“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 hi
s 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.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Membury had complained with pardonable irritation as they sat shivering in the jeep. “Sacrifice a bloody goat? I do wish the Rittmeister were more precise. It makes one look so silly.”
A week before that, disguised in green loden coats, they had taken themselves to a remote inn on the zonal border in search of a Heimkehrer from a Soviet uranium mine who was expected any moment. As they pushed open the door the conversation in the bar stopped dead and a score of peasants gawped at them.
“Billiards,” Membury ordered with rare decisiveness, from under his hand. “There’s a table over there. We’ll get a game going. Fit in.”
Still in his green loden, Membury stooped to play his ball, only to be interrupted by the resounding clang of heavy metal striking the tiled floor close at hand. Glancing down, Pym saw his commanding officer’s .38 service revolver lying at his large feet. He had recovered it for him in a moment, never quicker. But not quick enough to prevent the stampede to the door as the terrified peasants scattered in the darkness and the landlord locked himself in the cellar.
“Can I go back now, sir?” said Kaufmann. “I’m not a soldier at all, you see. I’m a coward.”
“No you can’t,” said Pym. “Now be quiet.”
The barn stood by itself as Sabina had said it would, at the centre of a flat field lined with larches. A yellow path led to it; behind it lay a lake. Behind the lake a hill and on the hill, as the evening darkened, a single watchtower overlooked the valley.
“You will wear civilian clothes and park your car at the crossroads to Klein Brandorf,” Sabina had whispered to his thighs as she kissed and fondled and revived him. The orchard had a brick wall and was occupied by a family of large brown hares. “You will leave sidelights burning. If you cheat and bring protection he will not appear. He will stay in the forest and be angry.”
“I love you.”
“There is a stone, painted white. This is where Kaufmann must stand. If Kaufmann passes the white stone, he will not appear, he will stay in the forest.”
“Why can’t you come too?”
“He does not wish it. He wishes only Pym. Perhaps he is hommsexual.”
“Thanks,” said Pym.
The white stone glinted ahead of them.
“Stay here,” Pym ordered.
“Why?” said Kaufmann.
Evening mist lay in strips across the field. The surface of the lake popped with rising fish. With the sun setting, the larches threw mile-long shadows across the golden meadow. Sawn logs lay beside the barn door, boxes of geraniums adorned the windows. Pym thought again of Sabina. Her enfolding flanks, the broad spaces of her back. “What I tell you I have not told to any Englishman. In Prague I have a younger brother who is called Jan. If you tell this to Membury he will already dismiss me immediately. The British do not allow us to have close family inside a Communist country. Do you understand?” Yes, Sabina, I understand. I have seen the moonlight on your breasts, your moisture is on my lips, it is sticking to my eyelids. I understand. “Listen. My brother sends me this message for you. Only for Pym. He trusts you because of me and because I have told him only good things about you. He has a friend who wishes to come out. This friend is very gifted, very brilliant, top access. He will bring you many secrets about the Russians. But first you must invent a story for Membury to explain how you received this information. You are clever. You can invent many stories. Now you must invent one for my brother and his friend.” Yes, Sabina, I can invent. For you and your beloved brother I can invent a million stories. Get me my pen, Sabina. Where did you put my clothes? Now tear me a piece of paper from your diary and I will invent a story about a strange man who telephoned me at the Weisses Ross and made me an irresistible proposal.
Pym unbuttoned his loden. “Always d
raw across the body,” his weapons instructor had advised at the sad little depot in Sussex where they had taught him how to fight Communism. “It gives you better protection when the other laddie shoots first.” Pym was not sure this was good advice. He reached the door and it was closed. He walked round the barn, trying to find a place to peep in. “His information will be good for you,” Sabina had said. “It will make you very famous in Vienna, Membury also. Good intelligence from Czechoslovakia is extremely rare at Div. Int. Mostly it comes from the Americans and is therefore corrupt.”
The sun had set and the dusk was gathering fast. From across the lake Pym heard the yelping of a fox. Rows of chicken coops stood at the back of the barn and the straw in them was clean. Chickens in no-man’s-land, he thought frivolously. Stateless eggs. The chickens tucked their necks at him and blew out their feathers. A grey heron lifted from the lake and set course toward the hills. He returned to the front of the barn.
“Kaufmann!”
“Sir?”
A hundred metres lay between them but their voices were as close as lovers in the evening stillness.
“Did you cough?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, don’t.”
“I expect I was sobbing, sir.”
“Keep guard, but whatever you see, don’t come any nearer unless I order you.”
“I’d like to desert, if I may, sir. I’d rather be a defector than this, honestly. I’m a sitting target. I’m not a human being at all.”
“Do some mental sums or something.”
“I can’t. I’ve tried. Nothing comes.”
Pym lifted the door latch, stepped inside and smelt cigar smoke and horse. St. Moritz, he thought, lightheaded in his apprehension. The barn was cavernous and beautiful and raised at one end like an old ship. On the dais stood a table and on the table, to Pym’s surprise, a lighted oil lamp. By its glow he admired the ancient beams and roof. “Wait inside and he will come,” Sabina had said. “He will want to see you go in first. My brother’s friend is very cautious. Like many Czechs, he has a great and cautious mind.” Two high-backed wooden chairs were pulled to the table and magazines were strewn on it like in a dentist’s waiting-room. Must be where the farmer does his paperwork. At the end of the barn, he noticed a rustic ladder leading to a loft. At the weekend I’ll bring you here. I’ll bring wine and cheese and bread, and blankets in case it’s prickly, and you can wear your flouncy skirt with nothing underneath. He climbed halfway up the ladder and peered over. Sound floor, dry hay, no sign of rats. An admirable location for rustic Rococo. He returned to the ground floor and made his way towards the dais where the light burned, intending to settle down in one of the chairs. “You must be patient, if necessary all night,” Sabina had said. “Crossing the border is extremely dangerous now. It is late summer and the doubters are coming over before the passes close. Therefore they have many guards and spies.” A stone pathway ran between two cattle drains. His feet echoed thickly in the roof. The echo stopped, his feet with it. A slender figure was seated at the head of the table. He was leaning alertly forward, posing for something. He held a cigar in one hand and an automatic pistol in the other. His gaze, like the barrel of the automatic, was fixed on Pym.
A Perfect Spy Page 46
