A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

Their names, Pym learned a few days later from the Daily Express, were Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean and they were members of the British Foreign Service. For several weeks, he continued to look for them everywhere, but he never found them because they had already defected to Moscow.

punctiliously

They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects.

He had only to consult his own nature to know when someone was writing in the margin of his memory and excluding the main text.

When one of them told a lie direct, Pym rapidly took back-bearings on likely versions of the truth with the aid of his mental compass. Questions teemed in him and, budding lawyer that he was, he learned quickly to shape them into a pattern of accusation.

He meant: I’m whole and I’ve joined the men at last.

“You think that by dividing everything you can pass between.”

see them hugging and laughing chest to chest, Slav style, before they hold one another at a distance to see what damage the years of separation have done to each of them.

The clown’s moustache, the clown’s hooped eyebrows had acquired a sadder humour. But the twinkling dark eyes, peering beneath their languid eyelids, were as merry as ever, while everything around them seemed to give depth to their perception.

Life is duty, he reflected. It’s just a question of establishing which creditor is asking loudest. Life is paying. Life is seeing people right if it kills you.

We are men of the middle ground—we have founded our own country with a population of two!

Mrs. Membury, hurtling off to the corner of the room and pulling out some albums from among the collected works of Evelyn Waugh. “How are the trout, Harrison?”

As she kept walking she had a reprise of the erotic expectation she had felt at the Wives’ meeting. He’s going to order me to undress and I shall obey. He’s going to lead me to a red fourposter and have me raped by footmen for his pleasure.

Whats happening here?

We are equals yet you are in command. No wonder Tom fell in love with you on sight.

What freedom has he found so suddenly that he cannot share it with us?”

He taught Magnus his style, she thought, in another spurt of recognition. The style he was always wanting for his novel. He taught him how to be superior to human foibles and how to give a Godlike laugh at himself as a way of fending off morbidity. He did all the things for him that a woman is grateful for, except that Magnus is a man.

Can you imagine being married to a sedentary ideologist? I had an uncle once who was a Lutheran pastor. He bored us all to death.”

Really I sometimes think he is entirely put together from bits of other people, poor fellow.” “He never

She spoke reasonably and sensibly as a good spy always does.

There are so many ways of taking vengeance on the world. Sometimes literature is simply not enough.” The alteration in his tone momentarily halted her in her hurry to get out. “He’ll find an answer,” she said carelessly. “He always does.” “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Brotherhood’s raggedy-arsed childhood which was always filled with white cloud left by the stop-go trains as they trundled across the fens to Norwich. The houses were all of the same design, and as he studied them their symmetry became beautiful to him without his understanding why. This was the order of life, he thought. This line of little English coffins is what I thought I was preserving. Decent white men in ordered rows. Number 75 had replaced his wooden gate with a wrought-iron one, with “Eldorado” done in curly handwriting. Number 77 had laid himself a concrete path with seashells bedded in it. Number 81 had faced himself in rustic teak. And number 79, upon which Brotherhood now advanced, was resplendent with a Union Jack fluttering from a fine white flagpole planted just inside his territory.

conkers.

It was the kind of question that unasked leaves a gap, but asked produces no dividend: part of the necessary luggage of the interrogator’s trade.

What was once a great service has become an immovable hybrid—half bureaucrat, half freebooter, and using the arguments of the one to negate the other.

An all-night coffee shop stood at the corner of Half Moon Street and on other early mornings Brotherhood might have stopped there and let the tired whores make a fuss of his dog, and Brotherhood in return would have made a fuss of the whores, bought them a coffee and chatted them up, because he liked their tradecraft and their guts and their mixture of human canniness and stupidity.

“Will you adore your country right or wrong so help you God and the Tory Party?” “I will again,” said Pym, laughing. “Do you also believe that to be born British is to be born a winner in the great lottery of life?” “Well, yes, to be honest, that too.” “Then be a spy,” his interlocutor suggested and drew from his desk yet another application form and handed it to Pym. “Jack Brotherhood sends his love, and says why on earth haven’t you been in touch with him, and why won’t you have lunch with his nice recruiter?”

The nearest they had come to life’s experience was the war, and they saw the peace as its continuation by other means. Yet in the terms of the world outside their heads they had led lives so untested, so childlike and tender in their simplicities, so inward in their connections, that they required echelons of cut-outs to reach the society they honestly believed they were protecting. Pym sat before them, calm, reflective, resolute, modest. Pym composed his features in one mould after another, now of reverence, now of awe, zeal, passionate sincerity or spiritual good humour. He paraded pleasurable surprise when he heard that his tutors thought the world of him, and a stern-jawed pride on learning that the army loved him too. He modestly demurred or modestly boasted. He weeded out the half-believers from the believers and did not rest until he had converted the pack of them to paid-up life membership of the Pym supporters’ club.

