Absolute Friends (38 page)

Fine, I'll focus it. I'm afraid of bankers who aren't bankers, money launderers, crooked billionaire philanthropists who send me half a million dollars I don't trust, wealthy Arabs who pay for the spread of the English language, fake surveyors and my own shadow. I'm afraid for Zara, Mustafa and Mo the dog. And for my ever-tenuous hold on human love.

He unlocks the car and when it doesn't explode he makes a long arm into the back and unearths a gangrenous khaki vest with kapok padding and poacher's pockets. Hauling off his suit jacket, he slips on the vest and changes over the contents of his pockets. The car starts first time.

To descend to earth he must enter a hellish iron car-lift that reminds him of the Steel Coffin. For half the official parking price in cash, an old attendant unlocks the doors for him with a prison-sized key and consigns him to the nether world. Emerging in free air, Mundy takes a right and another right to avoid passing Zara's café, because he knows that if he caught sight of her, he would scoop her up and drive her home and cause a lot of unnecessary confusion in everybody's minds including his own.

He reaches a roundabout and heads south. He is watching his mirrors but sees nothing to focus his fear on--but then if they're any good, I wouldn't, would I? It's midnight. A pink moon is shining, the road in front of him is as empty as the road behind him and there's a brave showing of stars. _Tomorrow we shall draw new lines between the stars.__ Dimitri may have pillaged the globe in order to save it, but along the way he found time to take a course in kitsch.

He is heading south down the road he drives every day and in forty minutes he will reach the first of the two intersections and filter left. He does. No blue Audi with Sasha crouched apelike at the wheel shepherds him, but he doesn't need one. In defiance of the lousy sense of direction that he shares with Trotsky, he knows the way. On the drive back with Sasha he made a mental record of the lefts and rights, and now he's following them in reverse order.

He passes the lay-by where he left his car in order to follow Sasha up the spiral staircase and keeps driving until he reaches the skimpy path that ran along the foot of the mountains. His fuel tank is a quarter full, but it won't stop him getting there. Soon he's driving through forest, down the same pitted alley, though the pits are deeper because the moon is brighter. He enters the forest clearing that was like the clearing outside Prague, but instead of crossing it he scans the trees for another opening, spots one below him and, switching off his headlights then his engine, coasts quietly towards it, cursing the twigs for snapping under his tires and the birds for screaming murder.

He rolls the car under the fir trees until he feels the weight of foliage on the roof, parks and picks his way between the boulders towards the concrete ramp.

Distances are real now. He's entering Badland and the rat is gnawing at his stomach. The barn looms ahead of him. Without the Audi's headlights shining on it, it's bigger than he remembers: two zeppelins' worth at least. Its doors are shut and padlocked. He edges along one side. Unlike the all-day surveyors in Heidelberg, he has no flashlight and no assistants.

He is handing himself along the barn's wooden wall, using its stone footings as a walkway, waiting for a window or a gap in the timber. There isn't one. He finds a loose plank and eases it. He needs his tool bag. Mustafa's got it. He needs Des. We're divorced.

The plank is warped. He warps it a little more. It writhes, bends back on itself and comes free. He peers through the gap. Shafts of moonlight show him what he needs to know. No shiny Jeep, no rows of quality cars for sale. In their place, three businesslike tractors, a wood saw and a pyramid of baled hay.

Have I come to the wrong address? No, I haven't, but the tenants have changed.

He walks back to the front of the barn and sets off along the track towards the wall of death. The Jeep's ascent by his reckoning took ten to twelve minutes. The walk will take him an hour. Soon he wishes it could be longer. He wishes it could take all his life, with Zara and Mustafa, and Jake if he's not too busy, because in Mundy's book there's nothing in the world to beat plodding through pine forest by the light of the moon with mist in the valley and the first pale flush of dawn coming up ahead of you, and the clatter of spring streams half deafening you, and the scent of resin bringing tears to your eyes, and the deer playing hide-and-seek as you trot along.

It's not the same farmhouse.

The house I came to was enormous and hospitable, with merry lights in the windows and geraniums in the window boxes and Hansel and Gretel smoke coming out of the chimney.

