“You must never tell me what happened, it is a rule,” Sabina ordered him, biting him half to death between her deep sad lips.
“I never will.”
“He is handsome, Jan’s friend? He is beautiful? Like you? I would love him immediately, yes?”
“He is tall and beautiful and very intelligent.”
“Sexy also?”
“Very sexy.”
“Hommsexual like you?”
“Totally.”
The description pleased her in some deep and satisfying way.
“You are good man, Magnus,” she assured him. “You have good taste that you protect this man like my brother.”
The due day came round when Sergeant Pavel was to make his second appearance. As Axel had predicted, Vienna had prepared a dense crop of follow-up questions for him concerning his first offering. Pym arrived with them written out in a shorthand notebook. He also brought brown smoked-salmon sandwiches and an excellent Sancerre from Membury. He brought cigarettes and Naafi mint chocolates and everything else the gastronomic experts of Div. Int. could think of to fill the tummy of a brave defector in place. While they ate the smoked salmon and drank vodka, they cleared up the outstanding points.
“So what have you got for me this time round?” Pym enquired cheerfully when they had reached a natural break in the proceedings.
“Nothing,” Axel replied comfortably, helping himself to more vodka. “We let them starve a little. Gives them a better appetite next time.”
“Pavel’s having a crisis of conscience,” Pym reported next day to Membury, obeying Axel’s instructions to the letter. “He’s having wife trouble and his daughter is going to bed with a no-good Russian officer every time Pavel is sent down to Austria. I didn’t press him. I told him we were there and he could trust us and we’re not adding to his pressures. I believe in the long run he’s going to thank us for that. But I did ask him our questions about the concentrated armour east of Prague and he was interesting.”
A visiting colonel from Vienna was sitting in. “What did he say?” asked the colonel, following Pym closely.
“He said he thinks it’s guarding something.”
“Any idea what?”
“Weaponry of some sort. Could be rockets.”
“Stay with him,” the colonel advised, and Membury puffed out his cheeks and looked like the proud father he had become.
At their third meeting source Greensleeves solved the mystery of the concentrated armour and produced in addition a breakdown of the total Soviet air strength in Czechoslovakia as of November last. Or nearly total. Vienna was in any case amazed, and London authorised the payment of two small gold bars on condition that the British assay marks first be removed for reasons of deniability. Sergeant Pavel was thus characterised as a greedy man which made everybody feel easier. For several months after this Pym scampered back and forth between Axel and Membury like a butler serving two masters. Membury wondered whether he should meet Greensleeves in person: Vienna seemed to think it would be a good idea. Pym tried for him but came back with the sad news that he would treat only with Pym. Membury resigned himself. It was the breeding season for trout. Vienna summoned Pym and dined him. Colonels, air commodores, and naval persons vied to stake their claim to him. But it was Axel, as it turned out, who was his true proprietor and parent company.
“Sir Magnus,” Axel whispered. “Something very terrible has happened.” His smile had lost its bounce. His eyes were haunted and there were heavy shadows under them. Pym had brought any number of Naafi delicacies but he refused them all. “You have to help me, Sir Magnus,” he said, darting scared looks towards the barn door. “You’re my only hope. Help me, for Christ’s sake. Do you know what they do to people like me? Don’t look at me like that! Think of something for a change! It’s your turn!”
* * *
I am in the barn at this moment, Tom. I have lived there these thirty and more years. Miss Dubber’s stippled ceiling has rolled away, leaving the old rafters and the upside-down bats dangling from the roof. I can smell his cigar smoke as I sit here and I can see the holes of his dark eyes in the lamplight as he whispers Pym’s name like the invalid he used to be: get me music, get me painting, get me bread, get me secrets. But there is no self-pity in his voice, no supplication or regret. That was never Axel’s way. He demands. His voice is sometimes soft, it is true. But it is never less than powerful. He is his man, as ever. He is Axel, he is owed. He has crossed frontiers and been beaten. Of myself I am thinking nothing at all. Not now, not then.
“They are arresting my friends back home, did you hear? Two of our group were dragged from their beds yesterday morning in Prague. Another vanished on his way to work. I had to tell them about us. It was the only way.”
The import of this statement takes a moment to penetrate Pym’s worried understanding. Even when it has done so, his voice remains mystified: “About us? Me? What did you say? Who to, Axel?”
“Not in detail. In principle. Nothing bad. Not your name. It’s okay, just more complicated, takes more handling. I’ve been more cunning than the others. In the end it may be better.”
“But what did you tell them about us?”
“Nothing. Listen. For me it’s different. The others, they work in factories, in the universities, they’ve no back door. When they’re tortured they tell the truth and the truth kills them. But me, I’m a big spy, I’ve got a strong position, same as you. ‘Sure,’ I say to them. ‘I go over the border. That’s my job. I collect intelligence, remember?’. . I act indignant, I demand to see my senior officer. He’s not bad, this senior officer. Not a hundred percent, maybe sixty. But he hates the Ivans too. ‘I’m cultivating a British traitor,’ I tell him. ‘He’s a big fish. An army officer. I have kept it secret from you because of the many Titoists inside our organisation. Get the secret police off my back and you can share his product with me when I put the heat on him.’”
Pym has given up speech by now. He doesn’t bother to ask what the senior officer says in reply, or to what extent the real life of Axel may be compared with the fictitious life of Sergeant Pavel. The cells are dying all over him, in his head, his groin, his bone marrow. His loving thoughts about Sabina are as old as childhood memories to him. There is only Pym and Axel and disaster in the world. He is changing into an old man even while he listens. The ignorance of ages is descending on him.
“He says I’ve got to bring him proof,” says Axel a second time.
“Proof?” Pym mumbles. “What sort of proof? Proof? I don’t follow you.”
“Intelligence.” Axel rubs his finger against his thumb, exactly as E. Weber once did. “Pinka-pinka. Product. Money. Something a British traitor like you could give me when I blackmailed him. It doesn’t have to be the secrets of the atom bomb but it has to be good. Good enough to keep him quiet. No junk, you understand? He’s got senior officers too.” Axel smiles, though it is not a smile I care to recollect even now. “There’s always one guy higher up the ladder, isn’t there, Sir Magnus? Even when you think you’re at the top. Then when you reach the top, there they are again below you, swinging on your boots. That’s how it is in a system like ours. ‘No fabrication,’ he says to me. ‘Whatever it is, it’s got to have quality. Then we can fix it.’ Steal for me, Sir Magnus. As you love my freedom, get me something wonderful.”