A Perfect Spy

And I remember that touch always. I can see it any time by looking into my own palm: dry and decent and forgiving. And the laughter: from the heart as it always was, once he had ceased to be tactical and become my friend again.

CHAPTER 16

How appropriate, Tom, that looking back over all the years that follow our meeting in the Czech summerhouse, I see nothing but America, America, her golden shores glittering on the horizon like the promise of freedom after the repressions of our troubled Europe, then leaping towards us in the summer joy of our attainment! Pym still has more than a quarter of a century in which to serve his two houses according to the best standards of his omnivorous loyalty. The trained, married, case-hardened, elderly adolescent has still to become a man, though who will ever break the genetic code of when a middle-class Englishman’s adolescence ends and his manhood takes over? Half a dozen dangerous European cities, from Prague to Berlin to Stockholm to the occupied capital of his native England, lie between the two friends and their goal. Yet it seems to me now they were no more than staging places where we could provision and refurbish and watch the stars in preparation for our journey. And consider for a moment the dreadful alternative, Tom: the fear of failure that blew like a Siberian wind on our unprotected backs. Consider what it would have meant, to two men such as ourselves, to have lived out our lives as spies without ever having spied on America!

It must be said quickly, lest there is any doubt of it left in your mind, that after the summerhouse, Pym’s path was set for life. He had renewed his vow and in the terms your Uncle Jack and I have always lived by, Tom, there was no way out. Pym was owned and hooked and pledged. Finish. After the barn in Austria, well, yes, there had been a little latitude still, though never any prospect of redemption. And you have seen how, if feebly, he did try to jump clear of the secret world and brave the hazards of the real one. Not with any conviction, true. But he made a stab at it, even if he knew he would be about as much use out there as a beached fish dying of too much oxygen. But after the summerhouse, God’s brief to Pym was clear: no more dithering; stay put in your proper station, in the element to which nature has appointed you. Pym needed no third telling.

“Make a clean breast of it,” I hear you cry, Tom. “Hurry home to London, go to Personnel, pay the penalty, begin again!” Well now, Pym thought of that, naturally he did. On the drive back to Vienna, on the aeroplane home, on the bus to London from Heathrow, Pym did a lot of energetic agonising along those lines, for it was one of the occasions when the whole of his life was pinned up in a vivid strip cartoon inside his skull. Begin where? he asked himself, not unreasonably. With Lippsie, whose death, in his gloomier hours, he was still determined to take upon himself? With Sefton Boyd’s initials? With poor Dorothy whom he had driven off her head? With Peggy Wentworth, screaming her dirt at him, another victim for sure? Or with the day he first picked the locks of Rick’s green cabinet or Membury’s desk? How many of the systems of his life exactly are you proposing that he bare to the guilt-bestowing gaze of his admirers?

“Then resign! Bolt to Murgo! Take the teaching job at Willow’s.” Pym thought of that too. He thought of half a dozen dark holes where he could bury his leftover life and hide his guilty charm. Not one of them attracted him for five minutes.

Would Axel’s people really have exposed Pym if he had cut and run? I doubt it, but that isn’t the point. The point is, Pym quite frequently loved the Firm as much as he loved Axel. He adored its rough, uncomprehending trust in him, its misuse of him, its tweedy bear-hugs, flawed romanticism and cock-eyed integrity. He smiled to himself each time he stepped inside its Reichskanzleis and safe palaces, accepted the unsmiling salute of its vigilant janitors. The Firm was home and school and court to him, even when he was betraying it. He really felt he had a lot to give it, just as he had a lot to give to Axel. In his imagination, he saw himself with cellars full of nylons and black-market chocolate, enough to see everybody right in every shortage — and intelligence is nothing if not an institutionalised black market in perishable commodities. And this time Pym himself was the hero of the fable. No Membury stood between himself and the fraternity.

“Suppose that on a lonely drive to Plzeň, Sir Magnus, you stopped your car to give a lift to a couple of workmen on their way to work. You would do that?” Axel had suggested, in the small hours of the morning in the summerhouse, when he had put Pym back together again.

Pym conceded that he might.