”

“I don’t want it, Axel. I’d rather give it back.”

“It’s too late. I have stolen the papers, I have come over, you have seen them, you know what they contain. Pandora’s box cannot be closed again. Your nice Major Membury — those clever aristos in Div. Int. — none of them ever saw such information. Do you follow this?”

Pym nods, Pym shakes his head. Pym frowns, smiles, and tries to look in every way he can the worthy and mature custodian of Axel’s destiny.

“In return, you must swear me one thing. I told you earlier you must not promise. Now I tell you you must. To me, Axel, you must promise loyalty. Sergeant Pavel, he’s a different matter. Sergeant Pavel you can betray and invent as much as you like — he is an invention anyway. But I, Axel — this Axel here — look at me—I do not exist. Not for Membury, not for Sabina, not even for yourself. Even when you are lonely and bored and you need to impress somebody or buy somebody or sell somebody, I am not a creature in your game. If your own people threaten you, if they torture you, you must still deny me. If they put you on the cross in fifty years from now, will you lie for me? Answer.”

Pym finds time to marvel that after energetically denying Axel’s existence for so long he should be promising him to deny it for still longer. And that it must be a very rare thing indeed to be offered a second chance to prove one’s loyalty after failing so miserably at the first attempt.

“I will,” says Pym.

“What will you?”

“I will keep you secret. I’ll lock you in my memory and give you the key.”

“For always. Sabina’s brother Jan also?”

“For always. Jan too. That’s the whole Soviet Order of Battle in Czechoslovakia you’ve given me,” says Pym in a trance. “If it’s genuine.”

“It’s a little bit old, but you British know how to value antiquity. Your maps in Vienna and Graz are older. And they are not so genuine. You like Membury?”

“I think so. Why?”

“Me too. You are interested in fish? You are helping him to restock the lake?”

“Sometimes. Yes.”

“That’s important work. Do it with him. Help him. It’s a lousy world, Sir Magnus. A few happy fish will make it better.”

It was six in the morning when Pym left. Kaufmann had long ago put himself to bed in the jeep. Pym could see his boots sticking over the tailboard. Pym and Axel walked as far as the white stone, Axel leaning on his arm the way he used to when they walked beside the Aare. As they reached it Axel stooped and picked a harvest poppy and handed it to Pym. Then he picked another for himself which on reflection he handed to Pym also.

“There is one of me and one of you, Sir Magnus. There will never be another of either of us. You are the keeper of our friendship. Give my love to Sabina. Tell her that Sergeant Pavel sends her a special kiss to thank her for her help.”

* * *

A man with a highly regarded source is an admired man and a well-fed one, Tom, as Pym quickly discovered in the next few weeks. Visiting Very Senior Officers from Vienna take him to dinner just for the touch of him and the vicarious feel of his achievement. Membury comes too, a grinning, loping Caesar dwarfing his Antony, hauling on his ear, dreaming of fish and smiling at the wrong people. Other officers less senior but still substantial alter their opinion of Pym overnight and send him swarmy notes by interzonal bag. “Marlene sends her love and is so sad that you had to leave Vienna without saying goodbye to her. It looked for a moment as if I might become your C.O. but fate decreed otherwise. M and I hope to be engaged as soon as we get clearance from the War Office.” He is a cult of one and to know him is to be an insider: “The fantastic work young Pym is doing — if I had my way, I’d give him a third pip, national serviceman or not.” “You should have heard London on the scrambler, they’re sending it to the top.” On London’s orders, no less, Sergeant Pavel receives the codename Greensleeves and Pym a commendation. Voluptuous Czech interpreters are proud of him, and demonstrate their pleasure in refined ways.

“You must never tell me what happened, it is a rule,” Sabina ordered him, biting him half to death between her deep sad lips.

“I never will.”

“He is handsome, Jan’s friend? He is beautiful? Like you? I would love him immediately, yes?”

“He is tall and beautiful and very intelligent.”

“Sexy also?”

“Very sexy.”

“Hommsexual like you?”

“Totally.”

The description pleased her in some deep and satisfying way.

“You are good man, Magnus,” she assured him. “You have good taste that you protect this man like my brother.”

