Part 42 (1/2)

There was resolution in Dollendorf's voice as well as embarra.s.sment, however, and his sergeant was peering sharply up and down the stairwell. ”The Herr Kommandant a.s.sures me that everything can be arranged discreetly, Herr Pym. He wishes at this stage to be delicate. He has made no approach to your superiors,” Dollendorf insisted, as Pym still hesitated. ”The Kommandant has high respect for you, Herr Pym.”

”I have to dress.”

”But quickly, if you are so kind, Herr Pym. The Kommandant would like the matter dealt with before he has to hand it over to the day s.h.i.+ft.”

Pym turned and walked carefully to his bedroom. He waited to hear the policemen following him, or a barked order, but they preferred to remain in the hall, looking at the Cries of London prints, courtesy of the Firm's accommodation section.

”May I use your telephone, Herr Pym?”

”Go ahead.”

He dressed with the door open, hoping to overhear the conversation. But all he heard was: ”Everything in order, Herr Kommandant. Our man is coming immediately.”

They walked down the broad stairs three abreast, to a parked police car with its light flas.h.i.+ng. Nothing behind it, no late-night loiterers in the street. How typical of the Germans to disinfect the entire area before arresting him. Pym sat in the front with Dollendorf. The sergeant sat tensely behind. It was raining and two in the morning. A red sky was seething with black cloud. n.o.body spoke any more.

And at the police station Jack will be waiting, thought Pym. Or the Military Police. Or G.o.d.

The Kommandant rose to receive him. Dollendorf and his sergeant had faded away. The Kommandant considered himself a man of supernatural subtlety. He was tall and grey and hollow-backed, with staring eyes and a narrow rattling mouth that operated at self-destructive speed. He leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together. He spoke in an anguished monotone to an etching of his birthplace in East Prussia that was hanging on the wall above Pym's head. He spoke, in Pym's calm estimation, for about six hours without a break and without appearing to draw breath, which for the Kommandant was the equivalent of a quick warm-up before they got down to a serious discussion. The Kommandant said that he was a man of the world and a family man, conversant with what he called the ”intimate sphere.” Pym said he respected this. The Kommandant said he was not didactic, he was not political, though he was a Christian Democrat. He was Evangelical but Pym could rest a.s.sured that he had no quarrel with Roman Catholics. Pym said he would have expected no less. The Kommandant said that misdeeds were a spectrum that ran between pardonable human error and calculated crime. Pym agreed, and heard a footfall in the corridor. The Kommandant begged Pym to bear in mind that foreigners in a strange country frequently felt a sense of false security when contemplating what might strictly be regarded as a felonious act.

”I may speak frankly, Herr Pym?”

”Please do,” said Pym, in whom by now a fearful premonition was beginning to form that it was Axel, not himself, who was under arrest.

”When they brought him to me, I looked at him. I listened to him. I said, 'No, this cannot be. Not Herr Pym. The man is an impostor,' I said. 'He is trading upon a distinguished connection.' However as I continued to listen to him, I detected a sense of, shall I say, vision? There is an energy here, an intelligence, I may say also a charm. Possibly, I thought, this man is who he says he is. Only Herr Pym can tell us, I thought.” He pressed a b.u.t.ton on his desk. ”I may confront him with you, Herr Pym?”

An old turnkey appeared, and waddled ahead of them down a painted brick corridor that stank of carbolic. He unlocked a grille and closed it behind them. He unlocked another. It was the first time I had seen Rick in prison, Tom, and I have made sure ever since that it was the last. In future times, Pym sent him food, clothes, cigars, and, in Ireland, Drambuie. Pym emptied his bank account for him, and if he had been a millionaire he would have bankrupted himself rather than see him there again, even in his mind's eye. Rick sat in the corner and Pym knew at once that he did this in order to give himself a bagger view of the cell, for ever since I had known him he always needed more s.p.a.ce than G.o.d had given him. He sat with his great head tipped forward, scowling with a convict's sullenness, and I swear he had closed off his hearing with his thinking and hadn't heard us coming.

”Father,” said Pym. ”It's me.”

Rick came to the bars and put a hand each side and his face between. He stared first at Pym, then at the Kommandant and the turnkey, not understanding Pym's position. His expression was sleepy and bad-tempered.

