Spy Hook (20 page)

'She said you'd want to know. She's heard of some money being moved. They are running scared, she says. They must realize that someone is on to them. All that sort of thing. She's bonkers.'

'Cindy has been working hard.'

Gloria wasn't too keen to endorse this praise for Cindy. 'She doesn't know what she's talking about,' said Gloria. 'A lot of hot money is being pulled out of German banks and companies right now. It's because the Bonn government is bringing in new laws. The EEC have instructed them to bring German corporate balance sheets into line with those of other countries. Until now German private banks and private corporations haven't had to reveal their profits. By next year it won't be so easy to bury money in a bank or corporation. Central Funding is sure to be preparing for that change.'

'I thought the German banks reported everything to the German tax authorities. I thought Germany didn't have hot money.'

Gloria shook her head. 'They only have to report their customers' money darling. Their own money, and all the rich pickings they make, are kept secret. You know what all those bloody High Street banks are like: well, German banks are ten times worse.'

'How do you know all this?'

'My economics classes. The West German financial markets is my special subject.'

'Did you tell Cindy this?'

'She thinks I'm your dumb blonde. She didn't come round to talk to me.' Gloria's grilled liver arrived. It looked good: I stole a piece of saute potato and let her eat her lunch in peace.

'I suppose eventually I'll have to talk to Cindy. I owe it to Jim.'

'She says phone her at home and she'll meet you at the weekend.' Gloria abandoned her liver and put her knife and fork down. It was a different tone of voice now: serious and concerned. 'I really do think she's unbalanced, Bernard. She parked her car miles away, in front of Inkerman Villas. I told her it was private parking there, and she might get towed away, but she wouldn't listen. She kept looking out of the window as though someone might have followed her. When I asked her what was the matter, she said she was just admiring the view. She has a mad sort of look in her eyes. She's scary.'

'I'll have to phone her,' I said while searching my mind for excuses not to. 'But I wish she'd leave me out of it. I've already ruffled Bret's feathers, and I ask myself what for? I've got enough work, and enough enemies, without looking for more.'

'You said you wanted to get to the bottom of it,' said Gloria.

'But I just can't spare any more time. It's just another one of the Department's little secrets, and if they are so determined that it remains a mystery; then let it stay a mystery. Everything I encounter mystifies me, I don't need any more.'

'Do I mystify you, my poor darling?' She reached out and stroked my hand.

'You especially,' I said.

'Do you think Alfonso would give me a bag so I can take the rest of my liver home for Muffin?' she said without expecting a reply, and added, 'Your friend Cindy won't let it go so easily.'

'She has more spare time than I do, and she likes these "causes". Cindy's always been a bit like that: animal welfare, women priests, diesel emission is killing the trees. She has to have a cause.'

'I think she's abnormal,' said Gloria in that flat casual voice that suggested that she didn't care one way or the other. She had switched off now. Gloria could do that. It was a knack I would dearly like to acquire. Suddenly she raised an arm and shouted, 'Can I have some coffee, Alfonso?'

'Make that two,' I called to him but he gave no sign of having heard me.

I'm sorry,' she said, 'I forgot that you don't like me to order things when I'm with you.'

'Are you wrapping that liver up in your handkerchief. Ugh!'

'Muffin loves liver.' She put the little parcel in her handbag as the coffee arrived.

'I shouldn't be drinking coffee,' I said. 'I need to go to bed.'

'The children won't be home until supper. Maybe I will go to bed too,' she said artlessly.

'Race you home!'

There was plenty of work waiting for me in the office. At the top of the pile, flagged and beribboned, was a Ministry of Defence request for details of Semtex, a Czechoslovak explosive exported through the DDR and now being used in home made 'bean can grenades' and causing casualties in Northern Ireland. Under it there were some confidential questions about the Leipzig Trade Fair and – with only a number one priority – some supplements from the Minister that must be ready for parliamentary question time.

