A Perfect Spy

For the truth was, of course, that given the limitations of any diplomatic friendship, the Pyms and the Lederers were one of the great quartets, and it was just Magnus’s perverse way of liking people to kick at them and pick holes in them and swear he would never talk to them again. The Lederers’ daughter Becky was the same age as Tom and they were practically lovers already; Bee and Mary got on like a house on fire. As to Bee and Magnus — well frankly Mary did wonder sometimes whether they weren’t the tiniest bit too friendly. But, on the other hand, she had noticed that with quartets there was always one strong diagonal relationship even if it never came to anything. And if it ever did come to something between them — well, to be absolutely totally frank, Mary would be quite willing to take her revenge with Grant, whose lurking intensity she found increasingly to be rather a turn-on.

“Mary, cheers, okay? A great party. We’re loving it.”

It was Bee, for ever toasting everyone. She was wearing diamond earrings and a décolleté which Mary had been eying all evening. Three children and breasts like that: it was bloody unfair. Mary lifted her glass in return. Bee has typist’s fingers, she noticed, crooked at the tips.

“Now Grant, old boy, come on now,” Magnus was saying, in his half-serious banter. “Give us a break, be fair. If everything your gallant President tells us about the Communist countries is true, how the devil can we do a deal with any of them?”

Out of the corner of her eye Mary saw Grant’s droll smile stretch until it looked like snapping in itchy admiration of Pym’s wit.

“Magnus, if I had my way, we’d set you up on a big Embassy carpet with a shaker full of dry Martinis and an American passport and magic you right back to Washington and have you pick up the Democratic ticket. I never heard a seditious case put so well.”

“Draft Magnus for President?” Bee purred, sitting up straight and pressing out her breasts as if somebody had offered her a chocolate. “Oh goody.”

At which point the ostentatiously menial Herr Wenzel appeared and, bowing elaborately over Magnus, murmured in his left ear that he was required urgently — forgive, Excellency — on the telephone from London — Herr Counsellor, excuse.

Magnus excused. Magnus excuses everybody. Magnus picked his way delicately between imaginary obstacles to the door, smiling and empathising and excusing, while Mary chatted all the more brightly to provide him with covering fire. But as the door closed behind him something unforeseen occurred. Grant Lederer glanced at Bee, and Bee Lederer glanced at Grant. And Mary caught them at it and her blood ran cold.

Why? What had passed between them in that one unguarded look? Was Magnus really sleeping with Bee — and had Bee told Grant? Were they momentarily joined, the two of them, in perplexed admiration of their departed host? In all the turmoil since, Mary’s answer to those questions had not budged an inch. It wasn’t sex, it wasn’t love, it wasn’t envy and it wasn’t friendship. It was conspiracy. Mary was not fanciful. But Mary had seen and she knew. They were a pair of murderers telling each other “soon” and the soon was about Magnus. Soon we shall have him. Soon his hubris will be purged and our honour restored. I saw them hate him, thought Mary. She had thought it then, she thought it now.

“Grant is a Cassius looking for a Caesar,” Magnus had said. “If he doesn’t find a back to stab soon, the Agency will give his dagger to someone else.”

Yet in diplomacy nothing lasts, nothing is absolute, a conspiracy to murder is no grounds for endangering the flow of conversation. Chatting busily, talking children and shopping — hunting frantically for an explanation for the Lederers’ bad look — waiting, above all, for Magnus to return to the party and re-enchant his end of the table in two languages at once — Mary still found time to wonder whether this urgent telephone call from London might be the one her husband had been waiting for all these weeks. She had known for some while that he had something big going on, and she was praying it was the promised reinstatement.

And it was at this moment, as Mary remembered it while she was still chatting and still praying for her husband’s luck to change, that she felt his fingertips skip knowingly over her naked shoulders as he returned to his place at the head of the table. She hadn’t even heard the door, though she’d been listening for it.

“Everything all right, darling?” she called to him over the candelabra, playing it openly because the Pyms were so frightfully happily married.

“Her Maj in good shape, Magnus?” she heard Grant enquire in his insinuating drawl. “No rickets? Croup?”