A Perfect Spy

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s my stomach,” says Pym.

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

* * *

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