A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

  The librarian was an émigré who knew Axel’s needs by heart. Pym brought Klee and Nolde, Kokoschka and Klimt, Kandinsky and Picasso. He stood their picture books and catalogues open on the mantelshelf where Axel could see them without moving his head. He turned the pages and read the captions out loud. When women came, Axel again sent them away. “I am being attended to. Wait till I am well.” Pym brought Max Beckmann. He brought Steinlen, then Schiele and more Schiele. Next day the writers were reinstated. Pym fetched Brecht and Zuckmayer, Tucholsky and Remarque. He read them aloud, hours of them. “Music,” Axel commanded. Pym borrowed Herr Ollinger’s wind-up gramophone and played him Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky until Axel fell asleep. He woke delirious, the sweat falling off him like raindrops while he described a retreat through snow with the blind hanging on to the lame and the blood freezing in the wounds. He talked of a hospital, two to a bed and the dead lying on the floor. He asked for water. Pym fetched it and Axel took the glass in both hands, shaking wildly. He lifted the glass till his hands froze, then he lowered his head in jerks until his lips reached the brim. Then he sucked the water like an animal, spilling it while his fevered eyes kept guard. He drew up his legs and wetted himself and sat shaking and grumpy in an armchair while Pym changed his sheets.

  “Who are you afraid of?” Pym asked again. “There’s no one here. It’s just us.”

  “Then I must be afraid of you. What’s that poodle in the corner?”

  “It’s Herr Bastl and he’s a chow chow, not a poodle.”

  “I thought it was the Devil.”

  Till a day when Pym woke to find Axel standing fully dressed at his bedside. “It is Goethe’s birthday and it’s four in the afternoon,” he announced in his military voice. “We must go into town and listen to the idiot Thomas Mann.”

  “But you’re ill.”

  “Nobody who stands up is ill. Nobody marches who is ill. Dress.”

  “Was Mann on the forbidden list too?” Pym asked as he pulled on his clothes.

  “He never made it.”

  “Why’s he an idiot?”

  Herr Ollinger supplied a raincoat that could have gone twice round Axel’s body, Mr. San provided a broad black hat. Herr Ollinger drove them to the door in his broken car two hours early and they took their places at the back before the great hall filled. When the lecture was over, Axel marched Pym backstage and hammered on the dressing-room door. Pym had not cared for Thomas Mann till now. He found his prose perfumed and unwieldy, though he had tried his best for Axel’s sake. But now, there stood God Himself, tall and angular like Uncle Makepeace. “This young English nobleman wishes to shake your hand, sir,” Axel advised him with authority from underneath Mr. San’s broad hat. Thomas Mann peered at Pym, then at Axel so pale and ethereal from his fever. Thomas Mann frowned at the palm of his own right hand as if asking himself whether it could take the strain of an aristocratic embrace. He held out his hand and Pym shook it, waiting to feel Mann’s genius flow into him like one of those electric shocks you used to be able to buy at railway stations—hold this knob and let my energy revive you. Nothing happened, but Axel’s enthusiasm was enough for both of them:

  “You touched him, Sir Magnus! You are blessed! You are immortal!”

  Within a week, they had saved enough cash to take themselves to Davos to visit the shrine of Mann’s diseased souls. They travelled in the lavatory, Pym standing and Axel, in his beret, sitting patiently on the seat. The conductor knocked on the door and yelled, “Alle Billette, bitte”; Axel gave a girlish whimper of discomfort and pushed their one ticket under the door. Pym waited, his eyes fixed on the shadows of the conductor’s feet. He felt the conductor stoop, he heard him grunt as he straightened up. He heard a snap that felt like his own nerve breaking as the ticket reappeared under the door with a hole punched in it. The shadows moved on. This is how you walked here, thought Pym with admiration, as they silently shook hands. These are the tricks that got you to Switzerland. In Davos that evening Axel told Pym all about his nightmare journey from Carlsbad to Bern. Pym felt so proud and rich he decided that Thomas Mann was the best writer in the world.

  “Dear Father”—he wrote jubilantly as soon as he was back in the attic—“I am having a really wizard time here now and getting some first-rate instruction. I cannot tell you how much I miss your worldly counsel and how grateful I am for your wisdom in sending me to Switzerland for my studies. Today I met lawyers who really seem to know life in all its aspects, and I am sure they will be a help in furthering my career.”