But this farmhouse is low, gray, shuttered and sullen. It is surrounded by a previously unobserved high-wire perimeter fence and backed against a blue rock face, and everything about it--but particularly the painted signs--says private, dangerous dogs, forbidden, one step further and you'll be prosecuted so fuck off. And if anyone is asleep in the rooms upstairs, they're sleeping with their windows bolted and their curtains open and they've padlocked themselves in from outside.

The fence is neither electrified nor new, which at first makes him feel a fool. But then he tells himself that not even the smartest Edinburgh graduate can be expected to notice everything on a first flying visit. And certainly not when he's being driven at breakneck speed at dead of night by a pigskin-gloved Amazon with Sasha in the back breathing down his neck.

There is razor wire at the top of the fence and conventional barbed wire below. There is a locked iron gate, but inside the perimeter there are also two roe deer that want badly to get out.

So somehow they got in. Maybe they jumped. No, they didn't, it's too high, even for them.

What they did--Mundy discovers, as he follows the fence round and searches the barns and outbuildings for signs of life and sees none--is cross a flattened stretch five feet wide where a tractor or other farm vehicle has ignored the warning signs and smashed its way in or out, and now the deer can't find it again.

But Mundy can find it and, better than that, he has discovered in his state of febrile agility an easy passage up a low-pitched slate roof to a window on the upper floor. And he has the wit, before he attempts the climb, to equip himself with a bit of rock. It's solid slate, weighs a ton, but for smashing open windows can't be bettered.

What have I come here for?

To make sure they're all as beautiful in the morning as they were at night.

To take a second look at the hidden signal in Dimitri's baby-blue eyes, the one that said, _You asked for this.__

To inquire, in the most casual way, what they think they're doing, at this extremely delicate point in all our histories, fooling around with funny money out of Riyadh.

And what caused them to conduct a day-long survey of my insolvent schoolhouse two weeks _ahead of__ asking me how much space it has.

Assuming it was a survey, which we don't.

In short, we are here to shed a little healthy light on an increasingly perplexing experience, my dear Watson.

Only to discover that he has arrived on the scene too late. The troupe has packed up its props and costumes and moved on.

Next gig Vienna. Or Riyadh.

It is a well-worn dictum, and not only of the spy business, that you can tell who people are by what they throw away.

In a long moonlit bedroom, six bunk beds, slept in and abandoned. No pillows, sheets or blankets. Bring your sleeping bag.

Spread round the beds, the sort of waste the rich leave for the maid--to use, dear, or to give to somebody you like.

A can of fashionable men's deodorant, half full. One of the Mormons? An anorak? A suit? A blazer?

Unisex hair spray. Richard?

A pair of Italian court shoes that weren't comfortable after all. Tights, lightly snagged. A high-necked silk blouse left hanging in a wardrobe. The aseptic blonde? Her chastity kit?

Three-quarters of a liter of good Scotch. For Dimitri, to mix with his soy milk?

A six-pack of Beck's beer, two left. A part-used carton of Marlboro Lights. An ashtray full of stubs. Angelo? Sven? Richard? You'd think all three had sworn on their mothers' knees never to touch nicotine or liquor.

Or is Ted Mundy, supersleuth, chasing his usual wild goose? Has a new crowd moved in here since the old one left, and I'm reading the wrong entrails?

Mundy gropes his way along a corridor, descends a couple of steps and makes a soft landing in carpet. There are no windows. He pats the walls around him and discovers a light switch. Billionaire philanthropists don't bother to switch off the power when they leave. He is standing opposite the door to Richard's office. He steps inside, half expecting to see Richard with his new haircut sitting at his brand-new desk, dressed in his brand-new blazer and airline steward's tie, but the desk is all that remains of him.

He pulls open the drawers. Empty. He drops to his knees on the deep-pile carpet and lifts the edge. No tacks, no Smooth Edge, no easy-grip or underlay: just deep, expensive, crudely cut carpet to cover the wiring underneath it.

What wiring? Richard had no telephone and no computer. Richard was sitting at a bareback desk. The ends of the wires are taped off. He follows the wires under the carpet to a painted chest of drawers beneath the window. He pulls out the chest. The wires run up the wall and across the sill and through a freshly drilled hole in the window frame.

