A Perfect Spy

“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.