  “Dear Belinda,

  “Now that I have put my foot down, things are much better.”

  Meanwhile there was good old you, wasn’t there, Jack? Jack the other war hero, Jack the other side of my head. I will describe to you who you were because I don’t expect we know the same person any more. I will describe what you were to me and what I did for you and as best I can why, because there again I doubt whether we share the same interpretation of events and personalities. I doubt it very much. To Jack, Pym was just another baby Joe, one more addition to his private army in the making, not broken and certainly not trained, but with the halter already slipped nicely round his neck and willing to run a long way for his lump of sugar. You probably don’t remember—why should you?—how you picked him up or made your overtures to him. All you knew was he was the type the Firm liked, and so did you, and so did part of me. Short back and sides, speaks the King’s English, decent linguist, good country public school. A games player, understands discipline. Not an arty chap, certainly not one of your overintellectual types. Levelheaded, one of us. Comfortably off but not too grand, father some sort of minor tycoon—how typical that you never bothered to check Rick out. And where else should you meet this paragon of tomorrow’s men but at the English church, where the flag of Saint George fluttered victorious in the neutral Swiss breeze?

  How long you had been tracking Pym I don’t know. I’ll bet you don’t either. You liked the way he read the Lesson, you said, so you must have had your eye on him from at least before Christmas because it was an early Advent text. You seemed surprised when he told you he was studying at the university, so I guess your first enquiries were made before he enrolled there and you hadn’t topped them up. It was on Christmas Day after matins that Pym shook your hand for the first time. The church porch was like a crowded lift with everyone rattling umbrellas and making rah-rah English noises, and the diplomatic kids pelting each other with snowballs in the street. Pym was wearing his E. Weber jacket, and you, Jack, you were a tweedy, unscalable English mountain of twenty-four. In terms of war and peace the seven years between us were a generation, more like two. Much as they were with Axel, as a matter of fact; you both had those crucial years on me, still do.

  Do you know what else you wore apart from your good brown suit? Your Airborne tie. Prancing silver-winged horses and crowned Britannias on a maroon field, congratulations. You never told me where you had been for it, but the reality as I now know it is no less impressive than my imaginings: with the Partisans in Yugoslavia and the Resistance in Czechoslovakia, behind the lines with the Long Range Desert Group in Africa and even, if I remember right, in Crete. You are an inch taller than I, but I remember as if it were yesterday how, as Pym grasped your great dry hand, that Airborne tie looked him in the eye. He lifted his head, he saw your rock jaw and your blue eyes—the ferocious bushy eyebrows even then—and he knew he was standing face to face with the character he was supposed to have become at all his schools, and sometimes in his fancy had: a straight-backed English brave of the officer class, the one who keeps his head when all about him are losing theirs. You wished him Happy Christmas and when you spoke your name he thought you were making a sort of Everyman’s joke to do with Christmas Day—you are Good Fellowship and I will be Brotherhood.

  “No, no, old boy, it’s real,” you insisted with a laugh. “Why should a nice chap like me use a false name?”

  Why indeed, when you had diplomatic cover? You invited him f
or a glass of sherry before lunch tomorrow, Boxing Day, and you said you would have sent him an invitation if you’d known his address, which was clever of you, because of course you knew it perfectly well: address, date of birth, education and all the other nonsense we imagine gives us ascendancy over those we seek to obtain. Then you did an amusing thing. You took an invitation card from your pocket and in the crammed porch while everyone went on woof-woofing you spun Pym round and, using his back to press on, wrote his name along the middle line and handed it to him: “Captain and Mrs. Jack Brotherhood request the pleasure.” You scratched out the “RSVP” to emphasise that the deal was done, and you scratched out the “Captain” to show what pals we were. “If you want to stay on afterwards you can help us eat up the cold turkey. Rough clothes,” you added. Pym watched you stride off through the rain exactly as he knew you had carried yourself through the gunfire of all the battlefields where you had triumphed single-handed over Jerry, while Pym was doing nothing braver than carve Sefton Boyd’s initials on the wall of the staff lavatory.

