A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

  Yet even with all this preliminary self-conditioning, it takes another six journeys on Pym’s part before he can coax Axel out of the shadows of his perilous existence.

  “Mr. Canterbury! Are you all right, Mr. Canterbury? Answer!”

  “Of course I’m all right, Miss D. I’m always all right. What is it?”

  Pym pulled back the door. Miss Dubber was standing in the darkness, her hair in papers, holding Toby for protection.

  “You thump so, Mr. Canterbury. You grind your teeth. An hour ago you were humming. We’re worried that you’re ill.”

  “Who’s we?” said Pym sharply.

  “Toby and me, you silly man. Do you think I’ve got a lover?”

  Pym closed the door on her and went swiftly to the window. One parked van, probably green. One parked car, white or grey, Devon registration. An early milkman he had not seen before. He returned to the door, put his ear to it and listened intently. A creak. A slippered footstep. He pulled the door open. Miss Dubber was halfway down the corridor.

  “Miss D?”

  “Yes, Mr. Canterbury?”

  “Has anybody been asking you questions about me?”

  “Why should they, Mr. Canterbury?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes people just do. Have they?”

  “It’s time you slept, Mr. Canterbury. I don’t mind how much the country needs you, it can always wait another day.”

  The town of Strakonice is more famous for its manufacture of motorcycles and Oriental fezzes than for any great cultural gem. Pym made his way there because he had filled a dead letter box in Pisek, nineteen kilometres to the north-east, and Firm tradecraft required he should not register his presence in a target town where a dead letter box was waiting to be cleared. So he drove to Strakonice feeling flat and bored, which was how he always felt after a bit of Firm’s business, and booked himself into an ancient hotel with a grand staircase, then drifted round the town trying to admire the old butchers’ shops on the south side of the square, and the Renaissance church which, according to his guidebook, had been changed to baroque; and the church of St. Wenceslaus which, though originally Gothic, had been altered in the nineteenth century. Having exhausted these excitements, and feeling even wearier from the long heat of the summer’s day, he trudged up the stairs to his bedroom thinking how pleasant it would be if they were leading him to Sabina’s apartment in Graz, in the days when he had been a penniless young double agent without a care in the world.

  He put his key in the keyhole but it was not locked. He was not unduly surprised by this for it was still the evening hour when servants turned back bedcovers, and secret policemen took a last look round. Pym stepped inside and discerned, half hidden behind a sloping shaft of sunlight from the window, the figure of Axel, waiting as the old wait, his domed head propped against the chair’s back, pitched a little sideways so that he could make out, among the lights and shades, who was coming in. And not in all the Firm’s unarmed combat lessons, and dagger-play lessons, and close-contact shooting lessons, had anybody thought to teach Pym how to terminate the life of an emaciated friend seated behind a sunbeam.

  Axel was prison-pale and a stone lighter. Pym could not have supposed, from his parting memory of him, that he had more flesh to give. But the purgers and interrogators and gaolers had managed to find it, as they usually do, and they had helped themselves to it in handfuls. They had taken it from his face, his wrists, his finger-joints and ankles. They had drained the last blood from his cheeks. They had also helped themselves to one of his teeth, though Pym did not discover this immediately, because Axel had his lips tight shut, and one twiglike forefinger raised to them in warning while he waved the other at the wall of Pym’s hotel bedroom, indicating microphones at work. They had smashed his right eyelid too, which drooped over its parent eye like a cocked hat, adding to his piratical appearance. But his coat, for all that, still hung over his shoulders like a musketeer’s cape, his moustache flourished, and he had inherited a marvellous pair of boots from somewhere, rich as timber, with soles like the running-boards of a vintage car.

  “Magnus Richard Pym?” he demanded with theatrical gruffness.

  “Yes?” said Pym after a couple of unsuccessful attempts to speak.

  “You are charged with the crimes of espionage, provocation of the people, incitement to treason and murder. Also sabotage on behalf of an imperialist power.”

  Still slouched languidly in his chair, Axel drove his hands together with improbable vigour, producing a thwack that echoed round the great bedroom, and no doubt impressed the microphones. After it, he offered the prolonged grunt of a man coming to terms with a heavy punch in the stomach. Delving in his jacket pocket, he then detached a small automatic pistol from the lining and, finger to his lips again, waved it about so that Pym got a healthy sight of it.

  “Face the wall!” he barked, clambering with difficulty to his feet. “Place your hands on your head, you Fascist swine! March.”

  Laying a hand gently round Pym’s shoulder, Axel guided him towards the door. Pym stepped ahead of him into the gloomy corridor. Two burly men in hats ignored him.

  “Search his room!” Axel commanded them. “Find what you can but do not remove anything! Pay attention to the typewriter, his shoes and the lining of his suitcase. Do not leave his room until you receive orders from me personally. Walk slowly down the stairs,” he told Pym, prodding him in the small of the back with the gun.

  “This is an outrage,” Pym said lamely. “I demand to see a British consul immediately.”

