A Perfect Spy

CHAPTER 14

When Mary Pym at the age of sixteen decided it was time to lose her virginity she faked a heavy dose of adolescent vapours and had herself put to bed by Matron instead of playing hockey. There she lay in the sick wing staring at the wall till the three-o’clock bell rang, telling her that Matron was off duty until five. She waited five more minutes exactly by her Confirmation watch, held her breath for thirty seconds which always helped to get her courage up, then tiptoed down the stone back stairs past the kitchens and the laundry and across a bit of sour grass to an old brick potting shed where the under-gardener had made a provisional bed of blankets and old sacking. The results were more spectacular than she had reason to hope, but what she relished afterwards was not the event so much as the anticipation of it: the lying boldly in the bed with her skirt rucked round her waist knowing nothing was going to stop her now she had made up her mind; the sense of freedom as she took herself across the border into a state of sin.

And that was the feeling she had now, sitting demurely in the centre row in Caroline Lumsden’s overfurnished drawing-room, with her hideous Thai tables and her garish Chinese paintings and her shelf full of factory-made Buddhas, listening to Caroline trying to sound like the Queen as she moaned out the minutes of the last meeting of the Vienna Branch of the Diplomatic Wives Association in her plummy swansong. I’ll do it, Mary told herself, dead calm. If it doesn’t work one way, I’ll make it work another. She glanced to the window. In their hired Mercedes across the street, Georgie and Fergus were sitting with their heads together, two lovers pretending to study a street map while they kept an eye on the front door and her Rover parked in Caroline’s drive. I’ll take the back way out. It worked then, it’ll work now.

“It was therefore unanimously agreed,” Caroline was lamenting, “that the Foreign Office Inspectors’ report on the local cost of living was both distorted and unfair, and that a Finance subcommittee would be formed immediately, headed, I am pleased to say, by Mrs. McCormick”—respectful hush. Ruth McCormick was the wife of the Economic Minister and therefore a financial genius. Nobody mentioned that she was screwing the Dutch military attaché. “The subcommittee will itemise all our points and, having done so, submit a written objection to our association in London for submission through the proper channels to the Head of the Inspectorate himself.”

Patter of soprano applause from fourteen pairs of female hands, Mary’s included. Great, Caroline, great. In another life, it will be your turn to be the rising young diplomat and your husband’s to stay home and imitate you.

Caroline had turned to Any Other Business. “Next Monday, our weekly transatlantic lunch at Manzi’s. Twelve-thirty sharp and four hundred schillings a head, cash, please, to include two glasses of wine, and please don’t be late as Herr Manzi took an awful lot of persuading to give us a private room.” Pause. Say it, you fool, Mary urged her. Caroline didn’t. Not yet. “Then on Friday, one week today, please, Marjory de Weever will be giving her really fascinating lantern lecture here on aerobics which she taught very successfully to an all-ranks class in the Sudan where her husband was second man. Right, Marjory?”

“Well, chargé really,” Marjory roared from the front row. “The Ambassador was only there for three months out of fourteen. Not that Brian got paid for it but that’s beside the point.”

For pity’s sake! thought Mary furiously. Now! But she had forgotten about Penny Sharlow’s bloody husband landing a medal.

“And I’m sure we’d all like to congratulate Penny on the fantastic support she’s given to James over the years, without which I’ll bet he wouldn’t have got anything at all.”

This was apparently a joke because there was hysterical laughter by too few voices, which Caroline quelled with a mournful stare into the middle distance. She put on her Official Mourning voice.

“And Mary darling — you did say you wouldn’t mind if I mentioned it.” Mary looked hastily downward to her lap. “I’m sure everyone would like me to say how sorry we are about the death of your father-in-law. We know Magnus has been hit very hard and we do hope he will get over it soon, and be back among us in his usual high spirits that we all find so refreshing.”

Sympathetic murmurs. Mary whispered “Thank you” and keeled forward not too far. She sensed the anxious pause while everyone waited for her head to come up, but it didn’t. She began to shake and was impressed to see real tears flopping on to her clenched hands. She let out a little choke and from her willed darkness heard cheerful Mrs. Simpson, wife of the Chancery guard, say “Come here, lovey,” as she put an enormous arm round Mary’s back. She choked again, pushed Mrs. Simpson half heartedly away and struggled to her feet, tears everywhere: tears for Tom, tears for Magnus, tears for being deflowered in the potting shed and I bet I’m pregnant. She let Mrs. Simpson take her arm, she shook her head and stammered “I’m fine.” She reached the hall to find that Caroline Lumsden had followed her out. “No thanks. . really I don’t want to lie down. Far rather just take a walk. . get my coat, please?. . Blue with a foul fur collar. . Rather be alone if you don’t mind…. You’ve been so kind. Oh Christ, I’m going to cry again. . ”

Once in the Lumsdens’ long back garden, she wandered, still hunched, along the path until it dropped out of sight behind the trees. Then she moved fast. Training, she thought gratefully, as she unlatched the back gate; nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. She headed quickly for the bus stop. There was one every fourteen minutes. She had looked them up.

* * *

“How terribly good of them!” cried Mrs. Membury, with the greatest satisfaction, as she topped up Brotherhood’s glass with her homemade elderflower wine. “Oh I do think that’s farsighted and sensible. I’d never supposed the War Office would have half the wit. Would you, Harrison? Not deaf,” she explained to Brotherhood while they waited. “Just slow-thinking. Would you, darling?”

Harrison Membury had come up from the stream at the end of the garden where he had been cutting reeds, and he was still wearing his waders. He was large and loping and at seventy still boyish, with pink immature cheeks and silk white hair. He sat at the far end of the table washing down homemade cake with tea from a huge pottery mug with “Gramps” written on it. He moved, Brotherhood reckoned, at exactly half his wife’s pace and spoke at half the volume.

“Oh I don’t know,” he said when everyone else had forgotten the question. “There were some quite clever chaps scattered around the place. Here and there.”

“Ask him about fish and you’ll get a far quicker answer,” said Mrs. Membury, hurtling off to the corner of the room and pulling out some albums from among the collected works of Evelyn Waugh. “How are the trout, Harrison?”

“Oh they’re all right,” said Membury with a grin.

“We’re not allowed to eat them, you know. Only the pike can do that. Now would it be fun to look at my photographs? I mean is it going to be an illustrated history? Don’t tell me. It doubles the cost. It said so in the Observer. Pictures double the cost of a book. But then I do think they double the attractiveness too. Specially with biographies. I can’t be doing with biography if I can’t look at the people who are being biogged. Harrison can. He’s cerebral. I’m visual. Which are you?”

“I think I must be more your way,” said Brotherhood with a smile, playing his ponderous rôle.

The village was one of those half-urbanised Georgian settlements on the edge of Bath where English Catholics of a certain standing have elected to gather in their exile. The cottage lay at the country end of it, a tiny sandstone mansion with a steep narrow garden descending to a stretch of river, and they sat in the cluttered kitchen on wheelback chairs, surrounded by washing-up, and vaguely votive bric-a-brac: a cracked ceramic plaque of the Virgin Mary from Lourdes; a disintegrating rush cross jammed behind the cooker; a child’s paper mobile of angels rotating in the draught; a photograph of Ronald Knox. While they talked, filthy grandchildren wandered in and stared at them before tall mothers swept them off. It was a household in permanent and benevolent disorder, pervaded by the gentle thrill of religious persecution. A white morning sun was poking through the Bath mist. There was a sound of slow water dripping in the gutters.

“You an academic chap?” Membury enquired suddenly, from the end of the table.

“Darling, I told you. He’s an historian.”

“Well, more a retired trooper, I suppose, sir, to be honest,” Brotherhood replied. “I was lucky to get the job. I’d have been on the shelf by now, if this hadn’t come along.”

“Now when will it come out?” Mrs. Membury shouted, as if everyone were deaf. “I’ve got to know months in advance so that I can put my name down with Mrs. Lanyon. Tristram, don’t tug. We have a mobile library here, you know. Magda darling, do something about Tristram, he’s trying to tear a page out of history. They come once a week and they’re an absolute godsend as long as you don’t mind waiting. Now this is Harrison’s villa where he had his office and everyone worked for him. The main bit’s 1680, the wing’s new. Well nineteenth. This is his pond. He stocked it from scratch. The Gestapo had thrown grenades into it and blown up all the fish. They would. Pigs.”

“From what my masters say, it will start out as a work of internal reference,” Brotherhood said. “Then afterwards they’ll publish a sanitised version for the open market.”

“You’re not M. R. D. Foot, are you?” said Mrs. Membury. “No, you can’t be. You’re Marlow. Well I think they’re inspired, anyway. So sensible to get hold of the actual people before they peg out.”

“Who did you troop with?” Membury said.

“Let’s just say I did a little of this and a little of that,” Brotherhood suggested with deliberate coyness, while he pulled on his reading glasses.

“There he is,” said Mrs. Membury, stabbing a tiny finger at a group photograph. “There. That’s the young man you were asking about. Magnus. He did all the really brilliant work. That’s the old Rittmeister, he was an absolute darling. Harrison, what was the mess waiter’s name — the one who ought to have become a novice but didn’t have the gump?”

“Forget,” said Membury.

“And who are the girls?” said Brotherhood, smiling.

“Oh my dear, they were all sorts of trouble. Each one dottier than the next and if they weren’t pregnant they were running off with unsuitable lovers, cutting their wrists. I could have opened a Marie Stopes clinic for them full time if we’d believed in birth control in those days. Now we’re hybrids. Our girls are on the pill, but they still get pregnant by mistake.”

