A Perfect Spy (27 page)

A darkly dressed figure has risen like a shade from the bed.

It's Dorothy, thinks Pym. It's Lippsie. It's Jemima's mother lodging a complaint. But as the darkness lifts, the aspiring monk observes that the figure before him is wearing neither Lippsie's headscarf nor Dorothy's cloche hat, nor has she the daunting authority of Lady Sefton Boyd. Like Lippsie she sports the antiquarian uniform of pre-war Europe but there the comparison ends. Her flared skirt has a nipped waist. She wears a blouse with a lace ruff and a feathery bit of hat that makes the whole outfit jaunty. Her breasts are in the best tradition of
Amor and Rococo Woman,
and the dim light flatters their roundness.

“Son, I want you to meet a noble and heroic lady who has known great advantages and misfortunes and fought great battles and suffered cruelly at the hands of fate. And who has paid me the greatest compliment a woman can pay a man by coming to see me in her hour of need.”

“Rot-schilt, darling,” the lady says softly, lifting her limp hand to a level where Pym may kiss or shake it.

“Heard that name anywhere, have you, son, with your fine education?
Baron
Rothschild?
Lord
Rothschild?
Count
Rothschild? Rothschild's
Bank?
Or are you going to tell me you're not conversant with the name of a certain great Jewish family with all the wealth of Solomon at its fingertips?”

“Well yes, of course I've heard of it.”

“Well then. Just you sit yourself here and listen to what she has to say because this is the baroness. Sit down, my dear. Come here between us. What do you think of him, Elena?”

“Beautiful, darling,” says the baroness.

He's selling me to her, thinks Pym, not at all unwilling. I'm his last desperate deal.

So there we all are, Tom. Everyone on the go and madness here to stay. Your father and grandfather seated buttock to buttock with a Jewish baroness in the half-furnished director's knocking-shop of a West End palace without electricity, and Mr. Cunningham, as I gradually realise, keeping guard at the door. An air of daft conspiracy comparable only with later daft conspiracies mounted by the Firm, as her soft voice embarks on one of those patient refugee monologues that your Uncle Jack and I have listened to more times than either of us can remember, except that tonight Pym is a virgin in these matters, and the baroness's thigh is pressed cosily against that of the aspiring monk.

“I am a humble widow of simple but pious family, married happily but oh so briefly to the late Baron Luigi Svoboda-Rothschild, the last of the great Czech line. I was seventeen, he twenty-one, imagine our pleasure. My greatest regret is I bore him no child. Our country seat was the Palais of Nymphs at Brno, which first the Germans then the Russians rape worse than a woman literally. My Cousin Anna she marry to the head man from De Beers diamonds Cape Town, got houses like you not imagine, too much luxury I don't approve.” Pym does not approve either, as he tries to tell her with a monkish smirk of sympathy. “With my Uncle Wolfram I never speak and thanks God I say. He collaborate with the Nazis. The Jews hang him upside down.” Pym sets his jaw in grim approval. “My Granduncle David give all his tapestries to the Prado. Now he is poor like a kulak, why don't the museum give him something so he can eat?” Pym rolls his head in despair at the baseness of the Spanish soul. “My Auntie Waldorf—” She breaks down beautifully while Pym wonders whether the agitation of his body is visible to her in the darkness.

“It's a damn shame!” cries Rick, while the baroness composes herself. “My God, son, those Bolsheviks could swoop down on Ascot tomorrow without a by-your-leave and help themselves to a fortune. Go on, my dear. Son, tell her to go on. Call her Elena, she likes it. She's not a snob. She's one of us.”

“Weiter, bitte,”
says Pym.

“Weiter,”
the baroness echoes approvingly and pats her eyes with Rick's handkerchief.
“Jawohl,
darling.
Sehr gut!”

“Oh but you should hear his accent,” Mr. Cunningham calls from the door. “Not a wrinkle, you can quote me, same as my own boy.”

“What does she say, son?”

“She can manage,” says Pym. “She can handle it.”

“She's a damned gem. I'm going to see her right, you mark my words.”

So is Pym. He is going to marry her at least. But meanwhile, to his irritation, he must hear more praise for my dear late husband the baron. My Luigi was not only the proprietor of a great palace, he was a financial genius and until the outbreak of war the Chairman of the House of Rothschild in Prague.

“They were the richest of the lot,” says Rick. “Weren't they, son? You've read your history. What's your verdict?”

“They couldn't even count it,” Mr. Cunningham confirms from the door with the pride of an impresario. “Could they, Elena? Ask her. Don't be shy.”

“We give such concerts, darling,” the baroness confides to Pym. “Princes from all countries. We got house from marble. We got mirrors, culture. Like here,” she adds graciously, indicating a priceless oil painting of Prince Magnus in his paddock, done from a photograph. “We lose everything.”

“Not quite everything,” says Rick under his breath.

“When the Germans come, my Luigi he refuse to flee. He face the Nazi pigs from the balcony, got a pistol in his hand, don't never been heard of since.”

Another necessary break follows in which the baroness allows herself a delicate sip of brandy from a row of crystal decanters on the floor, and Rick to Pym's fury takes over the story, partly because Rick is already tired of listening, but more particularly because a secret is approaching, and secrets in court etiquette are Rick's alone to divulge.

“That baron was a fine man and a fine husband, son, and he did what any fine husband would do, and believe me, if your mother was in a position to appreciate it, I'd do the same for her tomorrow—”

“I know you would,” says Pym hastily.

