A Perfect Spy (62 page)

Axel smiled his old warm smile. “If we only knew how the dead sleep,” he said.

“We held a sort of wake, hung around the house, half expecting you to come back. Herr Ollinger made some useless phone calls and got absolutely nowhere, naturally. Frau O remembered she had a brother in one of the Ministries,
he
was no good. In the end I thought, To hell with it, what have we got to lose? So I went down to the Fremdenpolizei myself. Passport in hand. ‘My friend's missing. Some men dragged him from the house early this morning, said they came from you. Where is he?' I banged the table a bit and got nowhere. Then two rather creepy gentlemen in raincoats took me into another room and told me that if I made any more trouble the same thing would happen to me.”

“That was brave of you, Sir Magnus,” said Axel. Reaching out a pale fist he tapped Pym lightly on the shoulder to say thanks.

“No, it wasn't. Not really. I mean I did have somewhere to go. I was British and I had rights.”

“Sure. And you knew people at the Embassy. That's true also.”

“And they'd have helped me out too. I mean they tried to. When I went to them.”

“You did?”

“Absolutely. Later, of course. Not immediately. Rather as a last resort. But they had a go.... So anyway, back I went to the Länggasse and we—honestly, we buried you. It was awful. Frau O was up in your room still crying, trying to sort out whatever you'd left behind without looking at it. Which wasn't much. The Fremdenpolizei seemed to have pinched most of your papers. I took your library books back. Your gramophone records. We hung your clothes in the cellar. Then we sort of wandered round the house as if it had been bombed. ‘To think this could happen in Switzerland,' we kept saying. Really just like a death.”

Axel laughed. “It was good of you to mourn me at least. Thank you, Sir Magnus. Did you hold a funeral service also?”

“With no body and no forwarding address? All Frau O wanted to do was look for the culprit. She was convinced you'd been informed against.”

“Who did she think did it?”

“Everyone in turn really. The neighbours. The shopkeepers. Maybe someone from the Cosmo. One of the Marthas.”

“Which one did she choose?”

Pym picked the prettiest and frowned. “I seem to remember there was a leggy blonde one who was reading English.”

“Isabella?
Isabella informed against
me?”
said Axel incredulously. “But she was in love with me, Sir Magnus. Why would she do that?”

“Maybe that was the reason,” said Pym boldly. “She came round a few days after you'd gone, you see. Asked for you. I told her what had happened. She howled and wept and said she was going to kill herself. But when I mentioned to Frau O that she'd called, she promptly said, ‘Isabella is the one. She was jealous of his other women so she informed against him.'”

“What did you think?”

“Seemed a bit far-fetched to me, but then everything else did too. So yes, maybe Isabella did it. She did seem a bit crazy sometimes, to be honest. I could sort of imagine her doing something awful out of jealousy—on an impulse, you know—then persuading herself she hadn't done it in the first place. It's a sort of syndrome, isn't it, with jealous people?”

Axel took his time to reply. For a defector in the throes of negotiating his terms, Pym reflected, he was remarkably relaxed. “I don't know, Sir Magnus. I don't have your gifts of imagination sometimes. Do you have any other theories?”

“Not really. It could have happened so many ways.”

In the silence of the night, Axel replenished their glasses, smiling broadly. “You all seem to have thought about it far more than I have,” he confessed. “I'm very touched.” He lifted his palms, Slav style, languidly. “Listen. I was illegal. I was a bum. No money, no papers. On the run. So they caught me, they threw me out. That's what happens to illegals. A fish gets a hook in its throat. A traitor gets a bullet in his head. An illegal gets marched across the border. Don't frown so much. It's over. Who gives a damn who did it? To tomorrow!”

“Tomorrow,” Pym said, and they drank. “Hey—how did the great book go by the way?” he asked in the secret euphoria of his absolution.

Axel laughed louder. “Go? My God, it went! Four hundred pages of immortal philosophising, Sir Magnus. Imagine the Fremdenpolizei wading their way through that!”

“You mean they kept it—stole it? That's outrageous!”

“Maybe I was not too polite about the good Swiss burghers.”

“But you've written it again since?”

Nothing could quench his laughter. “Written it again? It would have been twice as bad next time. Better we bury it with Axel H. You still have
Simplicissimus?
You haven't sold him?”