It was one of the natural laws of departmental life that the sort of files that Dicky chose to keep on his desk, while he worried about his career and vacillated about expedient courses of action, were always the ones that ultimately required the most urgent response from me when he finally dumped them on my desk. My work was not made easier by the cryptic thoughts and instructions that Dicky shared with me as each flat file was dropped into my tray.

'Just keep it warm until we hear who's going to be on the committee,' Dicky would say. Or, 'Tell the old bastard to get stuffed but keep him sweet'; 'This might work out if they find the right people but make sure it doesn't bounce back our way'; and his standard reaction: 'Find out what they really expect and maybe we'll be able to meet them halfway'. These were the sort of arcane instructions I was trying to implement on Tuesday while Dicky was gone to wherever he went when there was work in the offing. And Dicky wanted everything done by the end of the day.

By the time a debonair Frank Harrington looked into my little office and invited me to go for a quick lunch, I was glassy-eyed. 'You'll do yourself an injury if you try and work your way through this lot before going home,' said Frank, running the tip of an index finger across the cover of a fat file for which some unfortunate had analysed, in considerable detail, the various types of East European shops where only Western currency was accepted. Here were tables and estimates, comments and balance sheets, from Pewex in Poland, Tuwex in Czechoslovakia, Korekom in Bulgaria, compared point by point with Intershops in East Germany.

Without picking it up, Frank flicked open the file carefully so as not to get his hands dirty. 'Would you believe I saw this in the tray on the old man's desk on the day I got the Berlin job?'

'Of course I would,' I said.

'It's got fatter over the years, of course,' said Frank, who probably wanted to be congratulated on his phenomenal memory. He hooked his tightly rolled umbrella on the desk edge and then consulted his gold pocket watch as if to confirm that it was lunch time. 'Heave all this aside, Bernard. Let me buy you a pint of Guinness and a pork pie.' The illusion that Englishmen wanted a pub lunch every day was something that many expatriates cherished, so I smiled. Frank was looking very trim. He had been upstairs talking to the Deputy and was dressed in a three-piece grey worsted with gold watch-chain, wide-striped Jermyn Street shirt and a new Eton tie, of. which Frank seemed to have an inexhaustible supply.

My tie was plain and polyester, and my watch Japanese and plastic. I was weary and my ears were ringing with the sound of Dicky's voice. I'd been listening to the dictating machine, taking notes from a long rambling disquisition that Dicky had passed to me to 'get into shape'. It was going to be a long job. Dicky was not good at getting his arguments into proper order, and those passages where he was consistent and logical were riddled with inaccurate 'facts'. I pushed the work aside and said, 'What about next week, Frank? I'm in Berlin on Wednesday.'

Frank didn't leave. 'A very quick lunch, Bernard.'

I looked up to see him standing in the doorway with a forced smile on his face. It wasn't until then I realized how much such little things meant to him.

I knew of course that Frank had always looked upon me as a surrogate son. Several people had remarked on it, usually at times when I was being especially rude or making Frank's life difficult. Even Frank himself had more than once referred to some undefined responsibility he'd owed to my father. But Frank took it too seriously. More than once he'd risked his career to help me, and to tell the truth that made me uncomfortably indebted to him. Father-son relationships seldom run smoothly, and true to my role I'd taken considerably more from him than I ever gave, and I confess I resented being obliged to anyone, even Frank.

'You're right, Frank. To hell with it!' I took the tape cassette from the machine and locked it in my desk drawer. Maybe I should have sent it to the KGB to promote more confusion amongst the opposition. Frank reached for my coat.

Frank always had a car and driver during his visits to London. It was one of the desirable perks of his job in Berlin. We went off to a 'small City wine bar'; but because this was Frank Harrington's idea, the bar was not in the City. It was south of the Thames in that borough of London which is enigmatically called the 'the Borough'. In a street of rundown Victorian houses off the Old Kent Road its entrance was a doorway marked only by a small polished brass plate of the sort that marks the offices of lawyers and dentists. A long underground corridor eventually opened upon a gloomy cellar with heavy pillars and low vaulting. The brickwork was painted a shiny bottle-green. Small blackboards were chalked with tempting vintage wines that were today available by the glass. A bar counter occupied most of one wall of the largest 'room' and in the adjoining areas spotlights picked out small tables where shrill businessmen drank their vintage clarets and ports, nibbled at their expensive cold snacks and tried to look like tycoons avoiding the TV crews while concluding multi-million dollar City deals.

