The Firm’s system of natural selection, accelerated by Jack Brotherhood’s promptings, can no longer be resisted.
* * *
“Joined the Foreign Office?” Belinda’s father echoes, in heavy, artificial mystification. “Posted it to Prague? How do you do that from a dead-beat electronics firm? Well, well, I must say.”
“It’s a contract appointment. They need Czech speakers,” says Pym.
“He’s boosting British trade, Daddy. You wouldn’t understand. You’re just a stockbroker,” says Belinda.
“Well they might at least give him a decent cover story, mightn’t they?” says Belinda’s father, laughing his infuriating laugh.
In the Firm’s newest and most secret safe flat in Prague, Pym and Axel drink to Pym’s instatement as Second Secretary Commercial and Visa Officer at the British Embassy. Axel has fattened, Pym observes with pleasure. The lines of suffering are clearing from his haggard features.
“To the land of the free, Sir Magnus.”
“To America,” says Pym.
“My dearest Father,
“I am so glad you approve of my appointment. Unfortunately, I am not yet in a position to persuade Pandit Nehru to grant you an audience so that you can put your football pool scheme to him, though I can well imagine the boost it might give to the struggling Indian economy.”
So were there no genuine Joes at all? I hear you asking, Tom, in a tone of disappointment. Were they all pretend? Indeed there were genuine Joes. Never fear! And very good they were too, the best. And every one of them profited from Pym’s improved tradecraft, and looked up to Pym as he looked up to Axel. And Pym and Axel looked up to the genuine Joes also, in their fashion, regarding them as the unwitting ambassadors of the operation, testifying to its smooth running and integrity. And used their good offices to shield and advance them, arguing that every improvement in their circumstances brought glory to the networks. And smuggled them to Austria for clandestine training and rehabilitation. The genuine Joes were our mascots, Tom. Our stars. We made sure they would never want for anything again, so long as Pym and Axel were there to see them right. Which, as a matter of fact, is how it all went wrong. But later.
* * *
I wish I could adequately describe to you, Jack, the pleasure of being really well run. Of jealousy, of ideology, nothing. Axel was as keen for Pym to love England as he was to direct him at America, and it was part of his genius throughout our partnership to praise the freedoms of the West while tacitly implying that Pym had it within his reach, if not his duty as a free man, to bring some of this freedom to the East. Oh, you may laugh, Jack! And you may shake your grey hairs at the depths of Pym’s innocence! But can you not imagine how easily it came to Pym to take a tiny, impoverished country into his protection, when his own was so favoured, so victorious and wellborn? And, from where he saw it, so absurd? To love poor Czecho like a rich protector through all her terrible vicissitudes, for Axel’s sake? To forgive her lapses in advance? And blame them on the many betrayals that his parent England had perpetrated against her? Does it honestly amaze you that Pym, by making bonds with the forbidden, should be once more escaping from what held him? That he who had loved his way across so many borders should now be loving his way across another, with Axel there to show him how to walk and where to cross?
“I’m sorry, Bel,” Pym would say to Belinda as he abandoned her yet again to the Scrabble board in their dark apartment in Prague’s diplomatic ghetto. “Got to go up country. May be a day or two. Come on, Bel. Kiss-kiss. You wouldn’t rather be married to a nine-till-five man, would you?”
“I can’t find The Times,” she said, shaking him aside. “I suppose you left it at the bloody Embassy again.”
But however frayed Pym’s nerves when he arrived at the rendezvous, Axel reclaimed him every time they met. He was never hasty, never importunate. He was never anything but respectful of the pains and sensibilities of his agent. It was not stasis one side and all movement the other either, Tom, far from it. Axel’s ambitions were for himself as well as Pym. Was not Pym his ricebowl, his fortune in all its meanings, his passport to the privileges and status of a paid-up Party aristo? Oh, how he studied Pym! Such obsessive, flattering concentration on a single man! How delicately he coaxed and gentled him! How meticulous he was, always to put on the clothes Pym needed him to wear — now the mantle of the wise and steady father Pym had never had, now the bloody rags of suffering that were the uniform of his authority, now the soutane of Pym’s one confessor, his Murgo absolute. He had to learn Pym’s codes and evasions. He had to read Pym faster than ever he could read himself. He had to scold and forgive him like the parents who would never slam the door in his face, laugh where Pym was melancholy and keep the flame of all Pym’s faiths alive when he was down and saying, I can’t, I’m lonely and afraid.
Above all, he had to keep his agent’s wits constantly alert against the seemingly limitless tolerance of the Firm, for how could we ever dare believe, either of us, that the dear, dead wood of England was not a cladding for some masterly game being played inside? Imagine the headaches Axel had, as Pym went on producing his mountains of intelligence material, to persuade his masters they were not the victims of some grand imperialist deception! The Czechs admired you so much, Jack. The old ones knew you from the war. They knew your skills and respected them. They knew the dangers, every day, of underestimating their wily adversary. Axel had to fight toe to toe with them, more than once. He had to argue with the very henchmen who had tortured him, in order to prevent them from pulling Pym out of the field and giving him a little of the medicine they periodically dished out to one another, on the off chance of extracting a true confession from him: “Yes, I am Brotherhood’s man!” they wanted him to scream. “Yes, I am here to plant disinformation on you. To distract your eye from our anti-Socialist operations. And yes, Axel is my accomplice. Take me, hang me, anything but this.” But Axel prevailed. He begged and bullied and slammed the table, and when still more purges were planned to explain the chaos left behind by the last ones, he scared his enemies into silence by threatening to expose them for their insufficient appreciation of the historically inevitable imperialist decay. And Pym helped him every inch of the distance. Sat again at his sickbed — if only metaphorically — gave him nourishment and courage, held up his spirits. Ransacked the Station files. Armed him with outrageous examples of the Firm’s incompetence worldwide. Until, fighting thus for their mutual survival, Pym and Axel drew still closer together, each laying the irrational burdens of his country at the other’s feet.
And once in a while, when a battle was over and won, or a great scoop had been achieved on one side or the other, Axel would put on the play clothes of the libertine and arrange a midnight dash to his frugal equivalent of St. Moritz, which was a small white castle in the Giant Mountains, set aside by his service for people they thought the world of. The first time they went there was for an anniversary celebration, in a limousine with blackened windows. Pym had been in Prague two years.
“I have decided to present you with an excellent new agent, Sir Magnus,” Axel announced as they zigzagged contentedly up the gravel road. “The Watchman network is lamentably short of industrial intelligence. The Americans are pledged to the collapse of our economy, but the Firm is providing nothing to support their optimism. How would you regard a middle executive from our great National Bank of Czechoslovakia, with access to some of our most serious mismanagements?”