A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

  “Been to the Cosmo Club recently?” you enquired lightly as we headed towards Zurich, where you said you had a man to see about a dog. Pym confessed he had not. With Axel and Jack Brotherhood as his cosmos, who needed another?

  “I’m told some of the people who go along there are a bit outspoken. Nothing against Maria, mind. Those outfits always have a broad spectrum. Part of democracy. Might be a good idea all the same if you took a closer look,” you said. “Don’t stick out. If they expect you to be a Leftie, let them think you are one. If they’re looking for a Right-of-centre Brit, give ’em one. If necessary give ’em both. But don’t go overboard. We don’t want you getting into trouble with the Swissies. Any other Brits there, apart from you?”

  “There are a couple of Scottish medical students but they told me they come for the girls.”

  “A few names would help,” you said.

  With that one conversation, looking back, Pym was Pym no longer. He was our man in the Cosmo, don’t use the telephones for anything delicate. He was a symbolised agent, graded semiconscious, which is our sweet way of saying he sort of half knows what he is sort of doing and sort of why. He was seventeen years old, and if he needed you urgently he was to ring Felicity and say his uncle was in town. If you needed him you’d phone the Ollingers from a callbox and say you were Mac from Birmingham passing through. Otherwise it was meeting-to-meeting, which means we always fix the next one at this one. Float, Magnus, you said. Get in there and be your own charming self, Magnus. Keep your ears and eyes open, see what sticks, but for God’s sake don’t get us into trouble with the Swissies. And here’s your next month’s alimony, Magnus. And Sandy sends his love. I tell you, Jack: we reap as we sow, even if the harvest is thirty-five summers in the growing.

  The secretary of the Cosmo was a vapid Rumanian royalist called Anka who wept unaccountably in lectures. She was gangly and wild and walked with her wrists turned inside out, and when Pym stopped her in the corridor she scowled at him with red eyes and told him to go away because she had a headache. But Pym was on spy’s business and brooked no rejection.

  “I’m thinking of starting a Cosmo newsletter,” he announced. “I thought we might include a contribution from each group.”

  “The Cosmo don’t got no groups. The Cosmo don’t want no newsletter. You are stupid. Go away.”

  Pym pursued Anka to the tiny office that was her lair.

  “All I need is a list of members,” he said. “If I have a list of members I can send out a circular and find out who is interested.”

  “Why don’t you come to next meeting and ask them?” Anka said, sitting down and putting her head in her hands as if she were about to be sick.

  “Not everyone comes to meetings. I want to test all shades. It’s more democratic.”

  “Nothing is democratic,” said Anka. “Is all illusion.”

  “He is an English,” she explained to herself aloud as she hauled open a drawer and began to pick through its chaotic contents. “What does an English know about illusion?” she demanded of some private confessor. “He is mad.” She handed him a grimy sheet of names and addresses. Most of them, it turned out later, were misspelt.

  “Dearest Father” wrote Pym excitedly—“I am having one or two amazing successes here despite my youth, and I gather the Swissies are considering offering me some kind of academic honour.”

  “I love you”—he wrote to Belinda—“I’ve never written that to anyone before.”

  It is night. It is Bern’s darkest winter. The city will never see day again. A smothering brown fog rolls down the wet cobble of the Herrengasse and the good Swiss hurry dutifully through it like reservists headed for the front. But Pym and Jack Brotherhood sit snugly in a corner of their little restaurant and Sandy has sent his extra-special love, together with his absolutely warmest congratulations. It is the first time agent and controller have eaten together in public in their target city. An ingenious cover story has been agreed in the event of a chance encounter. Jack has appointed himself secretary of the Embassy’s Anglo-Swiss Christian Society and wishes to attract elements of the university. What more natural than he should turn to Magnus whom he knows from the English church? For deeper cover still he has brought the lovely Wendy who works in Chancery and is honey-haired and well-born, and has a slight but prominent protrusion of the upper lip as if she is permanently blowing out a candle just below her chin. Wendy loves both men equally; she is a natural and spontaneous toucher, with shallow, unfrightening breasts. When Pym has finished describing how he landed his great coup, Wendy cannot resist laying a hand along his cheek and saying, “God, Magnus, that was so brave. I mean marvellous. Wouldn’t Jemima be proud if she was allowed to know. Don’t you think so, Jack?” But all very quietly, in the soft-fall voice that even the horsiest must learn before they are let out of the paddock. And going very near to Jack with her hair to speak to him.

