Mexico Set

‘What sort of things?’ said Zena.

I said, ‘Things that require the cooperation of many different government departments. For instance, he’ll need a driving licence. And we don’t want that to materialize out of nowhere, not for a forty-year-old with no other driving experience on file and no record of passing a driving test. He’d need to have some innocuous-looking file in his local tax office. He’ll want a credit card; what does he put on the application? Then there are documents for travelling. He’ll probably want some freedom of movement and that’s always a headache. Incidentally he must give us some identity photos for his passport and so on. One good full-face picture will be enough. A picture of his wife too. I’ll get the copies done at the embassy.’

Werner nodded. He realized that this was his briefing. I was talking around the sort of offer he would be able to make to Stinnes. ‘You’re assuming that he would live in England?’ said Werner.

‘Certainly for the first year,’ I said. ‘It will be a long debriefing. Would that be a problem?’

‘He’s always spoken of Germany as the only place he’d ever want to be. Isn’t that true, Zena?’

‘That’s what he’s always said,’ Zena agreed. ‘But it’s the sort of thing everyone says at the Kronprinz Club. Everyone is drinking German beer and exchanging news of the old country. It is natural to talk of Germany with great affection. We all do. But when you are offering someone a chance to retire in comfort, England wouldn’t be too bad, I think.’ She smiled.

I said, ‘Dicky thinks Stinnes will jump at any decent offer.’

‘Does he?’ said Werner doubtfully.

‘London thinks Stinnes has been passed over for promotion. They think he’s been stuck away in East Berlin to rot.’

‘So why is he here in Mexico?’ said Werner.

‘Dicky thinks it’s just a nice little jaunt for him.’

‘It’s a convenient thing to say when you can’t think of any convincing answer,’ said Werner. ‘What do you think, Bernie?’

‘I’m convinced he’s here in connection with Paul Biedermann,’ I said cautiously. ‘But why the hell would he be?’

Werner nodded. He didn’t take me seriously. He knew I disliked Biedermann and thought this was clouding my judgement. ‘What makes you think that, Bernie?’ he said.

‘Stinnes and his pal didn’t know I was listening to them out at the Biedermann house. They said they were running Biedermann and I believe it.’

‘Paul Biedermann has been koshering cash for the KGB,’ Werner told Zena. ‘And sending it off for them too.’

‘What a bastard,’ said Zena. The family property in East Prussia, which Zena had failed to inherit because it was now a part of the USSR, made her unsympathetic to people who helped the KGB. But she didn’t put much venom into her condemnation of Biedermann; her mind was on Stinnes. ‘What’s so special about Stinnes?’ she asked me.

‘London wants him,’ I said. ‘And London Central moves in strange and unaccountable ways.’

‘It’s all Dicky Cruyer’s idea,’ she said, as if she’d had a sudden insight. ‘I’ll bet it’s not London at all. Dicky Cruyer went off to Los Angeles and had a meeting with Frank Harrington. Then he returned with the electrifying news that London wants Erich Stinnes, and he’s to be coaxed into defection.’

‘He couldn’t do that,’ said Werner, who hated to have his faith in London Central undermined. ‘It’s a London order, isn’t it, Bernie? It must be.’

‘Don’t be silly, Werner,’ his wife argued. ‘It was probably made official afterwards. You know that anyone could talk Frank Harrington into anything.’

Werner grunted. Zena’s brief love affair with the elderly Frank Harrington was something that was never referred to, but I could see it was not forgotten.

Zena turned to me. ‘I’m right. You know I am.’

‘A successful enrolment would do wonders for Dicky’s chances of holding on to the German Desk,’ I said. I got up and walked over to the window. I had almost forgotten that we were in Mexico City, but the mountains just visible behind a veil of mist, the dark ceiling of clouds, the flashes of lightning and the tropical storm that was thrashing the city were not like anything to be seen in Europe.

‘When do we get the money for finding him?’ Zena said. My back was to her and I pretended to think that she was asking Werner.

It was Werner who replied. ‘It will work out, darling. These things take time.’

Zena came across to the window and said to me, ‘We’ll not do any more to help until we’ve been paid some money.’

‘I don’t know anything about the money,’ I said.

‘No, no one knows anything about the money. That’s how you people work, isn’t it?’

Werner was still sitting heavily in his chair, munching his biscuits. ‘It’s not Bernie’s fault, darling. Bernie would give us the crown jewels if it was only up to him.’ The crown jewels had always been Werner’s idea of ultimate wealth. I remembered how, when we were at school, various prized possessions of his had all been things he wouldn’t exchange for the crown jewels.

‘I’m not asking for the crown jewels,’ said Zena demurely. I turned to look her in the face. My God but she was tough, and yet the toughness did not mar her beauty. I suddenly saw the fatal attraction she had for poor Werner. It was like having pet piranhas in the bath, or a silky rock python in the linen cupboard. You could never tame them but it was fun to see what effect they had on your friends. ‘I’m asking to be paid for finding Erich Stinnes.’ She picked up a notepad by the phone and entered the cup and saucer on to her list of breakages.

