A Perfect Spy

Above all, he had to keep his agent’s wits constantly alert against the seemingly limitless tolerance of the Firm, for how could we ever dare believe, either of us, that the dear, dead wood of England was not a cladding for some masterly game being played inside? Imagine the headaches Axel had, as Pym went on producing his mountains of intelligence material, to persuade his masters they were not the victims of some grand imperialist deception! The Czechs admired you so much, Jack. The old ones knew you from the war. They knew your skills and respected them. They knew the dangers, every day, of underestimating their wily adversary. Axel had to fight toe to toe with them, more than once. He had to argue with the very henchmen who had tortured him, in order to prevent them from pulling Pym out of the field and giving him a little of the medicine they periodically dished out to one another, on the off chance of extracting a true confession from him: “Yes, I am Brotherhood’s man!” they wanted him to scream. “Yes, I am here to plant disinformation on you. To distract your eye from our anti-Socialist operations. And yes, Axel is my accomplice. Take me, hang me, anything but this.” But Axel prevailed. He begged and bullied and slammed the table, and when still more purges were planned to explain the chaos left behind by the last ones, he scared his enemies into silence by threatening to expose them for their insufficient appreciation of the historically inevitable imperialist decay. And Pym helped him every inch of the distance. Sat again at his sickbed — if only metaphorically — gave him nourishment and courage, held up his spirits. Ransacked the Station files. Armed him with outrageous examples of the Firm’s incompetence worldwide. Until, fighting thus for their mutual survival, Pym and Axel drew still closer together, each laying the irrational burdens of his country at the other’s feet.

And once in a while, when a battle was over and won, or a great scoop had been achieved on one side or the other, Axel would put on the play clothes of the libertine and arrange a midnight dash to his frugal equivalent of St. Moritz, which was a small white castle in the Giant Mountains, set aside by his service for people they thought the world of. The first time they went there was for an anniversary celebration, in a limousine with blackened windows. Pym had been in Prague two years.

“I have decided to present you with an excellent new agent, Sir Magnus,” Axel announced as they zigzagged contentedly up the gravel road. “The Watchman network is lamentably short of industrial intelligence. The Americans are pledged to the collapse of our economy, but the Firm is providing nothing to support their optimism. How would you regard a middle executive from our great National Bank of Czechoslovakia, with access to some of our most serious mismanagements?”

“Where am I supposed to have found him?” Pym countered cautiously, for these were delicate decisions, requiring lengthy correspondence with Head Office before the approach to a new potential source was licensed.

The dinner table was laid for three, the candelabra lit. The two men had taken a long, slow walk in the forest and now they were drinking an apéritif before the fire, waiting for their guest.

“How is Belinda?” said Axel.

This was not a subject they often discussed, for Axel had little patience with unsatisfactory relationships.

“Fine, thank you, as always.”

“That’s not what our microphones tell us. They say you fight like two dogs day and night. Our listeners are becoming thoroughly depressed by you both.”

“Tell them we’ll mend our ways,” said Pym with a rare flash of bitterness.

A car was coming up the hill. They heard the footsteps of the old servant crossing the hall, and the rattle of bolts.

“Meet your new agent,” Axel said.

The door banged open and Sabina marched in. A little more matronly, perhaps, at the hips: one or two hard lines of officialdom around the jaw; but his delicious Sabina all the same. She was wearing a stern black dress with a white collar, and clumpy black court shoes that must have been her pride, for they had green brilliants on the straps and the sheen of imitation suède. Seeing Pym, she drew up sharply and scowled at him in suspicion. For a moment, her manner reflected the most radical disapproval. Then to his delight she burst out laughing her crazy Slav laugh, and ran to cover him with her body, much as she had done in Graz when he took his first faltering lessons in Czech.