“Of course not.”

A pause intervened. Axel smiled at Pym. Pym smiled at his hands, then raised his eyes to Axel.

“So here we both are,” said Pym.

“That's right.”

“I'm Lieutenant Pym and you're Jan's intelligent friend.”

“That's right,” Axel agreed, still smiling.

 

Having thus, in his own estimation, skilfully circumvented the one awkwardness that might have stood between them, the intelligence predator in Pym now artfully advanced upon the pertinent question of what had become of Axel since his eviction, and what his access had been, and so by extension—as Pym hoped—what cards he held, and what price he proposed to put on them as a reward for favouring the British over the Americans or even—dreadful thought—the French. In this he met at first with no unpleasant inhibition on Axel's part since, doubtless out of deference to Pym's position of authority, he seemed resigned to take the passive rôle. Nor could Pym fail to notice that his old friend in rendering account of himself assumed the familiar meekness of the displaced person in the presence of his betters. The Swiss had marched him across the German border, he said—and for ease of reference he mentioned the frontier point in case Pym wished to check. They had handed him over to the West German police who, having dealt him a ritual beating, handed him to the Americans, who beat him again, first for escaping, then for returning, and finally of course for being the red-toothed war criminal that he was not, but whose identity he had unwisely purloined. The Americans put him in prison while they prepared a fresh case against him, they brought in fresh witnesses who were too frightened not to identify him, they set a date to try him, and still Axel could reach nobody who would vouch for him or say he was just Axel from Carlsbad and not a Nazi monster brother. Worse still, as the rest of the evidence began to look increasingly thin, said Axel with an apologetic smile, his own confession became increasingly important, so they had naturally beaten him harder in order to obtain it. No trial was held, however. War crimes, even fictitious ones, were becoming out of date, so one day the Americans had thrown him on another train and handed him over to the Czechs who, not to be out-done, beat him for the double crime of having been a German soldier in the war and an American prisoner after it.

“Then one day they stopped beating me and let me out,” he said, smiling and opening his hands once more. “For this, it seems, I had my dear dead father to thank. You remember the great Socialist who had fought in the Thälmann brigade in Spain?”

“Of course I do,” said Pym, and it occurred to him as he watched Axel's quick hands gesticulating and his dark eyes twinkling that Axel had put aside the German in him and put on the Slav for good. “I had become an aristocrat,” he said. “In the new Czechoslovakia I was Sir Axel suddenly. The old Socialists had loved my father. The new ones had been my friends at school and were already in the Party apparatus. ‘Why do you beat up Sir Axel?' they asked my guards. ‘He's got a good brain, stop hitting him and let him out. Okay, so he fought for Hitler. He's sorry. Now he'll fight for us, won't you, Axel?' ‘Sure,' I said. ‘Why not?' So they sent me to university.”

“But what did you study?” said Pym amazed. “Thomas Mann? Nietzsche?”

“Better. How to use the Party to advance oneself. How to rise in the Youth Union. Shine in the committees. How to purge the faculties and students, climb over the backs of friends and the reputation of one's father. Which arses to kick and which to kiss. Where to talk too much and where to shut your mouth. Maybe I should have learned that earlier.”

Feeling he was close to the heart of things, Pym wondered whether it was time for him to take notes but decided not to destroy Axel's flow.

“Somebody had the nerve to call me a Titoist the other day,” Axel said. “Since '49 it's the latest insult.” Pym secretly wondered whether this was why Axel had come over. “Know what I did?”

“What?”

“I informed against him.”

“No! What for?”

“I don't know. Something bad. It's not what you say, it's who you say it to. You should know that. You're a big spy, I hear. Sir Magnus of the British Secret Service. Congratulations. Is Corporal Kaufmann all right out there? Maybe you should take him something?”

“I'll deal with him later, thank you.”

There was a hiatus while each in his separate way savoured the effect of this disciplinary note. They drank another toast, shaking their heads at one another over their luck. But inside himself Pym was less at ease than he let on. He had a sense of slipping standards and complicated undertones.

“So what work have you actually been up to these last days?” Pym asked, struggling to reclaim the ascendancy. “How does a sergeant from HQ Southern Command come to be wandering round the Soviet Zone of Austria, planning his defection?”

