A Perfect Spy (78 page)

“I'll join you soon, darling,” Pym murmurs as she leaves. “Must pop in on the Wexlers or they'll think I'm cutting them.”

Where am I? In the Mall? On the Hill? Pym has no idea. The bare arms and thighs and unhampered breasts of young American womanhood are brushing contentedly against him. Friendly hands make space for him to pass; laughter, pot-smoke, din pack the scalding night. “What's your name, man?” “You British? Here, let's shake your hand—take a swig of this.” Pym adds a mouthful of bourbon to the impressive mixture he has already taken in. He is climbing a slope, whether of grass or tarmac he cannot determine. The White House glistens below him. Before it, erect and floodlit, the white needle of the Washington Monument cuts its light-path to the unreachable stars. Jefferson and Lincoln, each in his eternal patch of Rome, lie to either side of him. Pym loves them both. All the patriarchs and founding fathers of America are mine. He crests the slope. A black man offers him popcorn. It is salt and hot like his own sweat. Further up the valley, the harmless battles of other firework shows boom and splash into the sky. The crowd is denser up here but still they smile at him and part for him while they ooh and aah at the fireworks, call friendship to each other, break into patriotic song. A pretty girl is teasing him. “Hey, man, why won't you dance?” “Well, thank you, I will with pleasure but just let me take off my coat,” Pym replies. His answer is too woody, she has found another partner. He is shouting. At first he does not hear himself but as he enters a quieter place his own voice bursts on him with startling distinctness. “Poppy! Poppy! Where are you?” Helpfully, the good people round him take up the cry. “Hurry on over, Poppy, your boyfriend's here!” “Come on, Poppy, you bad bitch, where you bin?” Behind and above him the rockets become a ceaseless fountain against the swirling crimson clouds. Before him a gold umbrella opens, embracing the whole white mountain and lighting the emptying street. Instructions are ringing remotely in Pym's head. He is reading the numbers of the streets and doorways. He finds the door and with a final surge of joy feels the familiar bony hand close round his wrist and the familiar voice admonishing him.

“Your friend Poppy cannot come tonight, Sir Magnus,” says Axel softly. “So will you please stop shouting her name?”

Shoulder to shoulder the two men sit on the steps of the Capitol, gazing down into the Mall on the uncountable thousands they have taken into their protection. Axel has a basket containing a thermos flask of ice-cold vodka, and the best gherkins and brown bread America can supply.

“We made it, Sir Magnus,” he breathes. “We are home at last.”

O
h my heaven, Tom, the fun we had! The glorious freewheeling last honeymoon, even as the clouds gathered!

You would be pardoned for thinking that the duties of a Deputy Head of Station, though elevated, are inferior to those of his boss. Not so. The Head of Station in Washington floats in the upper air of intelligence diplomacy. His task is to massage the corpse of the Special Relationship and convince everybody, including himself, that it is alive and well. Every morning, poor Hal Tresider rose early, put on his old Shirburnian tie and sweat-patched tropical suit, and pedalled his push-bike earnestly away to the sodden dreamland of the committee rooms, leaving your father free to ransack the Station Registry, supervise the out-stations in San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago, or dart off to welfare a field agent in transit to Central America, China, or Japan. Another chore was shepherding grey-faced British boffins through the battery farms of American high technology, where the scientific secrets that are traded in Washington have their artificial conception. Dining the poor souls, Tom, where others would have left them mouldering in their motels. Consoling them in their woman-less, under-financed foreign exile. Chatting hastily memorised jargon at them, about nose cones, turning radius, underwater communication and captive-carry. Borrowing their working documents from them to give back in the morning. “Hullo—
that
looks interesting. Mind if I sneak a sight of that for our Naval Attaché? He's been badgering the Pentagon about that one for years, but they've been holding out on him.”

The Naval Attaché had a sight, London had a sight, Prague had a sight. For what use is a Cosmic Pass without a Cosmic readership?

Poor stolid, worthy Hal! How meticulously Pym misused your trust and torpedoed your innocent ambitions! Never mind. If the National Trust won't have you, you can always count on the Royal Automobile Club or a favoured City company.

“I say, Pymmie, there's some ghastly group of physicists visiting the Livermore weapons laboratory next month,” you would say, all apology and diffidence. “You don't think you could pop down there and feed and water a few of them and see they don't blow their noses on the tablecloth, could you? Why on earth this service has to behave like a lot of flat-footed security officers these days, I really don't know. I've a good mind to do a letter to London about it, if I can squeeze a moment.”

