LeCarre, John by A Perfect Spy

Author:A Perfect Spy [Spy, A Perfect]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-03-03T20:30:56+00:00

A different Lederer has broken loose inside him and he greets this version of himself with pleasure. I am the bounty hunter, shuttling between London, Washington and Vienna with Pym perpetually in my sights. I am the Lederer who, as Bee vociferously complained when we were safe from microphones, took Pym into bed with us every night, woke sweating with self-doubt in the fitful hours, woke again in the morning with Pym once more firmly between us: "I'll get you, boy. I'll nail you." The Lederer who for the last twelve months—ever since Pym's name began to wink at me from the computer screen—has tracked him first as an abstraction, then as a fellow screwball. Has posed with him on spurious committees as his earnest and admiring colleague. Shared jolly drunken picnics with family Pym in the Vienna woods, then rushed back to my desk and set to work with fresh vigour to rip apart what I have just enjoyed. I am the Lederer who too easily attaches himself, then punishes whatever holds him tight; the Lederer who is grateful for every wiry smile and casual pat of encouragement from the great Wexler, my master, only to round on him minutes later, lampooning him, degrading him in my overheated mind, punishing him for being yet another disappointment to me.

Never mind that I am twenty years Pym's junior. What I recognise in Pym is what I recognise in myself: a spirit so wayward that, even while I am playing a game of Scrabble with my kids it can swing between the options of suicide, rape and assassination. "He's one of us, for Christ's sake!" Lederer wants to scream at the sleeping potentates around him. "Not one of you. One of me. We're howling psychopaths, the both of us." But of course Lederer doesn't scream that or anything else. He talks sanely and wisely about his computer. And about a man named Petz, also known as Hampel and Zaworski, who travels almost as much as Lederer and exactly as much as Pym, but takes more trouble than either of us to conceal his tracks.

But first, in the same perfectly balanced and dispassionate voice, Lederer describes the situation as it had stood in August, when it was agreed on both sides—Lederer casts a respectful glance towards his hero Brotherhood—that the Pym case should be abandoned and the committee of investigation dissolved.

"But it wasn't abandoned, was it?" Brotherhood says, not bothering this time to give warning of his interruption. "You kept a watch going on his house and I don't mind betting you left a few other meters ticking too."

Lederer glances at Wexler. Wexler scowls into his hands to say keep me ah out of this. But Lederer has no intention of fielding that ball, and waits boorishly for Wexler to do it for him.

"The determination on our side, Jack, was that we should capitalise the ah existing appropriation of resources," Wexler says reluctantly. "We opted here for a gradual reduction of a—ah phased and undramatic running down.

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