A Perfect Spy (60 page)

“This is Elsa,” McLaird said, presenting a dumpy Carinthian housewife with four children, in the grill-room of the Blue Rose. “Her boyfriend runs a café in St. Pölten. Sends her the registration numbers and insignia of the Russian lorries that go past his window, doesn't he, Elsa? All in secret writing on the back of his love letters. Three kilos of medium-roast coffee a month. In arrears.”

There were a dozen of them and Pym set to work immediately to develop and welfare them in every way he knew. Today when I play them through my memory they are as fine a bunch of neverwozzers as ever came the way of an aspiring spymaster. But to Pym they were simply the best scouts ever and he would see them right if it killed him.

And I have left till last Sabina, Jack, who like her friend Marlene in Vienna was an interpreter, and like Marlene was the most beautiful girl in the world, plucked straight from the pages of
Amor and Rococo Woman.
She was small like E. Weber, with broad, fluid hips and intense demanding eyes. Her breasts in summer or winter were high and very strong and, like her buttocks, pushed their way through the most workaday clothes, insistently demanding Pym's attention. Her features were those of a gloomy Slav elf haunted by sadness and superstition but capable of amazing bursts of sweetness, and if Lippsie had been reincarnated and made twenty-three again, she could have done a great deal worse than take Sabina's form.

“Marlene says you are respectable,” she informed Pym with contempt as she clambered aboard Corporal Kaufmann's jeep, not bothering to conceal her Rococo legs.

“Is that a crime?” Pym asked.

“Don't worry,” she replied ominously, and away they drove to the camps. Sabina spoke Czech and Serbo-Croat as well as German. In her spare time she was studying economics at Graz University, which gave her an excuse to talk to Corporal Kaufmann.

“You are believing in mixing agararian economy, Kaufmann?”

“I don't believe in any of it.”

“You are Keynesian?”

“I wouldn't be one with my own money, I'll tell you that,” said Kaufmann.

Thus the conversation went back and forth while Pym searched for ways of brushing carelessly against her white shoulder, or causing her skirt to open a fraction further to the north.

Their destination on these journeys was the camps. For five years the refugees of Eastern Europe had been pouring into Austria through every fast-closing gap in the barbed wire: crashing frontiers in stolen cars and lorries, across minefields, clinging to the underneath of trains. They brought their hollow faces and their shorn children and their puzzled old and their frisky dogs, and their Lippsies in the making, to be corralled and questioned and decided over in their thousands, while they played chess on wooden packing cases and showed each other photographs of people they would never see again. They came from Hungary and Rumania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and sometimes Russia, and they hoped they were on their way to Canada and Australia and Palestine. They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects. All passed across Pym's vision as he rode in his jeep from camp to camp with Kaufmann and Sabina, questioning, grading and recording, then hastening home to Membury with his booty.

At first his sensitivity was offended by so much misery and he had a hard time disguising his concern for everyone he spoke to: yes, I will see you to Montreal if it kills me; yes, I will send word to your mother in Canberra that you are safely here. At first Pym was also embarrassed by his lack of suffering. Everyone he questioned had had more experience in a day than he had in his whole young life and he resented them. Some had been crossing borders since they were children. Others spoke of death and torture so casually that he became indignant at their unconcern, until his disapproval sparked their anger and they flung back at him with mockery. But Pym the good labourer had work to do, and a commanding officer to please and, when he armed himself, a quick and covert mind to do it with. He had only to consult his own nature to know when someone was writing in the margin of his memory and excluding the main text. He knew how to make small talk while he was watching, and how to read the signals that came back to him. If they described a night crossing over the hills, Pym crossed with them, lugging their Lippsie suitcases and feeling the icy mountain air cutting through their old coats. When one of them told a lie direct, Pym rapidly took back-bearings on likely versions of the truth with the aid of his mental compass. Questions teemed in him and, budding lawyer that he was, he learned quickly to shape them into a pattern of accusation. “Where do you come from? What troops did you see there? What colour shoulder boards did they wear? What did they drive around in, what weapons did they have? Which route did you take, what guards, obstructions, dogs, wire, minefields did you meet along your way? What shoes were you wearing? How did your mother manage, your grandmother, if the mountain pass was so steep? How did you cope with two suitcases and two small children when your wife was so heavily pregnant? Is it not more likely that your employers in the Hungarian secret police drove you to the border and wished you luck as they showed you where to cross? Are you a spy and if so, would you not prefer to spy for us? Or are you merely a criminal, in which case you would surely like to take up spying, rather than be tossed back across the border by the Austrian police?” Thus Pym drew from his own criss-cross lives in order to unravel theirs, and Sabina with her scowls and moods and occasional gorgeous smiles became the sultry voice in which he did it. Sometimes he let her translate into German for him, in order to give himself the secret advantage of hearing everything twice.