  “You did a damn good job,” says Brotherhood with his military smile. “Church should be proud of you,” he adds, straight at his agent. They drink to Pym’s good job for the church.

  It is coffee time and Brotherhood has taken an envelope from one jacket pocket and from the other a pair of steel-framed half-moon spectacles which give a mysteriously finite authority to his British-brave face. Not alimony this time, for alimony comes in a white unwatermarked envelope, not a mousy-brown one like this. He does not hand it to Pym but opens it himself in full view of everyone who cares to watch, and asks Wendy for a pencil, dear, your flashy gold one, don’t tell me how you earned that. And Wendy says, “For you, darling, anything,” and drops it into his cupped hands, which close on hers. Jack spreads the paper out before him.

  “Just want to check on a few of these addresses,” he says. “Don’t want to start sending out literature till we’re sure. Okay?”

  “Okay” meaning: Have you decoded this brilliant double entendre?

  Pym says absolutely fine and Wendy trails a loving fingernail down the list, stopping at one or two lucky names that are marked with ticks and crosses.

  “Only it seems that one or two members of our choir have been quite unduly modest about their personal particulars. Almost as if they wanted to hide their lights under a bushel,” says Brotherhood.

  “I didn’t really look,” says Pym.

  Brotherhood’s voice drops. “Nor should you. That’s our job.”

  “We couldn’t find your lovely Maria anywhere,” says Wendy, frightfully disappointed. “What have you done with her?”

  “I’m afraid she has gone back to Italy,” says Pym.

  “Not looking for a replacement, Magnus, are you, darling?” says Wendy, and all laugh uproariously, Pym loudest, though he would have given the rest of his life just for the sight of one of her breasts.

  Brotherhood mentions names that have no addresses. Pym can help with none of them, cannot put faces to them, cannot supply character descriptions. In other circumstances, he would gladly have made some up but Brotherhood has an uncomfortable way of knowing answers before he asks questions and Pym is getting wise to this. Wendy refills the men’s glasses and keeps the dregs for herself. Brotherhood passes to addresses that have no names.

  “A.H.,” he says carelessly. “Ring a bell? A.—H.?”

  Pym confesses it does not. “I really haven’t been to enough meetings yet,” he says apologetically. “I’ve been having rather a hard slog at my work before exams.”

  Brotherhood is still smiling, still perfectly relaxed. Does he know that Pym is sitting no exams? Pym notices that Wendy’s pencil has nearly vanished inside his closed fist. Its sharp end peeks out of it like a tiny gun barrel.

  “Think a bit,” Brotherhood suggests. And says it again, mouthing it slowly like a password: “A.—H.”

  “Perhaps it’s A.H. somebody else,” says Pym. “A. H. Smith. Schmidt. I could find a way of asking if you like. It’s all quite open really.”

  Wendy has frozen in the way you freeze in party games when the music stops.
Her smile has frozen with her. Wendy has the private secretary’s art of suspending her personality until it is required and something has told her it is not required at present. The waiter is clearing plates. Brotherhood’s fist is covering the paper so that quite by accident no names are visible to the passer-by.

  “Would it help if I told you that A.H., whoever he is—or she is—shares a certain address in the Länggasse. Or says he does. Care of Ollinger. That’s your place too, isn’t it?”

  “Oh you mean Axel,” says Pym.

