A Perfect Spy

“That’s where Herr Ollinger has his factory.” Pym heard himself trying to make excuses. “He hasn’t any papers at all, you see. He destroyed his own in Carlsbad. The Americans kept the ones he bought and he can’t find anyone to give him a new set. Meanwhile he’s still on the Allied wanted list. He says he’d have confessed everything the Americans asked if only he’d known what he was supposed to have done wrong. But he didn’t, so they went on beating him.”

“Heard that one before too,” said Brotherhood under his breath, once more writing. “How does he spend his days here, Magnus? Who are his buddies?”

Far, far too late, voices were whispering Pym caution.

“He’s afraid to go out in case the Fremdenpolizei arrest him. If he goes into town he borrows a big hat. It isn’t only the Fremdenpolizei. If the ordinary Swissies knew about him they’d inform against him too. He says they do that. It’s a national sport. He says they do it out of envy and call it civic-mindedness. It’s just household gossip I’m telling you.”

“Pity you didn’t tell it to us earlier.”

“It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t anything you were interested in. Herr Ollinger told me most of it. He gossips all the time.”

Brotherhood had his car outside. Man and boy were sitting in it but Brotherhood didn’t drive anywhere. Wendy had gone home. Brotherhood asked about Axel’s politics. Pym said Axel despised established attitudes. Brotherhood said, “Describe.” He wasn’t writing any more and his head was very still in the window frame. Pym said Axel had once remarked that pain was democratic.

“Reading habits?” said Brotherhood.

“Well, everything really. Everything he’s missed from the war. He types a lot. Mostly at night.”

“What does he type?”

“He says it’s a book.”

“What does he read?”

“Well, everything. Sometimes when he’s ill I get books out of the library for him.”

“In your own name?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a bit rash. What do you get?”

“The whole spectrum.”

“Describe.”

Pym described and came inevitably to Marx and Engels and the bad bears, and Brotherhood wrote all of them down, asking him who Dühring was when he was at home.

Brotherhood asked about Axel’s habits. Pym said he liked cigars and vodka and sometimes kirsch. He didn’t mention whisky.

Brotherhood asked about Axel’s sex-life. Sweeping aside his own limitations in this respect, Pym declared it mixed.

“Describe,” said Brotherhood again.

Pym did his best, though he knew even less about Axel’s sexuality than his own, except that whatever form it took, unlike Pym he was on terms with it.

“He does sometimes have women,” said Pym deprecatingly, as if that were something all of us did. “Usually she’s some token beauty from the Cosmo, cooking for him or polishing his room. He calls them his Marthas. I thought at first he meant martyr.”

“Dearest Father”—Pym wrote that night, alone and miserable in his attic—“I am absolutely fine and my head is buzzing from all the seminars and lectures, though I miss you terribly as ever. One bad thing however is that I had a pal who recently let me down.”

* * *

How Pym loved Axel in the weeks that followed! For a day or so, it was true, he would not go near him, he resented him so much. He resented everything about him, every move on the other side of the radiator. He patronises me. He sneers at my ignorance without respecting my strengths. He is an arrogant German of the worst sort and Jack is right to keep his eye on him. Pym resented the mail he received, Herr Axel care of Ollinger. He resented more than ever the Marthas tiptoeing like shy disciples up the stairs to the great thinker’s sanctum, and down again two hours later. He is dissolute. He is unnatural. He is turning their heads for them, exactly as he tried to turn mine. Diligently he kept a log of these developments to give to Brotherhood at their next meeting. He also spent a lot of time in the third-class buffet wearing his clouded look for the benefit of Elisabeth. But these exercises in separation did not endure and the line to Axel grew tighter with every day. He discovered he could gauge his friend’s mood from the tempo of his typing: whether he was excited or angry or tired. He is reporting on us, he told himself without conviction. He is selling out the foreign students to his German paymaster. He is a Nazi war criminal turned Communist spy in the image of his Leftie father.

“When do we ever get to read it?” Pym had asked him once shyly in the days when they were close.

“If I ever finish it, and the publisher ever publishes it.”

“Why can’t I read it now?”

“Because you will take the cream off it for me, and leave me with the curds.”

“What’s it about?”

“Mysteries, Sir Magnus, and if they are spoken aloud they will never be written down.”