chaps chucked into prison by their own police, then? Being a bit harsh, aren’t you? Bit immoral?” “Not if it shortens the life of the system. No, sir, I don’t think I am. And I’m not persuaded about the innocence of these men of yours either, I’m afraid.” In life, says Proust, we end up doing whatever we do second best. What Pym might have done better, I shall never know. He accepted the Firm’s offer. He opened his Times and read with a similar detachment of his engagement to Belinda. That’s me taken care of, then, he thought. With the Firm getting one half of me and Belinda the other, I’ll never want for anything again.

resume the red thread of violence that has been spun into every new thing he is learning. This violence is not only of the body. It is the ravishment that must be done to truth, friendship and, if need be, honour in the interest of Mother England. We are the chaps who do the dirty work so that purer souls can sleep in bed at night. Pym of course has heard these arguments before from the Michaels, but now he must hear them again, from his new employers, who make pilgrimages from London in order to warn the uncut young of the wily foreigners they will one day have to tangle with.

Next day he continued to Prague and at the arranged hour sat himself in the famous Tyn church, which has a window looking into Kafka’s old apartment. Tourists and officials wandered about unsmiling. “So K.

Yet, as ever, nothing is one thing for long with Pym, and soon a strange calm begins to replace his early nervousness as he continues his secret missions.

You’ve read George Orwell, haven’t you? These are the people who can rewrite yesterday’s weather!” “I know,” said Pym.

“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.

Title

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.

who will ever break the genetic code of when a middle-class Englishman’s adolescence ends and his manhood takes over?

The point is, Pym quite frequently loved the Firm as much as he loved Axel. He adored its rough, uncomprehending trust in him, its misuse of him, its tweedy bear-hugs, flawed romanticism and cock-eyed integrity. He smiled to himself each time he stepped inside its Reichskanzleis and safe palaces, accepted the unsmiling salute of its vigilant janitors. The Firm was home and school and court to him, even when he was betraying it. He really felt he had a lot to give it, just as he had a lot to give to Axel. In his imagination, he saw himself with cellars full of nylons and black-market chocolate, enough to see everybody right in every shortage—and intelligence is nothing if not an institutionalised black market in perishable commodities. And this time Pym himself was the hero of the fable. No Membury stood between himself and the fraternity.

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.

Berlin. What a garrison of spies, Tom! What a cabinet full of useless, liquid secrets, what a playground for every alchemist, miracle-worker, and rat-piper that ever took up the cloak and turned his face from the unpalatable constraints of political reality! And always at the centre, the great good American heart, bravely drumming out its honourable rhythms in the name of liberty, democracy, and setting the people free.

In Berlin, the Firm had agents of influence, agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation. We even had one or two who supplied us with intelligence, though these were an underprivileged crowd, kept on more out of a traditional regard than any intrinsic professional worth. We had tunnellers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent-spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip-readers and disguise artists. But whatever the Brits had, the Americans had more, and whatever the Americans had, the East Germans had five of it and the Russians ten of it. Pym stood before these marvels like a child let loose in a sweet shop, not knowing what to grab first.

If love is whatever we can still betray, remember that I betrayed you on a lot of days.”

He is one with all these grown-up happy children celebrating their independence of things that never held them.

Before it, erect and floodlit, the white needle of the Washington Monument cuts its light-path to the unreachable stars.

Jefferson and Lincoln, each in his eternal patch of Rome, lie to either side of him. Pym loves them both. All the patriarchs and founding fathers of America are mine. He crests the slope. A black man offers him popcorn. It is salt and hot like his own sweat. Further up the valley, the harmless battles of other firework shows boom and splash into the sky. The crowd is denser up here but still they smile at him and part for him while they ooh and aah at the fireworks, call friendship to each other, break into patriotic song. A pretty girl is teasing him. “Hey, man, why won’t you dance?” “Well, thank you, I will with pleasure but just let me take off my coat,” Pym replies. His answer is too woody, she has found another partner.

These vulgar pleasure-seeking people, so frank and clamorous, were too uninhibited for his shielded and involuted life. They

In committee, it was true, they reverted soon enough to type, and became the warring princelings of the European countries they had left behind. They could run you up a cabal that would make mediaeval Venice blush. They could be Dutch and stubborn, Scandinavian and gloomy, Balkan and murderous and tribal.

He wanted to spy upon hope itself, look through keyholes at the sunrise and deny the possibilities he had missed.

Axel’s favourite place of all was the newly opened Air and Space Museum, where he could gaze his heart out at the Spirit of St. Louis and John Glenn’s Friendship 7, and touch the Moon Relic with his forefinger as devoutly as if he were taking water from a holy shrine.

portrayed the Christian God as the champion of wealth, since wealth was the enemy of Communism? “God’s waiting room” is what they call Palm Springs.

A guile that was only there to protect their innocence. A fantasy that fired but never owned them. A capacity to be swayed by everything, while still remaining sovereign.

USA !!!

esker.