  Somewhere a cock was crowing but Pym didn’t hear it. His ears were full of a kind of waterfall, his heart was bursting with a sense of righteous duty. He was in Rick’s dressing-room, looking for a way of stealing back the love he had given to a wrong cause. He was in the staff lavatory, doing a knife job on the classiest boy in the school. There were the stories Axel had told him when he was delirious and spilling his drinking water with both hands. There were the stories he had told him in Davos when they went to visit Thomas Mann’s sanatorium. There were the crumbs he had gleaned for himself on his occasional precautionary inspections of Axel’s room. And there was Brotherhood’s clever prompting that dragged things out of him he hadn’t realised he knew. Axel’s father had fought with the Thälmann brigade in Spain, he said. He was an old-style Social Democrat, so he was lucky to die before the Nazis could arrest him.

  “So he’s a Leftie?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I meant the son.”

  “Well not really, not that he’s said. He’s just catching up on his education. He’s uncommitted.”

  Brotherhood pressed his eyebrows together and penciled “Thälmann” on his choir list. Axel’s mother was Catholic but his father had been a member of the anti-Catholic Los von Rom movement, which was Lutheran, Pym said. His mother lost her right to confession because she had married a Protestant.

  “And a Socialist,” Brotherhood reminded Pym, under his breath, as he wrote.

  At the Gymnasium Axel’s friends all wanted to fly planes against England but Axel was persuaded by the visiting recruiting teams to volunteer for the army. He was posted to Russia, taken prisoner and escaped, but when the Allies invaded France he was pulled out to fight in Normandy where he was wounded in the spine and hip.

  “Did he tell you how he escaped from the Russians?” Brotherhood cut in.

  “He said he walked.”

  “Like he walked to Switzerland,” said Brotherhood with a hard smile and Pym began to see a pattern that he had not thought of until Brotherhood suggested it.

  “How long was he there?”

  “I don’t know. But long enough to learn Russian anyway. He’s got books in Cyrillic in his room.”

  Back in Germany he went ill from his wounds but as soon as he was well enough to walk he was sent to fight the Americans. He was wounded again and sent back to Carlsbad where his mother was laid up with jaundice, so he put her on a cart with her possessions and pushed her to Dresden, a beautiful city that the Allies had recently bombed flat. He took his mother to the district where the Silesian refugees had gathered but she died soon after he got her there, so he was alone. By now Pym’s head was swimming. The colours on the wall behind Brotherhood’s head were merging and sliding. It’s not me. It’s me. I’m doing my duty for my country. Axel, help me.

  “Right-ho, now it’s peacetime. Forty-five. What does he do?”

  “Gets out of the Soviet Zone.”

  “Why?”

  “He was scared the Russians would find him and put him back in prison. He didn’t like them and he didn’t like prison and he didn’t like the way the Communists were taking over Eastern Germany.”

  “Good story so far. What does he do about it?”

  “He burns his paybook and buys another one.”

  “Where from?”

  “A soldier he met in Carlsbad. Somebody who came from Munich who looked fairly like him. He said that in 1945 nobody in Germany looked like their photograph anyway.”

  “Why didn’t this accommodating soldier want his papers?”

  “He wanted to stay in the East.”

  “Why?”

  “Axel didn’t know.”

  “Bit thin, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “On we go.”

  “He boarded the repatriation train to Munich and everything worked fine till he got to the other end, when the Americans pulled him straight off the train and put him into prison and beat him up.”

  “Why’d they do a thing like that?”

  “It was because of his papers. He’d bought the papers of a wanted man. He’d just walked completely into a trap.”

  “Unless of course they were his own papers in the first place and he never bought them from anybody,” Brotherhood suggested, writing again. “Sorry, old boy. Didn’t mean to shatter your illusions. Way of the world, I’m afraid. How long did he do?”

  “I don’t know. He got ill again and they put him into hospital and he escaped from hospital.”

  “Pretty good at escaping, I must say. You say he walked here?”

  “Well, walked and bummed rides on trains. They had to shorten one of his legs. The Germans did. After he came back from Russia. That’s why he limps. I should have said that earlier. So I mean even with trains it was quite a walk. Munich to Austria, then Austria over the border at night to Switzerland. Then to Ostermundigen.”