Axel was lighting himself a fresh cigar so Pym had to wait a minute for his answer.

“A sergeant I don't know. In my unit we have only aristos. Like you, I am also a great spy, Sir Magnus. It's a boom industry these days. We did well to select it.”

Needing suddenly to tend his outward appearance, Pym smoothed his hair back in a reflective gesture he was working on. “But you are still proposing to come over to us—assuming that we can offer you the right sort of terms of course?” he asked, with hard-edged courtesy.

Axel waved away such a stupid idea. “I've paid my ticket same as you. So it's not perfect but it's my country. I've crossed my last frontier. They've got to put up with me.”

Pym had a sensation of dangerous disconnection. “Then why are you here—if you don't want to defect—if I may ask.”

“I heard about you. The great Lieutenant Pym of Div. Int., more latterly of Graz. Linguist. Hero. Lover. I was so excited to think of you spying on me. And me spying on you. It was so beautiful to think we were back in our old attic together, just that little thin wall between us—knock, knock! ‘I've got to get in touch with this fellow,' I thought. Shake his hand. Give him a drink. Maybe we can set the world to rights, same as we used to in the old days.”

“I see,” said Pym. “Great.”

“ ‘Maybe we can put our heads together. We are reasonable men. Maybe he doesn't want to fight any more wars. Maybe I don't. Maybe we are tired of being heroes. Good men are scarce,' I thought. ‘How many people in the world have shaken hands with Thomas Mann?'”

“Nobody but me,” said Pym with a burst of real laughter and they drank again.

“I owe you so much, Sir Magnus. You were so generous. I never knew a better heart. I yelled at you, cursed you. What did you do? Held my head when I threw up. Cooked me tea, cleaned the vomit and the shit off me, fetched me books—back and forth to the library—read to me all night. I owe this man, I thought. I owe this man a step or two forward in his career. I should make him a gesture that is painful to me. If I can help him achieve a position of influence in the world, that's rare, that's already good. For the world as well as for him. Not many good men achieve a position of influence today. So I'll play a little trick and go and see him. And shake his hand. And say, thank you, Sir Magnus. And take him a gift to pay my debt to him and help him in his career, I thought. Because I love this man, do you hear?”

He had brought no straw hat filled with coloured packages but from the briefcase at his side he drew a folder and handed it to Pym across the table.

“You have landed a great coup, Sir Magnus,” he declared proudly as Pym lifted the cover. “Took me a lot of spying to get it for you. A lot of risks. Never mind. It's better than Grimmelshausen, I think. If they ever find out what I've done, I can bring you my balls as well.”

 

Pym closes his eyes and opens them again, but it is the same night in the same barn. “I'm a little fat Czech sergeant who loves his vodka,” Axel is explaining while Pym continues in a dream to turn the pages of his gift. “I'm a good soldier Schweik. Did we read that book? My name is Pavel. Hear me? Pavel.”

“Of course we read it. It was great. Is this genuine, Axel? It isn't a joke or anything?”

“You think fat Pavel takes a risk like this to bring you a joke? He has a wife who beats him, kids who hate him, Russian bosses who treat him worse than a dog. Are you listening?”

With half his head, yes, Pym is listening. He is reading too.

“Your good friend Axel H, he doesn't exist. You never met him tonight. In Bern long ago, sure, you met a sickly German soldier who was writing a great book and maybe his name was Axel, what's a name? But Axel vanished. Some bad guy informed against him, you never knew what happened. Tonight you are meeting fat Sergeant Pavel of Czech Army Intelligence who likes garlic and screwing and betraying his superiors. He speaks Czech and German, and the Russians use him as a dogsbody because they don't trust the Austrians. One week he's hanging around their headquarters in Wiener Neustadt playing messenger boy and interpreter, the next he's freezing his arse off on the zonal border looking for small spies. The week after that he's back in his garrison in Southern Czecho being kicked around by more Russians.” Axel is tapping Pym's arm. “See this? Pay attention. Here's a copy of his paybook. Look at it, Sir Magnus. Concentrate. He brought it for you because he doesn't expect anybody ever to believe anything he says unless it is accompanied by
Unterlagen.
You remember
Unterlagen?
Papers? They are what I didn't have in Bern. Take it with you. Show it to Membury.”