“They did the interpreting for us,” Membury said, filling himself a pipe.

“Was there an interpreter involved in the Greensleeves operation?” Brotherhood said.

“No need,” said Membury. “Chap spoke German. Pym handled him alone.”

“Completely alone?”

“Solo. Greensleeves insisted on it. Why don’t you talk to Pym?”

“But who took him over when Pym left?”

“I did,” said Membury proudly, brushing wet tobacco from the front of his disgraceful pullover.

There is nothing like a red-backed notebook to instill order into desultory conversation. Having spread one very deliberately among the débris of several meals, and shaken out his big right arm as a prelude to becoming what he called a little bit official, Brotherhood drew a pen from his pocket with as much ceremony as a village policeman at the scene of the occurrence. The grandchildren had been removed. From an upper room came the sounds of someone trying to coax religious music from a xylophone.

“If we could get it all down first I can come back to the individual specifics later,” said Brotherhood.

“Jolly good idea,” said Mrs. Membury sternly. “Harrison, darling, listen.”

“Unfortunately, as I have already told you, most of the raw material on Greensleeves has been destroyed, lost or misplaced, which puts even greater responsibility on the shoulders of surviving witnesses. That’s you. Now then.”

For a while after this forbidding warning there was relative sanity while Membury with surprising accuracy recalled the dates and content of Greensleeves’ principal triumphs and the part played by Lieutenant Magnus Pym of the Intelligence Corps. Brotherhood wrote diligently and prompted little, only pausing to wet his thumb and turn the pages of his notebook.

“Harrison, darling, you’re being slow again,” Mrs. Membury interposed occasionally. “Marlow hasn’t got all day.” And once: “Marlow’s got to get back to London, darling. He’s not a fish.”

But Membury continued swimming at his own good pace, now describing Soviet military emplacements in southern Czechoslovakia; now the laborious procedure for prising small gold bars out of the Whitehall war chests which Greensleeves insisted on receiving in payment; now the fights he had had with Div. Int. to protect his pet agent from being overused. And Brotherhood, despite the little tape-recorder that nestled once more in his wallet pocket, set it all out for them to see, dates left, material centre.

“Greensleeves didn’t have any other codename at any time, did he?” he asked casually as he jotted. “Sometimes a source gets rechristened for security reasons or because the name’s already been bagged.”

“Think, Harrison,” Mrs. Membury urged.

Membury took his pipe from his mouth.

“Source Wentworth?” Brotherhood suggested, turning a page.

Membury shook his head.

“There was also a source”—Brotherhood faltered slightly as if the name had nearly escaped him—“Serena, that was it — no it wasn’t — Sabina. Source Sabina, operating out of Vienna. Or was it Graz? Maybe it was Graz before your time. Used to be a popular thing that, anyway, mixing up the sexes with the cover names. A quite general trick of disinformation, I’m told.”

“Sabina?” cried Mrs. Membury. “Not our Sabina?”

“He’s talking about a source, darling,” Membury said firmly, coming in much more quickly than was his habit. “Our Sabina was an interpreter, not an agent. Quite different.”

“Well our Sabina was an absolute—”

“She wasn’t a source,” said Membury firmly. “Now, come on, don’t tittle-tattle. Poppy.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Brotherhood.

“Magnus wanted to call him Poppy. We did for a bit. Source Poppy. I rather liked it. Then up came Remembrance Day and some ass in London decided Poppy was derogatory to the fallen — poppies are for heroes, not traitors. Absolutely typical of those chaps. Probably got promoted for it. Total buffoon. I was furious, so was Magnus. ‘Poppy is a hero,’ he said. I liked him for that. Nice chap.”

“That’s the bare bones done, then,” said Brotherhood, surveying his handiwork. “Now let’s flesh them out, can we?” He was reading from the subject headings he had written at the beginning of his notebook before he came. “Personalities, well, we’re touching on that. Value or otherwise of national servicemen to the peacetime intelligence effort, were they a help or a hindrance — we’ll come to it. Where they all went afterwards — did they attain positions of interest in their chosen walk of life? Well, you may have kept up with them, and there again you may not. That’s more for us to worry about than you.”

“Yes, well now, whatever did happen to Magnus?” Mrs. Membury demanded. “Harrison was so upset he never wrote. Well so was I. He never even told us whether he converted. He was awfully close, we felt. All he needed was one more shove. Harrison was exactly like that for years. It took a jolly good talking to from Father D’Arcy before Harrison saw the light, didn’t it, darling?”

Membury’s pipe had gone out and he was peering disappointedly into the bowl.

“I never liked the chap,” he explained with a kind of embarrassed regret. “Never thought much of him.”

“Darling, don’t be silly. You adored Magnus. You practically adopted him. You know you did.”

“Oh Magnus was a splendid chap. The other chap. The source. The Greensleeves chap. I thought he was a bit of a fraud, to be honest. I didn’t say anything — it didn’t seem useful. With Div. Int. and London waving their caps in the air, why should we complain?”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Membury, very firmly indeed. “Marlow, don’t listen. Darling, you’re being far too modest, as usual. You were the linchpin of the operation, you know you were. Marlow’s writing a history, darling. He’s going to write about you. You mustn’t spoil it for him, must he, Marlow? That’s the fashion these days. Put down, put down. I get absolutely sick of it. Look at what they did to poor Captain Scott on the television. Daddy knew Scott. He was a marvellous man.”

Membury continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “All the brigadiers from Vienna beaming away like sand boys. Roars of applause from the War Office. No point in me killing the golden goose if they were all happy, was there? Young Magnus cocka-hoop. Well I didn’t want to spoil his fun.”

“And he was taking instruction,” said Mrs. Membury pointedly. “Harrison had arranged for him to go to Father Moynihan twice a week. And he was running garrison cricket. And he was learning Czech. You can’t do that in a day.”

“A h now, that’s interesting. About the learning Czech, I mean. Was this because he had a Czech source then?”

“It’s because Sabina set her cap at him, the little minx,” said Mrs. Membury, but this time her husband actually spoke through her.

“His stuff was all so flashy, somehow,” he was saying, undeterred. “Always looked good on the plate, but when you came to chew it over, nothing really there. That’s how it seemed to me.” He gave a puzzled giggle. “Same as trying to eat a pike. All bones. You’d get a report in, look it over. I say, that’s jolly good, you’d think. But when you took a closer look it was boring. Yes, that’s true because we already know it…. Yes, that’s possible but we can’t verify it because we’ve nothing on that region. I didn’t like to say anything, but I think the Czechs could have been batting and bowling at the same time. I always thought that was why Greensleeves didn’t show up after Magnus went back to England. He wasn’t so sure he could hoodwink an older chap. Mean of me, I expect. I’m just a failed fish freak, aren’t I, Hannah? That’s what she calls me. Failed fish freak.”

The description pleased them both so much that they broke out laughing for some while, so that Brotherhood had to laugh with them and keep back his question until Membury was able to hear him clearly.

“You mean you never met Greensleeves? He never came to the rendezvous? I’m sorry, sir,” he said, returning to his notebook, “but didn’t you say just now you yourself took over source Greensleeves when Pym left Graz?”

“I did.”

“And now you say you never met him.”

“Perfectly true. I didn’t. Stood me up at the altar, didn’t he, Hannah? She got me into my best suit, packed together all these stupid special foods he was supposed to like — how that started, God knows — he never turned up.”

“Harrison probably got the wrong night,” said Mrs. Membury, with a fresh gust of laughter. “Harrison’s frightful about time, aren’t you, darling? He was never trained for Intelligence, you know. He was librarian in Nairobi. A jolly good one too. Then he met someone on the ship and got roped in.”

“And out,” said Membury cheerfully. “Kaufmann came along. He was the driver. Charming chap. Well he knew the meeting place like the back of his hand. I didn’t get the wrong night, darling. I got the right one, I know I did. Sat in an empty barn all night. No word from him, nothing. We’d no means of getting hold of him, it was all one way. Ate a bit of his stupid food. Drank some of his booze, I enjoyed that. Went home. Same again the next night and the next. I waited for a message of some sort, phone call like the first time. Absolute blank. Chap was never heard of again. We should have had a formal handover with Pym present, of course, but Greensleeves wouldn’t allow it. Prima donna, you see, like all agents. ‘One chap at a time.’ Iron rule.” Membury absently helped himself from Brotherhood’s glass. “Vienna was furious. Blamed it all on me. Then I told them he was no good anyway and that didn’t help.” He gave another rich laugh. “I should think it got me sacked if truth were known. They didn’t say so, but I’ll bet it jolly well helped!”

Mrs. Membury had made a tuna-fish risotto because it was Friday, and a trifle with cherries on it which she refused to let Membury eat. When lunch was over she and Brotherhood stood on the river bank watching Membury hacking cheerfully at the reeds. Nets and fine wires were stretched all ways across the water. Among the breeding boxes, an old punt was sinking at its mooring. The sun, freed of the mist, beat brightly.

“So tell us about the wicked Sabina,” Brotherhood suggested artfully, out of Membury’s earshot.

Mrs. Membury couldn’t wait. An absolute minx, she repeated: “One look at Magnus and she saw herself with a British passport, a jolly good British husband and nothing to worry about for the rest of her life. But Magnus was a bit too sly for her, I’m pleased to say. He must have stood her up. He never said so, but that was the way we read it. In Graz one day. Gone the next.”

