Mexico Set

‘That’s right. Well, let’s head back. You’ll drive for the first couple of hours. I will drive when we reach the mountains. If you see anything in the road drive over it. Too many people get killed on these roads swerving to avoid eyes they see shining in the headlights.’

4 (#u9c0e2a0f-d19c-58b3-a995-31eaa329af39)

I didn’t sleep again after they departed. I dozed fitfully but imagined I could hear their diesel car returning, with the alternate roars and screams that a really bad surface racks from a small engine. But it was just the wind, and then, as dawn came and the storm passed over, I was kept awake by the screeching and chattering of the animals. They came right down to the water through the thick undergrowth that bordered one side of the house. There was a stream there; it passed close by a window of Paul Biedermann’s study. I suppose he liked to watch the animals. It was an aspect of Biedermann’s character that I’d not yet encountered.

Dawn shone its hard grey light and made the sea look like granite. I went down to the kitchen and found some canned food: beans and tomatoes. I could find no way of warming the mixture so I ate a plateful cold. I was hungry.

From the kitchen window there was a view back towards the village. That way the sky was light pink. I counted seven vultures, circling very high and looking for breakfast. Nearer to the house there were birds in the trees making a lot of noise, and monkeys scrambling about in the lower branches with occasional forays into the garden.

I would have given a lot for a cup of coffee, but instant powder stirred into cold tinned milk did not appeal. I made do with a shot of Biedermann’s brandy. It was everything Stinnes said about it. So good, in fact, that I took another.

Fortified by the strong drink, and one of Biedermann’s fancy striped sweaters chosen from his wardrobe, I went outside. The sky was overcast to give a cold shadowless light and, although the black clouds had gone, there was still a cold wind from the ocean. The tyre marks of the jeep were to be seen on the roadway. I followed the new macadam road to the entrance gate. It was open, its chain freshly cut. Despite the borrowed sweater I was cold, and colder still as I circled the house completely, crossed the patio that was sheltered from the wind, and climbed up the hill at the back to the highest point of rock. I couldn’t see the road or the village but there was a haze of woodsmoke rising from where I guessed the village must be. I couldn’t see any sign of Biedermann or his car. That was the first time I’d noticed the swimming pool. It was about two hundred metres from the house and hidden by a line of junipers planted by some landscape gardener for that purpose.

The pool was big, and very blue. And full length on the bottom, at the deep end, was a human figure. At first I thought it was a drowning case. Wrapped in cheap grey blankets, the figure made a shapeless bundle that almost disappeared in the dark depths of blue shade. It was only when I got past the wooden building that housed four changing rooms and filtering and heating equipment that I was sure that the pool was dry and drained.

‘Hey!’ I shouted at the inert figure. ‘Tu que haces?’

Very slowly the blankets became unravelled to reveal a man dressed in badly wrinkled white trousers and a T-shirt advertising Underberg. One of his bare sunburned arms bore a lacework of neat white scar tissue, and so did one side of his face. He blinked and squinted into the light, trying to see me against the glaring sky.

‘Paul Biedermann,’ I shouted. ‘What the hell are you doing in the pool?’

‘You came,’ he said. His voice was hoarse and he coughed to clear his throat. ‘The others have gone? How did you get here?’

‘It’s Bernd,’ I said. ‘We spoke on the phone; Bernd Samson. I walked. Yes, the other two drove away hours ago.’ He must have been watching the road. My approach along the track had gone unobserved from wherever he’d been hiding.

Wrapped into his blanket I could see a hunting rifle. Biedermann pushed it away as he bent his head forward almost to his knees and stretched his arms. Then he rubbed his legs and arms, trying to restore his circulation. It must have been very uncomfortable on the hard, cold surface of the concrete pool all night. He looked up and then smiled as he recognized me. It was a severe smile, twisted by the puckered scars that marked one side of his face.

‘Bernd. Are you alone?’ he said, trying to make it sound as if it meant no more to him than how many cups of coffee to order. His face and arms were blue; it was the light reflected from the painted sides of the pool.

‘They’ve gone,’ I said. ‘Come and switch the electricity on, and make me a cup of coffee.’

He slung the rifle on his shoulder and climbed up the ladder of the empty pool. He left the blanket where it was. I wondered if he intended to spend another uncomfortable night here.

