A Perfect Spy

Pym asks her how she has known where to find it. I saw the stupid thing being delivered, she says. I was keeping a watch on Searle’s hotel the first day of the campaign. The pansy Cudlove drove it up specially in his limousine, the cost alone. The bastard Loft helped him carry it to the cellar, first time he’s got his hands dirty. Rick didn’t dare leave it in London while they were all up here. “I have to put the proof on him, Magnus,” she keeps repeating as he leads her through the dawn to her miserable lodging-house, her voice whining and insisting in his ear like a machine that nobody can stop. “If he’s got the proof there like he says, I’ll have it off of him and turn it back on him, I swear I will. All right, I’ve taken a drop of money off him, it’s true. But what’s the money when he’s cheated me in love? What’s the money when he can walk down the street a grandee and there’s my John rotting in his grave? And the people in the street all clapping for him, for Rickie boy? And con his way to Heaven into the bargain? What’s the use of a poor deluded victim like me who let him have his will with her and will burn in Hell for it, if she won’t do her duty by the world and point him up for the devil that he is? Where’s the proof? I’m asking.”

“Please stop,” said Pym. “I know what you want.”

“Where’s the justice? If he’s got it there I’ll have it from him, thank you. I’ve no letters above a couple of procrastinators from Perce Loft, and what do they say? It’s like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall, I tell you.”

“Try to be calm now,” Pym said. “Please.”

“I took myself to that stupid Lakin, the Tory. Half a day it took of waiting but I got to him. ‘Rick Pym’s a shark,’ I tell him. What’s the good of telling that to a Tory when they’re all sharks anyway? I told the Labour but they kept saying ‘What’s he done?’ They said they’ll enquire and thank you, but what will they find, the poor innocents?”

* * *

Mattie Searle is sweeping the courtyard. Pym is indifferent to his scrutiny. Pym carries himself with authority, using the same walk that got him to Lippsie’s bicycle and past the policeman to the Overflow House. I am authority. I am British. Will you kindly get out of my way.

“I left something in the cellar,” he says carelessly.

“Oh yes,” says Mattie.

Peggy Wentworth’s bandsaw voice is cutting into his soul. What dreadful echoes has it woken in him? In what empty house of his childhood is it nagging and whining at him? Why is he so abject before its dredging insistence? She is the risen Lippsie, speaking out from the grave at last. She is the world inside my head made strident. She is the sin I can never expiate. Put your head in the basin, Pym. Hold these taps and listen to me while I explain why no punishment will ever be enough for you. Put him on bread and water, his father’s child. Why do you wet your bed, old son? Don’t you know there’s a thousand quid in cash waiting for you at the end of your first dry year? He switches on the committee-room lights, throws open the door to the cellar steps and stomps heavily down them. Cardboard boxes. Commodities. A glut to fill the shortages. The Michaels’ dividers to the fore again, better than a Swiss penknife. He trips the lock of the green cabinet and pulls out the first drawer as the glow begins to spread over him.

Lippschitz first name Anna, two volumes only. Why Lippsie, it’s you at last, he thinks calmly. Well it was a short life, wasn’t it? No time now, but rest where you are and I’ll come back and claim you later. Watermaster Dorothy, Marital, one volume only. Well it was a short marriage too, but wait for me, Dot, for I’ve other ghosts I must attend to first. He closes the first drawer and pulls open the second. Rick, you bastard, where are you? Bankruptcy, the whole drawer full of it. He opens the third. The imminence of his discovery is setting his body on fire: the eyelids, the surfaces of his back and waist. But his fingers are light and quick and agile. This is what I was born for, if I was born at all. I am God’s detective, seeing everybody right. Wentworth, a dozen of them, tagged in Rick’s handwriting. Foremost in his mind Pym has the dates of Muspole’s letter regretting Rick’s absence for his national necessity. He remembers the Fall and Rick’s long healthy holiday while he and Dorothy were sweating out their imprisonment in The Glades. Rick you bastard where were you? “Come on, old son, we’re pals, aren’t we?” In a minute I shall hear Herr Bastl barking.