No country was ever easier to spy on, Tom, no nation so openhearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, share them, confide them, or consign them too early to the junk heap of planned American obsolescence. I am too young to know whether there was a time when Americans were able to restrain their admirable passion to communicate, but I doubt it. Certainly the path has been downhill since 1945, for it was quickly apparent that information which ten years ago would have cost Axel's service thousands of dollars in precious hard currency could by the mid-seventies be had for a few coppers from the
Washington Post.
We could have resented this sometimes, if we had been smaller natures, for there are few things more vexing in the spy world than landing a great scoop for Prague and London one week, only to read the same material in
Aviation Weekly
the next. But we did not complain. In the great fruit garden of American technology, there were pickings enough for everyone and none of us need ever want for anything again.

Cameos, Tom, little tiles for your mosaic are all I need to give you now. See the two friends romping under a darkening sky, catching the last rays of the sunlight before the game is over. See them thieving like children, knowing the police are round the corner. Pym did not take to America in a night, not in a month, for all the splendid fireworks of the Fourth. His love of the place grew with Axel's. Without Axel he might never have seen the light. Pym set out, believe it or not, determined to disapprove of everything he saw. He found no holding point, no stern judgment to revolt against. These vulgar pleasure-seeking people, so frank and clamorous, were too uninhibited for his shielded and involuted life. They loved their prosperity too obviously, were too flexible and mobile, too little the slaves of place, origin and class. They had no sense of that hush which all Pym's life had been the background music of his inhibition. In committee, it was true, they reverted soon enough to type, and became the warring princelings of the European countries they had left behind. They could run you up a cabal that would make mediaeval Venice blush. They could be Dutch and stubborn, Scandinavian and gloomy, Balkan and murderous and tribal. But when they mixed with one another they were American and loquacious and disarming, and Pym was hard put to find a centre to betray.

Why had they done him no harm? Why had they not cramped him, frightened him, forced his limbs into impossible positions from the cradle up? He found himself longing for the empty, darkened streets of Prague and the reassuring embrace of chains. He wanted his dreadful schools back. He wanted anything but the marvellous horizons that led to lives he had not lived. He wanted to spy upon hope itself, look through keyholes at the sunrise and deny the possibilities he had missed. And all this time, ironically, Europe was coming to get him. He knew that. So did Axel. Not a year had passed before the first insidious whispers of suspicion began to reach their ears. Yet it was this very intimation of mortality that shook Pym out of his reluctance, and inspired him to take the upper hand in their relationship just as Axel was saying, “End it, get out.” A mysterious gratitude for America the Just and her impending retribution seized him as, like a ponderous, puzzled giant, she bore steadily down on him, clutching in her great soft fist the multiplying evidence of his duplicity.

“Certain aristos in Langley and London are getting worried about our Czecho networks, Sir Magnus,” Axel warned him in his stiff, dry English at a crash meeting at the carpark of the Robert F. Kennedy Stadium. “They have begun to discern certain unfortunate patterns.”

“What patterns? There are no patterns.”

“They have noticed that the Czecho networks provide better intelligence when we are running them and almost nothing when we are not. That is the pattern. They have computers these days. It takes them five minutes to turn everything upside down and wonder what is the right way up. We have been careless, Sir Magnus. We were too greedy. Our parents were right. If you want a thing done well, you must do it yourself.”

“Jack Brotherhood can run those networks as well as we can. The head agents are genuine, they report whatever they can get hold of. All networks go moribund now and then. It's normal.”

“These networks only go moribund when we are not there, Sir Magnus,” Axel repeated patiently. “That is Langley's perception. It bothers them.”

“Then give the networks better material. Signal Prague. Tell your aristos we need a scoop.”

Axel sadly shook his head. “You know Prague, Sir Magnus. You know my aristos. The man who is absent is the man they conspire against. I have no power to persuade them.”