'Like it?' said Frank proudly.

'Wonderful, Frank.'

'Charming little place, eh? And no chance of meeting any of our people here, that's what I like about it.' By 'our' people he meant important Whitehall bureaucrats. He was right.

An old man dressed in appropriate wine cellar style – white shirt, bow tie and long apron – showed us to places set ready at the counter. Frank was obviously known and welcomed there, and when I saw how much he spent on a bottle of Chateau Palmer 1966 I could understand why. But Frank's discursive survey of the wine list, and its extravagant outcome, was part of the paternal role he had to demonstrate.

With due ceremony the bottle was opened, the cork sniffed. Poured, swirled and tasted. Frank puckered his lips, bared his teeth and pronounced it 'drinkable'. We laughed.

It was another immutable aspect of Frank's character that, along with his superlative wine, he ate, without adverse comment, yellowing Stilton, a desiccated hunk of pork pie and squashy white bread.

I could see he had something to tell me, but I contributed my share of office small-talk and let him take his time. When he'd eaten his segment of pork pie – each mouthful spread with a large dollop of fierce English mustard – he poured a second glass of claret for both of us and said, 'That bloody Zena.' He said it quietly but with feeling. 'I could kill her.'

I looked at him with interest. In the past Frank had always indulged Zena. Infatuated was the only word for it. 'Is she all right?' I asked casually between pieces of pork pie. 'She was off to Frankfurt an der Oder, the last I heard of her. Werner was worried.'

He looked at me as if trying to decide how much I knew, and then said, 'She was running up and down on the Berlin-Warsaw express.'

'The "paradise train"? What for?' I asked but I'd already guessed the answer.

'Black market. You've been on that train: you know.'

Yes, I'd been on that train and I knew. Once over the Polish border it became an oriental bazaar. Black-market traders – and in the subtle nuances of East Bloc social life, brown – and grey-market traders too – moved from compartment to compartment buying and selling everything from Scotch whisky to Black & Decker power tools. I remember loud Polish voices and hands waving bundles of dollar bills and suitcases almost bursting with pop music records and cartons of Marlboro cigarettes. The 'paradise train' would provide plenty of opportunities to buy rare artefacts and manuscripts. 'What was Zena doing on the train?' I asked.

'They picked her up coming back… on the platform at Friedrichstrasse. It sounds as if they were tipped off.'

'Where is she now?'

'They let her go.'

'What did she have?'

'Old engravings. And an icon and a Bible. They confiscated everything and let her go.'

'She was lucky,' I said.

'She told them she'd happily take a receipt for only one item and they could divide the rest of it up between them.'

'I still say she was lucky. An offer like that to the wrong man and she'd end up with ten years for attempted bribery.'

Frank looked at me and said, 'She's a good judge of men, Bernard.'

There was no answer to that. I sipped the lovely Chateau Palmer and nodded. The wine was coming to life now, a wonderful combination of half-forgotten fragrances.

The anger that the memory of Zena had regenerated now subsided again. 'Silly little cow,' he said, with a measure of affection in his voice. He smiled. 'What about a pudding, Bernard? I believe they do a splendid apple crumble here.'

'No thanks, Frank. Just coffee.'

'Werner came to London. He went into the office on Friday and kicked up no end of fuss,' said Frank. 'I was in Berlin, of course. By the time the Deputy came through to me, I'd heard that Zena was safe at home. I was able to tell him that all was well. I came out of it smelling of roses.'

'I wasn't in London,' I said. 'I was in California.'

