A Perfect Spy

So were there no genuine Joes at all? I hear you asking, Tom, in a tone of disappointment. Were they all pretend? Indeed there were genuine Joes. Never fear! And very good they were too, the best. And every one of them profited from Pym’s improved tradecraft, and looked up to Pym as he looked up to Axel. And Pym and Axel looked up to the genuine Joes also, in their fashion, regarding them as the unwitting ambassadors of the operation, testifying to its smooth running and integrity. And used their good offices to shield and advance them, arguing that every improvement in their circumstances brought glory to the networks. And smuggled them to Austria for clandestine training and rehabilitation. The genuine Joes were our mascots, Tom. Our stars. We made sure they would never want for anything again, so long as Pym and Axel were there to see them right. Which, as a matter of fact, is how it all went wrong. But later.

* * *

I wish I could adequately describe to you, Jack, the pleasure of being really well run. Of jealousy, of ideology, nothing. Axel was as keen for Pym to love England as he was to direct him at America, and it was part of his genius throughout our partnership to praise the freedoms of the West while tacitly implying that Pym had it within his reach, if not his duty as a free man, to bring some of this freedom to the East. Oh, you may laugh, Jack! And you may shake your grey hairs at the depths of Pym’s innocence! But can you not imagine how easily it came to Pym to take a tiny, impoverished country into his protection, when his own was so favoured, so victorious and wellborn? And, from where he saw it, so absurd? To love poor Czecho like a rich protector through all her terrible vicissitudes, for Axel’s sake? To forgive her lapses in advance? And blame them on the many betrayals that his parent England had perpetrated against her? Does it honestly amaze you that Pym, by making bonds with the forbidden, should be once more escaping from what held him? That he who had loved his way across so many borders should now be loving his way across another, with Axel there to show him how to walk and where to cross?

“I’m sorry, Bel,” Pym would say to Belinda as he abandoned her yet again to the Scrabble board in their dark apartment in Prague’s diplomatic ghetto. “Got to go up country. May be a day or two. Come on, Bel. Kiss-kiss. You wouldn’t rather be married to a nine-till-five man, would you?”

“I can’t find The Times,” she said, shaking him aside. “I suppose you left it at the bloody Embassy again.”

But however frayed Pym’s nerves when he arrived at the rendezvous, Axel reclaimed him every time they met. He was never hasty, never importunate. He was never anything but respectful of the pains and sensibilities of his agent. It was not stasis one side and all movement the other either, Tom, far from it. Axel’s ambitions were for himself as well as Pym. Was not Pym his ricebowl, his fortune in all its meanings, his passport to the privileges and status of a paid-up Party aristo? Oh, how he studied Pym! Such obsessive, flattering concentration on a single man! How delicately he coaxed and gentled him! How meticulous he was, always to put on the clothes Pym needed him to wear — now the mantle of the wise and steady father Pym had never had, now the bloody rags of suffering that were the uniform of his authority, now the soutane of Pym’s one confessor, his Murgo absolute. He had to learn Pym’s codes and evasions. He had to read Pym faster than ever he could read himself. He had to scold and forgive him like the parents who would never slam the door in his face, laugh where Pym was melancholy and keep the flame of all Pym’s faiths alive when he was down and saying, I can’t, I’m lonely and afraid.