“That baron got some of the best treasures out of that palace, he put them in a box and he gave that box to certain very good friends of his and friends of this fine lady here, and he gave orders that when the British won the war this same box should be handed over to his lovely young wife, with everything it contained, however much it may have risen in value in the meantime.”

The baroness knows the menu from memory and again selects Pym as her audience, for which purpose it is necessary for her to arrest his attention with a delicate hand placed on his wrist.

“One Gutenberg Bible, nice condition, darling, one Renoir early, two Leonardo medical. One first edition Goya caprices, artist annotation, three hundred best gold American dollar, Rubens a couple cartoons.”

“Cunningham says it's worth a bomb,” says Rick when she seems to have finished.

“It's Hiroshima,” says Mr. Cunningham from the door.

Pym contrives an ethereal smile intended to indicate that great art knows no price. The baroness intercepts it and understands.

It is an hour later. The baroness and her protector have departed, leaving father and son alone in the great unlighted room. The traffic below the window has subsided. Shoulder to shoulder on the bed they are eating fish and chips which Pym has been dispatched to buy with precious pound notes from Rick's back pocket. They wash it down with a bottle of Château d'Yquem from a Harrods crate.

“Are they still there, son?” says Rick. “Did they see you? Those men in the Riley. Heavy built.”

“I'm afraid they are,” says Pym.

“You believe in her, don't you, son? Don't spare my feelings. Do you believe in that fine woman or do you think she's a blackhearted liar and adventuress to boot?”

“She's fantastic,” says Pym.

“You don't sound convinced. Spit it out, son. She's our last chance, I'll tell you that for nothing.”

“It's just I wasn't quite sure why she hadn't gone to her own people.”

“You don't know those Jews the way I do. They're some of the finest people in the world. There's others, they'd have the coat off her back as soon as look at her. I asked her the same question. I didn't pull my punches either.”

“Who's Cunningham?” says Pym, barely able to conceal his distaste.

“Old Cunnie's first class. I'm bringing him into the business when this is over. Exports and Foreign. He'll be a tear-away. His sense of humour alone is worth five thousand a year to us. He wasn't on form tonight. He was tense.”

“What's the deal?” says Pym.

“Faith in your old man, that's the deal. ‘Rickie,' she says to me—that's what she calls me, she doesn't pull her punches either—‘Rickie, I want you get that box for me, sell the contents and invest the money in one of your fine enterprises, and I want you to take the cares off my shoulders and give me ten percent a year for life for as long as I'm spared, with all the necessary provisions of insurance and endowment if you go before me. I want that money to be yours to see the world right in whatever way you deem in your wisdom.' That's a big responsibility, son. If I had a passport I'd go myself. I'd send Syd if he was available. Syd would go. Cattle and pigs. That's what I'm going to do after this. Just a few acres and some livestock. I'm retiring.”

“What's happened to your passport?” said Pym.

“Son, I'm going to level with you, which I always do. That airy-fairy school of yours are hard bargainers. They want cash and they want it on the due day and that's it. You speak her language, that's the point. She likes you. She trusts you. You're my son. I could send Muspole but I'd never be sure he'd come back. Perce Loft's too legal. He'd scare her. Now slip to the window and see if that Riley's gone. Don't get the light on your face. They can't come in. They haven't got a warrant. I'm an honest citizen.”

Half hidden behind the chipped green filing cabinet, Pym squints steeply downward into the street in covert counter-surveillance. The Riley is still there.

There are no blankets for the bed so they make do with curtains and dust-sheets. Pym sleeps fitfully and freezes, dreaming of the baroness. Once Rick's arm falls violently across him, once he is roused by Rick's strangled voice calling out invective against a bitch called Peggy. And some time in the early hours he feels the soft female weight of Rick's nether body in silk shirt and underpants backing inexorably against him, which persuades him it is more restful on the floor. In the morning Rick still will not leave the house, so Pym walks alone to Victoria Station carrying his few possessions in a splendid white box-calf suitcase with Rick's initials in brass underneath the handle. He wears one of Rick's camel-hair coats though it is too large for him. The baroness, looking more delectable than ever, is waiting on the platform. Mr. Cunningham is there to wave them off. In the train lavatory, Pym opens the envelope Rick gave him and extracts a wad of white ten-pound notes and his first-ever instructions for a clandestine encounter.

I shall be brisk with the operational details of the Rothschild assignment, Jack—the days of hope, the days of doubt, the sudden leaps from one to the other. And I truly forget which street corners or codewords preceded the slow descent into inconclusion that has been my memory of so many operations since—just as I forget, if I ever knew, in what quantities of skepticism and blind faith Pym pursued his mission to its inevitable end. Certainly I have known operations since that have been mounted on quite as little likelihood of success, and have cost a great deal more than money. Signor Lapadi spoke only to the baroness, who relayed his information with disdain.

“Lapadi he talk mit his
Vertrauensmann,
darling.” She smiles indulgently when Pym asks what a
Vertrauensmann
is. “The
Vertrauensmann
is man we are trusting. Not yesterday, maybe not tomorrow. But today we are trusting him for ever.”

“Lapadi he need one hundred pound, darling”—a day or two later—“the
Vertrauensmann
know a man whose sister know the head from customs. Better he pay him now for friendship.”

Remembering Rick's instructions Pym offers token resistance but the baroness already has her hand out and is rubbing her finger and thumb together with delightful insinuation. “You want to paint the house, darling, first you got to buy the brush,” she explains and to Pym's amazement lifts her skirts to the waist and pops the banknotes into the top of her stocking. “Tomorrow we buy you nice suit.”