A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

  “Keep walking towards me, Sir Magnus,” Axel urged in a tone of considerable anxiety. “Put your arms up and for heaven’s sake don’t go imagining you are a great cowboy or a war hero. Neither of us is a member of the shooting classes. We put our guns away and we have a nice chat. Be reasonable. Please.”

  It would take our Maker himself, Tom, with help from all of us, to describe the range of thoughts and emotions charging at that moment through Pym’s poor head. His first response, I am sure, was disbelief. He had encountered Axel very often in the last few years and this was merely another example of the phenomenon. Axel watching him in his sleep, Axel standing at his bedside with his beret on—“Let’s take another look at Thomas Mann.” Axel laughing at him for his addiction to Old High German and remonstrating with him for his bad habit of protesting loyalty to everyone he met: to the Oxford Communists, to all women, to the Jacks and Michaels and to Rick. “You are a serious fool, Sir Magnus,” he had warned him once, when Pym returned to his rooms after a particularly deft night of juggling girls and social opposites. “You think that by dividing everything you can pass between.” Axel had limped at his side along the Isis towpath and watched him dash his knuckles against the wall in order to impress Jemima. At the election Pym could not have told you how often Axel’s glistening white dome had popped up in the audience, or his long, restive hands flapped in sarcastic applause. With Axel so much upon his conscience, therefore, Pym knew for a fact that Axel did not exist. And with this certainty in his head it was perfectly reasonable that his next response to seeing Axel was downright indignation that someone so thoroughly forbidden, someone who had been literally, for whatever reason, banished out of sight or mention over the borders of Pym’s kingdom, should presume to be sitting here, smoking and smiling and pointing a pistol at him—at me, Pym, a bulletproof, fornicating member of the British Occupational classes gifted with supernatural powers. And after that, of course, paradoxical as ever, Pym was more exultant, more thrilled and more happy to see Axel than anyone since the day Rick rode round the corner on his bicycle singing “Underneath the Arches.”

  Pym walked then ran to Axel’s side. He kept his arms above his head as Axel ordered him. He waited impatiently while Axel flashed his army revolver from his waistband and laid it with his own respectfully at the further end of the table. Then at last he dropped his arms far enough to fling them round Axel’s neck. I don’t remember that they had ever embraced before or did so afterwards. But I remember that evening as the last of childish sentiments between them, the last day of Bern, because I see them hugging and laughing chest to chest, Slav style, before they hold one another at a distance to see what damage the years of separation have done to each of them. And we may assume from contemporary photographs and from my own memories of the mirror in those days, which still played a large part in the young officer’s contemplations, that Axel saw the typical, uncut Anglo-Saxon features of a good-looking, fair young man still trying hard to put on the mantle of experience, whereas in Axel’s face Pym witnessed at once a hardening, a hollowing-out, a shaping that was there for ever. Axel would look like this for the rest of his days. Life had had its say. He had the manly, human face that he deserved. The softer contours had gone, leaving an etched jauntiness and assurance. His hairline had retreated but consolidated. Streaks of grey had joined the black, giving it a practical and military appearance. The clown’s moustache, the clown’s hooped eyebrows had acquired a sadder humour. But the twinkling dark eyes, peering beneath their languid eyelids, were as merry as ever, while everything around them seemed to give depth to their perception.

  “You look well, Sir Magnus!” Axel declared exuberantly, still holding him. “You are a fine fellow, my God. We should buy you a white horse and give you India.”

  “But who are you?” Pym cried in equal excitement. “Where are you? What are you doing here? Should I arrest you?”

  “Maybe I arrest you. Maybe I did already. You put your hands up, do you remember? Listen. We are in no-man’s-land here. We can arrest each other.”

  “You’re under arrest,” Pym said.

  “You too,” said Axel. “How’s Sabina?”

  “Fine,” Pym said with a grin.

  “She knows nothing, you understand? Only what her brother told her. You will protect her?”

  “I promise I will,” Pym said.

  Here a slight pause as Axel pretended to clap his hands over his ears. “Don’t promise, Sir Magnus. Just don’t promise.”

  For a frontier crosser Axel had come well equipped, Pym noticed. There was not a trace of mud on his boots, his clothes were pressed and official-looking. Releasing Pym, he grabbed a briefcase, plonked it on the table and drew from it a pair of glasses and a bottle of vodka. Then gherkins, sausage and a loaf of the black bread he used to send Pym out to buy in Bern. They toasted each other gravely, the way Axel had taught him. They refilled their glasses and drank again, a drink for each man. And it is my recollection that by the time they separated they had finished the bottle, for I remember Axel chucking it out into the lake to the outrage of about a thousand moorhens. But if Pym had drunk a case of the stuff it would not have affected him, such was the intensity of his feeling. Even while they began to talk, Pym kept secretly blinking into corners to make sure everything was how it was when he had last looked, so eerily similar at times was the barn to the Bern attic, right down to the soft wind that used to whirr in the skylights. And when he heard the fox again in the distance, he had the certain feeling it was Bastl barking on the wooden staircase after everyone had gone. Except that, as I say, those sentimental days were over. Magnus had killed them dead; the manhood of their friendship was beginning.

  Now it is the way of old friends when they bump into each other, Tom, to put aside the immediate cause of their meeting until last. They prefer as a prelude to account for the years between, which gives a kind of tightness to whatever they have met to discuss. And that is what Pym and Axel did, though you will understand, now that you are familiar with the workings of Pym’s mind, that it was he and not Axel who led this passage of the conversation, if only in order to show to himself as well as to Axel that he was totally without sin in the tricky matter of Axel’s disappearance. He did it well. He was a polished performer these days.

  “Honestly, Axel, nobody ever went out of my life so abruptly,” he complained in a tone of jocular reproach as he sliced sausage, buttered the bread and generally occupied himself with what actors call business. “You were there all safely tucked up in the evening, we’d got a bit drunk, said good night. Next morning I hammered on your wall, no answer. I go downstairs and walk into poor old Frau O crying her heart out. ‘Where’s Axel? They’ve taken away our Axel! The Fremdenpolizei carried him down the stairs and one of them kicked Bastl.’ From all they said, I must have been sleeping like the dead.”

  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.”

&nbs
p; “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 savo
ured 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.”