A Perfect Spy

“I’m afraid I didn’t,” said Pym. He peered round for someone to apologise to and saw instead the unclear form of a slender man curled on the armchair, clutching a patchwork blanket to his neck with one long white hand and a book with the other. He wore a black beret and had a drooping moustache. No feet showed, but his body had the look of something spiky and wrongly folded, like a tripod that had stuck halfway. Herr Ollinger’s walking-stick was propped against the chair. A small cigar smouldered between the fingers that clutched the blanket.

“In Switzerland it is forbidden to be poor, it is forbidden to be foreign, it is completely forbidden to hang clothes. You are an inmate of this establishment?”

“I am a friend of Herr Ollinger’s.”

“An English friend?”

“My name is Pym.”

Discovering the moustache, the fingers of one white hand began stroking it reflectively downward.

“Lord Pym?”

“Just Magnus.”

“But you are of aristocratic stock.”

“Well, nothing very special.”

“And you are the war hero,” the stranger said, and made a sucking noise that in English would have sounded skeptical.

Pym did not like the description at all. The account of himself that he had given to Herr Ollinger was obsolete. He was dismayed to hear it revived.

“So who are you, if I may ask?” said Pym.

The stranger’s fingers rose to claw at some irritation in his cheek while he appeared to consider a range of alternatives. “My name is Axel and since one week I am your neighbour, so I am obliged to listen to you grinding your teeth at night,” he said, drawing on his cigar.

“Herr Axel?” said Pym.

“Herr Axel Axel. My parents forgot to give me a second name.” He put down the book and held out a slim hand in greeting. “For God’s sake,” he exclaimed with a wince as Pym grasped it. “Go easy, will you? The war’s over.”

Too challenged for his comfort Pym left his washing for another day and took himself upstairs.

“What is Axel’s other name?” he asked Herr Ollinger next day.

“Maybe he hasn’t one,” Herr Ollinger replied mischievously. “Maybe that’s why he has no papers.”

“Is he a student?”

“He is a poet,” said Herr Ollinger proudly but the house was stiff with poets.

“They must be very long poems. He types all night,” said Pym.

“Indeed he does. And on my typewriter,” said Herr Ollinger, his pride complete.

My husband found him in the factory, Frau Ollinger said while Pym helped her prepare vegetables for the evening meal. That is to say, Herr Harprecht the night-watchman found him. Axel was sleeping on sacks in the warehouse and Herr Harprecht wanted to hand him over to the police because he had no papers and was foreign and smelly, but thank goodness my husband stopped Herr Harprecht in time and gave Axel breakfast and took him to a doctor for his sweating.

“Where does he come from?” Pym asked.

Frau Ollinger became uncharacteristically guarded. Axel comes from drüben, she said—drüben being across the border, drüben being those irrational tracts of Europe that were not Switzerland, where people rode in tanks instead of trolley-buses, and the starving had the ill manners to pick their food from rubble instead of buying it from shops.

“How did he get here?” Pym asked.

“We think he walked,” Frau Ollinger said.

“But he’s an invalid. He’s all crippled and thin.”

“We think he had a strong will and a great necessity.”

“Is he German?”

“There are many sorts of German, Magnus.”

“Which sort is Axel?”

“We don’t ask. Maybe you should not ask either.”

“Can you guess from his voice?”

“We don’t guess either. With Axel it is better we are completely without curiosity.”

“What’s he ill of?”

“Maybe he suffered in the war, as you did,” Frau Ollinger suggested with a smile of rather too much understanding. “Don’t you like Axel? Is he disturbing you up there?”

How can he disturb me when he doesn’t speak to me? thought Pym. When all I hear of him is the clicking of Herr Ollinger’s typewriter, the cries of ecstasy from his lady callers in the afternoons and the shuffle of his feet as he hauls himself to the lavatory on Herr Ollinger’s walking-stick? When all I see of him is his empty vodka bottles and the blue cloud of his cigar smoke in the corridor and his pale empty body disappearing down the stairs?

“Axel’s super,” he said.