A Perfect Spy

“Put him into the field while he’s unsullied,” says Personnel, who has a way of speaking about people as if they weren’t seated across the desk from him.

Pym is trained. Pym is complete. Pym is armed and ready and only one question remains. What mantle shall he wear? What disguise shall cover the secret frame of his maturity? In a series of unconsummated interviews reminiscent of the Oxford Appointments Board, Personnel unlocks a bedlam of possibilities. Pym will be a freelance writer. But can he write and will Fleet Street have him? With disarming openness Pym is marched through the offices of most of our great national newspapers, whose editors inanely pretend they do not know where he has come from, or why, though henceforth they will know him for ever as a creature of the Firm, and he them. He is already halfway to stardom with the Telegraph when a Fifth Floor genius has a better plan: “Look here, how would you like to join up with the Corns again, trade on your old allegiances, get yourself a billet in the international left wing set? We’ve always wanted to chuck a stone into that pond.”

“It sounds fascinating,” says Pym as he sees himself selling Marxism Today on street corners for the rest of his life.

A more ambitious plan is to get him into Parliament where he can keep an eye on some of these fellow-travelling M.P.s: “Any particular preference as to party, or aren’t we fussy?” asks Personnel, still in tweeds from his weekend in Wiltshire.

“I’d rather prefer it not to be the Liberals if it’s all the same to you,” says Pym.

But nothing lasts long in politics and a week later Pym is destined for one of the private banks whose directors wander in and out of the Firm’s Head Office all day long, moaning about Russian gold and the need to protect our trade routes from the Bolsheviks. At the Institute of Directors, Pym is lunched by a succession of captains of finance who think they may have an opening.

“I knew a Pym,” says one, over a second brandy or a third. “Kept a dirty great office in Mount Street somewhere. Best man at his job I ever knew.”

“What was his job, sir?” Pym asks politely.

“Con man,” says his host with a horsy laugh. “Any relation?”

“Must be my distant wicked uncle,” says Pym, laughing also, and hurries back to the sanctuary of the Firm.

On goes the dance, how seriously I’ll never know, for Pym is not yet privy to these backstage deliberations, though it isn’t for want of peeking into a few desk drawers and locked steel cupboards. Then suddenly the mood changes.

“Look here,” says Personnel, trying to hide his aggravation. “Why the devil didn’t you remind us you spoke Czech?”

* * *

Within a month, Pym is attached to an electrical-engineering company in Gloucester as a management trainee, no previous experience necessary. The managing director, to his lasting regret, was at school with the Firm’s reigning Chief, and has made the mistake of accepting a series of valuable government contracts at a time when he needed them. Pym is given to the exports department, charged with opening up the East European market. His first mission is nearly his last.

“Well, why don’t you just sort of take a general swing through Czecho and test the market?” says Pym’s notional employer wanly. And beneath his breath: “And do please remember that whatever else you get up to is nothing to do with us, will you?”

“A quick in and out,” Pym’s controller tells him gaily, in the safe house in Camberwell where cub agents receive their operational briefing before cutting their milk-teeth. He hands Pym a portable typewriter with hidden cavities in the carriage.

“I know it seems silly,” says Pym, “but I can’t actually type.”

“Everyone can type a bit,” says Pym’s controller. “Practise over the weekend.”

Pym flies to Vienna. Memories, memories. Pym hires a car. Pym crosses the border without the smallest difficulty, expecting to see Axel waiting for him the other side.

* * *

The countryside was Austrian and beautiful. Many barns lay beside many lakes. In Plzeň Pym toured a despondent factory in the company of square-faced men. In the evening he kept the safety of his hotel, watched by a pair of secret policemen who drank one coffee apiece until he went to bed. His next calls were in the north. On the road to Ústí he saw army lorries and memorised their unit insignia. To the east of Ústí lay a factory that the Firm suspected of producing isotope containers. Pym was unclear what an isotope was, or what it should be contained in, but he drew a sketch of the main buildings and hid it in his typewriter. Next day he continued to Prague and at the arranged hour sat himself in the famous Tyn church, which has a window looking into Kafka’s old apartment. Tourists and officials wandered about unsmiling.