The Unlikely Spy

Becker looked at the things, then at Vicary. "Cigarettes and chocolate--you're not here to seduce me, are you, Alfred?" Becker managed a small chuckle but prison life had changed him. His lustrous French suits had been replaced with a dour gray overall, neatly pressed and surprisingly well fitted through the shoulders. Officially he was on a suicide watch--which Vicary thought was absurd--and he wore flimsy canvas slippers with no laces. His skin, once deeply tanned, had faded to a dungeon white. His taut little body had assumed a sudden discipline imposed by small places; gone were the flailing arms and abandoned laughter that Vicary had seen in the old surveillance photographs. He sat ramrod straight, as though someone were holding a gun to his back, and arranged the chocolate, cigarettes, and matches as if he were laying down a boundary across which Vicary was not to venture.

 

Becker opened a packet of cigarettes and tapped out two of them, giving one to Vicary and keeping one for himself. He struck a match and held it out to Vicary before lighting his own cigarette. They sat in silence for a while, each studying his own spot on the cell wall--old chums who have told every story they know and now are content just to be in each other's presence. Becker savored his cigarette, rolling the smoke on his tongue like an excellent Bordeaux before blowing it in a slender stream at the low stone ceiling. In the tiny chamber, smoke gathered overhead like storm clouds.

 

"Please send my love to Harry," Becker finally said.

 

"I will."

 

"He's a good man--a bit on the dogged side, like all policemen. But he's not a bad sort."

 

"I'd be lost without him."

 

"And how's brother Boothby?"

 

Vicary let out a long breath. "As ever."

 

"We all have our Nazis, Alfred."

 

"We're thinking of sending him over to the other side."

 

Becker, laughing, used the stub of his cigarette to light another. "I see you've brought my radio," he said. "What heroic deed have I done for the Third Reich now?"

 

"You've broken into Number Ten and stolen all the prime minister's private papers."

 

Becker threw his head back and emitted a short, brutal burst of laughter. "I hope I'm demanding more money from those cheap bastards! And not the counterfeit that got me into trouble last time."

 

"Of course."

 

Becker looked at the radio, then at Vicary. "In the good old days you would have left a revolver on the table and let me do the deed myself. Now you bring a radio made by some fine, upstanding German company and let me kill myself a dot and a dash at a time."

 

"It is a terrible world in which we live, Karl. But no one forced you to become a spy."

 

"Better than the Wehrmacht," Becker said. "I'm an old man, like you, Alfred. I would be conscripted and sent off to the East to fight the fucking Ivans. No, thank you. I'll wait out the war right here in my pleasant little English sanitarium."

 

Vicary glanced at his watch--ten minutes until Becker was scheduled to go on the air. He reached inside his pocket and withdrew the coded message Becker was to send. Then he took out the photograph taken from the passport of the Dutch woman named Christa Kunst. A look of distant recollection flashed across Becker's face, then dissipated.

 

"You know who she is, don't you, Karl?"

 

"You've found Anna," he said, smiling. "Well done, Alfred. Well done indeed. Bravo!"

 

 

 

 

 

Vicary sat like a man straining to hear distant music, hands folded on the table, making no notes. He knew it was best to ask as few questions as possible, best to allow Becker to lead him where he wanted. Like a deer stalker, Vicary made no movements, stayed downwind. His cigarette, untouched, burned to gray dust in the metal ashtray at his elbow. Through the arrow-slit window he could hear an evening rainstorm smacking on the exercise yard. As always Becker started the story somewhere in the middle and with himself. He held his body with a regimental stillness for a time, but as the story built he began waving his arms and using his precise little fingers to weave a tapestry before Vicary's eyes. Like all Becker monologues there were blind alleys and detours for accounts of bravery, moneymaking, and sexual conquest. At times he would lapse into a long speculative silence; at other times he would tell it so quickly he would be overcome with a fit of coughing. "It's the goddamned damp in my cell," he said by way of explanation. "That's one thing you English do very well.

 

"People like me, they get almost no training," he said. "Oh, sure, a few lectures by some idiots in Berlin who've never seen England except on a map. This is how you estimate the size of an army, they tell you. This is how you use your radio. This is how you bite into your suicide capsule in the highly unlikely event that MI-Five kicks down your door. Then they send you off to England in a boat or a plane to win the war for the Fuhrer."

 

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