”So they got you too, did they, son?” he said--not, I thought, without a certain satisfaction. ”I always thought you were up to something. You should have read your law like I told you.” Slowly the truth began to dawn on him. The turnkey unlocked his door, the good Kommandant said, ”Please, Herr Pym,” and stood aside for Pym to enter. Pym went to Rick, and put his arms round him, but delicately, in case they had been beating him and he was sore. Gradually the puff began to fill Rick up again.

”G.o.d in heaven, old son, what the devil are they doing to me? Can't an honest fellow do a bit of business in this country? Have you seen the food they give you here, these German sausages? What do we pay our taxes for? What did we fight the war for? What's the good of a son who's head of the Foreign Office if he can't keep these German thugs away from his old man?”

But by then Pym was bear-hugging Rick, slapping his shoulders and saying it was good to see him in whatever circ.u.mstances. So Rick took to weeping also, and the Kommandant delicately removed himself to another room while, reunited, each pal celebrated the other as his saviour.

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 n.o.ble 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 Was.h.i.+ngton,” 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 d.a.m.ned 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d's trick, not mine.

A shocked stillness had descended over Pym and it was the literal stillness of death. He was standing at the window once more, watching the leaves drift across the empty square. An ominous inactivity marked everything he saw. Not a head in a window, not an open doorway. Not a dog or cat or squirrel or a single squawking child. They have taken to the hills. They are waiting for the raiders from the sea. But in his head he is standing in the cellar flat of a run-down office block in Cheapside, watching the two faded Lovelies on their knees as they tear open the last of Rick's files and lick their crabbed fingertips to speed them in their paperchase. Paper lies in growing mounds around them, it flutters through the air like swirling petals as they rummage and discard what they have vainly plundered: bank statements written in blood, invoices, furious solicitors' letters, warrants, summonses, love letters dripping with reproach. The dust of them is filling Pym's nostrils as he watches, the clang of the steel drawers is like the clang of his prison grilles, but the Lovelies heed nothing; they are avid widows ransacking Rick's record. At the centre of the debris, drawers and cupboard askew, stands Rick's last Reichskanzlei desk, its serpents twining themselves round its bombe legs like gilded garters. On the wall hangs the last photograph of the great TP in mayoral regalia and on the chimney piece, above a grate stuffed with false coals and the last of Rick's cigar b.u.t.ts, stands the bronze bust of your Founder and Managing Director himself, beaming out the last of his integrity. On the open door at Pym's back hangs the memorial tablet to Rick's last dozen companies, but a sign beside the bell reads ”Press here for attention,” because when Rick has not been saving his nation's faltering economy, he has been working as night porter for the block.

”What time did he die?” says Pym, before remembering that he knows.

”Evening, dearie. The pubs was just opening,” says one of the Lovelies through her cigarette as she heaves another batch of paper on to the rubbish heap.

”He was having a nice drop next door,” says the other, who like the first has-not for one moment relaxed her labours.

”What's next door?” says Pym.

”Bedroom,” says the first Lovely, tossing aside another spent file.

”So who was with him?” Pym asks. ”Were you with him? Who was with him, please?”

”We both were, dearie,” says the second. ”We was having a little cuddle, if you want to know. Your dad loved a drink and it always made him amorous. We'd had a nice tea early because of his commitments, steak with onion, and he'd had a bit of a barney on the blower with the telephone exchange about a cheque that was in the post to them. He was depressed, wasn't he, Vi?”

The first Lovely, if reluctantly, suspends her researches. The second does likewise. Suddenly they are decent London women, with kindly faces and puffed, overworked bodies.

”It was over for him, dearie,” she says, pus.h.i.+ng away a hank of hair with her chubby wrist.

”What was?”

”He said if he couldn't have that phone no more, he'd have to go. He said that phone was his lifeline and if he couldn't have it, it was a judgment on him, how would he do his business without a blower and a clean s.h.i.+rt?”

Mistaking Pym's silence for rebuke, her companion flares at him. ”Don't look at us like that, darling. He'd had all we've got long ago. We done the gas, we done the electric, we cooked his dinners, didn't we, Vi?”

”We done all we could,” says Vi. ”And given him the comfort, too.”

”We pulled tricks for him more than was natural, didn't we, Vi? Three a day for him, sometimes.”