Spy hook: a novel (10 page)

“The KGB is riding high: no financial cutbacks for them. And the Americans are still running their networks from their embassies, and all US embassies are bugged from roof to cellar. They never learn.”

“Is my wife involved in this reorganization?” I asked. “Isn’t that who we’re talking about?” said Werner. “She helped you with that “Structure Report” didn’t she?”

I didn’t reply. For ages now many had been saying that our networks should be organized quite separately from the embassies and other diplomatic organization. I’d spent a long time on a report about it, on the bottom of which Dicky Cruyer gladly signed his name. A lot of people, me included, thought that it would mean another big promotion for Dicky. It was the best work of that kind I’d ever done and I was proud of it. Some said that it must inevitably lead to a reorganization. But we reckoned without the Foreign Office. Even getting the D-G to submit the report was difficult. When the mandarins at the Foreign Office read it they stamped on it with such force that the whole building trembled. The Secret Intelligence Service was going to remain a part of the Foreign Office, its submissions rated no more important than those from a medium-sized embassy in Africa. Our offices would remain inside embassies, and if that meant that everyone knew where to find us, too bad chaps! It was a depressing thought. And Fiona knew the whole story.

We sat in silence, watching the street where traffic raced past and some people waiting to cross the road were hunched against the bitter-cold wind. “There is the matter of inheritance,” I said finally. I suppose we’d both been thinking of Lisl all the time. “The hotel?” said Werner.

“You might work yourself to death and then find she’s left the place to a dog’s home.”

“Dog’s home?” said Werner puzzled. It was of course an entirely English concept: old German ladies were unlikely to bequeath their entire estates for the welfare of unwanted canines.

“To some charity,” I explained.

“I’m not doing it to get the house,” said Werner. “No need to get irritable,” I said. “But it’s something you should settle before you start.”

“Don’t be stupid, Bernie. How can I sit down with Lisl and tell her to write her Will in my favour?” I didn’t try to answer through the sudden bellow of discordant sound that came from the jukebox. But after a few -bars to test it the mechanic switched it off and started to replace the coloured panels. “She has no other relatives, does she?”

“Yes she had,” said Werner. “There was a sister who died in the war and another - Inge Winter - even older than Lisl. She used to live in France. Childless and probably dead by now. Lisl said I met her once when she came to Berlin but I don’t remember it. She has some sort of claim to the house. Lisl once told me that her father left it to both daughters but only Lisl wanted to live in it. But it was half Inge Winter’s. And apart from the sister, there could be relatives of Lisl’s late husband Erich. I must talk to her again.”

“If Lisl said half the house belonged to her sister, the sister might be a signatory for the bank loan.”

“I know,” said Werner rubbing his moustache. “I was wondering if that’s why the sister came to Berlin.” “You’d better ask the bank,” I said.

“The bank won’t reveal anything to me without Lisl’s permission.” He rubbed his moustache again. “It itches,” he explained.

“It will have to be sorted out,” I said. “I’ll talk to her.” “No you won’t,” said Werner immediately. “It would spoil everything. It’s got to look as though I want to go and run the place. It’s got to seem as though she’s doing me the favour. Surely you see that?”

It was a long time before I nodded. But Werner was right. He must have spent a lot of sleepless nights working it all out. “Shall I find out if the sister is still alive?” I offered to do it more because I wanted to appease my conscience than because I thought it would lead anywhere, or be of any practical use. Perhaps Werner understood what my motives were. He said, “That would be really useful, Bernie. If you could find out about the sister, that would be the most important problem solved. I’ve got the last address she used in France. I got it out of that big green address book Lisl keeps in the office. I don’t know when it dates back to.” He looked across to the bar counter where Willi Leuschner had been operating the chrome espresso machine, and said, “Willi’s coming with the bread pudding.” “And about time.”

“He’ll want to sit down and chat,” Werner warned. “Don’t mention anything about the hotel for the time being. I’ll phone and give you the sister’s address.”

“Take a day or so to think it all over,” I suggested. Willi was coming this way now, carrying the desserts and the coffees and some Kipferl - sweet crescent-shaped biscuits - that always marked the end of any of Werner’s diets. “It’s a big step.” “I’ve thought it over,” said Werner firmly and with just a trace of sadness. “It’s what I’ve got to do.”

France, I thought. Why do I have to say such silly things? How the hell am I going to get time off and go to France to trace a sister who is undoubtedly long since dead and gone? And anyway wasn’t one Lisl in my life enough?

“We could have bought a micro-wave oven,” said Gloria suddenly and spontaneously.

“Is that what you want? A micro-wave oven?” “With the money this damned flight is costing us,” she explained bitterly.

“Oh,’ I said.’ Yes.’ She was making a list in her head. She did this sometimes. And the longer the list got the more bitter hatred she had for the air line and its management. Fortunately for the air line’s management none of them were sitting in the seat next to Gloria on the flight to Nice. I was sitting there. “It’s a rip-off,” she said.

“Everyone knows it’s a rip-off,” I said. “So drink the nice warm cafe, unwrap your processed fromage and enjoy the ambiance.”

The Plexiglass windows were scratched so that even the dense grey cloud looked cross-hatched. Gloria did not respond, nor eat the items set before her on the tiny plastic tray. She got nail varnish from the big handbag she always carried, and began doing something with her fingernails. This was always a dire portent.

