A Perfect Spy

“Hey, come on, Mabs, that’s a bit of a bad face, isn’t it?” says Magnus, jollying her up. “Don’t you like our new Schloss?”

“You were being funny and I smiled.”

“Didn’t look like a smile,” says Magnus, smiling himself to show her how. “More like a bit of a grimace from where I sits, m’dear.”

But Mary’s blood is rising and as usual she cannot stop herself. The prospect of her uncommitted crime is already laying its guilt on her.

“That’s what you’re writing about, is it?” she snaps. “How you waste your wit on the wrong woman?”

Appalled by her own unpleasantness Mary bursts out weeping and drives her fists on to the arms of the rush chair. But Magnus is not appalled at all. Magnus puts down his glass and comes to her, he taps her gently on the arm with his fingertips, waiting to be let in. He puts her glass delicately out of reach. Moments later the springs of their new bed are pinging and whining like a brass band tuning up, for a desperate erotic fervour has latterly come to Magnus’s aid. He makes love to her as if he will never see her again. He buries himself in her as if she is his only refuge and Mary goes with him blindly. She climbs, he draws her after him, she is shouting at him—“Please, oh Christ!” He hits the mark for her, and for a blessed moment Mary can kiss the whole bloody world goodbye.

“We’re using Pembroke, by the way,” Magnus says later but not quite late enough. “I’m sure it’s unnecessary but I want to be on the safe side in case.”

Pembroke is one of Magnus’s worknames. He keeps the Pembroke passport in his briefcase, she has already located it. It has an artfully muddy photograph that might be Magnus or might not. In the forgery workshop in Berlin they used to call photographs like that floaters.

“What do I tell Tom?” she asks.

“Why tell him anything?”

“Our son’s name is Pym. He might take a little oddly to being told he’s Pembroke.”

She waits, hating herself for her intractability. It is not often that Magnus has to hunt for an answer even when it concerns guidance on how to deceive their child. But he hunts now, she can feel him do it as he lies wakefully beside her in the dark.

“Yes, well tell him the Pembrokes own the house we’re in, I should. We’re using their name to order things from the shop. Only if asked, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“Those two men are still there,” says Tom from the door, who turns out to have been part of their conversation all this while.

“What men?” says Mary.

But her skin is pricking on her nape, her body is clammy with panic. How much has Tom heard? Seen?

“The ones who are mending their motorbike by the river. They’ve got special army sleeping-bags and a torch and a special tent.”

“There are campers all over the island,” says Mary. “Go back to bed.”

“They were on our ship too,” says Tom. “Behind the lifeboat, playing cards. Watching us. Speaking German.”

“Lots of people were on the ship,” says Mary. Why don’t you say something, you bastard? she screams at Magnus in her head. Why do you lie dead instead of helping me when I’m still wet from you?

With Tom on one side of her, Magnus on the other, Mary listens to the bells of Plomari tolling out the hours. Four more days, she tells herself. On Sunday, Tom flies back to London for the new school term. And on Monday I’ll do it and be damned.

* * *

Brotherhood was shaking her. Nigel had said something to him: ask her about the beginning — pin her down.

“We want you to come back a stage, Mary. Can you do that? You’re running ahead of yourself.”

She heard murmuring, then the sound of Georgie changing a reel on her tape-recorder. The murmuring was her own.

“Tell us how you came to be taking the holiday in the first place, will you, dear? Who proposed it?. . Oh Magnus, did he? I see. And was that here in this house?. . It was…. Now what time of day would that have been? Sit up, will you?”

So Mary sat up and began again where Jack had told her: on a sweet, early summer evening in Vienna when everything was still absolutely fine and neither Lesbos nor all the islands that came before it were a glint in clever Magnus’s eye. Mary was in the basement in her overalls, binding a first edition of Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, by Karl Kraus which Magnus had found in Leoben while meeting a Joe there and Mary—

“That a regular one — Leoben?”

“Yes, Jack, Leoben was regular.”

“How often did he go there?”

“Twice a month. Three times. It was an old Hungarian he had, no one special.”

“He told you that, did he? I thought he kept his Joes to himself.”

“An old Hungarian wine dealer from way back, with offices in Leoben and Budapest. Mostly Magnus kept his secrets to himself. Sometimes he told me. Now can I go on?”