  Next day he presented himself punctually at your little diplomatic house, and as he pressed the bell he read your visiting card framed in the panel above it. “Captain J. Brotherhood, Assistant Passport Officer, British Embassy, Bern.” You were married to Felicity in those days, you may remember. Adrian was six months old. Pym played with him for hours in order to impress you, a habit that soon became a feature of his dealings with the younger members of your trade. You questioned him in a perfectly agreeable way and, where you left off, Felicity as the good Secret Service squaw took over, God forgive her: “But what friends have you got, Magnus, you must be so lonely here?” she cried. “What do you do for fun, Magnus?” And was there much in the way of an extracurricular life at the university, for instance—she asked—political groups and so forth? Or was it all a bit flat and dreary like the rest of Bern? Pym didn’t find Bern flat or dreary at all, but for Felicity he pretended he did. In the chronology, Pym’s friendship with Axel was by now twelve hours old, but he didn’t give him a thought—why should he when he was so taken up with impressing you both with himself?

  I remember asking what crowd you fought with, sir, expecting you to say “Fifth Airborne,” or “Artists’ Rifles” so that I could look suitably awed. Instead you went a bit gruff and said, “General List.” I know now that you were exercising the double standard of diplomatic cover: you wanted it to cover you, but you also wanted Pym to see through it. You wanted him to know you were an irregular, and not one of those intellectual little ponces from the Foreign Office, as you call them. You asked him whether he got around the country and suggested that, on occasions when you were making an official car journey somewhere, he might like to come aboard and amuse himself the other end. The two of us put on boots and went for what you called a bash: meaning a forced march through the Elfenau woods. In the course of it you told Pym he needn’t call you “sir,” and when we came back, Felicity had fed Adrian, and there was an older, smirking man sitting talking to her. You introduced him as Sandy from the Embassy and Pym sensed you were colleagues and vaguely that Sandy was your boss. I know now that he was your Station Head and you were his number two, and that he was performing his standard task of looking over the property before allowing you to buy your way any further in. But at the time Pym just thought of Sandy as headmaster and you as housemaster, a construction you would not have disapproved of.

  “How good’s your German, by the by?” Sandy asked Pym through his smirk while the three of us munched Felicity’s mince pies. “Bit hard to learn here, isn’t it, with all this Swissie dialect about?”

  “Magnus knows rather a lot of university émigrés,” you explained for me, underlining a selling point. Sandy let out a silly laugh and slapped his knee.

  “Does he, does he though? I’ll bet there’s some rum characters among that crowd!”

  “He could probably tell us a good deal about them too, couldn’t you, Magnus?” you said.

  “You wouldn’t mind?” said Sandy quizzically, still smirking.

  “Why should I?” said Pym.

  Sandy forced the card cleverly. He sensed that Pym liked taking rash decisions in front of people, and he used this knowledge to press a commitment out of him before he knew what he was committing to.

  “No high-minded scruples about the sanctity of academic study or anything like that?” Sandy insisted.

  “None at all,” said Pym boldly. “Not if it’s for my country,” and was rewarded by Felicity’s smile.

  What version of himself Pym supplied that day, and had to live with for the coming months, I do not remember, which means it must have been a fairly restrained one, short on those awkward story-points that too often had to be paid for later. As best he could, he gave you what he thought you were looking for. He was prudent enough not to admit he was earning money, which went down well with you, for you knew already he was working “black,” as the Germans call it—meaning illegally, and at night. Shrewd chap, you thought; resourceful; not above a bit of larceny. He played down family life with the Ollingers since proxy parents undermined his self-image as a mature exile. When you asked him whether he knew any girls—the shadow of homosexuality, is he one of those?—Pym got the message at once, and wove a harmless fantasy around an Italian beauty called Maria whom he had met at the Cosmo Club and was keen on, but only as a stopgap for his regular girlfriend Jemima, back in England.

  “Jemima who?” you asked, and Pym said Sefton Boyd, which produced an audible sigh of social satisfaction. A real Maria did indeed exist and was indeed beautiful but Pym’s adoration of her was private to himself, for he had never spoken to her.

  “Cosmo?” said you. “Don’t think I’ve heard of that one. Have you, Sandy?”

  “Can’t say I have, old boy. Sounds fishy to me.”

  Pym explained that the Cosmo was a sort of foreigners’ political forum, and Maria was some sort of officer of it, like treasurer.

