A Perfect Spy

“You are to proceed to Bern and take Rooms at the Grand Palace Hotel. Mr. Bertl the under-manager is first Rate, the Bill is taken care of. Signor Lapadi will Contact the Baroness and guide you to the Austrian border. When Lapadi has given you the Box and you have Confirmed in our Language that it’s all there, see him right with the Enclosed and not until. This is going to be the Saving of us, son. That Money you are Carrying took a lot of earning, but when this is over none of us will ever have to Worry again.”

* * *

I shall be brisk with the operational details of the Rothschild assignment, Jack — the days of hope, the days of doubt, the sudden leaps from one to the other. And I truly forget which street corners or codewords preceded the slow descent into inconclusion that has been my memory of so many operations since — just as I forget, if I ever knew, in what quantities of skepticism and blind faith Pym pursued his mission to its inevitable end. Certainly I have known operations since that have been mounted on quite as little likelihood of success, and have cost a great deal more than money. Signor Lapadi spoke only to the baroness, who relayed his information with disdain.

“Lapadi he talk mit his Vertrauensmann, darling.” She smiles indulgently when Pym asks what a Vertrauensmann is. “The Vertrauensmann is man we are trusting. Not yesterday, maybe not tomorrow. But today we are trusting him for ever.”

“Lapadi he need one hundred pound, darling”—a day or two later—“the Vertrauensmann know a man whose sister know the head from customs. Better he pay him now for friendship.”

Remembering Rick’s instructions Pym offers token resistance but the baroness already has her hand out and is rubbing her finger and thumb together with delightful insinuation. “You want to paint the house, darling, first you got to buy the brush,” she explains and to Pym’s amazement lifts her skirts to the waist and pops the banknotes into the top of her stocking. “Tomorrow we buy you nice suit.”

“Gave her the money, son?” Rick roars that night across the Channel. “God in Heaven, what do you think we are? Fetch me Elena.”

“Don’t shout me, darling,” the baroness says calmly into the telephone. “You got lovely boy here, Rickie. He very strict with me. I think one day he be great actor.”

“The baroness says you’re first rate, son. Are you talking our language with her out there?”

“All the time,” says Pym.

“Have you had an honest-to-God English mixed grill yet?”

“No, we’re sort of saving it.”

“Well have one on me. Tonight.”

“We will, Father. Thanks.”

“God bless you, son.”

“And you too, Father,” says Pym politely and, butler-like, keeps his knees and feet together while he puts the phone down.

More important to me by far are my memories of Pym’s first platonic honeymoon with a wise lady. With Elena beside him, Pym wandered Bern’s old city, drank the light small wines of the Valais, watched thés dansants in the great hotels and consigned his past to history. In scented, frilly boutiques that she seemed to find by instinct, they exchanged her battered wardrobe for fur capes and Anna Karenina riding boots that slithered on the frosty cobble, and Pym’s dismal school habit for a leather jacket and trousers without buttons for his braces. Even in her disarray, the baroness would insist on Pym’s judgment, beckoning him into the little mirrored box to help her choose, and permitting him, as if unknowingly, delicious glimpses of her Rococo charms: now a nipple, now the cup of a buttock carelessly uncurtained, now an amazing shadow at the centre of her rounded thighs as she whisked from one skirt to another. She is Lippsie, he thought excitedly; she is how Lippsie would have been if she hadn’t thought so much of death.

“Gefall’ ich dir, darling?”

“Du gefällst mir sehr.”

“One day you have pretty girl, you talk to her just like this, she go crazy. You don’t think too tarty?”

“I think perfect.”

“Okay, we buy two. One for my sister Zsa-Zsa, she my size.”