  “To where?”

  “That’s where Herr Ollinger has his factory.” Pym heard himself trying to make excuses. “He hasn’t any papers at all, you see. He destroyed his own in Carlsbad. The Americans kept the ones he bought and he can’t find anyone to give him a new set. Meanwhile he’s still on the Allied wanted list. He says he’d have confessed everything the Americans asked if only he’d known what he was supposed to have done wrong. But he didn’t, so they went on beating him.”

  “Heard that one before too,” said Brotherhood under his breath, once more writing. “How does he spend his days here, Magnus? Who are his buddies?”

  Far, far too late, voices were whispering Pym caution.

  “He’s afraid to go out in case the Fremdenpolizei arrest him. If he goes into town he borrows a big hat. It isn’t only the Fremdenpolizei. If the ordinary Swissies knew about him they’d inform against him too. He says they do that. It’s a national sport. He says they do it out of envy and call it civic-mindedness. It’s just household gossip I’m telling you.”

  “Pity you didn’t tell it to us earlier.”

  “It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t anything you were interested in. Herr Ollinger told me most of it. He gossips all the time.”

  Brotherhood had his car outside. Man and boy were sitting in it but Brotherhood didn’t drive anywhere. Wendy had gone home. Brotherhood asked about Axel’s politics. Pym said Axel despised established attitudes. Brotherhood said, “Describe.” He wasn’t writing any more and his head was very still in the window frame. Pym said Axel had once remarked that pain was democratic.

  “Reading habits?” said Brotherhood.

  “Well, everything really. Everything he’s missed from the war. He types a lot. Mostly at night.”

  “What does he type?”

  “He says it’s a book.”

  “What does he read?”

  “Well, everything. Sometimes when he’s ill I get books out of the library for him.”

  “In your own name?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a bit rash. What do you get?”

  “The whole spectrum.”

  “Describe.”

  Pym described and came inevitably to Marx and Engels and the bad bears, and Brotherhood wrote all of them down, asking him who Dühring was when he was at home.

  Brotherhood asked about Axel’s habits. Pym said he liked cigars and vodka and sometimes kirsch. He didn’t mention whisky.

  Brotherhood asked about Axel’s sex-life. Sweeping aside his own limitations in this respect, Pym declared it mixed.


  “Describe,” said Brotherhood again.

  Pym did his best, though he knew even less about Axel’s sexuality than his own, except that whatever form it took, unlike Pym he was on terms with it.

  “He does sometimes have women,” said Pym deprecatingly, as if that were something all of us did. “Usually she’s some token beauty from the Cosmo, cooking for him or polishing his room. He calls them his Marthas. I thought at first he meant martyr.”

  “Dearest Father”—Pym wrote that night, alone and miserable in his attic—“I am absolutely fine and my head is buzzing from all the seminars and lectures, though I miss you terribly as ever. One bad thing however is that I had a pal who recently let me down.”

  How Pym loved Axel in the weeks that followed! For a day or so, it was true, he would not go near him, he resented him so much. He resented everything about him, every move on the other side of the radiator. He patronises me. He sneers at my ignorance without respecting my strengths. He is an arrogant German of the worst sort and Jack is right to keep his eye on him. Pym resented the mail he received, Herr Axel care of Ollinger. He resented more than ever the Marthas tiptoeing like shy disciples up the stairs to the great thinker’s sanctum, and down again two hours later. He is dissolute. He is unnatural. He is turning their heads for them, exactly as he tried to turn mine. Diligently he kept a log of these developments to give to Brotherhood at their next meeting. He also spent a lot of time in the third-class buffet wearing his clouded look for the benefit of Elisabeth. But these exercises in separation did not endure and the line to Axel grew tighter with every day. He discovered he could gauge his friend’s mood from the tempo of his typing: whether he was excited or angry or tired. He is reporting on us, he told himself without conviction. He is selling out the foreign students to his German paymaster. He is a Nazi war criminal turned Communist spy in the image of his Leftie father.