“Where you learn to play these stupid games?” she asked him sternly one evening as they danced together at the Hotel Wiesler, to the disapproval of the army wives.

Pym laughed.

On the brink of manhood, with Sabina's thigh riding against his own, why should he owe anything to anybody? So he invented a story for her about this cunning German he'd known at Oxford who had turned out to be a spy.

“We had a rather weird battle of wits,” he confessed, drawing upon hastily created memories. “He used all the tricks in the book and to start with I was as innocent as a babe and believed everything he told me. Gradually the contest got a bit more even.”

“He was Communist?”

“As it turned out, yes. He made a show of hiding it, but it slipped out when you really went for him.”

“He was hommsexual?” Sabina asked, voicing an ever-ready suspicion as she squirmed more deeply into him.

“Not so far as I could see. He had women in regiments.”

“He slept only with military women?”

“I meant he had large quantities of them. I was using a metaphor.”

“I think he was wishing to disguise his hommsexuality. This is normal.”

Sabina spoke of her own life as if it belonged to someone she hated. Her stupid Hungarian father had been shot at the border. Her fool mother had died in Prague attempting to produce a baby for a worthless lover. Her older brother was an idiot and studying to be a doctor in Stuttgart. Her uncles were drunkards and had got themselves shot by the Nazis and the Communists.

“You want I give you Czech lesson Saturday?” she asked him one evening in an even stricter tone than usual, as they drove home three abreast.

“I would like that very much,” Pym replied, holding her hand at her side. “I'm really beginning to enjoy it.”

“I think we make love this time. We shall see,” she said severely, at which Kaufmann nearly drove into a ditch.

Saturday came and neither Rick's shadow nor Pym's terrors could prevent him from ringing Sabina's doorbell. He heard a footstep softer than her usual practical tread. He saw the light-spots of her eyes regard him through the eye-slit in the door, and did his best to smile in a rugged, reassuring manner. He had brought enough Naafi whisky to banish the guilt of ages, but Sabina had no guilt and when she opened the door to him she was naked. Incapable of speech he stood before her clutching his carrier bag. In a daze he watched her reset the security chain, take the bag from his lifeless hands, stalk to the sideboard and unpack it. The day was warm but she had lit a fire and turned back the bedcovers.

“You have had many women, Magnus?” she demanded. “Women in regiments like your bad friend?”

“I don't think I have,” said Pym.

“You are hommsexual like all English?”

“I'm really not.”

She led him to the bed. She sat him down and unbuttoned his shirt. Severely, like Lippsie when she needed something for the laundry van outside. She unbuttoned the rest of him and arranged his clothes over a chair. She guided him on to his back and spread herself over him.

“I didn't know,” said Pym aloud.

“Please?”

He started to say something, but there was too much to explain and his interpreter was already occupied. He meant: I didn't know, for all my longing, what I was longing for till now. He meant: I can fly, I can swim on my front and on my back and on my side and on my head. He meant: I'm whole and I've joined the men at last.

