A Perfect Spy

“I’ve no luggage, I’m afraid, but I’d like a room for the night,” she said to the silver-haired receptionist, handing him the credit card, and the receptionist, who recognised her at once, said, “How is your husband, madam?”

A chasseur showed her to a magnificent bedroom on the first floor. Room 121 that everybody asks for, she thought; the very room I brought him to on his birthday for dinner and a night of love. The memory did not move her in the least. She phoned down to the same receptionist and asked him to book her on tomorrow morning’s flight to London: “Of course, Frau Pym.” Smoke, she remembered. Smoke was what we called deception. She sat on the bed listening to the footsteps go quiet in the corridor as the dinner hour drew nearer. Double doors, twelve foot high. Painting called Evening on the Bosphorus by Eckenbrecher. “I’ll love you till we’re both too old,” he’d said, with his head on that very pillow. “Then I’ll go on loving you.” The phone rang. It was the concierge to say only club class was available. Mary said, then take club. She kicked her shoes off and held them in her hand while she softly opened the door and peered out. If I think I’m being watched I’ll put my shoes out to be cleaned. Burble and canned music from the bar. A whiff of dill sauce from the dining-room. Fish. They have such good fish. She stepped onto the landing, waited but still no one came. Marble statues. Portrait of bewhiskered nobleman. She pulled her shoes on, climbed one staircase, called the lift and descended to the ground floor, emerging in a side corridor out of sight of the reception area. A darkened passage led towards the rear of the hotel. She followed it, heading for a service door at the far end. The door was ajar. She pushed it, already smiling apologetically. An elderly waiter was adding the finishing touches to a private dinner table. Another door stood open behind him, leading to a side street. With a jolly “Guten Abend” to the waiter, Mary stepped quickly into the fresh air and hailed a cab. “Wienerwald,” she told the driver and heard him announce it over the intercom: “Wienerwald.” Nothing was following. Approaching the Ring she gave him a hundred schillings, hopped out at a pedestrian crossing and took a second cab to the airport where she sat reading in the ladies’ loo for an hour until the last flight to Frankfurt.

* * *

It was earlier on the same evening.

The house was semi-detached and backed on to a railway embankment exactly as Tom had described. Once again Brotherhood reconnoitred it before making his approach. The road was as straight as the railway and seemingly as long. Nothing but the setting autumn sun disturbed the skyline. There was the road, there was the embankment with its telegraph lines and water tower, and there was the huge sky of Brotherhood’s raggedy-arsed childhood which was always filled with white cloud left by the stop-go trains as they trundled across the fens to Norwich. The houses were all of the same design, and as he studied them their symmetry became beautiful to him without his understanding why. This was the order of life, he thought. This line of little English coffins is what I thought I was preserving. Decent white men in ordered rows. Number 75 had replaced his wooden gate with a wrought-iron one, with “Eldorado” done in curly handwriting. Number 77 had laid himself a concrete path with seashells bedded in it. Number 81 had faced himself in rustic teak. And number 79, upon which Brotherhood now advanced, was resplendent with a Union Jack fluttering from a fine white flagpole planted just inside his territory. The tyre marks of a heavy vehicle were cut into the little gravel drive. An electric speaker was set beside the polished doorbell. Brotherhood pressed and waited. A gasp of atmospherics greeted him, followed by a wheezing male voice.

“Who the bloody hell’s that?”

“Are you Mr. Lemon?” Brotherhood said into the microphone.

“What if I am?” said the voice.

“My name is Marlow. I wondered whether I might have a quiet word with you on a private matter.”

“I’ve got two of them and they both work. Piss off.”

In the window bay the net curtain parted far enough for Brotherhood to glimpse a bronzed, shiny little face, very wrinkled, observing him from the darkness.

“Let me put it this way,” said Brotherhood more softly, still into the microphone. “I’m a friend of Magnus Pym.”

A further crackling while the voice at the other end seemed to regather strength. “Well why the hell didn’t you say so in the first place? Come in and have a wet.”