He moved about like an automaton. Once inside the house he showed me all the things I should have found for myself. There was bottled gas for cooking, a generator for lighting, and a battery-powered Sony short-wave radio. He boiled water and measured out coffee in silence. It was as if he wanted to take as long as he could to defer the start of the conversation. Even when we were both seated in his study, hands clasped round cups of strong black coffee, he still didn’t offer any explanation about his curious behaviour. I said nothing. I waited for him to speak. It was usually better that way and I wanted to see how he would start, and even more importantly what he would avoid.

‘I’ve got everything,’ said Paul Biedermann. ‘Plenty of money, my health, and a wife who stood by me after the accident. Even after that girl was killed in my car.’ It was hard to believe that this was the nervous schoolboy I’d known in Berlin. It was not just the strong American accent he’d acquired at his expensive East Coast school but something in his poise and his manner too. Paul Biedermann had become unreservedly American in a way that only Germans are able to do.

‘That was a nasty business,’ I said.

‘I was unconscious three days. I was in hospital almost six months altogether, counting the convalescence. Six months; and I hate hospitals.’ He drank some coffee. It was a heavy Mexican coffee that Biedermann had turned into a devil’s brew that made my teeth tingle. ‘But then I got entangled with those bastards and I haven’t slept properly ever since. Do you know that, Bernd? It’s the literal truth that I haven’t slept really well since the start of it.’

‘Is that so,’ I said. I didn’t want to sit there with my tongue hanging out. I wanted to sound casual; bored, almost. But I wanted to know, especially after I’d heard Stinnes and his pal talking about Biedermann as if he was a KGB agent.

‘The Russians,’ said Biedermann, ‘spies and all that. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’ He was looking over my shoulder as if he wanted to see the animals and birds in the trees outside.

‘I know what you’re talking about, Paul,’ I said.

‘Because you’re in all that, aren’t you?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ I said

‘I was talking to my sister Poppy. She met you at a dinner party at the house of one of the big Berlin spy chiefs. You’re one of them, Bernd. You probably always have been. Was that why your father sent you to school in Berlin, instead of sending you back to England the way the other British families sent their kids back there to go to school?’

‘Who were they, Paul? Who were those men who came in the night?’

‘I didn’t see you arrive. I was out with the gun, shooting lizards. I hate lizards, don’t you? Those Russkies are like lizards, aren’t they? Especially the one with glasses. I knew they would come, and I was right.’

‘How well do you know them?’

‘They pass me around like a parcel. I’ve dealt with so many different Russians that I’ve almost lost count. These two were sent from Berlin. The one with the strong Berlin accent calls himself Stinnes but he’s not really a German, he’s a Russian. The other one calls himself Pavel Moskvin. It sounds like a phoney name, doesn’t it? I still haven’t figured out if they work from Moscow or are part of the East German intelligence service. What do you think, Bernd?’

‘Moskvin means “man from Moscow”. It could be a genuine name. Do they have diplomatic cover?’

‘They said they do.’

‘Then they are Russians. The KGB give almost all their people diplomatic cover. The East Germans don’t. They work mostly in West Germany and infiltrate their agents among the refugees going there.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s part of the overall contingency plan. East German agents in West Germany are hard to find. They don’t need the cover. And in other parts of the world East German networks survive after Russians with diplomatic cover are discovered and kicked out.’

‘They never answer any questions. I thought they’d leave me alone, now that I spend most of the year in Mexico.’ Not most of the time but most of the year. Most of the financial year; it was a fiscal measurement of time.

‘How did you get entangled with the Russians, Paul?’ I asked, carefully using his own words.

‘What am I supposed to do? I’ve got half my family still living over there in Rostock. Am I supposed to tell them to go to hell so that they take it out on my aunts and uncles?’

‘Yes, that’s what you’re supposed to do,’ I said.

‘Well, I didn’t,’ said Biedermann. ‘I played along with them. I told them I’d do nothing serious but I played along when they asked for run-of-the-mill jobs.’

‘What did they get you to do?’

‘Laundering money. They never asked me to give them money – they seem to have plenty of that to throw around. They wanted Deutschmarks changed into dollars, Swedish kronor changed into Mexican pesos and vice versa, Latin American currencies changed into Dutch guilders.’

‘They could have all that done at a money exchange in West Berlin.’

He smiled and stared at something beyond me and drank his coffee. ‘Ja,’ he said, forgetting for a moment that we were speaking English. He touched the side of his face as if discovering the terrible scars for the first time. ‘There was a difference; the money was sent to me in large cash transfers and I had to pass it on in small contributions and donations.’

‘Pass it on how?’

‘By mail.’

‘In small amounts?’

‘One hundred dollars, two hundred dollars. Never more than five hundred dollars – or the equivalent amount in whatever currency.’

‘Cash?’