  “Any particular complexion?” Sandy asked.

  “Well she’s dark,” said Pym ingenuously and you and Felicity and Sandy laughed and laughed, like Little Audrey, and Felicity remarked that it was quite clear what Magnus’s politics were. After that no meeting was complete without somebody asking after Maria’s complexion, and everyone cracking up over such a marvellously healthy misunderstanding. It was evening by the time Pym left your house and you had given him a present of a duty-free bottle of scotch to keep out the cold. Cost to the Firm in those days: I guess around five shillings. You offered to run him home but he said he loved to walk, thus earning further Brownie points. And walk he did, on air. He skipped and laughed and hugged his bottle and himself; he hadn’t felt so blessed in all his seventeen years. In a single Christmas, God had dished him up two saints. The one was on the run and couldn’t walk, the other was a handsome English warlord who served sherry on Boxing Day and had never had a doubt in his life. Both admired him, both loved his jokes and his voices, both were clamouring to occupy the empty spaces of his heart. In return he was giving to each man the character he seemed to be in search of. His decision to keep them secret from each other was never taken. Let each be the mistress that keeps the other home intact, Pym thought. If he thought at all.

  “From whom did you steal it, Sir Magnus?” Axel asked in his formal English, looking curiously at the label.

  “The chaplain,” said Pym without a second’s hesitation. “He’s a terrific bloke. Ex-army. I didn’t steal it. He gave it me, actually. A free bottle for regular attenders. They get it at diplomatic rates, of course. They don’t have to pay like in the shops.”

  “He didn’t offer you cigarettes as well, did he?” said Axel.

  “Why should he?”

  “A bar of chocolate for a night with your sister?”

  “I haven’t got a sister.”

  “Good. Then let’s drink it.”

  Do you remember our car journeys, Jack? I begin to think you do. Have you ever wondered how our forebea
rs managed to run their agents in the days before the motorcar? Our first trip could not have come more handy. You had a date in Lausanne. You would need three hours. You gave no reason why you needed three hours in Lausanne, though you could have given me any cover story under the sun. Once again with the advantage of hindsight I know that you were deliberately admitting me to the secrecy of your work without letting on what the work was. You asked nothing of Pym on that occasion. You were building intimacy. The most you did was give him a rendezvous and a fallback and see whether he managed them. “Look here, it’s just possible I’ll have to make another call. If I’m not outside the Hotel Dora at three, be at the west side of the main post office at three-twenty.” Pym wasn’t good at east and west but he asked about six people till one of them got it right for him, and he made the fallback at three-twenty exactly, even if he was panting his heart out. You circled the square and the second time round you kept the car rolling and pushed open the door, and Pym hopped in like an airborne soldier to show you how able he was.

  “I’ve been talking to Sandy,” you said as we drove to Geneva a week later. “He wants you to do a job for him. Mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You any good at translation?”

  “What sort?”

  “Can you keep your mouth shut?”

  “I think so.”

  You gave him his first Target for Tonight: “We get technical stuff in from time to time. Mainly about funny little Swissie firms that are manufacturing things we don’t much like. Nasty things that blow up,” you added with a smile. “It’s not exactly secret, but we hire a lot of local labour in the Embassy so we’d rather have it done by someone outside. Preferably a Brit. Someone we trust. You game?”

  “Of course.”

  “We pay. Not much, but it’ll buy you a dinner with Maria now and then. Heard from Jemima recently?”

  “Jem’s fine, thanks.”

  Pym had never been so scared in his life. You handed him the envelope, he put it in his pocket, you gave him your Master of Intrigue look and said “Good luck, old chap”—Yes, Jack, you did! We talked to each other like that—and Pym walked home changing that damned envelope from one pocket to another so many times he must have looked like a bookie on the run. And what was in it? Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you: junk. Photocopied junk from out-of-date armaments catalogues. It was Pym’s soul you were after, not the piffling translation. He lost the envelope about six times in his attic too. Under the bed, under the mattress, behind the mirror, up the chimney. He translated its contents in hours even Axel didn’t know he had. You paid Pym twenty francs. The technical dictionary had cost twenty-five but he knew that gentlemen didn’t mention things like that, even if Rick’s cheques, if they came at all, tended to meet with failure.