A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

  Tom will come first for her.

  She’ll stay.

  She’ll take Tom with her.

  I need a woman.

  An all-night coffee shop stood at the corner of Half Moon Street and on other early mornings Brotherhood might have stopped there and let the tired whores make a fuss of his dog, and Brotherhood in return would have made a fuss of the whores, bought them a coffee and chatted them up, because he liked their tradecraft and their guts and their mixture of human canniness and stupidity. But his dog was dead and so for the time being was his sense of fun. He unlocked his door and headed for the sideboard where the vodka was. He poured himself a warm half tumbler and drank it down. He ran a bath, switched on his transistor radio and took it to the bathroom. The news reported disasters everywhere but no British diplomatic couple surfacing in Prague. If the Czechs want to blow the whistle they’ll do it at midday in order to catch the evening television and tomorrow’s papers, he thought. He began shaving. The phone was ringing. It’s Nigel saying we’ve found him, he was at his club all the time. It’s the duty officer reporting that the Prague Foreign Ministry has put out a midday press call for foreign correspondents. It’s Steggie, saying he likes strong men.

  He switched off the radio, walked naked to the drawing-room, snatched up the receiver, said “Yes?” and heard a ping, then nothing. He pressed his lips together as a warning to himself not to speak. He was praying. He was definitely praying. Speak, he prayed. Say something. Then he heard it: three short taps of a coin or a nail-file on the drum of the mouthpiece: Prague procedures. Casting round for something metal, he saw his fountain pen on the writing table and managed to seize it without relinquishing the telephone. He tapped once in return: I am reading you. Two more taps, then three again. Stay where you are, said the message. I have information for you. With his pen he gave four taps to the mouthpiece and heard two in reply before the caller rang off. He ran his fingers through his stubble hair. He took his vodka to the desk and sat down, put his face in his hands. Keep alive, he prayed. It’s the networks. It’s Pym, putting it all right. Keep clever. I’m here, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m here and waiting for your next signal. Don’t call again until you’re ready.

  The phone screamed a second time. He lifted the receiver but it was only Nigel. Pym’s description and photograph were on their way to every police station in the country, he said. The Firm was switching to the operational telephone lines only. Bo had ordered the Whitehall lines disconnected. The press contacts were already beating down the doors. Why is he talking to me? Brotherhood wondered. Is he lonely or is he giving me a chance to say I’ve just had this funny phone call from a Joe using Prague procedures? It’s the funny call, he decided.

  “Some joker just phoned me with a Czech call sign,” he said. “I gave him the signal to speak but he wouldn’t. God alone knows what it was about.”

  “Well if anything comes through, let us know at once. Use the operational line.”

  “So you said,” said Brotherhood.

  Waiting again. Thinking of every Joe who had ever come through badland. Take your time. Move carefully and with confidence. Don’t panic. Don’t run. Take your time. Pick your phone box. He heard a knock at the door. It’s some bloody hawker. Kate’s taken her overdose. It’s that fool Arab boy who lives downstairs and always thinks my bathroom’s leaking on him. He pulled on a dressing-gown, opened the door and saw Mary. He hauled her inside and slammed the door. Whatever seized him after that he didn’t know. Relief or fury, remorse or indignation. He slapped her once, then he slapped her again and on a clear day he would have taken her straight to bed.

  “There’s a place called Farleigh Abbott near Exeter,” she said.

  “What of it?”

  “Magnus told him he’d put his mother in a house beside the sea in Devon.”

  “Told who?”

  “Poppy. His Czech controller. They were students together in Bern. He thinks Magnus is going to kill himself. I suddenly realised. That’s what’s in the burnbox with the secrets. The Station gun. Isn’t it?”

  “How do you know it’s Farleigh Abbott?”

  “He talked about his mother in Devon. He hasn’t got a bloody mother. His only place in Devon is Farleigh Abbott. ‘When I was in Devon,’ he’d say. ‘Let’s go to Devon for a holiday.’ It was Farleigh Abbott, always. We never went and he stopped talking about it. Rick used to take him there from school. They used to picnic and bicycle on the beach. It’s one of his ideal places. He’s there with a woman. I know he is.”

