A Perfect Spy

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

“What did you think?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you’ve written it again since?”

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

“Of course not.”

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

“So here we both are,” said Pym.

“That’s right.”

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

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

* * *

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

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