A Perfect Spy

Waiting again. Thinking of every Joe who had ever come through badland. Take your time. Move carefully and with confidence. Don’t panic. Don’t run. Take your time. Pick your phone box. He heard a knock at the door. It’s some bloody hawker. Kate’s taken her overdose. It’s that fool Arab boy who lives downstairs and always thinks my bathroom’s leaking on him. He pulled on a dressing-gown, opened the door and saw Mary. He hauled her inside and slammed the door. Whatever seized him after that he didn’t know. Relief or fury, remorse or indignation. He slapped her once, then he slapped her again and on a clear day he would have taken her straight to bed.

“There’s a place called Farleigh Abbott near Exeter,” she said.

“What of it?”

“Magnus told him he’d put his mother in a house beside the sea in Devon.”

“Told who?”

“Poppy. His Czech controller. They were students together in Bern. He thinks Magnus is going to kill himself. I suddenly realised. That’s what’s in the burnbox with the secrets. The Station gun. Isn’t it?”

“How do you know it’s Farleigh Abbott?”

“He talked about his mother in Devon. He hasn’t got a bloody mother. His only place in Devon is Farleigh Abbott. ‘When I was in Devon,’ he’d say. ‘Let’s go to Devon for a holiday.’ It was Farleigh Abbott, always. We never went and he stopped talking about it. Rick used to take him there from school. They used to picnic and bicycle on the beach. It’s one of his ideal places. He’s there with a woman. I know he is.”

CHAPTER 15

You will imagine, Tom, with what glory in his youthful heart the brilliant intelligence officer and lover celebrated the completion of his two years of devoted service to the flag in distant Austria and set about returning to civilian England. His leave-taking from Sabina was not as heart-rending as he had feared, for as the day approached she feigned a Slav indifference to his departure.

“I shall be happy woman, Magnus. Your English wives will not make sour faces at me. I shall be economist and free woman, not the courtesan of a frivolous soldier.” Nobody had ever called Pym frivolous before. She even took herself on leave ahead of him to forestall the agony of parting. She is being brave, Pym told himself. His farewell from Axel, though haunted by rumours of fresh purges, had a similarly rounded feel to it.

“Sir Magnus, whatever happens to me, we have done a great work together,” he said as, in the evening light, they faced each other outside the barn that had become Pym’s second home. “Never forget you owe me two hundred dollars.”

“I never will,” Pym said.

He began the long walk back to Sergeant Kaufmann’s jeep. He turned to wave but Axel had vanished into the forest.

The two hundred dollars were a reminder of their increasing closeness during the final months of their relationship.

“My father’s pressing me for money again,” Pym had said one evening while they photographed a codebook he had borrowed from Membury’s cricket locker. “The Burmese police are proposing to arrest him.”

“Then send it to him,” Axel had replied, winding back the film of his camera. He slipped the film in his pocket and inserted a fresh one. “How much does he want?”

“Whatever it is, I haven’t got it. I’m a subaltern on thirteen shillings a day, not a millionaire.”

Axel had appeared to pay no further interest, and they turned instead to the topic of Sergeant Pavel. Axel said it was time to stage a fresh crisis in Pavel’s life.

“But he had a crisis only last month,” Pym had objected. “His wife threw him out of his apartment for drunkenness and we had to help him buy his way in again.”

“We need a crisis,” Axel had repeated firmly. “Vienna is beginning to take him for granted and I do not care for the tone of their follow-up questions.”

Pym found Membury sitting at his desk. The afternoon sun was shining on one side of his friendly head while he read a fish book.

“I’m afraid Greensleeves wants a bonus of two hundred dollars cash,” he said.

“But my dear chap, we’ve paid him a pot of money this month already! What on earth can he want two hundred dollars for?”

“He’s got to buy his daughter an abortion. The doctor only takes U.S. dollars and it’s getting urgent.”

“But the child’s a mere fourteen. Who’s the man? They ought to throw him into prison.”

“It’s that Russian captain from headquarters.”

“The pig. The utter swine.”

“Pavel’s a Roman Catholic too, you know,” Pym reminded him. “Not a very good one, I agree. But it’s not easy for him either.”

The next night Pym counted two hundred dollars across the barn table. Axel tossed them back at him.

“For your father,” he said. “A loan from me to you.”

“I can’t do that. Those are operational funds.”

“Not any more. They belong to Sergeant Pavel.” Pym still did not pick up the money. “And Sergeant Pavel lends them to you as your friend,” Axel said, tearing a sheet of paper from his notebook. “Here — write me an I.O.U. Sign it and one day I shall make you pay it back.”