I looked at Werner but he was trying on some new inscrutable faces, so I said, ‘I don’t know who told you that there was a cash payment for reporting the whereabouts of Erich Stinnes but it certainly wasn’t me. The truth is, Mrs Volkmann, that the department never pays any sort of bounty. At least I’ve never heard of such a payment being made.’ She stared at me with enough calm, dispassionate interest to make me worry whether my coffee was poisoned. ‘But I probably could sign a couple of vouchers that would reimburse you for air fares, first class, return trip.’

‘I don’t want any charity,’ she said. ‘I want what is due to me.’ It wasn’t ‘us’, I noticed.

‘What sort of fee would you think appropriate?’ I asked.

‘It must be worth sixteen thousand American dollars,’ she said. So she’d decided what she wanted. At first I wondered how she’d come to such an exact figure, but I then realized that it had not been quantified by the job she’d done; it was the specific amount of money she wanted for something or other. That was the way Zena’s mind worked; every step she took was on the way to somewhere else.

‘That’s a lot of money, Mrs Volkmann,’ I said. I looked at Werner. He was pouring himself more coffee and concentrating on the task as if oblivious of everything around him. It suited him to to have Zena giving me hell. I suppose she was voicing the resentment that had been building up in Werner in all the years he’d suffered from the insensitive double-dealing of the birdbrains at London Central. But I didn’t enjoy having Zena bawl me out. I was angry with him and he knew it. ‘I will see that your request is passed on to London.’

‘And tell them this,’ she said. She was still speaking softly and smiling so that a casual observer might have thought we were chatting amicably. ‘You tell them unless I get my money I’ll make sure that Erich Stinnes never trusts a word you say.’

‘How would you achieve that, Mrs Volkmann?’ I asked.

‘No, Zena …’ said Werner, but he’d left it too late.

‘I’d tell him exactly what you’re up to,’ she said. ‘I’d tell him that you’ll cheat him just as you’ve cheated me.’

I laughed scornfully. She seemed surprised. ‘Have you been sitting in on this conversation, and still not understood what Werner and I are talking about, Mrs Volkmann? Your husband earns his money from avalizing. He borrows money from Western banks to pay in advance for goods shipped to East Germany. The way he does it requires him to spend a lot of time in the German Democratic Republic. It’s natural that the British government might use someone such as Werner to talk to Stinnes about defecting. The KGB wouldn’t like that, of course, but they’d swallow it, the same way we swallow it when they use trade delegates to contact trouble-makers and float some ideas we don’t like.’

I glanced at Werner. He was standing behind Zena now, his hands clasped together and a frown on his face. He’d been about to interrupt but now he was looking at me, waiting to hear what I was going to say. I said, ‘Everyone likes a sportsman who can walk out into the middle of a soccer field, exchange a joke with the linesmen and flip a coin for the two team captains. But “enrolling” doesn’t just mean offering a man money to come to the other side; it can mean beating him over the head and shipping him off in a crate. I don’t say that’s going to happen, but Werner and I both know it’s a possibility. And if it does happen I want to make sure that the people in the other team keep thinking that Werner is an innocent bystander who paid the full price of admission. Because if they suspect that Werner is the kind who climbs the fence and throws beer cans at the goalkeeper they might get rough, Mrs Volkmann. And when the KGB get rough, they get very rough. So I advise you most sincerely not to start talking to Erich Stinnes in a way that makes it sound as if Werner is closely connected with the department, or there’s a real risk that they’ll do something nasty to you both.’

Werner knew I was going to spell it out for her. I suppose he didn’t want her to understand the implications in case she worried.

I looked at her. She nodded. ‘If Werner wants to talk to Stinnes, I won’t screw it up for you,’ she promised. ‘But don’t ask me to help.’

‘I won’t ask you to help,’ I said.

Werner went over to her and put his arm round her shoulder to comfort her. But she didn’t look very worried about him. She still looked very angry about not getting the money.

6 (#ulink_8f99794e-b0ab-552a-9e4b-736c6b41786b)

‘If Zena ever left me, I don’t know what I’d do,’ said Werner. ‘I think I’d die, I really would.’ He fanned away a fly using his straw hat.

This was Werner in his lugubrious mood. I nodded, but I felt like reminding him that Zena had left him several times in the past, and he was still alive. He’d even survived the very recent time when she’d set up house with Frank Harrington – a married man more than old enough to be her father – and had looked all set to make it permanent. Only Zena was never going to make anything permanent, except perhaps eventually make Werner permanently unhappy.

‘But Zena is very ambitious,’ said Werner. ‘I think you realize that, don’t you, Bernie?’