Red to Black (19 page)

They wind out of Geneva to the east and pass through its satellite towns and villages that dot the lake. He pays off the taxi a few miles before his destination and takes a bus the rest of the way.

The restaurant stands on a sloping lawn that meets the lake in a grass beach. Nearby is a quay where the ferry stops on the way up the lake. There is a large worn-out play area administered by two young women, probably itinerant workers from Eastern Europe. There is plenty of brightly coloured plastic equipment to amuse the children while their parents eat or drink in a modest wooden building that opens only in the summer.

Sergei sits by the window, facing towards the road with the beautiful lake view behind him.

‘You were quick,’ Finn says, and sits down.

‘You were slow,’ Sergei says. ‘We don’t have a lot of time. Life here isn’t so safe for me any more. Not since Dobby’s been in power.’

Sergei uses the insulting KGB nickname for President Putin, a name taken from Harry Potter’s goblin.

Sergei had come up through the Forest’s training school at the same time as me. In 1992 he started a trading company in Moscow which imported sugar at first, then branched out into other foodstuffs. He became acquainted with the trading floors of Western Europe, made his millions and then moved to Geneva.

After Yeltsin had made Putin his prime minister and when the various KGB clans rivalled each other to put their man in position to win the elections, Sergei was working on behalf of one of Putin’s opponents, one of the KGB’s four or five chosen candidates to win
the elections, before the list was finally whittled down to Putin. Sergei ended up funding a losing candidate.

A successful businessman, now worth several hundred million, Sergei continued his work as a KGB informer and reported directly to the KGB’s officer at the Russian delegation of the United Nations in Geneva. Sergei was riding high in Geneva for several years, making millions from KGB-backed trading contracts and his own private business. But his one mistake- a mistake that was to cost him and many others dear- was that he had backed the wrong horse. His candidate was now an ordinary MP in the Russian Duma and Putin was president.

‘Things will pass,’ Finn says. ‘Just ride it out, Sergei.’

‘I don’t know if I’m under surveillance but safe, or on the list and not safe,’ the Russian replies. ‘That’s how they like it best. Keeping everyone in fear.’

‘How bad is it?’ Finn says.

‘Terrible. The Petersburg clan are triumphant in their victory last year. Putin himself, Ivanov, Sechin–the lot of them. And now they’re ironing out their enemies-or anyone they feel like ironing out. Not just in Moscow either. They’re already turning to the outside world. Putin’s Petersburg clan-these damn Peterski-they’re even more ruthless than we thought.’

Sergei gulps from a plastic glass of transparent liquor.

‘They’re putting out contracts, for Christ’s sake,’ he continues. ‘It’s not enough that Putin’s won, now they want to erase anyone who’s got under their skin. I put nearly five million dollars on the losing ticket in the election campaign and now my whole fucking body’s above the parapet.’

Sergei drinks heavily again from the plastic tumbler and leans across the table to Finn.

‘I’m glad you’re here. You know, I may want to come over. Maybe it’s my only choice now.’ He sits back. ‘I hear you’ve left Moscow. You’ve got trouble too?’

Finn thinks about suggesting that Sergei go to the Americans as a safer haven, rather than the British. But he needs Sergei where he is for now, in the field, not in some CIA safe house in Connecticut on a two-year debriefing.

‘No, no trouble,’ Finn says. ‘Just a change of job.’

A waitress comes and takes Finn’s order for a glass of wine and another vodka for Sergei.

‘We can take you in, of course,’ Finn lies. ‘But now’s not a good time. Give it a few months when we can demonstrate more clearly what Putin’s doing. Then my people in London will really appreciate your value. But I need your help for that. Right now you’ll be coming up against my government’s love affair with Putin.’

‘I can’t last much longer like this,’ the Russian says plaintively, and Finn watches the alcoholic self-pity well up in his face. ‘They’re watching me, sticking pins in me, hounding me. An article appeared in
Izvestia,
naming me in some scandal. Inspired, of course, by the dogs in Putin’s clan. There are people in his clan who hate me in Moscow.’

