John LeCarre - A New Collection of Three Novels Part 40

"I'm not allowed to say," said Pym, and with a crisping of the jaw stared away from her towards the stark wastelands of his duty.

"Well don't then," Belinda said. "And don't tell Daddy anything, or he'll tell Mummy."

"Dear Jemima"--Pym wrote on an off chance, a week before his great day-- "It seems so odd we are both getting married within a month of each other. I keep wondering whether we are doing the right thing. I'm sick of the boring work I'm doing, and considering a change. I love you. Magnus."

Pym waited eagerly for the mail and scanned the moors around the training camp for a sight of her Land Rover as she dashed over the horizon to save him. But nothing came, and by the eve of his wedding he was left with himself again, walking the night streets of London, and pretending they reminded him of Karlovy Vary.

And what a husband he was, Tom! What a match was celebrated! Priests of upper-cla.s.s humility, the great church famed for its permanence and previous successes, the frugal reception in a tomblike Bayswater hotel, and there at the centre of the throng, our Prince Charming himself, chatting brilliantly to the crowned heads of suburbia. Pym forgot no one's name, was fluent and informative on the subject of government-sponsored language laboratories, vouchsafed Belinda long and tender glances. All this, at least, until somebody switched off the soundtrack, Pym's included, and the faces of his audience turned mysteriously away from him, looking for the cause of breakdown. Suddenly the interconnecting doors at the far end of the room, until now locked, were flung open by unseen hands. And Pym knew in his toes at once, just by the timing and the pause, and by the way people parted before the empty s.p.a.ce, that somebody had rubbed the lamp. Two waiters entered with the grace of well-tipped men, bearing trays of uncorked bubbly and chargers of smoked salmon, though Belinda's mother had not ordered smoked salmon, and had decreed that no champagne be served before the toast to the bride and groom. After that it was the Gulworth election all over again, because first Mr. Muspole appeared, followed by a thin man with a razor slash, and each commandeered a doorpost as Rick swept between them in full Ascot rig, leaning backwards and holding his arms wide, and smiling everywhere at once. "h.e.l.lo, old son! Don't you recognise your old pal? Have this one on me, boys! Where's that bride of his? By Jove, son, she's a beauty! Come here, my dear. Give your old father-in-law a kiss! My G.o.d, there's some flesh here, son. Where have you been hiding her all these years?"

One on each arm, Rick marched the nuptial pair to the hotel forecourt, where a brand-new Jaguar car, painted Liberal yellow, stood parked in everybody's way, with white wedding ribbons tied to the bonnet, and a mile-high bunch of Harrods gardenias crammed into the pa.s.senger seat, and Mr. Cudlove at the wheel with a carnation in his mulberry b.u.t.tonhole.

"Seen one of those before then, son? Know what it is? It's your old man's gift to both of you and n.o.body will ever take it away from you as long as I'm spared. Cuddie's going to drive you wherever you want to go and leave it with you, aren't you, Cuddie?"

"I wish you both all good fortune in your chosen walk of life, sir," Mr. Cudlove said, his loyal eyes filling with tears.

Of Rick's long speech, I remember only that it was beautiful and modest, and free of all hyperbole, and rested upon the theme that when two young people love each other, us old 'uns who have had our day should stand aside, because if anyone has deserved it, they have.

Pym never saw the car again, and it was a long while before he saw Rick either, because when they went back outside Mr. Cudlove and the yellow Jaguar had vanished, and two very obvious plainclothes police detectives were talking in low tones to the confused hotel manager. But I have to tell you, Tom, that it was the best of our wedding presents, barring perhaps the posy of red poppies, thrust into Pym's arms, without a card of explanation, by a man in a Polish-looking Burberry raincoat as Pym and Belinda rode into the sunset for a week at Eastbourne.

"Put him into the field while he's unsullied," says Personnel, who has a way of speaking about people as if they weren't seated across the desk from him.

Pym is trained. Pym is complete. Pym is armed and ready and only one question remains. What mantle shall he wear? What disguise shall cover the secret frame of his maturity? In a series of unconsummated interviews reminiscent of the Oxford Appointments Board, Personnel unlocks a bedlam of possibilities. Pym will be a freelance writer. But can he write and will Fleet Street have him? With disarming openness Pym is marched through the offices of most of our great national newspapers, whose editors inanely pretend they do not know where he has come from, or why, though henceforth they will know him for ever as a creature of the Firm, and he them. He is already halfway to stardom with the Telegraph when a Fifth Floor genius has a better plan: "Look here, how would you like to join up with the Coms again, trade on your old allegiances, get yourself a billet in the international left wing set? We've always wanted to chuck a stone into that pond."