The due day came round when Sergeant Pavel was to make his second appearance. As Axel had predicted, Vienna had prepared a dense crop of follow-up questions for him concerning his first offering. Pym arrived with them written out in a shorthand notebook. He also brought brown smoked-salmon sandwiches and an excellent Sancerre from Membury. He brought cigarettes and Naafi mint chocolates and everything else the gastronomic experts of Div. Int. could think of to fill the tummy of a brave defector in place. While they ate the smoked salmon and drank vodka, they cleared up the outstanding points.

“So what have you got for me this time round?” Pym enquired cheerfully when they had reached a natural break in the proceedings.

“Nothing,” Axel replied comfortably, helping himself to more vodka. “We let them starve a little. Gives them a better appetite next time.”

“Pavel’s having a crisis of conscience,” Pym reported next day to Membury, obeying Axel’s instructions to the letter. “He’s having wife trouble and his daughter is going to bed with a no-good Russian officer every time Pavel is sent down to Austria. I didn’t press him. I told him we were there and he could trust us and we’re not adding to his pressures. I believe in the long run he’s going to thank us for that. But I did ask him our questions about the concentrated armour east of Prague and he was interesting.”

A visiting colonel from Vienna was sitting in. “What did he say?” asked the colonel, following Pym closely.

“He said he thinks it’s guarding something.”

“Any idea what?”

“Weaponry of some sort. Could be rockets.”

“Stay with him,” the colonel advised, and Membury puffed out his cheeks and looked like the proud father he had become.

At their third meeting source Greensleeves solved the mystery of the concentrated armour and produced in addition a breakdown of the total Soviet air strength in Czechoslovakia as of November last. Or nearly total. Vienna was in any case amazed, and London authorised the payment of two small gold bars on condition that the British assay marks first be removed for reasons of deniability. Sergeant Pavel was thus characterised as a greedy man which made everybody feel easier. For several months after this Pym scampered back and forth between Axel and Membury like a butler serving two masters. Membury wondered whether he should meet Greensleeves in person: Vienna seemed to think it would be a good idea. Pym tried for him but came back with the sad news that he would treat only with Pym. Membury resigned himself. It was the breeding season for trout. Vienna summoned Pym and dined him. Colonels, air commodores, and naval persons vied to stake their claim to him. But it was Axel, as it turned out, who was his true proprietor and parent company.

“Sir Magnus,” Axel whispered. “Something very terrible has happened.” His smile had lost its bounce. His eyes were haunted and there were heavy shadows under them. Pym had brought any number of Naafi delicacies but he refused them all. “You have to help me, Sir Magnus,” he said, darting scared looks towards the barn door. “You’re my only hope. Help me, for Christ’s sake. Do you know what they do to people like me? Don’t look at me like that! Think of something for a change! It’s your turn!”

* * *

I am in the barn at this moment, Tom. I have lived there these thirty and more years. Miss Dubber’s stippled ceiling has rolled away, leaving the old rafters and the upside-down bats dangling from the roof. I can smell his cigar smoke as I sit here and I can see the holes of his dark eyes in the lamplight as he whispers Pym’s name like the invalid he used to be: get me music, get me painting, get me bread, get me secrets. But there is no self-pity in his voice, no supplication or regret. That was never Axel’s way. He demands. His voice is sometimes soft, it is true. But it is never less than powerful. He is his man, as ever. He is Axel, he is owed. He has crossed frontiers and been beaten. Of myself I am thinking nothing at all. Not now, not then.

“They are arresting my friends back home, did you hear? Two of our group were dragged from their beds yesterday morning in Prague. Another vanished on his way to work. I had to tell them about us. It was the only way.”

The import of this statement takes a moment to penetrate Pym’s worried understanding. Even when it has done so, his voice remains mystified: “About us? Me? What did you say? Who to, Axel?”

“Not in detail. In principle. Nothing bad. Not your name. It’s okay, just more complicated, takes more handling. I’ve been more cunning than the others. In the end it may be better.”

“But what did you tell them about us?”

“Nothing. Listen. For me it’s different. The others, they work in factories, in the universities, they’ve no back door. When they’re tortured they tell the truth and the truth kills them. But me, I’m a big spy, I’ve got a strong position, same as you. ‘Sure,’ I say to them. ‘I go over the border. That’s my job. I collect intelligence, remember?’. . I act indignant, I demand to see my senior officer. He’s not bad, this senior officer. Not a hundred percent, maybe sixty. But he hates the Ivans too. ‘I’m cultivating a British traitor,’ I tell him. ‘He’s a big fish. An army officer. I have kept it secret from you because of the many Titoists inside our organisation. Get the secret police off my back and you can share his product with me when I put the heat on him.’”