‘But, as you say, Sergei, they’re putting the frighteners on everyone, not just you. What they want you to do is run. That will prove your treachery. And then they catch you before you can get to safety.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

‘I’ll help you when it’s time,’ Finn says, lying easily again. He has no power to help Sergei or anyone else.

‘Putin has spent a year gathering Russia’s money,’ Sergei continues. ‘It’s going to be a great harvest. He’s put all his own people into the state economy, the state oil companies, where they drain a fat percentage for themselves on the inside. And the oligarchs, our once-new independent businessmen, are now cap in hand.
They’re all afraid, even the most powerful. Putin has told them they must share their wealth. Share it with the KGB, with the Forest, of course, but not with the country. Geneva, you wouldn’t believe it! It’s crawling with operatives. Back in Moscow they’re activating agents who’ve been asleep for years. There are sting operations against certain banks…’

‘Which banks?’

‘Which ones? There are half a dozen. All old KGB sympathisers who have long fallen into disuse. Asleep.’

Finn says nothing.

‘A month ago,’ Sergei says, leaning in towards Finn again, ‘the president of the Banque Leman was invited to Moscow. He has a weakness from a long time back. But this time they photographed him indulging in this weakness–for underage girls–in an apartment in the city. Now they use the pictures to tell him what to do.’

‘What’s new?’ Finn says.

‘This is what’s new. The regime isn’t only interested in funding the Forest’s operations abroad any more. It has very big plans, very big money from business, mafia sources, billions. There are accounts being opened up in the Banque Leman in the name of foreigners who hold very senior positions in the West. So they say. Bribe money is bottomless. That’s just one bank. There are others.’

‘Why’s it different from their normal Forest operations?’ Finn says calmly.

‘This time they plan to use their vast capital like the West does,’ Sergei says. ‘They’re in a no-limit poker game with the markets as the pot.’

The small children Finn has seen with Sergei on the quay earlier run into the restaurant and look at Finn.

‘What’s the name of this bank’s president?’ Finn says.

‘Naider. Clement Naider.’

‘Can you get me the pictures, the photographs with these underage girls your side has of him?’ Finn says.

‘You ask too much,’ Sergei says. ‘I tell you, I’m watched.’

One of the boys tugs his arm and his brother comes in to join them.

‘I’m taking too big a risk just by being here. I have to go,’ Sergei says. ‘You will help me?’

‘Soon. When it’s time. I need the pictures, Sergei,’ Finn says. ‘Naider and the girls.’

‘No more now please.’

Finn stands up as Sergei does. ‘I’ll help you if you do this,’ Finn promises. ‘We’ll have you in a nice big house in Surrey, near Boris, all yours, with a brand new passport.’

‘There isn’t much time for me,’ Sergei says, and drinks back the tumbler of vodka. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Finn leans in to the Russian.

‘No one’s interested in helping you, Sergei,’ Finn says harshly. ‘Not us, not the Americans. They’re in bed with Putin. If you want me to get you out, find the pictures.’

Beads of sweat break out across the Russian’s forehead. Then he takes the boy’s hand and leaves the restaurant without a word.

Finn watches the small boy looking back at him. Who’s that man, he seems to hear him say. They step out on to the warm lawn, and Finn wonders how much grace Sergei really does have left with the Kremlin.

I
WAKE EARLY
the next morning unable to sleep, the worst night since Finn disappeared ten days ago. It is Thursday, the beginning of the third day since my arrival in Tegernsee, and outside the town fills with market shoppers.

At first I don’t know where I am, then I see Finn’s journal and then the mountains beyond the window. My first thought is of Finn, and then of Mikhail.

Apart from the pink house, Mikhail was the one secret Finn had kept from me, and I thought the clue to Finn’s disappearance might lie not just here in Tegernsee, but in the identity of Mikhail.

