A Perfect Spy

“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.”

* * *