“Where did she go then?” Brotherhood said.

“Home to Czechoslovakia, that was the story. With her tail between her legs was our theory. Left a note for Harrison saying she was homesick and she was going back to her old boyfriend, despite the beastly régime. Well that didn’t please London, as you can imagine. It didn’t raise Harrison’s stock one bit. They said he should have seen it coming and done something about it.”

“I wonder what became of her,” Brotherhood mused with an historian’s dreaminess. “You don’t remember her other name, do you?”

“Harrison. What was Sabina’s other name?”

With surprising swiftness the answer rang back across the water. “Kordt. K-O-R-D-T. Sabina Kordt. Very beautiful girl. Charming.”

“Marlow says what became of her?”

“God knows. Last we heard she’d changed her name and landed herself a job in one of the Czech Ministries. One of the defectors said she’d been working for ’em all along.”

Mrs. Membury was not so much astonished as proved right. “Now there you are! Married getting on for fifty years, thirtysomething years since Austria, and he doesn’t even tell me she turned up in Czechoslovakia working for one of the Ministries! I expect Harrison had an affair with her himself if truth were known. Practically everybody did. Well my dear she must have been a spy, mustn’t she? It sticks out a mile. They’d never have taken her back if they hadn’t their hooks on her all along, they’re far too vindictive. So Magnus was well rid of her then, wasn’t he? Are you sure you won’t stay for tea?”

“If I could take a few of those old photographs,” Brotherhood said. “We’ll give you a credit in the book, naturally.”

* * *

Mary knew the technique exactly. In Berlin she had watched Jack Brotherhood use it a dozen times, and helped him often. At training camp they had called it paperchasing: how to make an encounter with someone you don’t trust. The only difference was, today it was Mary who was the subject of the operation, and the anonymous writer of the note who didn’t trust her:

“I have information that could lead us both to Magnus. You will please do the following. Any morning between ten and twelve, you will sit in the lobby of the Hotel Ambassador. Any afternoon between two and six you will take a coffee at the Café Mozart. Any evening between nine and midnight, the lounge of the Hotel Sacher. Mr. König will collect you.”

The Mozart was half empty. Mary sat at a centre table where she could be seen and ordered herself a coffee and a brandy. They’ve watched me arrive and now they’re watching to see whether I am followed. Pretending to consult her diary, she took covert note of the people round her and the parked charabancs and fiacres in the street outside the big windows, looking for anything that could resemble a stake-out. When you’ve got a conscience like mine, everything stinks anyway, she thought: from the two nuns frowning at the stock exchange prices in the window of the bank to the huddle of bowler-hatted young coachmen stamping their feet and watching the girls go by. In a corner of the café, a fat Viennese gentleman was expressing interest in her. I should have worn a hat, she thought. I’m not a respectable single woman. She got up, went to the newspaper rack and without thinking chose Die Presse. Now I suppose I roll it up and take it for a walk in my stockinged feet, she thought stupidly, as she opened it at the film page.

“Frau Pym?”

A woman’s voice, a woman’s bosom. A woman’s deferentially smiling face. It was the girl from the cash desk.

“That’s right,” said Mary, smiling in return.

From behind her back she produced an envelope with “Frau Pym” written on it in pencil. “Herr König left this message for you. He is very sorry.”

Mary gave her fifty schillings and opened the envelope.

“Please pay your bill and leave the café at once, turning right into the Maysedergasse, and remaining on the right-hand pavement. When you reach the pedestrian precinct turn left, and keep to the left side, walking slowly and admiring the shop windows.”

She wanted the loo but she didn’t like to go in case he thought she was tipping someone off. She put the note in her handbag, finished her coffee and took her bill to the cash desk where the girl gave her another smile.

“These men are all the same,” the girl said while the change rattled down the chute.

“You’re telling me,” said Mary. They both laughed.

As she left the café a young couple entered and she had a feeling they were disguised Americans. But then a lot of Austrians were. She turned right and came at once to the Maysedergasse. The two nuns were still at their stock prices. She kept to the right-hand pavement. It was twenty past three and the Wives’ meeting was sure to end by five so that they could all get home to change into halter dresses and sequin handbags for the evening cattle market. But even when everyone had gone and only Mary’s car remained in the Lumsdens’ drive, Fergus and Georgie might well assume she had stayed on for a quiet drink with Caroline on her own. If I make it back by quarter to six I stand a chance, she reckoned. She paused before a woman’s lingerie shop and found herself admiring a pair of tart’s black cami-knickers in the window. Who buys that stuff anyway? Bee Lederer, a pound to a penny. She hoped something would happen soon, before the Ambassadress came out with an armful of the stuff, or one of the many unattached men tried to pick her up.

“Frau Pym? I am from Herr König. Please come quickly.”

The girl was pretty and badly dressed and nervous. Following her Mary had an overwhelming memory of being back in Prague visiting a painter the authorities did not approve of. The side street was one minute packed with shoppers, the next empty. All Mary’s senses were alight. She smelt delicatessen, frost and tobacco. She glanced into a shop doorway and recognised the man from the Café Mozart. The girl turned left then right, then left again. Where am I? They entered a paved square. We’re in the Kärtnerstrasse. We’re not. A hippie boy took Mary’s photograph and tried to press a card on her. She brushed him aside. A red plastic bear was holding his mouth open for contributions to some charity. An Asian pop group was singing Beatles music. Across the square lay a dual carriageway and at the near side of it a brown Peugeot waited with a man at the wheel. As they approached, he pushed the back door open at them. The girl grabbed the door and said, “Get in, please.” Mary got in and the girl followed. Must be the Ring, she thought. If so it was not a part of the Ring she recognised. She saw a black Mercedes dawdling behind them. Fergus and Georgie, she thought, knowing that it wasn’t. Her driver glanced both ways, then pointed the car straight at the central reservation — bump, it’s the front tyres, bump, that was my backside you just broke. Everything hooted and the girl peered anxiously through the back window. They left the carriageway and shot down a side street, across a square and as far as the Opera where they stopped. The door on Mary’s side opened. The girl ordered her out. Mary had hardly made the pavement before a second woman squeezed past her and took her place. The car drove away at speed, as neat a substitution as Mary had seen. A black Mercedes followed it but she didn’t think it was the same one. A dapper, embarrassed young man was guiding her through a wide doorway to a courtyard.

“Take the lift, please, Mary,” said the young man, in Euro-American, handing her a piece of paper. “Apartment six, please. Six. You go up alone. You have that?”

“Six,” Mary said.

He smiled. “Sometimes when we are scared we kind of forget everything.”

“Sure,” she said. She walked to the doorway and he smiled and waved at her. She pushed it open and saw an old lift waiting with its doors open, and an old janitor smiling too. They’ve all been to the same charm school, she thought. She got into the lift and told the janitor, “Six, please,” and the janitor launched her on her climb. As the doorway sank below her she had a last glimpse of the boy standing in the courtyard still smiling and a couple of well-dressed girls standing behind him, consulting some bit of paper. The bit of paper in her own hand read “Six, Herr König.” Odd, she thought as she slipped it into her handbag. With me it works the other way. When I’m scared I don’t forget a damn thing. Like the car number. Like the number of the second Mercedes behind us. Like the fringe of dyed black hair on the driver’s neck. Like the Opium perfume that the girl was wearing and Magnus always insists on bringing me when he goes on air journeys. Like the fat gold ring with the red seal on the boy’s left hand.

The door to number 6 stood open. A brass plate beside it read “Interhansa Austria A.G.” She walked in and the door closed behind her. A girl again but not pretty. A sullen, strong girl with a flat Slav face and resentful, anti-Party manner. With a scowl she nodded Mary forward. She entered a dark drawing-room and saw nobody. At the far end of it stood another pair of doors, also open. The furnishings were old Vienna, phoney. Phoney old chests and oil paintings slipped by her as she advanced. Phoney lamp brackets reached at her from phoney imperial wallpaper. As she kept walking she had a reprise of the erotic expectation she had felt at the Wives’ meeting. He’s going to order me to undress and I shall obey. He’s going to lead me to a red fourposter and have me raped by footmen for his pleasure. But the second room contained no fourposter, it was a drawing-room like the first, with a desk and two armchairs and a heap of out-of-date Vogues on the coffee table. It was otherwise empty. Angry, Mary swung round intending to say something rude to the flat-faced Slav. Instead she found herself staring at him. He was standing in the doorway smoking a cigar and for a second she was puzzled she couldn’t smell it, but in some eerie way she knew that nothing about him was ever going to surprise her. The next moment the aroma had reached her and she was shaking his lazy hand as if this was the way they always greeted each other when they met fully dressed in Viennese apartments.

“You are a courageous woman,” he remarked. “Are they expecting you back soon or what is the arrangement? What can we do to make life easier for you?”

That’s perfectly right, she thought in absurd relief. The first thing you always ask your agent is how long you’ve got him for. The second is whether he needs immediate help. Magnus is in good hands. But she knew that already.

“Where is he?” she said.

He had the authority that enabled him to own to failure. “If only we knew, how happy we would both be!” he agreed as if her question had been a statement of despair, and with his long hand showed her to the chair that he required her to sit on. We, she thought. We are equals yet you are in command. No wonder Tom fell in love with you on sight.

