He struck first one Christmas Day, not six weeks after Pym had received a formal apology from Head Office. Georgetown had two feet of snow and we had asked the Lederers to lunch. Mary was putting the food on the table as the phone rang. Will Ambassador Pym accept a collect call from New Jersey? He will.
“Hullo, old son. How’s the world using you?”
“I’ll take this upstairs,” says Pym grimly to Mary, and everybody looks understanding, knowing that the secret world never sleeps.
“Happy Christmas, old son,” says Rick as Pym picks up the bedroom phone.
“And Happy Christmas to you, too, Father. What are you doing in New Jersey?”
“God’s the twelfth man on the cricket team, son. It’s God who tells us to keep the left elbow up through life. No one else.”
“So you always said. But it’s not the cricket season. Are you drunk?”
“He’s umpire, judge and jury rolled into one and never you forget it. There’s no conning God. There never was. Are you glad I paid for your education, then?”
“I’m not conning God, Father, I’m trying to celebrate with my family.”
“Say hullo to Miriam,” says Rick, and there is muffled protest before Miriam comes on the line.
“Hullo, Magnus,” says Miriam.
“Hullo, Miriam,” says Pym.
“Hullo,” says Miriam a second time.
“They feed you all right in that Embassy of yours, son, or is it all Thousand Island and French fries?”
“We have a perfectly decent canteen for the lower staff but at the moment I’m trying to eat at home.”
“Turkey?”
“Yes.”
“English bread sauce?”
“I expect so.”
“That grandson of mine all right then, is he? He’s got the forehead, has he, the one I gave you that everybody talks about?”
“He’s got a very good brow.”
“Blue eyes, same as mine?”
“Mary’s eyes.”
“I hear she’s first class, son. I hear first-rate reports of her. They say she’s got a fine piece of property down in Dorset that’s worth a bob or two.”
“It’s in trust,” says Pym sharply.
But Rick has already begun drowning in the gulf of his own self-pity. He weeps, the weep becomes a howl. In the background, Miriam is weeping, too, in a high-pitched whimper, like a small dog locked in a big house.
“But darling,” says Mary as Pym resumes his place as head of the family. “Magnus. You’re upset. What’s the matter?”
Pym shakes his head, smiling and crying at once. He grabs his wineglass and lifts it.
“To absent friends,” he calls out. “To all our absent friends!” And later, for a wife’s ears only: “Just an old, old Joe, darling, who managed to track me down and wish me happy bloody Yule.”
* * *
Would you ever have supposed, Tom, that the greatest country in the world could be too small for one son and his old man? Yet that is what happened. That Rick should head for wherever he could use his son’s protection was, I suppose, only natural and after Berlin, probably inevitable. He went first, as I now know, to Canada, unwisely trusting in the bonds of Commonwealth. The Canadians quickly tired of him and when they threatened to repatriate him he made a small down payment on a Cadillac and headed south. In Chicago, my enquiries show that he succumbed to the many enticing offers from property companies to move into new developments on the edge of town and live rent-free for three months as an inducement. A Colonel Hanbury resided at Farview Gardens, a Sir William Forsyth graced Sunleigh Court, where he extended his tenancy by conducting protracted negotiations to buy the penthouse for his butler. What either of them did for liquidity is, as ever, a mystery, though no doubt there were grateful Lovelies in the background. The one clue is a prickly letter from the stewards of a local turf club, advising Sir William that his horses will be welcome when his stable fees have been settled. Pym was still only vaguely aware of these distant rumblings, and his absences from Washington gave him a false sense of protection. But in New Jersey something changed Rick for ever, and whatever it was, from then on Pym became his only industry. Was the same wind of reckoning blowing over both men simultaneously? Was Rick really ill? Or was he, like Pym, merely conscious of impending judgment? Certainly Rick thought he was ill. Certainly he thought he ought to be:
“Am obliged to use strong walking-stick (twenty-nine dollars cash) at all times owing to Heart and other more sinister Ailments”—he wrote—“My doctor keeps the Worst from me and recommends that Frugal diet (plain foods and Champagne only, no Californian) could Prolong this Meagre existence and enable me to Fight back for a few more Months before I am Called.”
Certainly he took to wearing liver-coloured spectacles like Aunt Nell. And when he fell foul of the law in Denver, the prison doctor was so impressed by him that he was released the moment Pym had paid the medical fees.
* * *
And after Denver you decided you were already dead, didn’t you, and set out to haunt me with your smallness? Every town I went to, I walked in fear of your pathetic ghost. Every safe house I entered, I expected to see you waiting at the gate, parading your willed, deliberate littleness. You knew where I would be before I got there. You would con a ticket and travel five thousand miles just to show me how small you had become. And off we’d go to the best restaurant in town, and I would buy you your treat and boast to you about my diplomatic doings and listen to your boastings in return. I would shower you with all the money I could afford, praying that it would enable you to add a few more Wentworths to the green cabinet. But even while I fawned on you and exchanged radiant smiles with you and held hands with you and bolstered you in your idiotic schemes, I knew that you had pulled the best con of them all. You were nothing any more. Your mantle had passed to me, leaving you a naked little man, and myself the biggest con I knew.
“Why don’t those fellows give you your knighthood, then, old son? They tell me you ought to be Permanent Under Secretary by now. Got a skeleton in your cupboard, have you? Maybe I should slip over to London and have a word with those Personnel boys of yours.”
How did he find me? How could it be that his systems of intelligence were better than those of the Agency’s leash dogs who were fast becoming my regular, unwelcome companions? At first I thought he was using private detectives. I began collecting the numbers of suspicious cars, noting the times of dead-end phone calls, trying to distinguish them from Langley’s. I bearded my secretary: has someone calling himself my sick father been pestering you for information? Eventually I discovered that the Embassy travel clerk had an addiction to playing English snooker at some Masonic hostel in the dirty part of town. Rick had found him there and pitched him a fatuous cover story: “I’ve got this dicky heart,” he’d said to the fool. “It could get me any time, you see, but don’t you go telling my boy. I don’t like to bother him when he’s got enough on his plate as it is. What you’re to do, you’re to get on the blower to me and give me the wink whenever that boy of mine leaves town, so that I know where to find him when the end comes.” And no doubt there was a gold watch in it somewhere. And tickets for next year’s Cup Final. And seeing the boy’s dear old mother right next time Rick slipped home for a drop of English air.
But my discovery had come too late. We had had San Francisco by then, and Denver, and Seattle, and Rick had homed on every one of them, weeping and shrinking before my very eyes, until all that was left of Rick was what he owned of Pym; and all that was left of Pym, it seemed to me, as I wove my lies and blandished, and perjured myself before one kangaroo court after another, was a failing con man tottering on the last legs of his credibility.