Somewhere down in the cellar, I am sure, Finn would have left something that explained Mikhail. Until I have searched for this, the deepest secret of Finn’s, I know I can’t concentrate on anything else.

I take the book back down to the cellar, lock everything, and leave to find breakfast. There is nothing to eat or drink in the house except some half-empty liquor bottles. I walk to a small café, up
near Schmidtke’s house on the Graubstrasse, a few hundred yards away, and try to eat a croissant, but eventually I can’t postpone my sense of rising anticipation. I take the croissant and a cup of coffee and return to the house, buying a few supplies on my way back.

I descend to the cellar again, shutting everything up behind me, and light the oil stove. First I take the pile of Finn’s books that I have yet to read and flick through them, but I don’t expect Mikhail to be so easily discovered. Mikhail would be special, separate, if Finn had acknowledged Mikhail at all in his records. Mikhail would not be someone anyone could discover when they eventually found the pink house. How would Finn leave a record of Mikhail?

The cellar contains very little: a table where Finn seems to have edited some of the books before depositing them here, a small, empty metal filing cabinet, a rolled-up carpet that looks as if it hasn’t been moved for years, some odds and ends from a plumbing job- offcuts of plastic pipe and a tub of hardened white paste–a waste-paper basket filled with screwed-up paper, a rickety chair with a reed seat, dust, endless dust, and an empty picture frame.

I begin to look at everything and the more I look the more I know that Mikhail won’t be here. If Finn had written about Mikhail at all, there would at least be a clue here. And the clue, I knew, would be something that I, and only I, would understand.

I check the cellar completely and am covered with dust, then finally I empty the waste-paper basket and begin unscrewing the paper. It is mostly old envelopes and scraps of paper torn from his books with a single word on them, or a sentence, or nothing at all. I examine each one and can get no answer from any of the scribbled notes. When I unscrew a piece of paper near the bottom of the basket, a single sheet, I see that one line is written on it.

It is underlined, like a title, and reads
Bride of the Wind.
I stare at it. There is nothing else. I swiftly turn out the rest of the basket, unscrewing all the remaining paper, but they are all blank. There is nothing else as clear as this one sheet.

I turn off the oil heater and ascend the wooden steps again, open the metal door and shut it firmly behind me. I draw the false wall across it, with its built-in fireplace, check the ornaments on the mantelpiece, and assure myself that all is as it should be.

Then I put on my coat and woolly hat and, clutching the paper in a ball, leave the house again for the second time in two hours.

Down along the path by the lake where I’d walked the night before to the
gasthaus,
a brittle layer of ice creeps a few feet into the water. There is a clear sky, it is bitterly cold, and the snow on the path has frozen into crusts. I walk fast to keep warm and because it suits my sense of urgency.

I come to the first of three lidos, closed up for the winter, the water frozen solid in the man-made harbours. There is a metal rail fence around the lido, and inside the fence plastic covers are pulled over some refreshment stalls.

By the path, there is a low metal gate in the fence, shut with a chain and padlock. By the gate is a wooden pillbox to fit one person to take the money and dispense the tickets when the lido is open. The stand is closed up with padlocked stable doors.

It is easy to step over the gate. The fence and the gate are there just to deter summer visitors from entering the lido unnoticed, without paying. I walk past the pillbox ticket office, across the icy wood surface and past the boarded-up refreshment stands.

Behind them, on a broad wooden slatted deck area, are several dozen upturned rowing boats, sailing dinghies, tenders for larger boats anchored in the lake for the summer–nything that their owners had too little space or too much money to bother to take home with them at the end of the season. Most are covered, but the blue plastic covers are stretched across the hulls in such a way that I can pick out the boats’ names written on the bow or on the transom.

