A Perfect Spy

“Well she’s dark,” said Pym ingenuously and you and Felicity and Sandy laughed and laughed, like Little Audrey, and Felicity remarked that it was quite clear what Magnus’s politics were. After that no meeting was complete without somebody asking after Maria’s complexion, and everyone cracking up over such a marvellously healthy misunderstanding. It was evening by the time Pym left your house and you had given him a present of a duty-free bottle of scotch to keep out the cold. Cost to the Firm in those days: I guess around five shillings. You offered to run him home but he said he loved to walk, thus earning further Brownie points. And walk he did, on air. He skipped and laughed and hugged his bottle and himself; he hadn’t felt so blessed in all his seventeen years. In a single Christmas, God had dished him up two saints. The one was on the run and couldn’t walk, the other was a handsome English warlord who served sherry on Boxing Day and had never had a doubt in his life. Both admired him, both loved his jokes and his voices, both were clamouring to occupy the empty spaces of his heart. In return he was giving to each man the character he seemed to be in search of. His decision to keep them secret from each other was never taken. Let each be the mistress that keeps the other home intact, Pym thought. If he thought at all.

“From whom did you steal it, Sir Magnus?” Axel asked in his formal English, looking curiously at the label.

“The chaplain,” said Pym without a second’s hesitation. “He’s a terrific bloke. Ex-army. I didn’t steal it. He gave it me, actually. A free bottle for regular attenders. They get it at diplomatic rates, of course. They don’t have to pay like in the shops.”

“He didn’t offer you cigarettes as well, did he?” said Axel.

“Why should he?”

“A bar of chocolate for a night with your sister?”

“I haven’t got a sister.”

“Good. Then let’s drink it.”

Do you remember our car journeys, Jack? I begin to think you do. Have you ever wondered how our forebears managed to run their agents in the days before the motorcar? Our first trip could not have come more handy. You had a date in Lausanne. You would need three hours. You gave no reason why you needed three hours in Lausanne, though you could have given me any cover story under the sun. Once again with the advantage of hindsight I know that you were deliberately admitting me to the secrecy of your work without letting on what the work was. You asked nothing of Pym on that occasion. You were building intimacy. The most you did was give him a rendezvous and a fallback and see whether he managed them. “Look here, it’s just possible I’ll have to make another call. If I’m not outside the Hotel Dora at three, be at the west side of the main post office at three-twenty.” Pym wasn’t good at east and west but he asked about six people till one of them got it right for him, and he made the fallback at three-twenty exactly, even if he was panting his heart out. You circled the square and the second time round you kept the car rolling and pushed open the door, and Pym hopped in like an airborne soldier to show you how able he was.

“I’ve been talking to Sandy,” you said as we drove to Geneva a week later. “He wants you to do a job for him. Mind?”

“Of course not.”

“You any good at translation?”

“What sort?”

“Can you keep your mouth shut?”

“I think so.”

You gave him his first Target for Tonight: “We get technical stuff in from time to time. Mainly about funny little Swissie firms that are manufacturing things we don’t much like. Nasty things that blow up,” you added with a smile. “It’s not exactly secret, but we hire a lot of local labour in the Embassy so we’d rather have it done by someone outside. Preferably a Brit. Someone we trust. You game?”

“Of course.”

“We pay. Not much, but it’ll buy you a dinner with Maria now and then. Heard from Jemima recently?”

“Jem’s fine, thanks.”

Pym had never been so scared in his life. You handed him the envelope, he put it in his pocket, you gave him your Master of Intrigue look and said “Good luck, old chap”—Yes, Jack, you did! We talked to each other like that — and Pym walked home changing that damned envelope from one pocket to another so many times he must have looked like a bookie on the run. And what was in it? Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you: junk. Photocopied junk from out-of-date armaments catalogues. It was Pym’s soul you were after, not the piffling translation. He lost the envelope about six times in his attic too. Under the bed, under the mattress, behind the mirror, up the chimney. He translated its contents in hours even Axel didn’t know he had. You paid Pym twenty francs. The technical dictionary had cost twenty-five but he knew that gentlemen didn’t mention things like that, even if Rick’s cheques, if they came at all, tended to meet with failure.