A Perfect Spy

I don’t mean to disappoint you, Tom, but I do honestly forget, perhaps deliberately, the details of Rick’s Berlin transactions. Pym was expecting his own judgment at the time, not Rick’s. I remember two sisters and that they were of noble Prussian stock and lived in an old house in Charlottenburg, because Pym called on them to pay them off for the usual missing paintings Rick was selling for them, and the diamond brooch he was getting cleaned for them, and the fur coats that were being remodelled by a first-rate tailor friend of his in London who would do it free because he thought the world of Rick. And I remember the sisters had a bent nephew who was involved in a shady arms racket, and that somewhere in the story Rick had an aeroplane for sale, the finest, best-preserved fighter-bomber you could wish for, in mint condition inside and out. And for all I know it was being painted by those lifelong Liberals, Balham’s of Brinkley, and guaranteed to fly everyone to Heaven.

It was in Berlin also that Pym courted your mother, Tom, and took her away from his boss and hers, Jack Brotherhood. I am not sure that you or anybody else has a natural right to know what accident conceived you, but I’ll try to help you as best I can. There was mischief in Pym’s motive, I won’t deny it. The love, what there was of it, came later.

“Jack Brotherhood and I seem to be sharing the same woman,” Pym remarked impishly to Axel one day, during a callbox-to-callbox conversation.

Axel required to know immediately who she was.

“An aristo,” said Pym, still teasing him. “One of ours. Church and spy Establishment, if that means anything to you. Her family’s connections with the Firm go back to William the Conqueror.”

“Is she married?”

“You know I don’t sleep with married women unless they absolutely insist.”

“Is she amusing?”

“Axel, we are talking of a lady.”

“I mean is she social?” Axel demanded impatiently. “Is she what you call diplomatic geisha? Is she bourgeois? Would Americans like her?”

“She’s a top Martha, Axel. I keep telling you. She’s beautiful and rich and frightfully British.”

“Then maybe she is the ticket that will get us to Washington,” said Axel, who had recently been expressing anxieties about the number of random women drifting through Pym’s life.

Soon afterwards, Pym received similar advice from your Uncle Jack.

“Mary has told me what’s going on between you, Magnus,” he said, taking him aside in his most avuncular manner. “And if you ask me you could travel further and fare a damned sight worse. She’s one of the best girls we’ve got, and it’s time you looked a little less disreputable.”

So Pym, with both his mentors pushing in the same direction, followed their advice and took Mary, your mother, to be his truly wedded partner at the High Table of the Anglo-American alliance. And really, after all that he had given away already, it seemed a very reasonable sacrifice.

“Hold his hand, Jack”—Pym wrote—“He’s the dearest thing I had.”

“Mabs, forgive”—Pym wrote—”Dear, dear Mabs, forgive. If love is whatever we can still betray, remember that I betrayed you on a lot of days.”

He began a note to Kate and tore it up. He scribbled “Dearest Belinda” and stopped, scared by the silence around him. He looked sharply at his watch. Five o’clock. Why hasn’t the clock chimed? I’ve gone deaf. I’m dead. I’m in a padded cell. From across the square the first chime sounded. One. Two. I can stop it any time I want, he thought. I can stop it at one, at two, at three. I can take any part of any hour and stop it dead. What I cannot do is make it chime midnight at one o’clock. That’s God’s trick, not mine.

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