 

It was a balmy Friday afternoon in the villa six days later. In the gardens below the windows of Membury's enormous office, the Rittmeister in his lederhosen was shelling peas for Wolfgang. Membury sat at his desk, his battledress unbuttoned to the waist while he drafted a questionnaire for trawler captains that he proposed to send in hundreds to the major fishing fleets. For weeks now he had set his heart on tracing the winter routes of sea trout, and the unit's resources had been hard pressed to accommodate him.

“I've had a rather rum approach made to me, sir,” Pym began delicately. “Somebody claiming to represent a potential defector.”

“Oh but how interesting for you, Magnus,” Membury said politely, prising himself with difficulty from his preoccupations. “I hope it's not another Hungarian frontier guard. I've rather had my fill of them. So has Vienna, I'm sure.” Vienna was a growing worry to Membury, as Membury was to Vienna. Pym had read the painful correspondence between them that Membury kept safely locked at all times in the top left drawer of his flimsy desk. It might be only a question of days before the captain of Fusiliers arrived in person to take charge.

“He's not Hungarian, actually, sir,” said Pym. “He's Czech. He's attached to HQ Southern Command based outside Prague.”

Membury tilted his large head to one side as if shaking water out of his ear. “Well that's heartening,” he remarked doubtfully. “Div. Int. would give their eye-teeth for some good stuff about Southern Czecho. Or anywhere else in Czecho for that matter. The Americans seem to think they have a monopoly of the place. Somebody said as much to me on the telephone only the other day, I don't know who.”

The telephone line to Graz ran through the Soviet Zone. In the evenings Russian technicians could be heard on it, singing drunken Cossack music.

“According to my source he's a disgruntled clerk sergeant working in their strongroom,” Pym persisted. “He's supposed to be coming out tomorrow night. If we're not there to receive him he'll go to the Americans.”

“You didn't hear of him through the Rittmeister, did you?” said Membury nervously.

With the skill of long habituation, Pym entered the risky ground. No, it was not the Rittmeister, he assured Membury. At least it didn't sound like the Rittmeister. The voice sounded younger and more positive.

Membury was confused. “Could you possibly explain?” he said.

Pym did.

It was just an ordinary Thursday evening, he said. He'd been to the movies to see
Liebe 47,
and on his way back he thought he'd drop in at the Weisses Ross for a beer.

“I don't think I know the Weisses Ross.”

“It's just another pub, sir, really, but the Czech émigrés use it a lot and everyone sits at long tables. I'd been there literally two minutes when the waiter called me to the phone.
‘Herr Leutnant, fur Sie.'
They know me a bit there so I wasn't too surprised.”

“Good for you,” said Membury, impressed.

“It was a man's voice, speaking High German. ‘Herr Pym? Here is an important message for you. If you do exactly as I tell you, you will not be disappointed. Have you pen and paper?' I had, so he started reading to me at dictation speed. He checked it back with me and rang off before I could ask him who he was.”

From his pocket Pym produced the very sheet of paper, torn from the back of a diary.

“But if this was last night, why on earth didn't you tell me earlier?” Membury objected, taking it from him.

“You were at the Joint Intelligence Committee meeting.”

“Oh my hat, so I was. He asked for you by name,” Membury remarked with pride, still looking at the paper. “‘ Only Lieutenant Pym will do.' That's rather flattering, I must say.” He pulled at a protruding ear. “Well look here, you take jolly good care,” he warned, with the sternness of a man who could refuse Pym nothing. “And don't go too near the border in case they try and haul you over.”

 

This was not by any means the first advance tip-off of a defector's arrival that had come Pym's way in recent months, not even the sixth, though it was the first that had been whispered to him by a naked Czech interpreter in a moonlit orchard. Only a week before, Pym and Membury had sat out a night in the Carinthian lowlands waiting to receive a captain of Rumanian Intelligence and his mistress who were supposedly approaching in a stolen aeroplane crammed with priceless secrets. Membury had the Austrian police close off the area, Pym fired coloured Very lights into the empty air as they had been instructed in secret messages. But when dawn came no aeroplane had arrived.