"It sounds fascinating," says Pym as he sees himself selling Marxism Today on street corners for the rest of his life.

A more ambitious plan is to get him into Parliament where he can keep an eye on some of these fellow-travelling M.P.s: "Any particular preference as to party, or aren't we fussy?" asks Personnel, still in tweeds from his weekend in Wilts.h.i.+re.

"I'd rather prefer it not to be the Liberals if it's all the same to you," says Pym.

But nothing lasts long in politics and a week later Pym is destined for one of the private banks whose directors wander in and out of the Firm's Head Office all day long, moaning about Russian gold and the need to protect our trade routes from the Bolsheviks. At the Inst.i.tute of Directors, Pym is lunched by a succession of captains of finance who think they may have an opening.

"I knew a Pym," says one, over a second brandy or a third. "Kept a dirty great office in Mount Street somewhere. Best man at his job I ever knew."

"What was his job, sir?" Pym asks politely.

"Con man," says his host with a horsy laugh. "Any relation?"

"Must be my distant wicked uncle," says Pym, laughing also, and hurries back to the sanctuary of the Firm.

On goes the dance, how seriously I'll never know, for Pym is not yet privy to these backstage deliberations, though it isn't for want of peeking into a few desk drawers and locked steel cupboards. Then suddenly the mood changes.

"Look here," says Personnel, trying to hide his aggravation. "Why the devil didn't you remind us you spoke Czech?"

Within a month, Pym is attached to an electrical-engineering company in Gloucester as a management trainee, no previous experience necessary. The managing director, to his lasting regret, was at school with the Firm's reigning Chief, and has made the mistake of accepting a series of valuable government contracts at a time when he needed them. Pym is given to the exports department, charged with opening up the East European market. His first mission is nearly his last.

"Well, why don't you just sort of take a general swing through Czecho and test the market?" says Pym's notional employer wanly. And beneath his breath: "And do please remember that whatever else you get up to is nothing to do with us, will you?"

"A quick in and out," Pym's controller tells him gaily, in the safe house in Camberwell where cub agents receive their operational briefing before cutting their milk-teeth. He hands Pym a portable typewriter with hidden cavities in the carriage.

"I know it seems silly," says Pym, "but I can't actually type."

"Everyone can type a bit," says Pym's controller. "Practise over the weekend."

Pym flies to Vienna. Memories, memories. Pym hires a car. Pym crosses the border without the smallest difficulty, expecting to see Axel waiting for him the other side.

The countryside was Austrian and beautiful. Many barns lay beside many lakes. In Plzen Pym toured a despondent factory in the company of square-faced men. In the evening he kept the safety of his hotel, watched by a pair of secret policemen who drank one coffee apiece until he went to bed. His next calls were in the north. On the road to Usti he saw army lorries and memorised their unit insignia. To the east of Usti lay a factory that the Firm suspected of producing isotope containers. Pym was unclear what an isotope was, or what it should be contained in, but he drew a sketch of the main buildings and hid it in his typewriter. Next day he continued to Prague and at the arranged hour sat himself in the famous Tyn church, which has a window looking into Kafka's old apartment. Tourists and officials wandered about unsmiling.

"So K. began to move off slowly," Pym read as he sat in the south aisle, third row from the altar, pretending to study his guidebook. "K. felt forlorn and isolated as he advanced between the rows of empty pews, with the priest's eyes fixed on him for all he knew...."

Needing a rest, Pym knelt down and prayed. With a grunt and a puff, a heavy man shuffled in beside him and sat down. Pym smelt garlic and thought of Sergeant Pavel.

Through a crack in his fingers, he identified the recognition signals: smear of white paint on left fingernail, splash of blue on left cuff, a ma.s.s of disgraceful black hair, black coat. My contact is an artist, he realised. Why didn't I think of that before? But Pym did not sit back, he did not ease the little package from his pocket as a prelude to laying it between them on the pew. He remained kneeling and soon discovered why he had done so. The sound of trained feet was crunching towards him down the aisle. The footsteps stopped. A male voice said, "Come with us, please," in Czech. With a sigh of resignation, Pym's neighbour clambered wearily to his feet and followed them out.

