Part 41 (1/2)

”Yes.” ”Developed?”

”I a.s.sume not.”

”From the dead letter box in Pisek?” ”Yes.”

”Then I wouldn't bother to develop it. It's cheap pedlar material. Money?” ”A bit, yes.” ”How much?” ”Five thousand dollars.” ”Codebooks?”

”A couple.”

”Anything I might have forgotten? No atom bomb?”

”There's a concealed camera.”

”Is that the talc.u.m-powder tin?”

”If you peel the paper off the lid, it makes a lens.”

”Anything else?”

”A silk escape map. In one of my neckties.”

Axel drew on his cigar again, his thoughts seemingly far away. Suddenly he drove his fist on to the iron table. ”We have got to get ourselves out of this, Sir Magnus!” he exclaimed angrily. ”We have got to get ourselves out. We've got to rise in the world. We've got to help each other until we become aristos ourselves and we can kick the other b.a.s.t.a.r.ds goodbye.” He stared into the gathering darkness. ”You make it so difficult for me, you know that? Sitting in that prison, I had bad thoughts about you. You make it very, very difficult to be your friend.”

”I don't see why.”

”Oh, oh! He doesn't see why! He does not see that when the bold Sir Magnus Pym applies for a business visa, even the poor Czechs can look in their card index and discover there was a gentleman of the same name who was a Fascist imperialist militarist spy in Austria, and that a certain running dog named Axel was his fellow conspirator.” His anger reminded Pym of the days of his fever in Bern. His voice had acquired the same unpleasant edge. ”Are you really so ignorant of the manners of the country you are spying on that you do not understand what it means these days for a man like me even to have been in the same continent as a man like you, let alone his fellow conspirator in a spying game? Do you really not know that in this world of whisperers and accusers, I may literally die of you? You've read George Orwell, haven't you? These are the people who can rewrite yesterday's weather!”

”I know,” said Pym.

”Do you also know then, that I may be fatally contaminated like all those poor agents and informers you are showering with money and instructions? Do you not know that you are delivering them to the scaffold, unless they belong to us already? You know at least what they will do with you, I a.s.sume, unless I make them hear me, these aristos of mine, if we can't satisfy their appet.i.tes by other means? They mean to arrest you and parade you before the world's press with your stupid agents and a.s.sociates. They plan to have another show trial, hang some people. When they start to do that, it will be sheer oversight if they don't hang me too. Axel, the imperialist lackey who spied for you in Austria! Axel, the revanchist t.i.toist Trotskyist typist who was your accomplice in Bern! They would prefer an American but in the meantime they will stretch a point and hang an Englishman until they can get hold of the real thing.” He flopped back, his fury exhausted. ”We've got to get out of this, Sir Magnus,” he repeated. ”We've got to rise, rise, rise. I am sick of bad superiors, bad food, bad prisons and bad torturers.” He drew angrily on his cigar again. ”It's time I looked after your career and you looked after mine. And this time properly. No bourgeois shrinking back from the big scoops. This time we are professionals, we make straight for the biggest diamonds, the biggest banks. I mean it.”

Suddenly, Axel turned his chair until it was facing Pym, then sat on it again and laughed, and tapped Pym smartly on the shoulder with the back of his hand to cheer him up.

”You got the flowers okay, Sir Magnus?”

”They were super. Someone handed them into our cab as we were leaving the reception.”

”Did Belinda like them?”

”Belinda doesn't know about you. I never told her.”

”Who did you say the flowers were from?”

”I said I'd no idea. Probably for another wedding altogether.”

”That was good. What's she like?”

”Super. We were childhood sweethearts together.”

”I thought Jemima was your childhood sweetheart.”

”Well, Belinda was too.”

”At the same time--both of them? That's quite a childhood you had,” Axel said with a fresh laugh as he refilled Pym's gla.s.s.

Pym managed to laugh too, and they drank together.