* * *

They were sitting opposite one another, she on the gilded sofa, he on the gilded chair. The Slav girl had brought a tray of vodka and some gherkins and black bread and her devotion to him was obscene, she preened and smirked so. She’s one of his Marthas, thought Mary, which was what Magnus called his Station secretaries. He poured two stiff ones, holding each glass carefully by turn. He drank to her, looking over the brim. That’s what Magnus does, she thought. And it’s you he learned it from.

“Has he telephoned?” he asked.

“No. He can’t.”

“Of course not,” he agreed sympathetically. “The house is bugged and he knows that. Has he written?”

She shook her head.

“He’s wise. They are watching for him everywhere. They are immoderately angry with him.”

“Are you?”

“How can I be angry when I owe the man so much? His last message to me was that he didn’t want to see me any more. He said he was free and goodbye. I felt a genuine pang of jealousy. What freedom has he found so suddenly that he cannot share it with us?”

“He said the same to me — I mean about being free. I think he said it to several people. To Tom as well.”

Why do I talk to you as if you were an old lover? What sort of whore am I that I can throw off my loyalties with my clothes? If he had reached out to her and taken her hand she would have let him. If he had drawn her to him—

“He should have come to me when I told him,” he said in the same philosophically reproachful tone. “‘It’s over, Sir Magnus,’ I said to him. That’s my name for him. Forgive me.”

“In Corfu,” she said.

“In Corfu, in Athens, everywhere I could speak to him. ‘Come with me. We are passé, you and I. It’s time for us oldies to leave the field to the next anguished generation.’ He wouldn’t see it. ‘Do you want to be like one of those poor old actors one has literally to drag from the stage?’ I said. He wouldn’t listen. He was so adamant they would clear him.”

“They almost did. Maybe they did. He thought so.”

“Brotherhood won a little time and that was all. Not even Jack could sweep back the tide for ever. Besides — Jack has joined the bad guys now. Hell hath no fury like a deceived protector.”

He taught Magnus his style, she thought, in another spurt of recognition. The style he was always wanting for his novel. He taught him how to be superior to human foibles and how to give a Godlike laugh at himself as a way of fending off morbidity. He did all the things for him that a woman is grateful for, except that Magnus is a man.

“His father seems to have been quite a mystery man,” he said, lighting himself another cigar. “What’s all that about, do you think?”

“I don’t know. I never met him. Did you?”

“Many times. In Switzerland when Magnus was a student, his father was a great British sea captain who had gone down with his ship.”

She laughed. Heaven help me, I’m actually laughing. Now it’s me who’s found the style.

“Oh yes. Then when I next heard of him he was a great financial baron. His tentacles extended to every banking house in Europe. He had miraculously recovered from being drowned.”

“Oh Christ,” she said. And burst out again in cathartic, uncontrollable laughter.

“Since I was German at the time I naturally felt greatly relieved. I had had a really bad conscience about sinking his father until then. What is it about your husband, do you know, that gives us such a bad, bad conscience?”

“His potential,” she said unthinkingly, and took a long pull of vodka. She was trembling and her cheeks were burning hot. He watched her calmly, helping her to steady.

“You’re his other life,” she said.

“He always told me I was his oldest friend. If you know different, please don’t destroy my illusions.”

She was getting it back. Her head. The room was clearing and her head with it. “I understood that position was reserved for somebody called Poppy,” she said.

“Where did you hear that name?”

“It’s in the great book he’s been writing. ‘Poppy, my dearest, oldest friend.’”

“Is that all?”

“Oh no. There’s much more. Poppy gets a big hand on every fifth page. Poppy this, Poppy that. When they found the camera and the codebook they found dried poppies with them, as a keepsake.”

She had hoped to disconcert him, but all she drew from him was a smile of gratification.

“I’m flattered. Poppy is the fanciful codename he awarded me many years ago. I have been Poppy for most of our lives.”

Somehow she stayed in there fighting. “So what is he?” she demanded. “Is he a Communist? He can’t be. It’s too ridiculous.”

He opened his long hands. He smiled again, infectiously, offering an immediate bond of his bewilderment. He was invulnerable. “I’ve asked myself the same question many times. And then I think — well, who believes in marriage these days? He’s a searcher. Isn’t that enough? In our profession I am sure we should not ask for more. Can you imagine being married to a sedentary ideologist? I had an uncle once who was a Lutheran pastor. He bored us all to death.”

She was getting stronger. Less mad. More indignant. “What did Magnus do for you?” she asked.

“He spied. Selectively, it is true. But treasonably it is also true. And often very energetically — something you will understand about him. When his life is happy he believes in God and wants everyone to have a gift. When he is down he will sulk and refuse to go to church. Those of us who run him have to live with that.”

Nothing had happened to her. She was upright and drinking vodka in a stranger’s safe flat. He has pronounced the sentence, she thought calmly, as if she were attending someone else’s trial. Magnus is dead. Mary is dead. Their marriage is dead. Tom is an orphan with a traitor for a father. Everybody’s absolutely fine.

“But then I don’t run him,” she objected, answering his point quite calmly.

He appeared not to notice the new coldness in her voice. “Allow me to sell myself to you a little. I am fond of your husband.”

And so you should be, she thought. After all, he sacrificed us to you.

“I also owe him,” he continued. “Whatever he wants for the rest of his life, I can give it to him. I am greatly to be preferred to Jack Brotherhood and his service.”

You’re not, she thought. You are absolutely not.

“Did you say something?” he asked.

She smiled sadly for him and shook her head.

“Brotherhood wishes to catch your husband and punish him. I am the opposite. I wish to find him and reward him. Whatever he will allow us to give, we will give it.” He drew on his cigar.

You’re a sham, she thought. You seduce my husband and call yourself his friend and mine.

“You know this trade, Mary. I don’t need to tell you that a man in his position is a most desirable commodity. Put more frankly, we cannot afford to lose him. The last thing we want is to have him sitting in an English prison for the rest of his useful life, telling the authorities what he’s been doing these thirty and more years. Nor do we particularly want him to write a book.”

You want, she thought. What about us?

“We would much prefer him to enjoy a well-earned retirement with us — distinction, medals, his family around him if they wish it — where we can still consult him as we need. I can’t guarantee that we will permit him to lead the double life he is accustomed to but in every other respect we shall do our best to meet his needs.”

“He doesn’t want you any more though, does he? That’s why he’s hiding.”

He puffed at his cigar, flapping a hand between them to stop the smoke from bothering her. But it bothered her anyway. It would shame and disgust and accuse her for the rest of her life. He was talking again. Reasonably.

“I am at my wits’ end, to be frank. I have done all I can to put Brotherhood and everyone else off the scent and to find your husband ahead of them. I still have not the least idea where he is and I feel a complete fool.”

“What happened to the people he betrayed?” she said.

“Magnus? Oh he hates bloodshed. He always made that clear.”

“That never stopped anybody yet from shedding blood.”

Once more a pause for his private gravity. “You are right,” he agreed. “And he chose a hard profession. I’m afraid it’s a little late for us all to ponder our moralities.”

“Some of us are rather new to them,” she said. But she could not move him. “Why did you ask me here?”

She met his gaze and saw that though nothing had changed in his expression his face was different, which was what happened sometimes when she looked at Magnus.

“Before you came I had ideas that you and your son might care to start a new life in Czechoslovakia and that Magnus would therefore be strongly tempted to join you.” He indicated a briefcase at his side. “I brought passports for you and all that nonsense. I was absurd. Having met you, I realise you are not defector material. However, it still occurs to me as a possibility that you do know where he is, and that you have managed, because you are a capable woman, not to tell anybody. You cannot suppose he is better off with his pursuers than he would be with me. So if you do know, I think you should tell me now.”

“I don’t know where he is,” she said. And closed her mouth before she could add: and if I did, you would be the last person on earth I would ever tell.

“But you have theories. You have ideas. You have been thinking of nothing else night and day ever since he left, surely. Magnus, where are you? It’s your one thought, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. You know more about him than I do.”

She was beginning to hate his sanctimony. His manner of pondering before he spoke to her, as if wondering whether she was up to his next question.

“Did he ever talk to you about a woman called Lippsie?”

“No.”

“She died when he was young. She was Jewish. All her friends and relations had been killed by the Germans. It seems she adopted Magnus as some kind of support. Then changed her mind and killed herself instead. The reasons, as usual with Magnus, are clouded. It was a curious example for a child, nonetheless. Magnus is a great imitator, even when he doesn’t know it. Really I sometimes think he is entirely put together from bits of other people, poor fellow.”

“He never told me about her,” she repeated doggedly.

He brightened. Just as Magnus might. “Come, Mary. Do you not have the consoling feeling there is someone looking after him? I am sure there is. My understanding of him has always been that he is attracted only to human beings, not to ideas at all. He hates to be alone because then his world is empty. So who is looking after him? Let us try to think whom he would like — I’m not talking of women, you see. Only of friends.”

She was smoothing her skirt, looking for her coat. “I’ll take a cab,” she said. “You don’t need to ring for one. There’s a stand just on the corner. I saw it as I came.”

“Why not his mother? She would be a good person.”

She stared at him, unable for a moment to believe her ears.

“Not long ago he talked to me about his mother for the first time,” he explained. “He said he had taken to visiting her again. I was surprised. Also flattered, I confess. He unearthed her somewhere and put her in a house. Does he see her much?”

She had the wit. Still in the nick of time she felt her cunning come rushing back to take command of her. Magnus hasn’t got a mother, you idiot. She’s dead, he hardly knew her, and he doesn’t care. The one true thing I know of him, and will swear for him on the Last Day, is that Magnus Pym is not now and never has been the adult son of any woman. But Mary kept her head. She didn’t fling insults at him, or sneer at him, or laugh out loud in relief that Magnus had lied to his oldest, dearest friend with the same precision with which he had lied to his wife, his child and his country. She spoke reasonably and sensibly as a good spy always does.