Pym has given up speech by now. He doesn’t bother to ask what the senior officer says in reply, or to what extent the real life of Axel may be compared with the fictitious life of Sergeant Pavel. The cells are dying all over him, in his head, his groin, his bone marrow. His loving thoughts about Sabina are as old as childhood memories to him. There is only Pym and Axel and disaster in the world. He is changing into an old man even while he listens. The ignorance of ages is descending on him.

“He says I’ve got to bring him proof,” says Axel a second time.

“Proof?” Pym mumbles. “What sort of proof? Proof? I don’t follow you.”

“Intelligence.” Axel rubs his finger against his thumb, exactly as E. Weber once did. “Pinka-pinka. Product. Money. Something a British traitor like you could give me when I blackmailed him. It doesn’t have to be the secrets of the atom bomb but it has to be good. Good enough to keep him quiet. No junk, you understand? He’s got senior officers too.” Axel smiles, though it is not a smile I care to recollect even now. “There’s always one guy higher up the ladder, isn’t there, Sir Magnus? Even when you think you’re at the top. Then when you reach the top, there they are again below you, swinging on your boots. That’s how it is in a system like ours. ‘No fabrication,’ he says to me. ‘Whatever it is, it’s got to have quality. Then we can fix it.’ Steal for me, Sir Magnus. As you love my freedom, get me something wonderful.”

“You look as though you’ve been seeing things,” Corporal Kaufmann says as Pym returns to the jeep.

“It’s my stomach,” says Pym.

But on the journey back to Graz he began to feel better. Life is duty, he reflected. It’s just a question of establishing which creditor is asking loudest. Life is paying. Life is seeing people right if it kills you.

* * *

There were half a dozen reconstructed Pyms wandering the streets of Graz that night, Tom, and there isn’t one of them I need now feel ashamed of, or wouldn’t happily embrace as a long-lost son who had paid his debt to society and come home, if he knocked on Miss Dubber’s door at this moment and said, Father, it’s me. I don’t think there was a night in his life when he thought less about himself and more about his obligation to others than when he was patrolling his city kingdom under the shadows of crumbling Hapsburg glories, pausing now at the leafy gates of Membury’s spacious married quarters, now at the doorway to Sabina’s unprepossessing apartment house, while he made his plan and flashed them reassuring promises. “Don’t worry about a thing,” he told Membury in his heart. “You will suffer no humiliation, your lake will continue to be stocked and your post will be safe for as long as you care to adorn it. The Highest in the Land will continue to respect you as the presiding genius of the Greensleeves operation.” “Your secrets are in my hands,” he whispered to Sabina’s unlit window. “Your employment by the British, your heroic brother Jan, your exalted opinion of your lover Pym are all secure. I shall cherish them as I cherish your soft warm body sleeping its troubled sleep.”

He took no decisions because he had no doubts. The lone crusader had identified his mission, the skilled spy would take care of the detail, the loyal attacher would never again betray his friend in exchange for the illusion of being a servant of national necessity. His loves, his duties and allegiances had never been clearer. Axel, I owe you. Together we can change the world. I will bring you gifts as you brought gifts to me. I will never again send you to the camps. If he contemplated alternatives, then it was only to reject them as disastrous. Over the last months the inventive Pym had built Sergeant Pavel into a figure of joy and admiration in the secret corridors of Graz, Vienna and Whitehall. Under his skilful hand the choleric little hero’s drinking, womanising and quixotic bursts of courage had become a legend. Even if Pym were prepared to break Axel’s trust a second time, how could he go to Membury and say: “Sir. Sergeant Pavel does not exist. Greensleeves is my friend Axel, who requires that we give him genuine British secrets”? Membury’s kindly eyes would pop open, his innocent face would collapse in lines of sadness and despair. His trust in Pym would wither, his reputation with it: Membury to the lantern, sack Membury; Membury, his wife and all his daughters, go home. An even worse disaster would result if Pym were to strike a compromise by visiting Axel’s dilemma upon the fictitious Sergeant Pavel. He had played that scene, too, in his imagination: “Sir. Sergeant Pavel’s frontier-crossings have been noticed. He has told the Czech secret police that he has a British agent in play. We must therefore give him chickenfeed to back his story.” Div. Int. had no mandate to run double agents. Graz even less so. Even a defector in place was stretching things. Only Greensleeves’ insistence on being handled by Pym personally had prevented a takeover by London long ago, and there was already a lot of earnest talk going on about who would get Pavel when Pym’s military service expired. To place Sergeant Pavel in the position of a double agent would unloose a string of immediate consequences, all frightful: Membury would lose Greensleeves to London; Pym’s successor would discover the deception in five minutes; Axel would once more be betrayed and his chances of survival forfeit; the Memburys would be posted to Siberia.