Calmly Pym contemplated the option that remained to him. Over dinner in their smart house in Georgetown, while Mary played gracious hostess, gracious English lady, gracious diplomatic geisha, Pym wondered whether it was time to persuade Poppy to cross one more frontier after all. He saw himself free of taint, a husband, son and father in good standing at last. He remembered an old Revolutionary farmhouse he and Poppy had admired in Pennsylvania, set among rolling fields and stone fences, with thoroughbred horses that loomed at them out of the sun-stained morning fog. He remembered the whitewashed churches, so sparkling and hopeful after the musty crypts of his childhood, and imagined the resettled family Pym at work and prayer there, and Axel rocking on the garden swing while he drank vodka and shelled peas for lunch.

I shall sell Axel to Langley and buy my freedom, he thought as he dazzled a pearly-toothed matron with a witty anecdote. I shall negotiate an administrative amnesty for myself, and put the record straight.

He never did, he never would. Axel was his keeper and his virtue, he was the altar on which Pym had laid his secrets and his life. He had become the part of Pym that was not owned by anybody else.

 

Do I need to tell you, Tom, how bright and dear the world looks when we know our days are numbered? How all life swells and opens to you, and says “Come in” just when you had thought you were unwanted? What a paradise America became once Pym knew the writing was on the wall. All his childhood, rushing back to him! He took Mary to point-to-points at Winterthur in the château country and dreamed of Switzerland and of Ascot. He wandered Georgetown's beautiful Oak Hill Cemetery and imagined he was with Dorothy at The Glades, confined to the dripping orchard where his guilty face could be hidden from the passers-by. Minnie Wilson was our letter box at Oak Hill, Tom. Our first in all America—go and take a look at her one day. She lies on a curled plinth a short way down the terraced bowl, a small dead Victorian girl in marble drapes. We left our messages in a leafy recess between Minnie's backside and her protector, one Thomas Entwistle, who had died in later age. The doyen of the graveyard rested higher up, near the gravel sweep where Pym parked his diplomatic car. Axel found him, Axel made sure Pym found him too. He was Stefan Osusky, co-founder of the Czechoslovak Republic, died in exile, 1973. No concealed offering to Axel seemed complete without a silent prayer of greeting to our brother Stefan. After Minnie, as the volume of our business grew, we were obliged to appoint postmen nearer to the centre of the town. We selected forgotten bronze generals, mostly French, who had fought on the American side in order to annoy the British. We relished their soft hats and telescopes and horses, and the flowers in red uniform at their feet. Their battlefields were grass squares filled with lounging students, our letter boxes anything from the stubby cannon that protected them to the stunted conifers whose inner branches made convenient brown nests of pine needles. But Axel's favourite place of all was the newly opened Air and Space Museum, where he could gaze his heart out at the
Spirit of St. Louis
and John Glenn's
Friendship 7,
and touch the Moon Relic with his forefinger as devoutly as if he were taking water from a holy shrine. Pym never saw him do these things. He could only hear about them afterwards. The trick was to leave their packages in separate lockers in the cloakroom, and swap keys in the darkness of the Samuel P. Langley projection theatre while the audience gasped and clutched the handrails as the screen dazzled them with the thrills of flight.

 

And away from the eyes and ears of Washington, Tom? What shall I give you first? Silicon Valley, perhaps, and the little Spanish village south of San Francisco where Murgo's monks sang plainsong to us after dinner. Or the Dead Sea landscape of Palm Springs, where the golf carts had Rolls-Royce grilles, and the Mountains of Moab looked down on the pastel stucco and artificial-rock pools of our walled motel while illegal Mexicans wandered the lawns with backpacks, blowing away unsightly leaves that could offend the sensibilities of our fellow millionaires. Can you imagine Axel's ecstasy as he beheld the outdoor air-conditioning machines that moistened the desert air and blew micro-mist over the sunbathers with faces covered in green mud? Shall I tell you of the Palm Springs Humane Society's dog-adoption dinner we attended to celebrate Pym's acquisition of the very latest blueprint for the nose cone of the Stealth bomber? How the dogs were led on stage groomed and ribboned, to be auctioned to humane ladies, while everybody wept as if they were Vietnamese orphans? Of the all-day Bible-thumpers' radio channel that portrayed the Christian God as the champion of wealth, since wealth was the enemy of Communism? “God's waiting room” is what they call Palm Springs. It has one swimming-pool for every five inhabitants, and lies a couple of hours' drive from the biggest killing factories in the world. Its industries are charity and death. That night, unknown to the retired bandits and senile comedians who made up its geriatric court, Pym and Axel added espionage to the list of its accomplishments.