“He likes to chat with her now and then, certainly,” she conceded. Picking up her handbag she peered inside it as if to make sure she had money for her taxi.

“Then might he not have taken himself off to Devon and stayed with her? She was so grateful to have her bit of sea air at last. And Magnus was so proud he had been able to work the magic for her. He spoke interminably of the wonderful walks they had together on the beach. How he took her to church on Sundays and fixed her garden for her. Maybe he is doing something as innocent as that?”

“Her house was the first place they looked,” Mary lied, closing her handbag. “They frightened the poor old lady out of her skin. How do I get in touch with you if I need you? Throw a newspaper over the wall?”

She stood up. He stood up also, though not so easily. His smile was still in place, his eyes were still as wise and sad and merry in the style that Magnus envied so.

“I don’t think you will need me, Mary. And perhaps you are right that Magnus does not want me any more either. Just as long as he wants someone. That’s all we must worry about if we love him. There are so many ways of taking vengeance on the world. Sometimes literature is simply not enough.”

The alteration in his tone momentarily halted her in her hurry to get out.

“He’ll find an answer,” she said carelessly. “He always does.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

They walked towards the front door, slowly in order to allow for his limp. He summoned the lift for her and held back the grille. She got in. Her last sight of him was through the bars, still watching her. By then she was liking him again, and frightened stiff.

* * *

She had worked out what she would do. She had her passport and she had her credit card. She had checked both when she looked inside her handbag. She had her plan, because it was the one she had used on training exercises in little English towns, and later with modifications in Berlin. In the world of ordinary mortals it was dusk. In the courtyard, two priests were talking in low voices with their heads together, swinging their rosaries behind their backs. The street was packed with shoppers. A hundred people could have been watching her, and when she began to count the possibilities in her mind, a hundred seemed about the likely figure. She imagined a kind of Vienna Quorn, with Nigel as Master and Georgie and Fergus as Whips, and bearded little Lederer heading up the bunch, and teams of Czech hoods in hot pursuit. And poor old Jack, unhorsed, plodding over the horizon after them.

She chose the Imperial which Magnus loved for its pomp.

“I’ve no luggage, I’m afraid, but I’d like a room for the night,” she said to the silver-haired receptionist, handing him the credit card, and the receptionist, who recognised her at once, said, “How is your husband, madam?”

A chasseur showed her to a magnificent bedroom on the first floor. Room 121 that everybody asks for, she thought; the very room I brought him to on his birthday for dinner and a night of love. The memory did not move her in the least. She phoned down to the same receptionist and asked him to book her on tomorrow morning’s flight to London: “Of course, Frau Pym.” Smoke, she remembered. Smoke was what we called deception. She sat on the bed listening to the footsteps go quiet in the corridor as the dinner hour drew nearer. Double doors, twelve foot high. Painting called Evening on the Bosphorus by Eckenbrecher. “I’ll love you till we’re both too old,” he’d said, with his head on that very pillow. “Then I’ll go on loving you.” The phone rang. It was the concierge to say only club class was available. Mary said, then take club. She kicked her shoes off and held them in her hand while she softly opened the door and peered out. If I think I’m being watched I’ll put my shoes out to be cleaned. Burble and canned music from the bar. A whiff of dill sauce from the dining-room. Fish. They have such good fish. She stepped onto the landing, waited but still no one came. Marble statues. Portrait of bewhiskered nobleman. She pulled her shoes on, climbed one staircase, called the lift and descended to the ground floor, emerging in a side corridor out of sight of the reception area. A darkened passage led towards the rear of the hotel. She followed it, heading for a service door at the far end. The door was ajar. She pushed it, already smiling apologetically. An elderly waiter was adding the finishing touches to a private dinner table. Another door stood open behind him, leading to a side street. With a jolly “Guten Abend” to the waiter, Mary stepped quickly into the fresh air and hailed a cab. “Wienerwald,” she told the driver and heard him announce it over the intercom: “Wienerwald.” Nothing was following. Approaching the Ring she gave him a hundred schillings, hopped out at a pedestrian crossing and took a second cab to the airport where she sat reading in the ladies’ loo for an hour until the last flight to Frankfurt.

* * *

It was earlier on the same evening.

The house was semi-detached and backed on to a railway embankment exactly as Tom had described. Once again Brotherhood reconnoitred it before making his approach. The road was as straight as the railway and seemingly as long. Nothing but the setting autumn sun disturbed the skyline. There was the road, there was the embankment with its telegraph lines and water tower, and there was the huge sky of Brotherhood’s raggedy-arsed childhood which was always filled with white cloud left by the stop-go trains as they trundled across the fens to Norwich. The houses were all of the same design, and as he studied them their symmetry became beautiful to him without his understanding why. This was the order of life, he thought. This line of little English coffins is what I thought I was preserving. Decent white men in ordered rows. Number 75 had replaced his wooden gate with a wrought-iron one, with “Eldorado” done in curly handwriting. Number 77 had laid himself a concrete path with seashells bedded in it. Number 81 had faced himself in rustic teak. And number 79, upon which Brotherhood now advanced, was resplendent with a Union Jack fluttering from a fine white flagpole planted just inside his territory. The tyre marks of a heavy vehicle were cut into the little gravel drive. An electric speaker was set beside the polished doorbell. Brotherhood pressed and waited. A gasp of atmospherics greeted him, followed by a wheezing male voice.

“Who the bloody hell’s that?”

“Are you Mr. Lemon?” Brotherhood said into the microphone.

“What if I am?” said the voice.

“My name is Marlow. I wondered whether I might have a quiet word with you on a private matter.”

“I’ve got two of them and they both work. Piss off.”

In the window bay the net curtain parted far enough for Brotherhood to glimpse a bronzed, shiny little face, very wrinkled, observing him from the darkness.

“Let me put it this way,” said Brotherhood more softly, still into the microphone. “I’m a friend of Magnus Pym.”

A further crackling while the voice at the other end seemed to regather strength. “Well why the hell didn’t you say so in the first place? Come in and have a wet.”

Syd Lemon was a tiny, thickset old man these days, dressed all in brown like a rabbit. His brown hair, without a fleck of grey, was parted down the centre of his skull. His brown tie had horses’ heads looking doubtfully at his heart. He wore a trim brown cardigan and pressed brown trousers and his brown toecaps shone like conkers. From amid a maze of sunbaked wrinkles two bright animal eyes shone merrily, though his breath came hard to him. He carried a blackthorn stick with a rubber ferrule, and when he walked he swung his little hips like a skirt to get himself along.

“The next time you press that bell, just say you’re an Englishman,” he advised as he led the way down the tiny, spotless hall. On the walls Brotherhood saw photographs of racehorses, and a younger Syd Lemon wearing Ascot rig. “After that you state your business clearly and I’ll tell you to piss off again,” he ended with a gush of laughter and pivoted awkwardly on his stick so that he could wink at Brotherhood and show him it was just his joke.

“How is the young tyke then?” said Syd.

“In excellent shape, thank you,” said Brotherhood.

Without warning Syd sat himself abruptly on a high-backed chair, then leaned cautiously forward on his stick like a tiny dowager until he had the angle that cost him least discomfort. Brotherhood saw dark shadows under his eyes and a film of sweat on his forehead.

“You’ll have to do the honours for us today, squire, I’m not myself,” he said. “It’s in the corner. Lift the lid. I’ll take a drop of the scotch one for my health and you’ll please yourself.”

A thick maroon carpet ran wall to wall. A lurid painting of a Swiss scene hung above the tiled fireplace, to one side of which stood a fine burr-walnut cocktail cabinet. As Brotherhood lifted the lid, a music box began playing a tune, which was what Syd had been waiting for it to do.

“Know that one, do you?” said Syd. “Listen to it. Put the lid down again — that’s right — now pull it up. There we go.”

“It’s ‘Underneath the Arches,’” Brotherhood said with a smile.

“Course it is. His dad give it me. ‘Syd,’ he says. ‘I can’t afford a gold watch just now, and I’m afraid there’s a temporary problem of liquidity about your pension. But there’s an article of furniture I possess which has given us a lot of fun down the corridor of years which is worth a bob or two and I’d like you to have it as a small token.’ So we run the van up, me and Meg, before the repossession artists got their hands on it. Five years ago that was. He’d bought six of them from Harrods to see his contacts right. There was this one left. He never asked for it back, not once. ‘Still playing, is she, Syd?’ he’d say. ‘Many a good tune played on an old fiddle, you know. I can still surprise them myself.’ He could too. The bloody keyholes wasn’t safe when he was around. Right till the end. I couldn’t get to the funeral. I was indisposed. How was it?”

“I’m told it was beautiful,” said Brotherhood.

“Well it would be. He’d made his mark. They weren’t burying just anybody, you know. That man had shaken hands with some of the Highest in the Land. He called the Duke of Edinburgh ‘Philip.’ Did they write about him when he died? I looked in a few papers but I didn’t see a lot. Then I thought, Well they’re probably saving it up for the Sundays. Of course you can never tell with Fleet Street. I’d have slipped up there if I’d been well, offered them a few bob to make sure. Are you a bogey, sir?”

Brotherhood laughed.

