A Perfect Spy

Everything froze: herself, his pale eyes, even Harry in the doorway. “Well, well,” said Brotherhood at last. “That would make you feel better, would it? A kidnapping? Now why do you say that, dear? What’s worse than kidnapping, I wonder?”

* * *

Trying to meet his gaze Mary experienced a violent time warp. I don’t know anything. I want Plush. Give me back the land that Sam and Daddy died for. She saw herself as a school-leaver seated in front of the careers mistress in the middle of her last term. A second woman is with her, London and tough. “This lady is a recruiting officer for the Foreign Service, dear,” says the careers mistress. “A special bit of it,” says the tough woman. “She’s terribly impressed by the way you draw, dear,” says the careers mistress. “She so admires your draughtsmanship, as we all do. She wonders whether you’d be interested in taking your folder to London for a day or two, so that some other people can look at it.” “It’s for your country, dear,” the tough woman says with meaning, to the child of English patriots.

She remembered the training house in East Anglia, girls like herself, our class. She remembered the jolly lessons in copying and engraving and colouring, in papers and cardboards and linens and threads, how to make watermarks and how to alter them, how to cut rubber stamps, how to make paper look older and how to make it look younger, and she tried to remember just when it was exactly that they had realised they were being taught to forge documents for British spies. And she saw herself standing before Jack Brotherhood in his rickety upstairs office in Berlin, not a stone’s throw from the Wall, Jack the Stripper, Jack the Stoat, Jack the Black and all the other Jacks he was known as. Jack who had charge of Berlin Station and liked to meet all newcomers personally, particularly if they were pretty girls of twenty. She remembered his bleached gaze running slowly over her body while he guessed her shape and sexual weight and she remembered again hating him on sight, as she was trying to hate him now as she watched him flip through a folder of family correspondence he had pulled from the desk.

“You realise half of those are Tom’s letters from boarding-school, I suppose,” she said.

“Why doesn’t he write to both of you?”

“He does write to both of us, Jack. Tom and I have one correspondence. Magnus and Tom have a separate correspondence.”

“No interconsciousness,” said Brotherhood, using a bit of trade talk he had taught her in Berlin. He lit one of his fat yellow cigarettes and watched her theatrically through the flame. There’s a poseur in all of them, she thought. Magnus and Grant included.

“You’re absurd,” she said in nervous anger.

“It’s an absurd situation and Nigel will be here any minute to make it more absurd still. What caused it?” He opened another drawer.

“His father. If it’s a situation at all.”

“Whose camera’s this?”

“Tom’s. But we all use it.”

“Any other cameras around?”

“No. If Magnus needs one for his work he brings it from the Embassy.”

“Any here from the Embassy now?”

“No.”

“Maybe his father caused it or maybe a lot of things did. Maybe a marital tiff I don’t know about caused it.”

He was examining the camera’s settings, turning it over in his big hands as if he were thinking of buying it.

“We don’t have them,” she said.

His knowing eyes lifted to her. “How do you manage that?”

“He doesn’t offer a fight, that’s why.”

“You do though. You’re a right little demon when you get going, Mary.”

“Not any more,” she said, mistrusting his charm.

“You never met his dad, did you?” said Brotherhood as he wound the film through the camera. “There was something about him, I seem to remember.”

“They were estranged.”

“Ah.”

“Nothing dramatic. They’d drifted apart. They’re that sort of family.”

“What sort, dear?”

“Scattered. Business people. He’d said he’d let them in on his first marriage and once was enough. We hardly talked about it.”

“Tom go along with that?”

“Tom’s a child.”

“Tom was the last person Magnus saw before he vanished, Mary. Apart from the porter at his club.”

“So arrest him,” Mary suggested rudely.

Dropping the film into the bin bag Brotherhood picked up Magnus’s little transistor radio.

“This the new one they do with all the shortwave on it?”

“I believe so.”

“Take it with him on holiday, did he?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Listen to it regularly?”

“Since, as you once told me, he runs Czechoslovakia single-handed out here, it would be fairly startling if he didn’t.”

He switched it on. A male voice was reading the news in Czech. Brotherhood stared blankly at the wall while he let it continue for what seemed like hours. He switched off the radio and put it in the bag. His gaze lifted to the uncurtained window, but it was still a long while before he spoke. “Not displaying too many lights for the time of morning, are we, Mary?” he asked distractedly. “Don’t want to set neighbours chattering, do we?”

“They know Rick’s dead. They know it’s not a normal time.”

“You can say that again.”