  15

  You will imagine, Tom, with what glory in his youthful heart the brilliant intelligence officer and lover celebrated the completion of his two years of devoted service to the flag in distant Austria and set about returning to civilian England. His leave-taking from Sabina was not as heart-rending as he had feared, for as the day approached she feigned a Slav indifference to his departure.

  “I shall be happy woman, Magnus. Your English wives will not make sour faces at me. I shall be economist and free woman, not the courtesan of a frivolous soldier.” Nobody had ever called Pym frivolous before. She even took herself on leave ahead of him to forestall the agony of parting. She is being brave, Pym told himself. His farewell from Axel, though haunted by rumours of fresh purges, had a similarly rounded feel to it.

  “Sir Magnus, whatever happens to me, we have done a great work together,” he said as, in the evening light, they faced each other outside the barn that had become Pym’s second home. “Never forget you owe me two hundred dollars.”

  “I never will,” Pym said.

  He began the long walk back to Sergeant Kaufmann’s jeep. He turned to wave but Axel had vanished into the forest.

  The two hundred dollars were a reminder of their increasing closeness during the final months of their relationship.

  “My father’s pressing me for money again,” Pym had said one evening while they photographed a codebook he had borrowed from Membury’s cricket locker. “The Burmese police are proposing to arrest him.”

  “Then send it to him,” Axel had replied, winding back the film of his camera. He slipped the film in his pocket and inserted a fresh one. “How much does he want?”

  “Whatever it is, I haven’t got it. I’m a subaltern on thirteen shillings a day, not a millionaire.”

  Axel had appeared to pay no further interest, and they turned instead to the topic of Sergeant Pavel. Axel said it was time to stage a fresh crisis in Pavel’s life.

  “But he had a crisis only last month,” Pym had objected. “His wife threw him out of his apartment for drunkenness and we had to help him buy his way in again.”

  “We need a crisis,” Axel had repeated firmly. “Vienna is beginning to take him for granted and I do not care for the tone of their follow-up questions.”

  Pym found Membury sitting at his desk. The afternoon sun was shining on one side of his friendly head while he read a fish book.

  “I’m afraid Greensleeves wants a bonus of two hundred dollars cash,” he said.

  “But my dear chap, we’ve paid him a pot of money this month already! What on earth can he want two hundred dollars for?”

  “He’s got to buy his daughter an abortion. The doctor only takes U.S. dollars and it’s getting urgent.”

  “But the child’s a mere fourteen. Who’s the man? They ought to throw him into prison.”

  “It’s that Russian captain from headquarters.”

  “The pig. The utter swine.”

  “Pavel’s a Roman Catholic too, you know,” Pym reminded him. “Not a very good one, I agree. But it’s not easy for him either.”

  The next night Pym counted two hundred dollars across the barn table. Axel tossed them back at him.

  “For your father,” he said. “A loan from me to you.”

  “I can’t do that. Those are operational funds.”

  “Not any more. They belong to Sergeant Pavel.” Pym still did not pick up the money. “And Sergeant Pavel le
nds them to you as your friend,” Axel said, tearing a sheet of paper from his notebook. “Here—write me an I.O.U. Sign it and one day I shall make you pay it back.”

  Pym rode away in good heart, confident that Graz and all its responsibilities, like Bern, would cease to exist the moment he entered the first tunnel.

  Laying down his arms at the Intelligence Corps Depot in Sussex, Pym was handed the following PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL letter by the demobilisation officer:The Government Overseas Research Group

  P. O. Box 777

  The Foreign Office

  London, S.W. I

  Dear Pym,

  Mutual friends in Austria have passed your name to me as someone who might be interested in longer term employment. If this is so, would you care to lunch with me at the Travellers’ Club for an informal chat on Friday the nineteenth at 12:45?

  (Signed) Sir Alwyn Leith, C.M.G.