I suppose I should have told her, right from the beginning, that our journey was made to fulfil a promise I’d made about finding Lisl Hennig’s sister. I should have realized that Gloria would be angry when the truth was revealed, and that I’d have to tell her sooner rather than later.

Looking back on it, I don’t know why I chose the airport departure lounge to tell Gloria the real reason for the trip. She was unhappy to hear that this was not actually the “mad lovers” weekend” that I’d let her think of it as. She called me names, and did it so loudly that some people on the next seat took their children out of earshot.

It was at times like that I tried to analyse the essence of my relationship with Gloria. My contemporaries - married men in their forties - were not reluctant to give me their own interpretations of my romance with this beautiful twenty-two year-old. Sometimes these took the form of serious “talks”, sometimes anecdotes about mythical friends, and sometimes they were just lewd jokes. Oddly enough it was the envious comments that offended me. I wished they would try- to understand that such relationships are complex and this love affair was more complex than most.

Sitting on the plane, with no work to do and nothing to read except the “flight magazine”, I thought about it. I tried to compare this relationship with Gloria to the one I’d had with Fiona, my wife whose fortieth birthday would be coming up soon. She’d always said she dreaded her fortieth birthday. This “dread” had begun as a-sort of joke, and my response was to promise that we’d celebrate it in style. But now she’d be celebrating it in East Berlin with Russian champagne no doubt, and perhaps some caviar too. Fiona loved caviar.

Would I have got as far as London Heathrow with Fiona and still been trying to pretend that we were embarking on some madcap romantic escapade? No. But the fact of the matter was that such a romantic escapade would have had a very, very limited appeal to my wife Fiona. Wait a moment! Was that true? Surely the real reason I wouldn’t have told her that this was a “surprise getaway” was that my wife would not have believed for one instant that a sudden invitation to fly to Nice would be a romantic escapade. My wife Fiona knew all too well; that was the truth of it.

But at Nice the sun was shining, and it did not take very much to restore Gloria to her usual light-hearted self. In fact, it took no more than my renting a car for our trip to the last known address of Inge Winter. At work Gloria had seen me dictating and conversing in German, and - sometimes my imperfect Russian was used too. So she was ill-prepared for my halting French.

It went wrong right from the start. The beautifully coiffured young French woman at the car rental desk was understandably irritated when I tried to interpose news about my need for a car into a private conversation she was having with her female colleague. She didn’t hide her irritation. She spoke rapidly and with a strong Provencal accent that I couldn’t follow. When finally I appealed to Gloria for help in translating this girl’s rapid instructions about finding the vehicle, Gloria’s jubilation knew no bounds. No compree!’she said and laughed and clapped her hands with joy.

Despite Gloria’s uncooperative attitude we found the car, a small white Renault hatchback that must have been sitting in the rental car pound for many winter days, for it did not start easily.

But once away, and on to the Autoroute heading west, all was well. Gloria was laughing and I was finally persuaded that it had all been very amusing.

It was only a few minutes along the Autoroute before the Antibes exit. On this occasion, determined not to provide more laughs for Gloria I had a handful of small change ready to pay the Autoroute charge. Now, with Gloria bent low over a map, we began to thread our way through the back roads towards Grasse.

Once off the Autoroute you find another France. Here in this hilly backwater there is little sign of the ostentatious wealth that marks the coastline of the Riviera. Rolls-Royces, Cadillacs and Ferraris are here replaced by brightly painted little vans and antique Ladas that bump over the large pot-holes and splash through the ochre-coloured pools that are the legacy of steady winter rain. Here is a landscape where nothing is ever completed. Partially built houses - their innards skeletal grey blocks” fresh cement and ganglia of wiring - stand alongside half-demolished old farm buildings. Ladders, broken bidets and abandoned bath tubs mark the terraces of olive trees. Heaps of sand - eroded by the rain storms - are piled alongside bricks, sheets of galvanized metal and half-completed scaffolding . The fruit of urban squalor litters the fields where the most profitable cash crop is the maison secondaire. But “Le Mas des Vignes Blanches” was not such a place.

Here, on the south-facing brow of a hill, there was a Prussian interlude in the Gallic landscape. The house had once been a place from which some lucky landowner surveyed his vineyards. Now the hillsides were disfigured with a pox of development, an infection inevitably rendered more virulent by the thin crescent of Mediterranean which shone pale blue beyond the next hill.

The house was surrounded with a box hedge but the white wooden gates were open, and I drove up the well-kept gravel path. The main building must have been well over a hundred years old. It wasn’t the grim rectangular shape that northern landowners favoured. This was a house built for the Provengal climate, two stories with shuttered windows, vines climbing across the faqade, some mature palm trees - fronds thrashing in the wind - and a gigantic cactus, pale green and still, like a huge prehensile sea creature waiting to attack.

At the back of the house I could see a cobbled courtyard, swept and scrubbed to a cleanliness that is unusual hereabouts. From the coachhouse jutted the rear ends of a big Mercedes and a pale blue BMW. Behind that there was a large garden with neatly pruned fruit trees espaliered on the walls. I noticed the lawns in particular. In this part of the world - where fierce sunshine parches the land - a well-tended lawn is the sign of eccentric foreign tastes, of a passionate concern for gardens, or wealth.