  At the reception desk the female concierge sat knitting like a hag at the guillotine. Axel prodded Pym past her to a waiting car outside. A yellow cat had taken shelter underneath it. Pulling open the passenger door, Axel nodded Pym to get in and, having shooed the cat into the gutter, climbed in after him and started the engine.

  “If you collaborate completely you will not be harmed,” Axel announced in his official voice, indicating a patch of crude perforations in the dashboard. “If you attempt to escape you will be shot.”

  “This is a ridiculous and scandalous act,” Pym muttered. “My government will insist that those responsible be punished.”

  But once again, his words had none of the confident ring they had possessed in the cosy barrack hut in Argyll where he and his colleagues had practised the skills of resisting interrogation.

  “You have been watched from the moment you arrived here,” said Axel loudly. “All your movements and contacts have been observed by the protectors of the people. You have no alternative but to make an immediate admission of your guilt on all charges.”

  “The free world will see this senseless act as the latest evidence of the brutality of the Czech régime,” Pym declared, with increasing strength. Axel nodded approvingly.

  The streets were empty, the old houses also. They entered what had once been a rich suburb of patrician villas. Sprawling hedges hid the lower windows. The iron gateways, wide enough to ride a coach through, were blocked with ivy and barbed wire.

  “Get out,” Axel commanded.

  The evening was young and beautiful. The full moon shed a white, unearthly light. Watching Axel lock the car, Pym smelt hay and heard the clamour of insects. Axel guided him down a narrow path between two gardens until they came to a gap in the yew hedge to his right. Grabbing Pym’s wrist, he led him through it. They were standing on the terrace of what had once been a great garden. A many-towered castle lifted into the sky behind them. Ahead, almost lost to a thicket of roses, stood a decrepit summerhouse. Axel wrestled with the door but it refused to yield.

  “Kick it for me, Sir Magnus,” he said. “This is Czechoslovakia.”

  Pym drove his foot against the panel. The door gave, they stepped inside. On a rusted table stood the familiar bottle of vodka and a tray of bread and gherkins. Grey stuffing was bleeding from the ripped covers of the wicker chairs.

  “You are a very dangerous friend, Sir Magnus,” Axel complained as he stretched out hi
s thin legs and surveyed his fine boots. “Why in God’s name couldn’t you have used an alias? Sometimes I think you have been put on earth in order to be my black angel.”

  “They said I would be better being me,” Pym replied stupidly as Axel twisted the cap from the vodka bottle. “They call it natural cover.”

  For a long time after that, Axel appeared unable to think of anything useful to say at all, and Pym did not feel it was his place to interrupt his captor’s reverie. They were sitting legs parallel and shoulder to shoulder like a retired couple on the beach. Below them, squares of cornfield stretched towards a forest. A heap of broken cars, more than Pym had ever seen on the Czech roads, littered the lower end of the garden. Bats wheeled decorously in the moonlight.

  “Do you know this was my aunt’s house?” said Axel.

  “Well, no, I didn’t, actually,” said Pym.

  “Well, it was. My aunt was a witty woman. She once described to me how she broke the news to her father that she wished to marry my uncle. ‘But why do you want to marry him?’ said her father. ‘He has no money. He is very small and you are small too. You will have small children. He is like the encyclopedias you make me buy you every year. They look pretty but once you have opened them and seen inside, you don’t bother with them any more.’ He was wrong. Their children were large and she was happy.” He scarcely paused. “They want me to blackmail you, Sir Magnus. That is the only good news I have for you.”

  “Who do?” said Pym.

  “The aristos I work for. They think I should show you the photographs of the two of us coming out of the barn together in Austria, and play you the recordings of our conversations. They say I should wave the I.O.U. in your face that you signed to me for the two hundred dollars we tricked out of Membury for your father.”

  “How did you answer them?” said Pym.

  “I said I would. They don’t read Thomas Mann, these guys. They’re very crude. This is a crude country, as you no doubt noticed in your journeys.”

  “Not at all,” said Pym. “I love it.”

  Axel drank some vodka and stared into the hills. “And you people don’t make it any better. Your hateful little department has been seriously interfering in the running of my country. What are you? Some kind of American butler? What are you doing, framing our officials, sowing suspicion, and seducing our intellectuals? Why do you cause people to be beaten unnecessarily, when a few years in prison would be enough? Do they teach you no reality over there? Have you no reality at all, Sir Magnus?”

  “I didn’t know the Firm was doing that,” said Pym.

  “Doing what?”

  “Interfering. Causing people to be tortured. That must be a different section. Ours is just a sort of postal service for small agents.”

  Axel sighed. “Maybe they’re not doing it. Maybe I have been brainwashed by our own stupid propaganda these days. Maybe I’m blaming you unfairly. Cheers.”

  “Cheers,” said Pym.

  “So what will they find in your room?” Axel asked when he had lit himself a cigar and puffed at it several times.

  “Pretty well everything, I suppose.”

  “What’s everything?”

  “Secret inks. Film.”

  “Film from your agents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Developed?”

  “I assume not.”

  “From the dead letter box in Pisek?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I wouldn’t bother to develop it. It’s cheap pedlar material. Money?”

