A Perfect Spy

“You are a very dangerous friend, Sir Magnus,” Axel complained as he stretched out his thin legs and surveyed his fine boots. “Why in God’s name couldn’t you have used an alias? Sometimes I think you have been put on earth in order to be my black angel.”

“They said I would be better being me,” Pym replied stupidly as Axel twisted the cap from the vodka bottle. “They call it natural cover.”

For a long time after that, Axel appeared unable to think of anything useful to say at all, and Pym did not feel it was his place to interrupt his captor’s reverie. They were sitting legs parallel and shoulder to shoulder like a retired couple on the beach. Below them, squares of cornfield stretched towards a forest. A heap of broken cars, more than Pym had ever seen on the Czech roads, littered the lower end of the garden. Bats wheeled decorously in the moonlight.

“Do you know this was my aunt’s house?” said Axel.

“Well, no, I didn’t, actually,” said Pym.

“Well, it was. My aunt was a witty woman. She once described to me how she broke the news to her father that she wished to marry my uncle. ‘But why do you want to marry him?’ said her father. ‘He has no money. He is very small and you are small too. You will have small children. He is like the encyclopedias you make me buy you every year. They look pretty but once you have opened them and seen inside, you don’t bother with them any more.’ He was wrong. Their children were large and she was happy.” He scarcely paused. “They want me to blackmail you, Sir Magnus. That is the only good news I have for you.”

“Who do?” said Pym.

“The aristos I work for. They think I should show you the photographs of the two of us coming out of the barn together in Austria, and play you the recordings of our conversations. They say I should wave the I.O.U. in your face that you signed to me for the two hundred dollars we tricked out of Membury for your father.”

“How did you answer them?” said Pym.

“I said I would. They don’t read Thomas Mann, these guys. They’re very crude. This is a crude country, as you no doubt noticed in your journeys.”

“Not at all,” said Pym. “I love it.”

Axel drank some vodka and stared into the hills. “And you people don’t make it any better. Your hateful little department has been seriously interfering in the running of my country. What are you? Some kind of American butler? What are you doing, framing our officials, sowing suspicion, and seducing our intellectuals? Why do you cause people to be beaten unnecessarily, when a few years in prison would be enough? Do they teach you no reality over there? Have you no reality at all, Sir Magnus?”

“I didn’t know the Firm was doing that,” said Pym.

“Doing what?”

“Interfering. Causing people to be tortured. That must be a different section. Ours is just a sort of postal service for small agents.”

Axel sighed. “Maybe they’re not doing it. Maybe I have been brainwashed by our own stupid propaganda these days. Maybe I’m blaming you unfairly. Cheers.”

“Cheers,” said Pym.

“So what will they find in your room?” Axel asked when he had lit himself a cigar and puffed at it several times.

“Pretty well everything, I suppose.”

“What’s everything?”

“Secret inks. Film.”

“Film from your agents?”

“Yes.”

“Developed?”

“I assume not.”

“From the dead letter box in Pisek?”

“Yes.”

“Then I wouldn’t bother to develop it. It’s cheap pedlar material. Money?”

“A bit, yes.”

“How much?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“Codebooks?”

“A couple.”

“Anything I might have forgotten? No atom bomb?”

“There’s a concealed camera.”

“Is that the talcum-powder tin?”

“If you peel the paper off the lid, it makes a lens.”

“Anything else?”

“A silk escape map. In one of my neckties.”

Axel drew on his cigar again, his thoughts seemingly far away. Suddenly he drove his fist on to the iron table. “We have got to get ourselves out of this, Sir Magnus!” he exclaimed angrily. “We have got to get ourselves out. We’ve got to rise in the world. We’ve got to help each other until we become aristos ourselves and we can kick the other bastards goodbye.” He stared into the gathering darkness. “You make it so difficult for me, you know that? Sitting in that prison, I had bad thoughts about you. You make it very, very difficult to be your friend.”

“I don’t see why.”