“You look like a bogey. I did time for him, you know. A lot of us did as a matter of fact. ‘Lemon,’ he says — always called me by my surname when he wanted something very badly, I never knew why—‘Lemon, they’ll get me on my signature on those documents. Now if I was to deny it was my signature, and you was to say you’d forged it, nobody would be the wiser, would they?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I would. I’d do a lot of time for it,’ I said to him. ‘If doing time makes you wise, I’m going to be as wise as Methuselah,’ I said. I still did it, mind. I don’t know why. He said I’d have fifty grand when I come out. I knew I wouldn’t. I suppose you could call it friendship really. A cocktail cabinet like that, you couldn’t get one to save your life these days. Here’s to him. Mud in your eye.”

“Cheers,” said Brotherhood and drank while Syd looked on approvingly.

“So what are you if you’re not a bogey? Are you one of his airy-fairy Foreign Office friends? You don’t look like an airy-fairy. More like a boxer to me, if you’re not a bogey. Ever do that at all, did you, the fight game? Ringside seats we used to have, every time. We was there the night Joe Baksi said goodbye to poor old Bruce Woodcock. We had to have a bath afterwards, get the blood off. Then round to the Albany Club and there was Joe standing at the bar without a mark on him, a couple of Lovelies beside him there, and Rickie says to him, ‘Why didn’t you finish him off, Joe? Why did you spin it out like that, round after round?’ Wonderful way with words he had. ‘Rickie,’ says Joe, ‘I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t got the heart and that’s a fact. Every time I hit him he was going “oooh — oooh”—like that — I couldn’t put the finisher in and that’s a fact.’”

While he continued to listen, Brotherhood allowed his eye to fall idly upon the imprint of an absent piece of furniture in a corner of the room. The shape of it was square, perhaps two foot by two, and it had cut through the carpet pile to the canvas backing underneath. “Did Magnus come along that night as well?” he enquired jovially, turning the conversation delicately back upon the purpose of his visit.

“He was too young, sir,” Syd replied stoutly. “Too tender he was. Rickie would have took him but Meg she said no. ‘You leave him with me,’ she said. ‘You boys can go out, you can have your fun. But Titch stays here with me and we’ll go to a flick and have a nice evening and that’s it.’ Well, you didn’t quarrel with Meg when she said a thing like that, not twice you didn’t. I’d be broke today without her. I’d have given him every penny I had. But Meg, she put a bit away. She knew her Syd. Knew her Rickie too — a bit too well, I thought sometimes. Still you can’t blame her. He was bent, you see. We was all bent, but Titch’s dad was very bent indeed. Took me a long time to realise that. Still, if he came back, I suppose we’d all do the same.” He laughed though it hurt him to do so. “We’d do the same and more, I’ll bet we would. Is Titch in trouble, then?”

“Why should he be?” said Brotherhood, lifting his gaze away from the corner of the room.

“You tell me. You’re the bogey, not me. You could run a prison with a face like that. I shouldn’t be talking to you. I can feel it. I’d walk into the office one day. Audley Street. Mount Street. Chester Street. Old Burlington. Conduit. Park Lane. Always the best addresses. Nothing altered. Everything nice and tidy. Receptionist there, sitting at her desk like the Mona Lisa. ‘Morning, Mr. Lemon.’ ‘Morning, sweetheart.’ But I’d know. I’d see it in her face. I’d hear the quiet. Hullo, I’d say to myself. It’s the bogies. They’ve been having a word with Rickie. Off you go, Syd, it’s out the back door fast. I was never wrong. Not once. Even if it was another twelve months without the option when they nicked me, I always had the nose for when the trouble started.”

“When did you last see him then?”

“Couple of years ago. Maybe more. He stayed away after Meg went, I don’t know why. I’d have thought he’d come more but he didn’t like it. Didn’t like people dying on him, I suppose. Didn’t like people being poor, or no-hopers. He stood for Parliament once, you know. He’d have got in too if we’d started a week earlier. Same as his horses. Always leaving it too late at the finish. He’d ring up of course. Loved the telephone, always did. Never happy if the blower wasn’t ringing.”

“I was meaning Magnus,” said Brotherhood patiently. “Titch.”

“I thought you might be,” said Syd. He began coughing. His whisky stood on the table in front of him but he hadn’t touched it although it was in reach. He doesn’t drink any more, thought Brotherhood. It’s there for the decorum. The coughing ended and left him breathless.

“Magnus came and saw you,” said Brotherhood.

“Did he? I didn’t notice. When was that?”

“On his way to see Tom. After the funeral.”

“How did he do that then?”

“Drove out here. Sat with you. Chatted about old times. He was pleased he came. He told young Tom afterwards. ‘I had a lovely talk with Syd,’ he said. ‘It was just like old times.’ He wanted everyone to know.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“He told Tom.”

“Didn’t tell you though. Or you wouldn’t need to come here. I always reasoned that. I was never wrong. ‘If the bogies ask, it’s because they don’t know. So don’t tell them. If they ask and they do know, they’re trying to catch you out. So don’t tell’em either.’ I used to say the same to Rickie but he wouldn’t listen. It was being a Mason partly. It made him feel immune if he talked enough. That’s how they got him, nine times out of ten. He talked himself into it.” He barely paused. “Listen, squire. I’ll do a deal with you. You tell me what you want and I’ll tell you to piss off. How’s that?”

A long silence followed but Brotherhood’s patient smile did not tire. “Tell me something. What’s that Union Jack doing out there?” he suggested. “Does it have a meaning at all, or is it just a big flower for the garden?”

“It’s a scarecrow for keeping off foreigners and bogies.”

As if he were producing a photograph of his family, Brotherhood drew out his green card, the one he had shown to Sefton Boyd. Syd drew a pair of spectacles from his pocket and read it back and front. A train thundered past but he appeared not to hear it.

“Is this a con?” he asked.

“I’m in the same business as that flag,” Brotherhood said. “If that’s a con.”

“Could be. Everything could be.”

“You were Eighth Army, weren’t you? I understand you picked up a small medal at Alamein as well. Was that a con, too?”

“Could have been.”

“Magnus Pym is in a little bit of trouble,” said Brotherhood. “To be perfectly honest with you, which I always am with people, he seems to have temporarily disappeared.”

Syd’s small face had tightened. His breathing became harsh and quick. “Who’s disappeared him, then? You? He hasn’t been messing with Muspole’s boys, has he?”

“Who’s Muspole?”

“Friend of Rickie’s. He knew people.”

“He may have been lifted, he may have gone into hiding. He was playing a dangerous game with some very bad foreigners.”

“Foreigners eh? Well he had the parley-voo, didn’t he?”

“He was working under cover. For his country. And for me.”

“Well he’s a silly little bugger then,” said Syd angrily and, hauling a perfectly ironed handkerchief from his pocket, dusted his shiny face. “I’ve no patience with him. Meg saw it. ‘He’ll go to the bad,’ she said. ‘There’s a copper in that boy, you mark my words. He’s a natural grass. Born to it.’”

“This wasn’t grassing, this was risking his neck,” said Brotherhood.

“That’s what you say. That’s what you think perhaps. Well you’re wrong. Never satisfied, that boy wasn’t. God wasn’t half good enough for him. Ask Meg. You can’t. She’s gone. She was a wise one, Meg was. She was a woman, but she had more sense in one eye than you and me and half the world together. He’s been playing both ends against the middle, I know. Meg always said he would.”

“How did he look when he came and saw you?”

“Healthy. Everyone does. Roses in his nasty little cheeks. I always know when he wants something. He’s charming, like his dad. I said, ‘A bit more mourning would become you by the look of you.’ He wouldn’t hear of it. ‘It was a beautiful service, Syd,’ he says. ‘You’d have loved it.’ Well, that was smoke up my arse for a start. ‘They was packed together like sardines and there still wasn’t room for them in the church.’ ‘Moonshine,’ I said. ‘They was in the square outside, they were queuing down the street, Syd. There must have been a thousand people there. If the Irish had let a bomb off, they’d have deprived this country of its finest brains.’ ‘Was Philip there?’ I said. ‘Course he was.’ Well, I mean he couldn’t have been, could he, or they’d have had it in the papers and the telly. Well, I suppose he could have gone incognito. I’m told they do that a lot these days, thanks to the Irish. He had a friend once. Kenny Boyd. His mum was a lady. Rick had a how d’you do with his aunt. Maybe he went to young Kenny. He might.”

Brotherhood shook his head.

“Belinda? She was straight, always, although he bilked her. He could go to Belinda any time.”

Brotherhood shook it again.

“I mean, a thousand mourners,” Syd objected. “Creditors, if you like. Not mourners. You don’t mourn Rick. Not really. You heave a bit of a sigh of relief, to be frank. Then you look in your wallet and thank old Meg there’s still a bit left over for yourself. I didn’t tell Titch that. It wouldn’t have been appropriate…. Did Philip go? Did you hear anything about Philip going?”

“It was a lie,” said Brotherhood.

Syd was shocked. “Ah now, that’s a bit hard, that is. That’s copper’s talk. Magnus was conning me, put it that way, same as his dad did.”

“Why?” said Brotherhood.

Syd didn’t hear.

“What did he want?” said Brotherhood. “Why would he take so much trouble to con you?”