  “A bit, yes.”

  “How much?”

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  “Codebooks?”

  “A couple.”

  “Anything I might have forgotten? No atom bomb?”

  “There’s a concealed camera.”

  “Is that the talcum-powder tin?”

  “If you peel the paper off the lid, it makes a lens.”

  “Anything else?”

  “A silk escape map. In one of my neckties.”

  Axel drew on his cigar again, his thoughts seemingly far away. Suddenly he drove his fist on to the iron table. “We have got to get ourselves out of this, Sir Magnus!” he exclaimed angrily. “We have got to get ourselves out. We’ve got to rise in the world. We’ve got to help each other until we become aristos ourselves and we can kick the other bastards goodbye.” He stared into the gathering darkness. “You make it so difficult for me, you know that? Sitting in that prison, I had bad thoughts about you. You make it very, very difficult to be your friend.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Oh, oh! He doesn’t see why! He does not see that when the bold Sir Magnus Pym applies for a business visa, even the poor Czechs can look in their card index and discover there was a gentleman of the same name who was a Fascist imperialist militarist spy in Austria, and that a certain running dog named Axel was his fellow conspirator.” His anger reminded Pym of the days of his fever in Bern. His voice had acquired the same unpleasant edge. “Are you really so ignorant of the manners of the country you are spying on that you do not understand what it means these days for a man like me even to have been in the same continent as a man like you, let alone his fellow conspirator in a spying game? Do you really not know that in this world of whisperers and accusers, I may literally die of you? You’ve read George Orwell, haven’t you? These are the people who can rewrite yesterday’s weather!”

  “I know,” said Pym.

  “Do you also know then, that I may be fatally contaminated like all those poor agents and informers you are showering with money and instructions? Do you not know that you are delivering them to the scaffold, unless they belong to us already? You know at least what they will do with you, I assume, unless I make them hear me, these aristos of mine, if we can’t satisfy their appetites by other means? They mean to arrest you and parade you before the world’s press with your stupid agents and associates. They plan to have another show trial, hang some people. When they start to do that, it will be sheer oversight if they don’t hang me too. Axel, the imperialist lackey who spied for you in Austria! Axel, the revanchist Titoist Trotskyist typist who was your accomplice in Bern! They would prefer an American but in the meantime they will stretch a point and hang an Englishman until they can get hold of the real thing.” He flopped back, his fury exhausted. “We’ve got to get out of this, Sir Magnus,” he repeated. “We’ve got to rise, rise, rise. I am sick of bad superiors, bad food, bad prisons and bad torturers.” He drew angrily on his cigar again. “It’s time I looked after your career and you looked after mine. And this time properly. No bourgeois shrinking back from the big scoops. This time we are professionals, we make straight for the biggest diamonds, the biggest banks. I mean it.”

  Suddenly, Axel turned his chair until it was facing Pym, then sat on it again and laughed, and tapped Pym smartly on the shoulder with the back of his hand to cheer him up.

  “You got the flowers okay, Sir Magnus?”

  “They were super. Someone handed them into our cab as we were leaving the reception.”

  “Did Belinda like them?”

  “Belinda doesn’t know about you. I never told her.”

  “Who did you say the flowers were from?”

  “I said I’d no idea. Probably for another wedding altogether.”

  “That was good. What’s she like?”

  “Super. We were childhood sweethearts together.”

  “I thought Jemima was your childhood sweetheart.”

  “Well, Belinda was too.”

  “At the same time—both of them? That’s quite a childhood you had,” Axel said with a fresh laugh as he refilled Pym’s glass.

  Pym managed to laugh too, and they drank together.

  Then Axel began speaking, kindly and gently without irony or bitterness, and it seems to me that he spoke for about thirty years because his words are as loud in my ear now as they ever were in Pym’s then, never mind the din of the cicadas and the cheeping of the bats.


  “Sir Magnus, you have in the past betrayed me but, more important, you have betrayed yourself. Even when you are telling the truth, you lie. You have loyalty and you have affection. But to what? To whom? I don’t know all the reasons for this. Your great father. Your aristocratic mother. One day maybe you will tell me. And maybe you have put your love in some bad places now and then.” He leaned forward and there was a kindly, true affection in his face and a warm long-suffering smile in his eyes. “Yet you also have morality. You search. What I am saying is, Sir Magnus: for once nature has produced a perfect match. You are a perfect spy. All you need is a cause. I have it. I know that our revolution is young and that sometimes the wrong people are running it. In the pursuit of peace we are making too much war. In the pursuit of freedom we are building too many prisons. But in the long run I don’t mind. Because I know this. All the junk that made you what you are: the privileges, the snobbery, the hypocrisy, the churches, the schools, the fathers, the class systems, the historical lies, the little lords of the countryside, the little lords of big business, and all the greedy wars that result from them, we are sweeping that away for ever. For your sake. Because we are making a society that will never produce such sad little fellows as Sir Magnus.” He held out his hand. “So. I’ve said it. You are a good man and I love you.”