I walk up and down the rows of boats, pausing to look at names, and lift the flap of a hanging cover, here and there, for a better sight. I translate the mostly German names, the type of silly, fond names
that people give boats:
Our Boys, Jaws, Titanic, Beautiful Melinda.
By the time I reach the end of the last row, I have spent nearly an hour and am cold again. Every name I stop to study; I turn them this way and that, trying to see another meaning, another message from Finn. But it is no good. I leave the lido and hurry further up the path and into the
gasthaus
for warmth and coffee.

There is a solitary girl behind the bar at this quiet time of the day. I ask her about the lidos that dot the shoreline. She says that only local people kept their boats in most of them, including the one I had randomly chosen, and that if I am from out of town, the only place I can keep a boat is at a lido in the next village of Rottach-Egern. There, she says, they allow casual visitors to leave boats over the winter. I finish my coffee and take a bus for less than a mile along the lake.

Rottach-Egern is all but joined to Tegernsee by the scattering of houses and small inns between them. It lies at the edge of the lake and its lido stretches out a hundred metres from the shore.

It is built in a similar way and there is nobody to prevent me from getting inside, nobody around in winter at all. There is nothing to steal, except boats, and nobody in their right mind would wish to take a boat out at this time of year, even for a prank.

Again I walk the rows of upturned boats, checking the names. Finally I come to a sailing dinghy, perhaps fourteen feet long and made of wood. I look at the bow and there is no name written there. Its winter cover obscures the stern. I cut the string and lift up the thick plastic. The boat is called
Windsbraut, Bride of the Wind.
I see that the writing covers another, previous name that has been painted out.

I untie the rest of the blue plastic cover and peel it away and see a smooth, blue-painted hull with a slit in the centre for a daggerboard. I lift the boat up from the side as far as I can, but it is heavy and I can’t hold it and look inside the hull at the same time. So I let it down and look around for something to prop it up.

There is the heavy concrete base of a parasol near one of the covered refreshment stalls and I half drag, half roll it over, placing it close to the hull and managing to lift the boat about two feet off the wooden decking to place it precariously on the metal tube the parasol slots into. I get down on my back and worm my way underneath.

The daggerboard casing takes up most of the centre of the boat, there are coiled wires and a plastic bailer tied on to a thwart. Around the insides of the cockpit are ballast tanks built into the hull. They have four circular black plastic screw tops about six inches across that give access to the tanks. I begin to unscrew each one of them and to pull out the inflated yellow plastic ballast sacks inside. I pull them out one by one and when I’ve finished I worm out from under the boat. There are six ballast sacks in all. I pick up each one until I find which of them contains an object that I can feel sliding up and down inside. The rest I kick back under the hull. I lower the boat back on to the decking, put the parasol base back where I found it and cover and tie the boat again with its plastic sheet.

I let the air out of the ballast sack until I can fit it, and the solid object I can feel it contains, under my coat.

I find a taxi and take it to the market square in Tegernsee and walk, carefully again–watching for other interested eyes–until I approach the pink house.

In the kitchen I study the yellow ballast bag. I see its plastic seams have been carefully parted in order to store an object inside, and have then been melted together again. I rip it open with a knife. Inside is a watertight package and, inside that, an exercise book. I open it up and, from the first lines, see that this story begins with Finn’s alternative history lesson.

I take it into the sitting room, light the fire, and sit on the sofa.

‘Vladimir Putin took up his KGB posting in Dresden,’ Finn begins, ‘in 1980, the year that Oskar Kokoschka died. He occupied a KGB residence two streets away from where Kokoschka held the Professorship of Arts at the Dresden Academy between 1917 and 1924. There the similarities end.

‘Putin was one of the guardians of Yuri Andropov’s post-Soviet vision, in which the outmoded, outdated methods of all the years since the Russian Revolution were to be reconfigured, under the watchful gaze of the first KGB president, Andropov. But then Andropov died prematurely. His successor, Chernenko, was a throwback to the Brezhnev era and lasted little more than a year before he, too, died.

‘And then they ushered in Gorbachev, who would always have the KGB at his shoulder.

