A Perfect Spy

Pym has been visiting the golden semicircle that lies along Route 128. Welcome to America’s Technological Highway. It is a place like a crematorium without a smokestack. Discreet, low-lying factories and laboratories crouch amid shrubberies and landscaped mounds. He has picked the brains of a British delegation and taken a few forbidden photographs with a concealed camera in his briefcase. He has lunched privately at the home of a great American patriarch of industry named Bob, whom he has befriended for his indiscretion. They have sat on the verandah, they have gazed across a garden of descending lawns which a black man is sedately mowing with a triple cutter. After lunch Pym drives to Needham, where Axel is waiting for him beside a bend in the Charles River, which serves them as their local Aare. A heron skims over the blue-green rushes. Red-tailed hawks eye them from dead trees. Their path climbs deep into the woods, along a raised esker.

“So what’s the matter?” says Axel finally.

“Why should anything be the matter?”

“You are tense and you are not speaking. It is reasonable to assume something is the matter.”

“I’m always tense for a debriefing.”

“Not tense like this.”

“He wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Bob wouldn’t?”

“I asked him how the Nimitz refitting contract was going. He replied that his corporation was making great strides in Saudi Arabia. I asked him about his discussions with the Admiral of the Pacific Fleet. He asked me when I was going to bring Mary up to Maine for the weekend. His face has changed.”

“How?”

“He’s angry. Somebody’s warned him about me. I think he’s more angry with them than he is with me.”

“What else?” says Axel patiently, knowing that with Pym there is always one more door.

“I was followed to his house. A green Ford, smoked windows. There’s nowhere to hang around and American watchers don’t walk, so they left again.”

“What else?”

“Stop asking what else!”

“What else?”

Suddenly a great gulf of caution and mistrust separated them.

“Axel,” said Pym finally.

It was unusual for Pym to address him by name; the proprieties of espionage normally restrained him.

“Yes, Sir Magnus.”

“When we were in Bern together. When we were students. You weren’t, were you?”

“Not a student?”

“You weren’t spying on anyone. On the Ollingers. On the Cosmo. On me. You hadn’t got people running you in those days. You were just you.”

“I was not spying. Nobody was running me. Nobody owned me.”

“Is that true?”

But Pym knew already that it was. He knew it by the rare glow of anger that shone in Axel’s eyes. By the solemnity and distaste in his voice.

“It was your idea that I was a spy, Sir Magnus. It was never mine.”

Pym watched him light a fresh cigar and noticed how the flame of the match trembled.

“It was Jack Brotherhood’s idea,” Pym corrected him.

Axel drew on the cigar and his shoulders slowly relaxed. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It is simply unimportant at our age.”

“Bo’s authorised a hostile interrogation,” said Pym. “I’m flying back to London on Sunday to face the music.”

* * *

Who should talk to Axel of interrogation? And of a hostile one at that? Who should dare compare the nocturnal posturings of a couple of the Firm’s tame barristers in a safe house in Sussex with the beatings and electric shocks and deprivations that for two decades had been Axel’s irregular fare? I blush now to think I used the word to him at all. In ’52, as I learned later, Axel had denounced Slansky and demanded the death sentence for him — not very loud because he was half dead himself.

“But that’s terrible!” Pym had cried. “How can you serve a country that does that to you?”

“It was not terrible at all, thank you. I should have done it earlier. I secured my survival and Slansky would have died whether I denounced him or not. Give me another vodka.”

In ’56 he went down again: “That time it was less problematic,” he explained, lighting himself a fresh cigar. “I denounced Tito and nobody even bothered to go and kill him.”

In the early sixties, while Pym was in Berlin, Axel had rotted for three months in a mediaeval dungeon outside Prague. What he promised that time has always been unclear to me. It was the year when the Stalinists themselves were purged, if only halfheartedly, and Slansky was declared alive again, if only posthumously. (Though he was still ruled to be guilty of his offences, you will remember, if only innocently.) In any case, Axel came back looking ten years older, and for some months had a soft “r” in his speech that was very like a stammer.