To Mundy the homebuilder, the hole is cowboy work. The window frame is of fine old wood. The bastards might as well have shot a bullet through it. He opens the window and leans out. The wire goes down the wall for six feet and ducks back into the house: _there.__ No staples, of course, which is typical. Just let it dangle till the next foehn wind slings it into the forest.

He returns to the staircase, descends a flight and makes for the living room where the philanthropist and his acolytes received their latest novice. Early dawn light is filling the windows on the valley side. At the spot where he watched Dimitri in his tracksuit bearing down on him, Mundy pauses. Dimitri came in through that door and went out through it.

Making the same diagonal traverse, Mundy reaches the door, shoves it open and enters not a greenroom but a glazed lean-to kitchen tacked onto the north side of the house. It is part of a covered balcony--the same balcony, no doubt, where Dimitri invited Sasha to name today's stars.

The wires from upstairs are poking through the window. This time, instead of putting a bullet hole through the window frame, the cowboys have bashed out a pane of glass. The wires' ends are once more taped.

So this is where Dimitri hid after delivering his great soliloquy. This is where he held his breath and waited till I'd left the auditorium. Or did he amuse himself by playing with some clever piece of machinery, something that connected him with Richard upstairs? What for, for heaven's sake? Why stoop to humble wires in our modern high-tech age? _Because low-tech wires that aren't tapped are a bloody sight safer than high-tech signals that are, Ted,__ the sages of Edinburgh reply.

With a sense that he is outstaying his welcome, Mundy returns upstairs and climbs down the slate roof to hard ground. He remembers the dangerous dogs and wonders why they haven't bitten him yet, and why they have left the roe deer in peace. Perhaps they decamped with the rest of the philanthropists. At the bit of flattened perimeter fence he makes a halfhearted effort to persuade the deer to come with him, but they dip their heads and eye him reproachfully. Maybe when I've gone, he thinks.

Flare-paths of orange cloud sweep across the sky. Mundy bounds down the steep track, trusting in physical exertion to produce some kind of enlightenment. With each stride the voices in his head grow more emphatic: abort, send the moneyback, say no--but who to? He needs to talk to Sasha, but has no route to him: _I am required immediately in Paris... I am personally charged with the composition of our college libraries__... Yes, damn you, but what's your phone number? I didn't ask.

"Checkpoint," he says aloud, and feels the rat give a bite at his abdomen.

A line of frontier guards or policemen--he can't tell which--is strung across the goat path twenty yards below him. He counts nine men. They wear blue-gray trousers and black jackets with red piping, and Mundy guesses they are Austrian not German because he's never seen uniforms like that in Germany before. They are aiming their rifles at him. Plainclothesmen are hovering behind them.

Some of the guns are aimed at his head, the rest at his midriff, all with a marksman's concentration. A loudspeaker is booming at him in German to put his hands on his head _now.__ As he does so, he sees more men to his left and right, as many as a dozen on each side. And he notes that they have had the sense to stagger their positions so that when they shoot at him they won't shoot each other by mistake. The loudspeaker belongs to the group below him, and its voice is bouncing all over the valley like a ricochet that won't lie down. Deep Bavarian accent, could be Austrian.

"Take your hands off your head and stretch your arms above you."

He does as he is told.

"Shake your hands around."

He shakes them.

"Take off your watch. Drop it on the ground. Roll back your shirtsleeves. Further. All the way to the shoulders."

He pushes his sleeves up as far as they'll go.

"Keep your hands in the air and turn round. Keep turning. Stand still. What have you got in your vest?"

"My passport and some money."

"Anything else?"

"No."

"Anything inside the vest?"

"No."

"No gun?"

"No."

"No bomb?"

"No."

"Sure?"

"Positive."

Mundy has pinpointed him. He's the odd one out in the middle of the nine. Peaked cap, mountain boots. No rifle, but a pair of field glasses. Each time he speaks he has to drop the glasses and pick up the microphone.

"Before you take off your vest, I'm going to tell you something. Are you ready?"

"Yes."

"If you touch the pockets of the vest or put your hand inside it, we'll kill you. Understood?"