A Perfect Spy

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.