No, Tom. As Pym walked the momentous night away under a canopy of unreachable ideals, eschewing Sabina’s bed in his purity of soul, he was not tormenting himself over great choices. He was not examining his immortal spirit in anticipation of what purists might call a treasonable act. He did not consider that tomorrow was the day set for his irrevocable execution — the day on which all hope for Pym would die and your father would be born. He was watching the dawn rise on a day of beauty and harmony. A day when a bad record could be put straight, when the fate of everyone he was responsible for rested in his care, when the electors of his secret constituency would go down on their knees and thank Pym and his Maker that he had been born to see them right. He was glowing and exulting. He was letting his goodwill and self-faith fill him up with courage. The secret crusader had placed his sword upon the altar and was transmitting fraternal messages to the God of Battles.

“Axel, come over!” Pym had begged him. “Forget about Sergeant Pavel. You can be an ordinary defector. I’ll look after you. I’ll get you everything you need. I promise.”

But Axel was as fearless as he was determined. “Do not advise me to betray my friends, Sir Magnus. I am the only one who can save them. Did I not tell you I have crossed my last frontier? If you help me, we can win a great victory. Be here on Wednesday at the same time.”

* * *

Briefcase in hand Pym makes quickly for the top floor of the villa and unlocks the door to his office. I am a morning man, it is known of me. Pym is an early riser, Pym is keen, Pym has done a day’s work while most of us are still shaving. Membury’s office is linked to his own by a pair of grand doors. Pushing them open, Pym steps inside. As he does so, his sense of well-being becomes unbearable: a dizzying blend of resolution, rightness and release. I am blessed. Membury’s tin desk is no Reichstag desk. It has an old tin back and Pym’s Swiss Army penknife knows the four screws well. In the third drawer down, on the left side, Membury keeps his basic works of reference: standing orders for the unit, Brown Fish of the World, classified telephone directory, Lakes and Waterways of Austria, Order of Battle of Military Intelligence in London, a list of leading aquaria and a chart for Div. Int., Vienna, showing units and their functions but no names. Pym reaches a hand in. Not an invasion. Not a retribution. No initials are being carved into the panelling. I am here to administer a caress. Folders, loose-leaf manuals. Signals instructions marked “Top Secret, Guard” which Pym has never seen. I am here to borrow, not to steal. Opening his briefcase he extracts an army-issue Agfa camera with a one-foot measuring chain fastened to the lens front. It is the same camera that he uses when Axel brings out raw material and Pym has to photograph it on the spot. He cocks it and sets it on the desk. This is what I was born for, he thinks, not for the first time. In the beginning was the spy.

From a file with the word “Vertebrates” crossed out on the cover, he selects the Order of Battle of Div. Int. Axel knows it anyway, he reasons. Nevertheless, there are impressive “Top Secret” stamps at top and bottom, and a distribution stamp to guarantee authenticity. As you love my freedom, get me something wonderful. He photographs it once, then again, and is left with a feeling of anticlimax. There are thirty-six frames on this film. Why do I cheesepare and give him only two? I could do something for our mutual understanding. Axel, you deserve better. He remembers a recent War Office assessment of the Soviet threat. If they will read that, they’ll read anything. It is in the top drawer, beside A Handbook of Water Mammals, and begins with a summary of conclusions. He photographs each page and finishes the film nicely. Axel, I’ve done it! We’re free. We’ve put the world to rights, exactly as you said we would! We are men of the middle ground — we have founded our own country with a population of two!

“Promise you will never bring me anything so good again, Sir Magnus,” said Axel at their next meeting. “If you do, they will make me a general and we shall not be able to meet any more.”

“Dear Father”—Pym wrote to the Majestic Hotel, Karachi, where Rick appeared to be living for his health—“Thanks for your two letters. I am so glad to hear you are hitting it off with the Aga Khan. I believe I am doing good work out here and you would be proud of me."