Then Axel began speaking, kindly and gently without irony or bitterness, and it seems to me that he spoke for about thirty years because his words are as loud in my ear now as they ever were in Pym's then, never mind the din of the cicadas and the cheeping of the bats.

”Sir Magnus, you have in the past betrayed me but, more important, you have betrayed yourself. Even when you are telling the truth, you lie. You have loyalty and you have affection. But to what? To whom? I don't know all the reasons for this. Your great father. Your aristocratic mother. One day maybe you will tell me. And maybe you have put your love in some bad places now and then.” He leaned forward and there was a kindly, true affection in his face and a warm long-suffering smile in his eyes. ”Yet you also have morality. You search. What I am saying is, Sir Magnus: for once nature has produced a perfect match. You are a perfect spy. All you need is a cause. I have it. I know that our revolution is young and that sometimes the wrong people are running it. In the pursuit of peace we are making too much war. In the pursuit of freedom we are building too many prisons. But in the long run I don't mind. Because I know this. All the junk that made you what you are: the privileges, the sn.o.bbery, the hypocrisy, the churches, the schools, the fathers, the cla.s.s systems, the historical lies, the little lords of the countryside, the little lords of big business, and all the greedy wars that result from them, we are sweeping that away for ever. For your sake. Because we are making a society that will never produce such sad little fellows as Sir Magnus.” He held out his hand. ”So. I've said it. You are a good man and I love you.”

And I remember that touch always. I can see it any time by looking into my own palm: dry and decent and forgiving. And the laughter: from the heart as it always was, once he had ceased to be tactical and become my friend again.

16.

How appropriate, Tom, that looking back over all the years that follow our meeting in the Czech summerhouse, I see nothing but America, America, her golden sh.o.r.es glittering on the horizon like the promise of freedom after the repressions of our troubled Europe, then leaping towards us in the summer joy of our attainment! Pym still has more than a quarter of a century in which to serve his two houses according to the best standards of his omnivorous loyalty. The trained, married, case-hardened, elderly adolescent has still to become a man, though who will ever break the genetic code of when a middle-cla.s.s Englishman's adolescence ends and his manhood takes over? Half a dozen dangerous European cities, from Prague to Berlin to Stockholm to the occupied capital of his native England, lie between the two friends and their goal. Yet it seems to me now they were no more than staging places where we could provision and refurbish and watch the stars in preparation for our journey. And consider for a moment the dreadful alternative, Tom: the fear of failure that blew like a Siberian wind on our unprotected backs. Consider what it would have meant, to two men such as ourselves, to have lived out our lives as spies without ever having spied on America!

It must be said quickly, lest there is any doubt of it left in your mind, that after the summerhouse Pym's path was set for life. He had renewed his vow and in the terms your Uncle Jack and I have always lived by, Tom, there was no way out. Pym was owned and hooked and pledged. Finish. After the barn in Austria, well, yes, there had been a little lat.i.tude still, though never any prospect of redemption. And you have seen how, if feebly, he did try to jump clear of the secret world and brave the hazards of the real one. Not with any conviction, true. But he made a stab at it, even if he knew he would be about as much use out there as a beached fish dying of too much oxygen. But after the summerhouse, G.o.d's brief to Pym was clear: no more dithering; stay put in your proper station, in the element to which nature has appointed you. Pym needed no third telling.

”Make a clean breast of it,” I hear you cry, Tom. ”Hurry home to London, go to Personnel, pay the penalty, begin again!” Well now, Pym thought of that, naturally he did. On the drive back to Vienna, on the aeroplane home, on the bus to London from Heathrow, Pym did a lot of energetic agonising along those lines, for it was one of the occasions when the whole of his life was pinned up in a vivid strip cartoon inside his skull. Begin where? he asked himself, not unreasonably. With Lippsie, whose death, in his gloomier hours, he was still determined to take upon himself? With Sefton Boyd's initials? With poor Dorothy whom he had driven off her head? With Peggy Wentworth, screaming her dirt at him, another victim for sure? Or with the day he first picked the locks of Rick's green cabinet or Membury's desk? How many of the systems of his life exactly are you proposing that he bare to the guilt-bestowing gaze of his admirers?

