A Perfect Spy

For a frontier crosser Axel had come well equipped, Pym noticed. There was not a trace of mud on his boots, his clothes were pressed and official-looking. Releasing Pym, he grabbed a briefcase, plonked it on the table and drew from it a pair of glasses and a bottle of vodka. Then gherkins, sausage and a loaf of the black bread he used to send Pym out to buy in Bern. They toasted each other gravely, the way Axel had taught him. They refilled their glasses and drank again, a drink for each man. And it is my recollection that by the time they separated they had finished the bottle, for I remember Axel chucking it out into the lake to the outrage of about a thousand moorhens. But if Pym had drunk a case of the stuff it would not have affected him, such was the intensity of his feeling. Even while they began to talk, Pym kept secretly blinking into corners to make sure everything was how it was when he had last looked, so eerily similar at times was the barn to the Bern attic, right down to the soft wind that used to whirr in the skylights. And when he heard the fox again in the distance, he had the certain feeling it was Bastl barking on the wooden staircase after everyone had gone. Except that, as I say, those sentimental days were over. Magnus had killed them dead; the manhood of their friendship was beginning.

* * *

Now it is the way of old friends when they bump into each other, Tom, to put aside the immediate cause of their meeting until last. They prefer as a prelude to account for the years between, which gives a kind of tightness to whatever they have met to discuss. And that is what Pym and Axel did, though you will understand, now that you are familiar with the workings of Pym’s mind, that it was he and not Axel who led this passage of the conversation, if only in order to show to himself as well as to Axel that he was totally without sin in the tricky matter of Axel’s disappearance. He did it well. He was a polished performer these days.

“Honestly, Axel, nobody ever went out of my life so abruptly,” he complained in a tone of jocular reproach as he sliced sausage, buttered the bread and generally occupied himself with what actors call business. “You were there all safely tucked up in the evening, we’d got a bit drunk, said good night. Next morning I hammered on your wall, no answer. I go downstairs and walk into poor old Frau O crying her heart out. ‘Where’s Axel? They’ve taken away our Axel! The Fremdenpolizei carried him down the stairs and one of them kicked Bastl.’ From all they said, I must have been sleeping like the dead.”

Axel smiled his old warm smile. “If we only knew how the dead sleep,” he said.

“We held a sort of wake, hung around the house, half expecting you to come back. Herr Ollinger made some useless phone calls and got absolutely nowhere, naturally. Frau O remembered she had a brother in one of the Ministries, he was no good. In the end I thought, To hell with it, what have we got to lose? So I went down to the Fremdenpolizei myself. Passport in hand. ‘My friend’s missing. Some men dragged him from the house early this morning, said they came from you. Where is he?’ I banged the table a bit and got nowhere. Then two rather creepy gentlemen in raincoats took me into another room and told me that if I made any more trouble the same thing would happen to me.”

“That was brave of you, Sir Magnus,” said Axel. Reaching out a pale fist he tapped Pym lightly on the shoulder to say thanks.

“No, it wasn’t. Not really. I mean I did have somewhere to go. I was British and I had rights.”

“Sure. And you knew people at the Embassy. That’s true also.”

“And they’d have helped me out too. I mean they tried to. When I went to them.”

“You did?”

“Absolutely. Later, of course. Not immediately. Rather as a last resort. But they had a go…. So anyway, back I went to the Länggasse and we — honestly, we buried you. It was awful. Frau O was up in your room still crying, trying to sort out whatever you’d left behind without looking at it. Which wasn’t much. The Fremdenpolizei seemed to have pinched most of your papers. I took your library books back. Your gramophone records. We hung your clothes in the cellar. Then we sort of wandered round the house as if it had been bombed. ‘To think this could happen in Switzerland,’ we kept saying. Really just like a death.”

Axel laughed. “It was good of you to mourn me at least. Thank you, Sir Magnus. Did you hold a funeral service also?”

“With no body and no forwarding address? All Frau O wanted to do was look for the culprit. She was convinced you’d been informed against.”

“Who did she think did it?”

“Everyone in turn really. The neighbours. The shopkeepers. Maybe someone from the Cosmo. One of the Marthas.”

“Which one did she choose?”

Pym picked the prettiest and frowned. “I seem to remember there was a leggy blonde one who was reading English.”

“Isabella? Isabella informed against me?” said Axel incredulously. “But she was in love with me, Sir Magnus. Why would she do that?”