And I think of him for some reason as one of a pair of brothers, though I don’t recall ever hearing he had a brother. His home-based staff consisted of a sergeant whom I barely remember and a cockney driver called Kaufmann who had a degree in Economics at Cambridge. His second in command was a pink-cheeked young banker named Lieutenant McLaird who was returning to the City. In the cellars, dutiful Austrian clerks tapped telephones, steamed open mail and dumped their unread product in a row of army dustbins which were emptied by the Graz authorities punctiliously once a week because it was a nightmare of Membury’s that some fish-hating vandal would tip them in the lake. On the ground floor he kept his stable of locally recruited lady interpreters who ranged from the maternal to the nubile, and Membury, when he remembered their existence, admired them all. And finally he had his wife Hannah, a painter of trees, and Hannah, as is so often the way with the wives of very large men, was as fragile as a wisp. Hannah made painting attractive to me, and I remember her best seated at her easel in a low white dress while the girls roll shrieking down a grass bank and Membury and myself in bathing costumes toil in the brown water. Even today it is impossible to imagine her as the mother of all those daughters.
The rest of Pym’s life could scarcely have been more to his liking. For commodities he had Naafi whisky at seven shillings a bottle and cigarettes at twelve shillings a hundred. He could barter or, if he preferred, convert them without effort into the local currency, though it was safest to rely on the services of an elderly Hungarian Rittmeister who sat around Registry reading secret files and gazing lovingly at Wolfgang, much as Mr. Cudlove liked to gaze at Ollie. All of it was familiar, all of it was necessary to Pym for the continuation of his unlived orthodox childhood. On Sundays, he escorted the Memburys to mass and over lunch looked down the front of Hannah’s dress. Membury is a genius, Pym exulted as he moved his desk into the great man’s ante-room. Membury is Renaissance Man made spy. Within weeks he had his own imprest. Within a few more he had a second pip for Wolfgang to sew on his shoulder, for Membury said he looked silly with only one.
And he had his Joes.
“This is Pepi,” McLaird explained with a droll smile, over a discreet dinner out of town. “Pepi fought the Reds for the Germans and now he’s fighting them for us. You’re a fanatic anti-Communist, aren’t you, Pepi? That’s why he takes his motorbike into the Zone and sells pornographic photographs to the Russian soldiery. Four hundred Players Medium a month. In arrears.”
“This is Elsa,” McLaird said, presenting a dumpy Carinthian housewife with four children, in the grill-room of the Blue Rose. “Her boyfriend runs a café in St. Pölten. Sends her the registration numbers and insignia of the Russian lorries that go past his window, doesn’t he, Elsa? All in secret writing on the back of his love letters. Three kilos of medium-roast coffee a month. In arrears.”
There were a dozen of them and Pym set to work immediately to develop and welfare them in every way he knew. Today when I play them through my memory they are as fine a bunch of neverwozzers as ever came the way of an aspiring spymaster. But to Pym they were simply the best scouts ever and he would see them right if it killed him.
And I have left till last Sabina, Jack, who like her friend Marlene in Vienna was an interpreter, and like Marlene was the most beautiful girl in the world, plucked straight from the pages of
“Marlene says you are respectable,” she informed Pym with contempt as she clambered aboard Corporal Kaufmann’s jeep, not bothering to conceal her Rococo legs.
“Is that a crime?” Pym asked.
“Don’t worry,” she replied ominously, and away they drove to the camps. Sabina spoke Czech and Serbo-Croat as well as German. In her spare time she was studying economics at Graz University, which gave her an excuse to talk to Corporal Kaufmann.
“You are believing in mixing agararian economy, Kaufmann?”
“I don’t believe in any of it.”
“You are Keynesian?”
“I wouldn’t be one with my own money, I’ll tell you that,” said Kaufmann.
Thus the conversation went back and forth while Pym searched for ways of brushing carelessly against her white shoulder, or causing her skirt to open a fraction further to the north.