  For several days a mysterious squeamishness held Pym back from replying. I need new horizons, he told himself. They are good people but limited. Feeling strong one morning, he wrote regretting he was considering a career in the Church.

  “There’s always Shell, Magnus,” said Belinda’s mother, who had taken Pym’s future much to heart. “Belinda’s got an uncle in Shell, haven’t you, darling?”

  “He wants to do something worthwhile, Mummy,” Belinda said, stamping her foot and making the breakfast table rattle.

  “Time somebody did,” said Belinda’s father from behind his Telegraph, and for some reason found this very funny, and went on laughing through his gapped teeth while Belinda stormed into the garden in a rage.

  A more interesting contender for Pym’s services was Kenneth Sefton Boyd, who had come into an inheritance and was proposing that he and Pym should open a nightclub. Keeping this intelligence from Belinda, who had views on nightclubs and the Sefton Boyds, Pym pleaded an engagement at his old school and took himself to the family estate in Scotland, where Jemima met him at the station. She was driving the very Land Rover from which she had glowered at him when they were children. She was more beautiful than ever.

  “How was Austria?” she asked as they bumped cheerfully over purple Highlands towards a monstrous Victorian castle.

  “Super,” said Pym.

  “Did you box and play rugger all the time?”

  “Well not all the time, actually,” Pym confessed.

  Jemima cast him a look of protracted interest.

  The Sefton Boyds lived in a parentless world. A disapproving retainer served them dinner. Afterwards they played backgammon until Jemima was tired. Pym’s bedroom was as large as a football field and as cold. Sleeping lightly, he woke without stirring to see a dismembered red spark switching like a firefly across the darkness. The spark descended and disappeared. A pale shape advanced on him. He smelt cigarette and toothpaste and felt Jemima’s naked body arrange itself softly around him, and Jemima’s lips find his own.

  “You won’t mind if we turf you out on Friday, will you?” said Jemima while the three breakfasted in bed from a tray brought in by Sefton Boyd. “Only we’ve got Mark coming for the weekend.”

  “Who’s Mark?” said Pym.

  “Well I’m going to sort of marry him, actually,” said Jemima. “I’d marry Kenneth if I could, but he’s so conventional about those things.”

  Renouncing women, Pym wrote to the British Council offering to distribute culture among primitives, and to his old housemaster, Willow, asking for a position teaching German. “I greatly miss the school’s discipline and have felt a keen loyalty towards it ever since my father failed to pay my fees.” He wrote to Murgo booking himself in for an extended retreat, though he had the prudence to be vague about dates. He wrote to the Catholics of Farm Street asking to continue the instruction he had begun in Graz. He wrote to an English school in Geneva and an American school in Heidelberg, and to the BBC, all in a spirit of self-negation. He wrote to the Inns of Court about opportunities for reading law. When he had thus surrounded himself with a plethora of choices, he filled in an enormous form detailing his brilliant life till now and followed it to the Oxford Appointments Board in search of more. The morning was sunny; his old university city dazzled him with carefree memories of his days as a Communist informer. His interlocutor was whimsical if not downright fey. He pushed his spectacles to the top of his nose. He shoved them into his greying locks like an effeminate racing driver. He gave Pym sherry and put a hand on his backside in order to propel him to a long window that gave on to a row of council houses.

  “How about a life in filthy industry?” he suggested.

  “Industry would be fine,” said Pym.

  “Not unless you like eating with the crew. Do you like eating with the crew?”

  “I’m really not very class-conscious actually, sir.”

  “How charming. And do you like having grease up to your elbows?”

  Pym said he didn’t mind grease either, actually, but by then he was being guided to a second window that gave on to spires and a lawn.

  “I’ve a menial librarianship at the British Museum and a sort of third assistant clerkship to the House of Commons, which is the proletarian version of the Lords. I’ve bits and bobs in Kenya, Malaya, and the Sudan. I can do you nothing in India, they’ve taken it away from me. Do you like abroad or hate it?”

  Pym said abroad was super, he had been to university in Bern. His interlocuter was puzzled. “I thought you went to university here.”

  “Here too,” said Pym.

