Mr. Pilgrim is a freelance agent.
He works for himself, or for his own company, a tourist agency which he has given the name Pilgrim Tours, based out of West Germany, West Berlin to be more specific. The years we are able to follow his activities are in the late 1950s when the Cold War has firm taken hold in the world and the demarcation lines between the West and Communist Bloc, dubbed by Winston Churchill as the Iron Curtain, is solidly in place.
We are told in a blurb for the first adventure that his tourism business "offered some rather strange services", one of the most unique, and for us the most interesting, one being "the transportation of refugees from behind the Iron Curtain". In this endeavor he is rightly nicknamed, at least in promotion of his missions, as a modern-day Pimpernel. He assists the clandestine transfer of people out of danger or at least forced labor into the Free World.
Mr. Pilgrim certainly has a first name, as we will see in a moment, however, throughout the two recorded adventures he is routinely addressed by the narrator solely as Mr. Pilgrim
A dossier held by the Communists on Pilgrim has a good deal of valuable intelligence in it, most of which is true and the rest likely. His full name is believed to be Peter Schafer Pilgrim, born in 1920 in Koln (Cologne) to Anglo-German parents and attending Berlin University in 1938 before apparently falling into trouble and being sent to a concentration camp. Some evidence incorrectly had him dying at a camp in Hammersee in 1944. After the end of the War and the forced grab of control by Moscow to create East Germany, Pilgrim joined with more than a dozen others to make use of the escape routes first employed by ex-Nazis but now to smuggle people out of the East and into the West. This group had a couple of successful years before it was broken up by a high-ranking member of the MVD; most of the members were put to death. Pilgrim was able to rebuild the system, the revised group known as the Pilgrim Organization which has had an impressive run of successes getting some high level scientists and diplomats out. Of the workings of this new group. that dossier has precious little to say other than "affiliations unknown, resourced unknown, headquarters unknown". Mr. Pilgrim's penchant for secrecy has proven beneficial.
Pilgrim is described, again in the dossier, as being about 35 years old, standing 5'10" tall and weighing around "11 stone" (around 155 lbs.), with blue eyes, 'fair hair', and no distinguishing features; all ff which one man observed meant he was much like "ten thousand" other men in Berlin alone. Considering that Pilgrim had been active with his own organization for over a half decade and that was the most that the East German secret police had been able to determine about him, that was impressive on its own.
Good Lines:
- "[There is] a hair's-breadth balance on which a successful coup d'état invariably hangs".