'I'll have a savoury: Angels on Horseback, they do it rather well here. Sure you won't have something?' When I shook my head he called to the waiter and ordered it. 'I must say, Sir Percy is doing a damned good job,' said Frank.

But I wasn't going to let him steer the conversation round to the Deputy's abilities or lack of them. 'Did you know that Bret is alive? I saw him in California.'

'Bret?' He looked at me full in the eye. 'Yes, the old man told me… a couple of days ago.'

'Were you surprised?'

'I was damned annoyed,' said Frank. 'The old man had actually heard me say that Bret was dead and had never contradicted me or confided the truth of the matter.'

'Why?'

'God knows. The old man can be a bit childish at times. He just laughed and said Bret deserved a bit of peace. And yet it was the old man who told me Bret was dead. It was a little supper party at the Kempi; there were other people present: outsiders. I couldn't pursue it. Perhaps I should have done.'

'But why say he was dead? What was it all about?'

'You saw him: I didn't. What did Bret tell you?'

'I didn't ask him why he wasn't dead,' I replied woodenly.

Frank preferred to see it as a harmless subterfuge. 'Bret was at death's door. What difference did it make? Perhaps it was better security to say he was dead.'

'But you don't know of any special reason?'

'No, I don't Bernard.' He drank some more wine, studied its colour and gave it great attention.

I said, 'Posh Harry button-holed me over there.' Frank raised an eyebrow. 'He wanted to tell me that, whatever Bret was doing, Washington like it.'

'Well, Posh Harry would know. He's landed a cushy job,' said Frank. 'They use him like an errand boy but his starting salary is more like a king's ransom.'

'Sounds just like my job,' I said, 'apart from the salary.'

'Why did Posh Harry button-hole you?'

'He said I was asking too many questions.'

'Mistaken identity. That doesn't sound at all like you,' said Frank with his laborious sense of humour. 'Questions about Bret?'

'Fiona was involved. Some kind of financial bore-hole. A lot of money. Prettyman was a signatory… probably a go-between for Central Funding.'

'You're not still going around saying Prettyman was murdered, are you? I looked at the homicide figures for Washington – it's horrific – and I know the Deputy arranged for the FBI to take a special look at the Prettyman killing. There's nothing to support the idea of it being anything but the casual sort of murder that muggers commit over there. A miserable business, but nothing there to justify any further investigation.'

'It seemed like a chance to find out more about Fiona.'

'I thought we'd found out all there was to find out about Fiona.'

'Her motives. Her accomplices and so on.'

'I'd imagine the Department followed up every lead, Bernard. For months afterwards they were sniffing around everyone who'd even heard of Fiona.'

'Even you?'

'No one is above suspicion in that sort of inquiry, Bernard. I would have thought you'd know that better than anyone. The D-G had the Minister breathing down his neck for week after week. I think that was what made the old man ill.'

'Is the D-G really ill?' I said. 'Or is it just a stunt so he can retire early or do something else?' Frank and the old man had been together during the war, they were close friends.

'Sir Henry's not around very much is he? They're probably letting him work out the contract for the sake of his pension. But I can't see him taking up the reins again.'

'Will Sir Percy take over?'

'No one knows at present. They say the PM is very keen to have someone from outside… putting one of the younger Law Lords into the driver's seat might ease the pressure on her to have a Parliamentary Committee sitting in judgment on everything we do.'

Frank's 'Angels on Horseback' arrived; a couple of cooked oysters wrapped in fried bacon and balanced on a triangle of warm toast. Frank liked savouries. At his dinner parties he stubbornly kept to the Victorian tradition of serving such salty, fiery tidbits after the dessert. 'Clears a chap's palate for the port,' he'd explained to me more than once. Now he ate it with a relish that he'd not shown for anything else except the claret, and said nothing until it was finished and the plate removed.

Then he wiped his lips with one of the huge linen napkins and said, 'You're miffed aren't you, Bernard?'

'Miffed?'

Frank grinned. 'You're put out. Don't pretend you're not.'

'Why would I be?' I insisted.