A Perfect Spy

“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?”