‘Putin ran a large network of agents in East Germany. The most important of these was a man named Klaus-Maria Sudhoff. Sudhoff was another Russian-German, like Schmidtke, who had been stationed in Dresden for five years before Putin arrived. Sudhoff, apart from being the conduit between Schmidtke and the KGB, was also the main contact between all of them and Otto Roth.

‘Sudhoff knew where all the skeletons were buried. Sudhoff was involved in KGB arms and drugs trafficking and he worked with terrorist groups in the West, particularly in West Germany. His friendship with Putin was described as instant. They hit it off like old friends.

‘In January 1990, Putin began to sign contracts with all his operatives in East Germany which promised them, only a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the KGB would look after its own. Contracts were written and toasted in Sekt, Putin’s favourite wine while he was based in Dresden. Plans were drawn up to give his network new identities, send them to other countries or simply bring them to live in Russia. The deals were sealed with a handshake from Putin.

‘But as so often with such plans, the promises were never kept and some agents began to make threats and feel threatened at the same time. Some disappeared, Sudhoff among them.

‘One of Putin’s agents, Klaus Zuchold, finally went over to the BND, West Germany’s secret service, and gave the names of fifteen spies in West Germany working for Moscow. But the West Germans decided not to pursue the names he gave them, and they buried them in their attempt to obliterate the complex past, just as they were to sweep Schmidtke under the carpet during the same years.

‘Klaus-Maria Sudhoff was among those names. And he disappeared sometime in 1990.

‘He was finally found face down in a canal in Berlin in March 1992. He’d consumed a great deal of alcohol, no doubt, but that was only partially responsible for his death. The official record claims the cause of death as “drowning”.

‘But I must digress for a moment from Sudhoff to look at the organisation you and your father were assigned to, Anna, Directorate “S”. As well as your job, darling Anna, training subversives-
nelegali
-to engage in terrorist activities in their own countries, Directorate “S” was actually charged with a far more important role. That role was no less than the preservation of the KGB itself. When Gorbachev was President and before the Wall came down, Directorate “S” was assigned to hold the Soviet state together through the organs of the security services; to put the KGB on ice.

‘Independent groups of senior officers in Directorate “S” set about preserving the clan loyalties that ran deeper than any loyalty to Communist cliques or even to the Politburo. In fact, one of the main aims of Directorate “S” in these years was to sweep these fusty, inefficient Communist cliques aside, right up to the Politburo itself.

‘Directorate “S” operated with a cell structure, an underground formation, with no centralised control. Central control would have been too risky. Look at what happened in 1991. Kryuchkov and
his other KGB associates staged their disastrous putsch against Gorbachev for control of the Kremlin and nearly ruined all the plans Directorate “S” had so carefully laid. It was its cell structure which ensured its preservation. The putsch was a setback for those who knew what the deeper, longer plan was. The Plan. Directorate “S” was playing a far longer game than Kryuchkov and the rest of his dreamers realised.

‘When Yeltsin stood on his tank in 1991 and the putsch was defeated, the Plan was disrupted by a chain of events that began with the coup Yeltsin overthrew. The cell structure buried itself still deeper, and waited. Yeltsin could have destroyed the structure by unmasking all Russia’s operatives and all its illegals in the West. But he was afraid to do that, and who can blame him? Yeltsin, however, the one hope for democracy, did gain the upper hand for a while, and the Plan was postponed.

‘So their organisation became even tighter. And then slowly, as Yeltsin weakened, these disparate cells began to join together, firstly through the KGB’s reconquest of the Ministry of Defence and then, as Putin’s power grew at the end of the nineties, through other ministries. Shebarshin and Drozdov helped the movement gather strength and to coordinate itself. Then Leonov promoted Sergei Ivanov to Minister of Defence. Once Ivanov became a minister and Putin became head of the KGB, the wagon began to roll at last. As you know, they called themselves- call themselves–“The Patriots”.