A Perfect Spy

He was looking at the book. “Another gem he’s underlined. ‘If I am not for myself who is for me; and being for my own self what am I? If not now when?’ Well, well. I’m enlightened. Are you?”

“No.”

“Nor am I. He’s free.” He closed the book and put it back on the table. “He didn’t take anything with him on his walk, did he? Like a briefcase?”

“A newspaper.”

You’re going deaf. Admit it. You’re worried that a hearing-aid will spoil your self-image. Speak, damn you!

She had said it. She knew she had. She had been waiting all evening to say it, prepared it from every possible angle, practised it, rehearsed it, denied it, forgotten it, revived it. And now it was echoing in her head like an explosion while she took a frightfully careless pull at her whisky. Yet his eyes, straight at her, were still waiting.

“A newspaper,” she repeated. “Just a newspaper. What of it?”

“Which newspaper?”

“The Presse.”

“That’s a daily.”

“Correct. Die Presse is a daily.”

“A local daily newspaper. And Magnus took it with him. To read in the dark. Dressed in his dancing pumps. Tell me about it.”

“I just did, Jack.”

“No, you didn’t. And you’re going to have to, Mary, because when we get the heavy guns here you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

She had perfect recall. Magnus was standing by the door, a step from where Brotherhood stood now. He was pale and untouchable, the dufflecoat flung crookedly over his shoulders while he glared round in stiff phases: fireplace, wife, clock, books. She heard herself telling him the things she had already recounted to Brotherhood, but more of them. For God’s sake, Magnus, stay. Don’t get the blacks, stay. Don’t sink into one of your moods. Stay. Make love. Get drunk. If you want company, I’ll get Grant and Bee back, or we’ll go there. She saw him smile his rigid, bright-lit smile. She heard him put on his awfully easy voice. His Lesbos voice. And she heard herself repeat his words exactly, to Brotherhood, now.

“He said, ‘Mabs, where’s the bloody paper, darling?’ I thought he meant The Times for looking at the Scottish property market, so I said, ‘Wherever you put it when you brought it back from the Embassy.’”

“But he didn’t mean The Times,” said Brotherhood.

“He went over to the rack — there—” She looked at it but didn’t point, because she was terrified of giving too much importance to the gesture. “And helped himself. To Die Presse. From the rack, where the Presse is kept. Till the end of each week. He likes me to keep the back numbers. Then he walked out,” she ended, making it all sound perfectly normal, which of course it was.

“Did he look at it at all when he took it out?”

“Just the date. To check.”

“What did you suppose he wanted it for?”

“Maybe there was a late-night film.” Magnus had never gone to a late-night film in his life. “Maybe he wanted something to read in the café.” With no money on him, she thought, as she filled the void of Brotherhood’s silence. “Maybe he was looking for distraction. As we all might be. Have been. Anyone might when they’re bereaved.”

“Or free,” Brotherhood suggested. But he did not otherwise help her.

“Anyway, he was so upset he took the wrong day’s,” she said brightly, clinching the matter.

“You looked, did you, dear?”

“Only when I was throwing away.”

“When were you doing that?”

“Yesterday.”

“Which one did he take?”

“Monday’s. It was all of three days old. So I mean obviously he was in considerable shock.”

“Obviously.”

“All right, his father wasn’t the great love of his life. But he was still dead. Nobody’s rational when a thing like that happens. Not even Magnus.”

“So what did he do next? After he’d looked at the date and taken the wrong day’s?”

“He went out. As I told you. For a walk. You don’t listen. You never did.”

“Did he fold it?”

“Really, Jack! What does it matter how somebody carries a newspaper?”

“Just tuck in your ego a minute and answer. What did he do with it?”

“Rolled it.”

“And then?”

“Nothing. He carried it. In his hand.”

“Did he carry it back again?”

“Here to the house? No.”

“How do you know he didn’t?”

“I was waiting for him in the hall.”

“And you noticed: no newspaper. No rolled newspaper, you said to yourself.”

“Purely incidentally, yes.”

“Incidentally nothing, Mary. You had it in your mind to look. You knew he’d gone out with it and you spotted at once he’d come back without it. That’s not incidental. That’s spying on him.”

“Please yourself.”

He was angry. “It’s you who’s going to have to do the pleasing, Mary,” he said, loud and slow. “You’re going to have to please Brother Nigel in about five minutes from now. They’re in spasm, Mary. They can see the ground opening up at their feet again and they do not know what to do. They literally do not know what to do.” His anger passed. Jack could do that. “And later — as soon as you had a chance — you incidentally searched his pockets. And it wasn’t there.”

“I didn’t look for it, I simply noticed it was missing. And yes, it wasn’t there.”

“Does he often go out with old newspapers?”