  “Ah. Now do you like danger?”

  “I love it, actually.”

  “You poor boy. Don’t keep saying ‘actually.’ And will you give unquestioning allegiance to whoever is rash enough to employ you?”

  “I will.”

  “Will you adore your country right or wrong so help you God and the Tory Party?”

  “I will again,” said Pym, laughing.

  “Do you also believe that to be born British is to be born a winner in the great lottery of life?”

  “Well, yes, to be honest, that too.”

  “Then be a spy,” his interlocutor suggested and drew from his desk yet another application form and handed it to Pym. “Jack Brotherhood sends his love, and says why on earth haven’t you been in touch with him, and why won’t you have lunch with his nice recruiter?”

  I could write whole essays for you, Tom, on the voluptuous pleasures of being interviewed. Of all the arts of affiliation Pym mastered, and throughout his life improved upon, the interview must stand in first place. We didn’t have Office trick-cyclists in those days, as your Uncle Jack likes to call them. We didn’t have anybody who wasn’t himself a citizen of the secret world, blessed with the unlined innocence of privilege. The nearest they had come to life’s experience was the war, and they saw the peace as its continuation by other means. Yet in the terms of the world outside their heads they had led lives so untested, so childlike and tender in their simplicities, so inward in their connections, that they required echelons of cut-outs to reach the society they honestly believed they were protecting. Pym sat before them, calm, reflective, resolute, modest. Pym composed his features in one mould after another, now of reverence, now of awe, zeal, passionate sincerity or spiritual good humour. He paraded pleasurable surprise when he heard that his tutors thought the world of him, and a stern-jawed pride on learning that the army loved him too. He modestly demurred or modestly boasted. He weeded out the half-believers from the believers and did not rest until he had converted the pack of them to paid-up life membership of the Pym supporters’ club.

  “Now tell us about your father, will you, Pym?” said a man with a droopy moustache uncomfortably reminiscent of Axel’s. “Sounds a bit of a colourful sort of type to me.”

  Pym smiled ruefully, sensing the mood. Pym delicately faltered before rallying.

  “I’m afraid he’s a bit too colourful sometimes, sir,” he said amid a hubble-bubble of male laughter. “I don’t see a lot of him to be honest. We’re sti
ll friends, but I rather steer clear of him. I have to, actually.”

  “Yes. Well, I don’t think we can hold you responsible for the sins of your old man, can we?” said the same questioner indulgently. “It’s you we’re interviewing, not your papa.”

  How much did they know of Rick, or care? Even today I can only guess, for the question was never raised again and I am sure that in any formal way it went forgotten within days of Pym’s acceptance. English gentlemen, after all, do not discriminate against each other on the grounds of percentage, only of breeding. Occasionally they must have read of one of Rick’s more lurid collapses, and perhaps allowed themselves an amused smile. Here and there, presumably, word trickled down to them by way of their commercial contacts. But my suspicion is that Rick was an asset. A healthy streak of criminality in a young spy’s background never did him any harm, they reasoned. “Grown up in a hard school,” they told one another. “Could be useful.”

  The last question of the interview and Pym’s answer echo for ever in my head. A military man in tweeds put it.

  “Look here, young Pym,” he demanded, with a thrust of his bucolic head. “You’re by way of being a Czech buff. Speak their language a bit, know their people. What d’you say to these purges and arrests they’re having over there? Worry you?”

  “I think the purges are quite appalling, sir. But they are to be expected,” said Pym, fixing his earnest gaze upon a distant, unreachable star.

  “Why expected?” demanded the military man, as if nothing ought to be.

  “It’s a rotten system. It’s superimposed on tribalism. It can only survive by the exercise of oppression.”

  “Yes, yes. Granted. So what would you do about it—do?”

  “In what capacity, sir?”

  “As one of us, you fool. Officer of this service. Anyone can talk. We do.”

  Pym had no need to think. His patent sincerity was out there speaking for him already.

  “I’d play their game, sir. I’d divide them against themselves. Spread rumour, false accusation, suspicion. I’d let dog eat dog.”