Syd was overacting. He frowned. He pursed his lips. He dusted the tip of his brown nose. “Wanted to see me right, didn’t he?” he said too brightly. “Flannel me along. I’ll go and chat up old Syd. Make him feel nice.’ Oh we was always friends. Great friends. A father to him I was, quite often. And Meg was a truly incredible mother.” Perhaps with old age he had lost the liar’s art. Or perhaps he had never quite had it in the first place. “He just wanted a social, that’s all. Comfort, that’s what it comes down to. I’ll comfort you, you comfort me. He was always fond of Meg, you see. Even when she saw through him. Loyal. I’ll say that.”

“Who’s Wentworth?” Brotherhood said.

Syd’s face had slammed tight as a prison door. “Who’s who, old boy?”

“Wentworth.”

“No. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I know a Wentworth. More a place. Why, is a Wentworth giving him trouble then?”

“Sabina. Did he ever mention a Sabina?”

“That’s a racehorse, isn’t it? Wasn’t there a Princess Sabina who was fancied for the Gold Cup last year?”

“Who’s Poppy?”

“Here. Is Magnus playing the Lovelies again? Mind you, he wouldn’t be his dad’s son if he didn’t.”

“What did he come here for?”

“I told you. Comfort.” Then, by a kind of cruel magnetism, Syd’s gaze slid to the spot where a piece of furniture had stood, before returning, too brazenly, to Brotherhood.

“Well then,” said Syd.

“Tell us something, do you mind?” said Brotherhood. “What was in that corner there?”

“Where?”

“There.”

“Nothing.”

“Furniture? Keepsakes?”

“Nothing.”

“Something of your wife’s you’ve sold?”

“Meg’s? I wouldn’t sell anything of Meg’s if I was starving.”

“What made those lines then?”

“What lines?”

“Where I’m pointing. In the carpet. What made them?”

“Fairies. What’s it to do with you?”

“What’s it to do with Magnus?”

“Nothing. I told you. Don’t repeat things. It annoys me.”

“Where is it?”

“Gone. It isn’t anything. It’s nothing.”

Leaving Syd sitting in his chair, Brotherhood ran up the narrow stairs two at a time. The bathroom was ahead of him. He looked inside then stepped to the main bedroom left. A frilly pink divan filled most of the room. He looked under it, felt beneath the pillows, looked under them. He pulled open the wardrobe and swept aside rows of camel-hair coats and costly women’s dresses. Nothing. A second bedroom lay across the landing but it contained no piece of heavy furniture two feet by two, just heaps of very beautiful white hide suitcases. Returning to the ground floor he inspected the dining-room and kitchen and, from the rear window, the tiny garden leading to the embankment. There was no hut, no garage. He returned to the parlour. Another train was passing. He waited for the sound of it to fade before he spoke. Syd was sitting hard forward in his chair. His hands were clasped over the handle of his blackthorn, his chin rested passively upon them.

“And the tyre marks in your drive,” said Brotherhood. “Did the fairies make them too?”

Then Syd spoke. His lips were tight and the words seemed to hurt him. “Do you swear to me, Scout’s honour, copper, that this is for his country?”

“Yes.”

“Is what he done, which I don’t believe and don’t want to know, unpatriotic or could be?”

“It could be. The most important thing for all of us is to find him.”

“And may you rot if you’re lying to me?”

“And may I rot.”

“You will, copper. Because I love that boy but I never did wrong by my country. He come here to con me, that’s true. He wanted the filing cabinet. Old green filing cabinet Rick gave me to look after when he went off on his travels. ‘Now Rick’s dead, you can release his papers. It’s all right,’ he says. ‘It’s legal. They’re mine. I’m his heir, aren’t I?’”

“What papers?”

“His dad’s life. All his debts. His secrets, you might say. Rickie always kept them in this special cabinet. What he owed us all. One day he was going to see everybody right, we’d never want for anything again. I said no at first. I’d always said no when Rickie was alive, and I didn’t see nothing had changed it. ‘He’s dead,’ I said. ‘Let him have his peace. Nobody never had a better pal than your old dad and you know it, so just you stop asking questions and get on with your own life,’ I says. There’s some bad things in that cabinet. Wentworth was one of them. I don’t know the other names you said. Maybe they’re in there too.”

“Maybe they are.”

“He argued around and so finally I said ‘Take it.’ If Meg had been here, he’d never have had it off me, legal heir or not, but she’s gone. I couldn’t refuse him, that’s the truth. I never could, no more than what I could his dad. He was going to write a book. I didn’t like that either. ‘Your dad never held with books, Titch,’ I said. ‘You know that. He was educated in the university of the world.’ He didn’t listen. He never would when he wanted something. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Take it. And maybe that’ll get him off your back. Shove it in the car and piss off,’ I said, ‘I’ll get the big Mick from next door to help you lift it.’ He wouldn’t. ‘The car’s not right for it,’ he says. ‘It’s not going where the cabinet’s going.’ ‘All right,’ I says, ‘then leave it here and shut up.’”

“Did he leave anything else here?”

“No.”

“Was he carrying a briefcase?”

“A black airy-fairy job with the Queen’s badge on it and two keyholes.”

“How long did he stay?”

“Long enough to con me. An hour, half an hour, what do I know? Wouldn’t even sit down. Couldn’t. He walked back and forth all the time in his black tie, smiling. Kept looking out of the window. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘which bank have you robbed, then? I’ll go and take my money out.’ He used to laugh at jokes like that. He didn’t, but he was smiling all the time. Well, funerals, they take you in a lot of ways, don’t they? I could have done without his smiling all the same.”

“So then he left. With the cabinet?”

“Course he didn’t. He sent the lorry, didn’t he?”

“Of course he did,” said Brotherhood, cursing himself for his stupidity.

He was seated close to Syd and he had put his whisky beside Syd’s on the beaten-brass Indian table that Syd kept polished till it shone like the Eastern sun. Syd was speaking very reluctantly, and his voice had almost died.

“How many?”

“Two blokes.”

“Did you give them a cup of tea?”

“Course I did.”

“See their lorry?”

“Course I did. I was looking out for them, wasn’t I? That’s a major entertainment, that is, round here, a lorry.”

“What was the firm?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t written, was it? It was a plain lorry. More like a hired one.”

“Colour?”

“Green.”

“Hired from who?”

“How should I know?”

“Did you sign anything?”

“Me? You’re daft. They had a tea, loaded up, and buggered off.”

“Where were they taking it?”

“The depot, weren’t they?”

“Where’s the depot?”

“Canterbury.”

“You sure?”

“Course I’m sure. Canterbury. Package for Canterbury. Then they complained about the weight. They always do that, they think it gets them more dropsy.”

“Did they say package for Pym?”

“Canterbury. I told you.”

“Did they have a name at all?”

“Lemon. Call at Lemon’s, get the package for Canterbury. I’m Lemon. The answer is a Lemon.”

“Did you see the number of the lorry?”

“Oh yes. Wrote it down. I mean that’s my hobby, lorry numbers.”

Brotherhood managed a smile. “Well, can you at least remember what make of lorry it might have been?” he asked. “Distinguishing marks and whatnot?”

It was a harmless enough question, harmlessly put. Brotherhood himself had little expectation of it. It was the kind of question that unasked leaves a gap, but asked produces no dividend: part of the necessary luggage of the interrogator’s trade. Yet it was the last that Brotherhood put to Syd on that dying autumn evening, and as a matter of fact it was the last in his short but desperate search for Magnus Pym, because after it he had only answers to concern him. Yet Syd refused point-blank to address himself to it. He started to speak, but then he changed his mind and clapped his mouth shut with a little pop. His chin came off his hands, his head lifted, then by degrees his whole little body lifted too, painfully but strictly from the chair, as if a distant bugle had summoned him to a last parade. His back arched, he held his stick to his side.

“I don’t want that boy doing prison,” he said with a husk to his voice. “Do you hear me? And I’m not going to help you put him there. His dad did prison. I did prison. And I don’t want the boy there. It bothers me. Nothing personal, copper, but on your way.”

* * *

It’s over, thought Brotherhood calmly, staring round the crowded conference table in Brammel’s suite on the Fifth Floor. This is my last feast with you. I shall walk out of this door a gamekeeper’s son of sixty. A dozen pairs of hands lay under the downlight like corpses waiting to be identified. To his left languished the tailor-made worsted sleeves of the Foreign Office representative named Dorney. Heraldic lions postured on his gold cufflinks. Beyond Dorney reposed the unspoiled fingertips of his master Brammel, whose mid-Surrey heredity needed no advertisement. Beyond Bo sat Mountjoy from Cabinet. Then the rest. In his mood of increasing alienation Brotherhood found it difficult to put the voices to the hands. Not that it mattered any more because tonight they were one voice and one dead hand. They are the body corporate I once believed was greater than the sum of its parts, he thought. In my lifetime I have witnessed the birth of the jet airplane and the atom bomb and the computer, and the demise of the British institution. We have nothing to clear away but ourselves. The musty midnight air smelt of decay. Nigel was reading the death certificate.

“They waited outside the Lumsden house till six-twelve, then telephoned the house from a callbox down the road. Mrs. Lumsden replied that she and her maid were looking for Mrs. Pym at this moment. Mary had taken herself for a walk in the back garden and not returned. She’d been out more than an hour. The garden was empty. Lumsden himself was at the Residence. The Ambassador apparently required him.”

“I hope nobody’s going to try and blame the Lumsdens for this,” said Dorney.

“I’m sure not,” said Bo.

“She left no note, no word to anyone,” Nigel continued. “She’d been preoccupied during the day but that was natural. We checked the airlines and found she was booked to London on tomorrow morning’s British Airways flight club class. She gave her address as the Imperial Hotel, Vienna.”

