“Who do?” said Pym.
“The aristos I work for. They think I should show you the photographs of the two of us coming out of the barn together in Austria, and play you the recordings of our conversations. They say I should wave the I.O.U. in your face that you signed to me for the two hundred dollars we tricked out of Membury for your father.”
“How did you answer them?” said Pym.
“I said I would. They don’t read Thomas Mann, these guys. They’re very crude. This is a crude country, as you no doubt noticed in your journeys.”
“Not at all,” said Pym. “I love it.”
Axel drank some vodka and stared into the hills. “And you people don’t make it any better. Your hateful little department has been seriously interfering in the running of my country. What are you? Some kind of American butler? What are you doing, framing our officials, sowing suspicion, and seducing our intellectuals? Why do you cause people to be beaten unnecessarily, when a few years in prison would be enough? Do they teach you no reality over there? Have you no reality at all, Sir Magnus?”
“I didn’t know the Firm was doing that,” said Pym.
“Doing what?”
“Interfering. Causing people to be tortured. That must be a different section. Ours is just a sort of postal service for small agents.”
Axel sighed. “Maybe they’re not doing it. Maybe I have been brainwashed by our own stupid propaganda these days. Maybe I’m blaming you unfairly. Cheers.”
“Cheers,” said Pym.
“So what will they find in your room?” Axel asked when he had lit himself a cigar and puffed at it several times.
“Pretty well everything, I suppose.”
“What’s everything?”
“Secret inks. Film.”
“Film from your agents?”
“Yes.”
“Developed?”
“I assume not.”
“From the dead letter box in Pisek?”
“Yes.”
“Then I wouldn’t bother to develop it. It’s cheap pedlar material. Money?”
“A bit, yes.”
“How much?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“Codebooks?”
“A couple.”
“Anything I might have forgotten? No atom bomb?”
“There’s a concealed camera.”
“Is that the talcum-powder tin?”
“If you peel the paper off the lid, it makes a lens.”
“Anything else?”
“A silk escape map. In one of my neckties.”
Axel drew on his cigar again, his thoughts seemingly far away. Suddenly he drove his fist on to the iron table. “We have got to get ourselves out of this, Sir Magnus!” he exclaimed angrily. “We have got to get ourselves out. We’ve got to rise in the world. We’ve got to help each other until we become aristos ourselves and we can kick the other bastards goodbye.” He stared into the gathering darkness. “You make it so difficult for me, you know that? Sitting in that prison, I had bad thoughts about you. You make it very, very difficult to be your friend.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Oh, oh! He doesn’t see why! He does not see that when the bold Sir Magnus Pym applies for a business visa, even the poor Czechs can look in their card index and discover there was a gentleman of the same name who was a Fascist imperialist militarist spy in Austria, and that a certain running dog named Axel was his fellow conspirator.” His anger reminded Pym of the days of his fever in Bern. His voice had acquired the same unpleasant edge. “Are you really so ignorant of the manners of the country you are spying on that you do not understand what it means these days for a man like me even to have been in the same continent as a man like you, let alone his fellow conspirator in a spying game? Do you really not know that in this world of whisperers and accusers, I may literally die of you? You’ve read George Orwell, haven’t you? These are the people who can rewrite yesterday’s weather!”
“I know,” said Pym.
“Do you also know then, that I may be fatally contaminated like all those poor agents and informers you are showering with money and instructions? Do you not know that you are delivering them to the scaffold, unless they belong to us already? You know at least what they will do with you, I assume, unless I make them hear me, these aristos of mine, if we can’t satisfy their appetites by other means? They mean to arrest you and parade you before the world’s press with your stupid agents and associates. They plan to have another show trial, hang some people. When they start to do that, it will be sheer oversight if they don’t hang me too. Axel, the imperialist lackey who spied for you in Austria! Axel, the revanchist Titoist Trotskyist typist who was your accomplice in Bern! They would prefer an American but in the meantime they will stretch a point and hang an Englishman until they can get hold of the real thing.” He flopped back, his fury exhausted. “We’ve got to get out of this, Sir Magnus,” he repeated. “We’ve got to rise, rise, rise. I am sick of bad superiors, bad food, bad prisons and bad torturers.” He drew angrily on his cigar again. “It’s time I looked after your career and you looked after mine. And this time properly. No bourgeois shrinking back from the big scoops. This time we are professionals, we make straight for the biggest diamonds, the biggest banks. I mean it.”
Suddenly, Axel turned his chair until it was facing Pym, then sat on it again and laughed, and tapped Pym smartly on the shoulder with the back of his hand to cheer him up.
“You got the flowers okay, Sir Magnus?”
“They were super. Someone handed them into our cab as we were leaving the reception.”
“Did Belinda like them?”
“Belinda doesn’t know about you. I never told her.”
“Who did you say the flowers were from?”
“I said I’d no idea. Probably for another wedding altogether.”
“That was good. What’s she like?”
“Super. We were childhood sweethearts together.”
“I thought Jemima was your childhood sweetheart.”
“Well, Belinda was too.”
“At the same time — both of them? That’s quite a childhood you had,” Axel said with a fresh laugh as he refilled Pym’s glass.
Pym managed to laugh too, and they drank together.
Then Axel began speaking, kindly and gently without irony or bitterness, and it seems to me that he spoke for about thirty years because his words are as loud in my ear now as they ever were in Pym’s then, never mind the din of the cicadas and the cheeping of the bats.
“Sir Magnus, you have in the past betrayed me but, more important, you have betrayed yourself. Even when you are telling the truth, you lie. You have loyalty and you have affection. But to what? To whom? I don’t know all the reasons for this. Your great father. Your aristocratic mother. One day maybe you will tell me. And maybe you have put your love in some bad places now and then.” He leaned forward and there was a kindly, true affection in his face and a warm long-suffering smile in his eyes. “Yet you also have morality. You search. What I am saying is, Sir Magnus: for once nature has produced a perfect match. You are a perfect spy. All you need is a cause. I have it. I know that our revolution is young and that sometimes the wrong people are running it. In the pursuit of peace we are making too much war. In the pursuit of freedom we are building too many prisons. But in the long run I don’t mind. Because I know this. All the junk that made you what you are: the privileges, the snobbery, the hypocrisy, the churches, the schools, the fathers, the class systems, the historical lies, the little lords of the countryside, the little lords of big business, and all the greedy wars that result from them, we are sweeping that away for ever. For your sake. Because we are making a society that will never produce such sad little fellows as Sir Magnus.” He held out his hand. “So. I’ve said it. You are a good man and I love you.”