A Perfect Spy

The stairs belonged to the houses of his childhood so he skipped up them lightly and forgot his aches and pains. The star-of-Bethlehem lampshade on the landing, though it shed a lousy light, was an old friend from The Glades. Everything is kind to me, he noticed. When he pushed open the door of his room, everything winked and laughed at him like a surprise party. The parcels were all as he had prepared them but it never did any harm to check. So he checked them now. Envelope for Miss Dubber, lots of money and apologies. Envelope to Jack, no money and come to think of it, precious few apologies. Poppy, how odd that you are such a distant sound at last. That stupid filing cabinet, I don’t know why I bothered with it all these years. I haven’t even looked inside. The burnbox, what a weight it is for so few secrets. Nothing to Mary but he’d really nothing much more to say to her: “Sorry I married you for cover. Glad I managed a bit of love along the way. Hazards of the trade, m’dear. You’re a spy too, remember? Rather better than Pym was, come to think of it. Class will tell in the end.” Only the envelope to Tom bothered him, and he tore open the sealed flap feeling that a last word of explanation was after all required.

“You see, Tom, I am the bridge,” he wrote in a hand that was irritatingly sluggish. “I am what you must walk over to get from Rick to life.”

Then he added his initials, as one always should with a postscript, and addressed a fresh envelope and put the old one in the waste-paper basket because he had been taught from early in his life that untidiness was the sister of insecurity.

Then he hauled the burnbox from the top of the cabinet to the desk and with the two keys from his chain disarmed it and fished out first the files which were too secret to be classified at all and which gave a lot of bogus information about the networks he and Poppy had so painstakingly composed. He chucked them in the waste-paper basket too. When he’d done that he pulled out the gun and loaded it and cocked it, all rather swiftly, and set it on the desk thinking of the many times he had carried a gun and not fired it. He heard a scraping sound from the roof, and said to himself: must be a cat. He shook his head as if to say those damned cats, they get everywhere these days, don’t give the birds a chance. He glanced at his gold watch, a wide gesture, remembering that Rick had given it to him and that he might forget to take it off in the bath. So he took it off now and laid it on Tom’s envelope and drew a cheerful moon face right next to it, the sign they drew for one another to say “Smile.” He undressed and laid his clothes neatly by the bed, then he put on his dressing-gown and took both his towels from the clothes-horse, the big one for the bath, the small one for hands and face. He slipped the gun into the dressing-gown pocket, leaving the safety catch in the “off” position because it was the laborious ethic of the trainers that a safed gun was more dangerous than a live one. He was only going across the corridor but it’s a violent world these days and you can’t be too careful. About to open the bathroom door he was annoyed to discover that the porcelain knob had stiffened up and scarcely turned. Damned doorknob. Look at that. It took him all the strength of both his hands to twist it and, more annoying still, some idiot must have left soap on it, because his hands kept slithering and he had to use a towel to get a grip. It’s probably dear old Lippsie, he thought with a smile: always living in that world inside her head. Placing himself for the last time before the shaving mirror, he arranged the towels around his head and shoulders, making a bonnet of the small one and a cape of the large one, because if there was one thing Miss Dubber hated above another, it was mess. Then he held the gun to where his right ear was, forgetting, as anybody might in the circumstances, whether the trigger of your Browning.38 automatic had two pressures or just the one. And he noticed how he was leaning: not away from the gun, but into it, like someone a little deaf, straining for a sound.

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