A Perfect Spy

Their destination on these journeys was the camps. For five years the refugees of Eastern Europe had been pouring into Austria through every fast-closing gap in the barbed wire: crashing frontiers in stolen cars and lorries, across minefields, clinging to the underneath of trains. They brought their hollow faces and their shorn children and their puzzled old and their frisky dogs, and their Lippsies in the making, to be corralled and questioned and decided over in their thousands, while they played chess on wooden packing cases and showed each other photographs of people they would never see again. They came from Hungary and Rumania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and sometimes Russia, and they hoped they were on their way to Canada and Australia and Palestine. They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects. All passed across Pym’s vision as he rode in his jeep from camp to camp with Kaufmann and Sabina, questioning, grading and recording, then hastening home to Membury with his booty.

At first his sensitivity was offended by so much misery and he had a hard time disguising his concern for everyone he spoke to: yes, I will see you to Montreal if it kills me; yes, I will send word to your mother in Canberra that you are safely here. At first Pym was also embarrassed by his lack of suffering. Everyone he questioned had had more experience in a day than he had in his whole young life and he resented them. Some had been crossing borders since they were children. Others spoke of death and torture so casually that he became indignant at their unconcern, until his disapproval sparked their anger and they flung back at him with mockery. But Pym the good labourer had work to do, and a commanding officer to please and, when he armed himself, a quick and covert mind to do it with. He had only to consult his own nature to know when someone was writing in the margin of his memory and excluding the main text. He knew how to make small talk while he was watching, and how to read the signals that came back to him. If they described a night crossing over the hills, Pym crossed with them, lugging their Lippsie suitcases and feeling the icy mountain air cutting through their old coats. When one of them told a lie direct, Pym rapidly took back-bearings on likely versions of the truth with the aid of his mental compass. Questions teemed in him and, budding lawyer that he was, he learned quickly to shape them into a pattern of accusation. “Where do you come from? What troops did you see there? What colour shoulder boards did they wear? What did they drive around in, what weapons did they have? Which route did you take, what guards, obstructions, dogs, wire, minefields did you meet along your way? What shoes were you wearing? How did your mother manage, your grandmother, if the mountain pass was so steep? How did you cope with two suitcases and two small children when your wife was so heavily pregnant? Is it not more likely that your employers in the Hungarian secret police drove you to the border and wished you luck as they showed you where to cross? Are you a spy and if so, would you not prefer to spy for us? Or are you merely a criminal, in which case you would surely like to take up spying, rather than be tossed back across the border by the Austrian police?” Thus Pym drew from his own criss-cross lives in order to unravel theirs, and Sabina with her scowls and moods and occasional gorgeous smiles became the sultry voice in which he did it. Sometimes he let her translate into German for him, in order to give himself the secret advantage of hearing everything twice.

“Where you learn to play these stupid games?” she asked him sternly one evening as they danced together at the Hotel Wiesler, to the disapproval of the army wives.

Pym laughed.

On the brink of manhood, with Sabina’s thigh riding against his own, why should he owe anything to anybody? So he invented a story for her about this cunning German he’d known at Oxford who had turned out to be a spy.

“We had a rather weird battle of wits,” he confessed, drawing upon hastily created memories. “He used all the tricks in the book and to start with I was as innocent as a babe and believed everything he told me. Gradually the contest got a bit more even.”

“He was Communist?”

“As it turned out, yes. He made a show of hiding it, but it slipped out when you really went for him.”

“He was hommsexual?” Sabina asked, voicing an ever-ready suspicion as she squirmed more deeply into him.

“Not so far as I could see. He had women in regiments.”

“He slept only with military women?”

“I meant he had large quantities of them. I was using a metaphor.”

“I think he was wishing to disguise his hommsexuality. This is normal.”