A Perfect Spy

Axel was prison-pale and a stone lighter. Pym could not have supposed, from his parting memory of him, that he had more flesh to give. But the purgers and interrogators and gaolers had managed to find it, as they usually do, and they had helped themselves to it in handfuls. They had taken it from his face, his wrists, his finger-joints and ankles. They had drained the last blood from his cheeks. They had also helped themselves to one of his teeth, though Pym did not discover this immediately, because Axel had his lips tight shut, and one twiglike forefinger raised to them in warning while he waved the other at the wall of Pym’s hotel bedroom, indicating microphones at work. They had smashed his right eyelid too, which drooped over its parent eye like a cocked hat, adding to his piratical appearance. But his coat, for all that, still hung over his shoulders like a musketeer’s cape, his moustache flourished, and he had inherited a marvellous pair of boots from somewhere, rich as timber, with soles like the running-boards of a vintage car.

“Magnus Richard Pym?” he demanded with theatrical gruffness.

“Yes?” said Pym after a couple of unsuccessful attempts to speak.

“You are charged with the crimes of espionage, provocation of the people, incitement to treason and murder. Also sabotage on behalf of an imperialist power.”

Still slouched languidly in his chair, Axel drove his hands together with improbable vigour, producing a thwack that echoed round the great bedroom, and no doubt impressed the microphones. After it, he offered the prolonged grunt of a man coming to terms with a heavy punch in the stomach. Delving in his jacket pocket, he then detached a small automatic pistol from the lining and, finger to his lips again, waved it about so that Pym got a healthy sight of it.

“Face the wall!” he barked, clambering with difficulty to his feet. “Place your hands on your head, you Fascist swine! March.”

Laying a hand gently round Pym’s shoulder, Axel guided him towards the door. Pym stepped ahead of him into the gloomy corridor. Two burly men in hats ignored him.

“Search his room!” Axel commanded them. “Find what you can but do not remove anything! Pay attention to the typewriter, his shoes and the lining of his suitcase. Do not leave his room until you receive orders from me personally. Walk slowly down the stairs,” he told Pym, prodding him in the small of the back with the gun.

“This is an outrage,” Pym said lamely. “I demand to see a British consul immediately.”

At the reception desk the female concierge sat knitting like a hag at the guillotine. Axel prodded Pym past her to a waiting car outside. A yellow cat had taken shelter underneath it. Pulling open the passenger door, Axel nodded Pym to get in and, having shooed the cat into the gutter, climbed in after him and started the engine.

“If you collaborate completely you will not be harmed,” Axel announced in his official voice, indicating a patch of crude perforations in the dashboard. “If you attempt to escape you will be shot.”

“This is a ridiculous and scandalous act,” Pym muttered. “My government will insist that those responsible be punished.”

But once again, his words had none of the confident ring they had possessed in the cosy barrack hut in Argyll where he and his colleagues had practised the skills of resisting interrogation.

“You have been watched from the moment you arrived here,” said Axel loudly. “All your movements and contacts have been observed by the protectors of the people. You have no alternative but to make an immediate admission of your guilt on all charges.”

“The free world will see this senseless act as the latest evidence of the brutality of the Czech régime,” Pym declared, with increasing strength. Axel nodded approvingly.

The streets were empty, the old houses also. They entered what had once been a rich suburb of patrician villas. Sprawling hedges hid the lower windows. The iron gateways, wide enough to ride a coach through, were blocked with ivy and barbed wire.

“Get out,” Axel commanded.

The evening was young and beautiful. The full moon shed a white, unearthly light. Watching Axel lock the car, Pym smelt hay and heard the clamour of insects. Axel guided him down a narrow path between two gardens until they came to a gap in the yew hedge to his right. Grabbing Pym’s wrist, he led him through it. They were standing on the terrace of what had once been a great garden. A many-towered castle lifted into the sky behind them. Ahead, almost lost to a thicket of roses, stood a decrepit summerhouse. Axel wrestled with the door but it refused to yield.

“Kick it for me, Sir Magnus,” he said. “This is Czechoslovakia.”

Pym drove his foot against the panel. The door gave, they stepped inside. On a rusted table stood the familiar bottle of vodka and a tray of bread and gherkins. Grey stuffing was bleeding from the ripped covers of the wicker chairs.