"Sheer coincidence," Pym's controller a.s.sured him, much amused, when he got back. "He's already been on to us. They were pulling him in for a routine questioning. He comes up for one every six weeks. Never even crossed their minds he might be making a clandestine pick-up. Let alone with a chap your age."

"You don't think he's--well, told them?" Pym said.

"Old Kyril? Blown you? You must be joking. Don't worry. We'll give you another shot in a few weeks' time."

Rick was not pleased to hear of Pym's contribution to the British export drive, and told him so on one of his secret visits from Ireland, where he had established his winter quarters while he cleared up certain misunderstandings with Scotland Yard, and fought his way into the crowded new profession of West End property evictions.

"Working as a commercial traveller--my own boy?" he exclaimed, to the alarm of the adjoining tables. "Selling electric shavers to a bunch of foreign Communists? We did all that, son. It's over. What did I pay your education for? Where's your patriotism?"

"They're not electric shavers, Father. I sell alternators, oscillators and sparking plugs. How's your gla.s.s?"

Hostility towards Rick was a new and giddying notion for Pym. He vented it cautiously, but with growing excitement. If they ate a meal, he insisted on paying in order to savour Rick's disapproval at seeing his own boy put down good money where a signature would have done the trick.

"You're not mixed up with some racket out there, are you?" said Rick. "The doors of tolerance only open a certain distance, you know, son. Even for you. What are you up to? Tell us."

The pressure on Pym's arm was suddenly dangerous. He made a joke of it, smiling broadly. "Hey, Father, that hurts," he said, awfully amused. It was Rick's thumbnail that he was most aware of, boring into an artery. "Could you possibly stop doing that, Father?" he said. "It really is uncomfortable." Rick was too busy pursing his lips and shaking his head. He was saying it was a d.a.m.ned shame when a father who had given up everything for his own son was treated like a "poor ayah." He meant pariah but the notion had never properly formed in him. Placing his elbow on the table, Pym relaxed his whole arm and let it ride about with Rick's pressure--flop one way, flop the other. Then abruptly stiffened it and, exactly as he had been taught, smacked the fat of Rick's knuckles on to the table-edge, causing the gla.s.ses to jump and the cutlery to dance and slide off the table. Taking back his bruised hand, Rick turned away to bestow a resigned smile on his subjects feasting around him. Then with his good hand he lightly pinged the edge of his Drambuie gla.s.s to indicate that he required another nice touch. Just as, by unlacing his shoes, he used to let it be known that somebody should fetch his bedroom slippers. Or by rolling on to his back, after a lengthy banquet, and spreading his knees, he declared a carnal appet.i.te.

Yet, as ever, nothing is one thing for long with Pym, and soon a strange calm begins to replace his early nervousness as he continues his secret missions. The silent, unlit country that at first sight appeared so threatening to him becomes a secret womb where he can hide himself, rather than a place of dread. He has only to cross the border for the walls of his English prisons to fall away: no Belinda, no Rick--and very nearly no Firm either. I am the travelling executive of an electronic company. I am Sir Magnus, roving free. His solitary nights in unpeopled provincial towns, where at first the yapping of a dog had been enough to bring him sweating to his window, now inspire him with a sense of protection. The air of universal oppression that hangs over the entire country enfolds him in its mysterious embrace. Not even the prison walls of his public school had given him such a sense of security. On car and train rides through river valleys, over hills capped by Bohemian castles, he drifts through realms of such inner contentment that the very cattle seem to be his friends. I shall settle here, he decides. This is my true home. How foolish of me to have supposed that Axel could ever leave it for another! He begins to relish his stilted conversations with officials. His heart leaps when he unlocks a smile from their faces. He takes pride in his slowly filling order book, feels a fatherly responsibility for his oppressors. Even his operational detours, when he is not blocking them from his mind, can be squeezed beneath the broad umbrella of his munificence: "I am a champion of the middle ground," he tells himself, using an old phrase of Axel's, as he prises a loose stone from a wall, fishes out one package and replaces it with another. "I am giving succour to a wounded land."

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 dose-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 c.o.c.ked 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 pa.s.senger 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 regime," 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 his thin legs and surveyed his fine boots. "Why in G.o.d'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?"