”Then resign! Bolt to Murgo! Take the teaching job at Willow's.” Pym thought of that too. He thought of half a dozen dark holes where he could bury his leftover life and hide his guilty charm. Not one of them attracted him for five minutes.

Would Axel's people really have exposed Pym if he had cut and run? I doubt it, but that isn't the point. The point is, Pym quite frequently loved the Firm as much as he loved Axel. He adored its rough, uncomprehending trust in him, its misuse of him, its tweedy bear-hugs, flawed romanticism and c.o.c.k-eyed integrity. He smiled to himself each time he stepped inside its Reichskanzleis and safe palaces, accepted the unsmiling salute of its vigilant janitors. The Firm was home and school and court to him, even when he was betraying it. He really felt he had a lot to give it, just as he had a lot to give to Axel. In his imagination, he saw himself with cellars full of nylons and black-market chocolate, enough to see everybody right in every shortage--and intelligence is nothing if not an inst.i.tutionalised black market in perishable commodities. And this time Pym himself was the hero of the fable. No Membury stood between himself and the fraternity, ”Suppose that on a lonely drive to Plzen, Sir Magnus, you stopped your car to give a lift to a couple of workmen on their way to work. You would do that?” Axel had suggested, in the small hours of the morning in the summerhouse, when he had put Pym back together again.

Pym conceded that he might.

”And suppose, Sir Magnus, that as simple fellows will, they had confided to you, as you drove along, their fears about handling radioactive material without sufficient protective clothing. You would p.r.i.c.k up your ears?”

Pym laughed and agreed that he would.

”And suppose also that as a great operator and a generous spirit, Sir Magnus, you had written down their names and addresses and promised to bring them a pound or two of good English coffee next time you visited their region?”

Pym said he would certainly have done this.

”And suppose,” Axel continued, ”that having driven these fellows to the outer perimeter of the protected area where they work, you had the courage, and the initiative, and the officer qualities--as you a.s.suredly have--to park your car in a discreet spot and climb this hill.” Axel was indicating the very hill on a military map he happened to have brought along with him and spread over the iron table. ”And from its apex you photographed the factory, using the convenient protection of a thicket of lime trees whose lower branches are later discovered to have slightly marked the pictures? Your aristos would admire your enterprise? They would applaud the great Sir Magnus? They would instruct him to recruit the two loquacious workmen and obtain further details of the factory's output and purpose?”

”They surely would,” said Pym vigorously.

”Congratulations, Sir Magnus.”

Axel drops the very film into Pym's waiting palm. The Firm's own issue. Wrapped in anonymous green. Pym secretes it in his typewriter. Pym hands it to his masters. The wonder does not stop there. When the product is rushed to the Whitehall a.n.a.lysts, the factory turns out to be the very plant recently photographed from the air by an American overflight! With a show of reluctance, Pym supplies the personal particulars of his two innocent and, thus far, fict.i.tious informants. The names are filed, carded, checked, processed and bandied round the senior officers' bar. Until finally, under the divine laws of bureaucracy, they are the subject of a special committee.

”Look here, young Pym, what makes you think these chaps aren't going to turn you in next time you show up on their doorstep?”

But Pym is in interview mode, he has a large audience and is invincible: ”It's a hunch, sir, that's all.” Count two slowly. ”I think they trusted me. I think they're keeping their mouths shut and hoping I'll show up one evening exactly as I said I would.”

And events prove him right, as they would, wouldn't they, Jack? Braving all, our hero returns to Czecho and repairs, regardless of risk, to their very doorsteps--how can he fail to, since he is escorted there by Axel, who makes the introductions? For this time there will be no Sergeant Pavels. A loyal, bright-eyed repertory company of actors has been born, Axel is its producer and these are its founder-members. Painfully and dangerously, the network is built upon. By Pym, a cool number if ever we knew one. Pym, the latest hero of the corridors, the chap who put Conger together.