“This morning’s,” somebody corrected, and Brotherhood saw Nigel’s gold watch tilt sharply towards him.

“This morning’s flight then,” Nigel agreed testily. “When we checked the Imperial she wasn’t in her room and when we tried the airport a second time we established she’d taken a standby seat on the last flight of the day, Lufthansa to Frankfurt. Unfortunately we did not come by this information until after the Frankfurt flight had landed at its destination.”

She diddled you, thought Brotherhood with a satisfaction bordering on pride. She’s a good girl and knows the game.

“Isn’t it rather a pity you couldn’t have found out about Frankfurt the first time you went to the airport?” said an unbeliever boldly from the end of the table.

“Of course it’s a pity,” Nigel snapped. “But if you had been listening a little more closely, I think you would have heard me say that she took a standby seat. The official flight list bearing her name was therefore not complete until literally the moment when the plane took off.”

“Sounds a bit of a muddle all the same,” said Mountjoy. “What about the unofficial flight list?”

No, thought Brotherhood. It is not a muddle. To make a muddle you must first have order. This is inertia, this is normality. What was once a great service has become an immovable hybrid — half bureaucrat, half freebooter, and using the arguments of the one to negate the other.

“So where is she?” somebody asked.

“We don’t know,” said Nigel with satisfaction. “And short of asking the Germans — and incidentally of course the Americans — to search every hotel in Frankfurt, which seems a long shot to say the least, I fail to see what more we can do. Or could have done. Frankly.”

“Jack?” said Brammel.

Brotherhood heard an older version of his own voice ebb into the darkness. “God knows,” he said. “Probably sitting on her backside in Prague by now.”

Nigel again. “She’s done nothing wrong as far as anyone knows. We can’t keep her prisoner against her will, you know. She’s a free citizen. If her son wants to join her there next week there’s not much we can do about that either.”

Mountjoy voiced a previous worry. “I do think the telephone intercept from the American Embassy is fairly extraordinary. This woman Lederer, sitting in Vienna, screaming to her husband in London about two people exchanging messages in church. That was our church she was talking about. Mary was there. Couldn’t we have made a few deductions from that?”

Nigel had his answer pat: “Only long after the event, I’m afraid. Perfectly understandably, the transcribers saw nothing dramatic in the intercept and passed it to us twenty-four hours after the phone call had taken place. The information that would have put us on the alert — namely that Mary had been seen possibly emerging from a Czech safe flat where this man Petz and so forth had previously been housed — therefore reached us before the intercept. You can hardly blame us because we didn’t put the cart before the horse, can you?”

Nobody seemed to know whether they could or couldn’t.

Mountjoy said it was time to take a view. Dorney said they really must decide whether to call in the police and circulate Pym’s photograph, and be damned. At this Brammel came sharply to life.

“If we do that, we may as well put up the shutters,” he said. “We’re so nearly there. We’re so warm, aren’t we, Jack?”

“I’m afraid we’re not,” said Brotherhood.

“But of course we are!”

“It’s guesswork. Still. We need the furniture van. That won’t be a simple job either. He’ll have used cut-outs, halfway houses. The police know how to do those things. We don’t have a chance. He’s using the name of Canterbury. Or we think he is. That’s because in the past all his worknames have been places — he’s got a tic about that. Colonel Manchester, Mr. Hull, Mr. Gulworth. On the other hand they just may have taken the cabinet to Canterbury and Canterbury is where he is. Or they’ve taken it to Canterbury and Canterbury is where he isn’t. We need a square beside the sea and a house with a woman in it whom he apparently loves. She’s not in Scotland or Wales because that’s where he says she is. We are not in a position to comb every seaside town in the United Kingdom. The police are.”

“He’s mad,” said a ghost.

“Yes, he’s mad. He’s been betraying us for more than thirty years and so far we have failed to certify him. Our error. So we may as well agree that he makes a pretty decent show of being sane when he needs to, and that his tradecraft is damn good. Is anybody nearer to him than I am?”

The door opened and closed. Kate was standing before them with an armful of red striped folders. She was pale and very steady, like a sleepwalker. She laid one folder before each guest.

“These have just come up from Sig. Int.,” she said, to Bo only. “They ran the Simplicissimus bookcode across the Czech transmissions. The results are positive.”

* * *

At seven in the morning the London streets were empty but Brotherhood marched in them as if they were full, keeping a straight back among the falterers and weaklings, a man of bearing in a crowd. A solitary policeman wished him good morning. Brotherhood was the kind of man policemen greeted. Thank you, Officer, he thought, striding yet more purposefully. You have just smiled on the man who befriended tomorrow’s newest traitor — the man who fought off criticism of him until the case became unanswerable, then fought off his apologists when it became unfaceable. Why do I begin to understand him? he wondered, marvelling at his own tolerance. Why is it that in my heart if not my intellect I sense a stirring of sympathy for the man who all his life has made a failure of my successes? What I made him do, he made me pay for.

You brought it on yourself, Belinda had said. Then why was it that, as with his dangling arm at the moment it was shot to pieces, he had yet to feel the pain?

He’s in Prague, he thought. The chase game of the last few days was a Czech fan dance to keep us looking the wrong way while they smuggled him to safety. Mary would never have gone there unless Magnus was ahead of her. Mary would never have gone there, period.

Would she? Wouldn’t she? He didn’t know and he wouldn’t have trusted anybody who said they did. To leave Plush and all her Englishness behind? For Magnus now?

She’d never do it.

She’d do it for Magnus.

Tom will come first for her.

She’ll stay.

She’ll take Tom with her.

I need a woman.

An all-night coffee shop stood at the corner of Half Moon Street and on other early mornings Brotherhood might have stopped there and let the tired whores make a fuss of his dog, and Brotherhood in return would have made a fuss of the whores, bought them a coffee and chatted them up, because he liked their tradecraft and their guts and their mixture of human canniness and stupidity. But his dog was dead and so for the time being was his sense of fun. He unlocked his door and headed for the sideboard where the vodka was. He poured himself a warm half tumbler and drank it down. He ran a bath, switched on his transistor radio and took it to the bathroom. The news reported disasters everywhere but no British diplomatic couple surfacing in Prague. If the Czechs want to blow the whistle they’ll do it at midday in order to catch the evening television and tomorrow’s papers, he thought. He began shaving. The phone was ringing. It’s Nigel saying we’ve found him, he was at his club all the time. It’s the duty officer reporting that the Prague Foreign Ministry has put out a midday press call for foreign correspondents. It’s Steggie, saying he likes strong men.

He switched off the radio, walked naked to the drawing-room, snatched up the receiver, said “Yes?” and heard a ping, then nothing. He pressed his lips together as a warning to himself not to speak. He was praying. He was definitely praying. Speak, he prayed. Say something. Then he heard it: three short taps of a coin or a nail-file on the drum of the mouthpiece: Prague procedures. Casting round for something metal, he saw his fountain pen on the writing table and managed to seize it without relinquishing the telephone. He tapped once in return: I am reading you. Two more taps, then three again. Stay where you are, said the message. I have information for you. With his pen he gave four taps to the mouthpiece and heard two in reply before the caller rang off. He ran his fingers through his stubble hair. He took his vodka to the desk and sat down, put his face in his hands. Keep alive, he prayed. It’s the networks. It’s Pym, putting it all right. Keep clever. I’m here, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m here and waiting for your next signal. Don’t call again until you’re ready.

The phone screamed a second time. He lifted the receiver but it was only Nigel. Pym’s description and photograph were on their way to every police station in the country, he said. The Firm was switching to the operational telephone lines only. Bo had ordered the Whitehall lines disconnected. The press contacts were already beating down the doors. Why is he talking to me? Brotherhood wondered. Is he lonely or is he giving me a chance to say I’ve just had this funny phone call from a Joe using Prague procedures? It’s the funny call, he decided.

“Some joker just phoned me with a Czech call sign,” he said. “I gave him the signal to speak but he wouldn’t. God alone knows what it was about.”

“Well if anything comes through, let us know at once. Use the operational line.”

“So you said,” said Brotherhood.

Waiting again. Thinking of every Joe who had ever come through badland. Take your time. Move carefully and with confidence. Don’t panic. Don’t run. Take your time. Pick your phone box. He heard a knock at the door. It’s some bloody hawker. Kate’s taken her overdose. It’s that fool Arab boy who lives downstairs and always thinks my bathroom’s leaking on him. He pulled on a dressing-gown, opened the door and saw Mary. He hauled her inside and slammed the door. Whatever seized him after that he didn’t know. Relief or fury, remorse or indignation. He slapped her once, then he slapped her again and on a clear day he would have taken her straight to bed.

“There’s a place called Farleigh Abbott near Exeter,” she said.

“What of it?”

“Magnus told him he’d put his mother in a house beside the sea in Devon.”

“Told who?”

“Poppy. His Czech controller. They were students together in Bern. He thinks Magnus is going to kill himself. I suddenly realised. That’s what’s in the burnbox with the secrets. The Station gun. Isn’t it?”

“How do you know it’s Farleigh Abbott?”

“He talked about his mother in Devon. He hasn’t got a bloody mother. His only place in Devon is Farleigh Abbott. ‘When I was in Devon,’ he’d say. ‘Let’s go to Devon for a holiday.’ It was Farleigh Abbott, always. We never went and he stopped talking about it. Rick used to take him there from school. They used to picnic and bicycle on the beach. It’s one of his ideal places. He’s there with a woman. I know he is.”