Spy Hook (9 page)

'Not so often. Nowadays I can sometimes arrange a few of the preliminaries on the phone.'

'Is it getting better?'

'Not better; different. They are better at covering up than they used to be; better too at understanding what upsets the Western press.' It was a harsh verdict coming from Werner, who tried always to be objective in such off-the-cuff remarks about the East.

'How is Normannenstrasse these days?'

'Very happy,' said Werner.

'Tell me more.'

'The East Germans are number one on Moscow 's hit parade. Prague is no longer the centre of Russian penetration of the West and our friends in Normannenstrasse are rubbing their hands in glee.'

'I heard the Stasi was getting a big shake-up over there.'

'One by one the old gang are being got rid of. The same with the administration. It's a smaller and better organization these days.'

'Okay.'

'Of course the KGB monitors it from day to day. If things are not going well, Moscow makes its displeasure known.'

'Ever hear anything about that fellow Erich Stinnes?'

'He's the Moscow liaison. He got a big promotion.'

'Stinnes?'

'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 ^hat "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 establishments. 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've 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 has,' 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 microwave oven,' said Gloria suddenly and spontaneously.

'Is that what you want? A microwave 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
café
, 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 me 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 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 Provencal climate, two stories with shuttered windows, vines climbing across the facade, 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.

On the small secluded front terrace there was a selection of garden furniture: some fancy metal chairs arranged around a large glass-topped table and a couple of recliners. But despite the sunshine, it was not really a day for sitting outside. The wind was unrelenting, and here on the hill even the tall conifers whipped with each gust of it. Gloria turned up her collar as we stood waiting for someone to respond to the jangling bell.

The woman who answered the door was about forty years old. She was attractive looking in that honest way that country people sometimes are, a strong big-boned woman with quick intelligent eyes and greying hair that she'd done nothing to darken. 'Frau Winter?' I said.

'My name is Winter,' she said. 'But I am Ingrid.' She opened the door to us and, as if needing something to say, added, 'It is confusing that I have the same initial as my mother.' Having noted our cheap rented car, she gave all her attention to Gloria and was no doubt trying to guess our relationship. 'You want Mama. Are you Mr Samson?' Her English was excellent, with an edge of accent that was more German than French. Her dress was a green, floral-patterned Liberty fabric cut to an old-fashioned design with lacy white high collar and cuffs. It was hard to know whether she was poor and out of style, or whether she was following the trendy ideas that are de rigueur at smart dinner parties in big towns.

'That's right,' I said. I'd written to say that I was an old friend of Lisl, a writer, researching for a book that was to be set in Berlin before the war. Since I would be in the neighbourhood, I wondered if she would allow me to visit her and perhaps share some of her memories. There had been no reply to the letter. Perhaps they were hoping that I wouldn't show up.

'Let me take your coats. It's so cold today. Usually at this time of year we are lunching outside.' Her nails were short and cared for but her hands were reddened as if with housework. There was an expensive-looking wristwatch and some gold rings and a bracelet but no wedding ring.

I murmured some banalities about the winters getting colder each year, while she got a better look at us. So there was a daughter. She didn't look anything like Lisl, but I remembered seeing an old photo of Lisl's mother in a large hat and a long dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves: she was a big woman too. 'How is your mother?' I asked while Gloria took the opportunity to look at herself in the hall mirror and tease her hair out with her fingertips.

'She goes up and down, Mr Samson. Today is one of her better days. But I must ask you not to stay too long. She gets tired.'

'Of course.'

We went into the large drawing room. Several big radiators kept the room warm despite large windows that provided a view of the front lawn. The floor was of the red tile that is common in this region; here and there some patterned carpets were arranged. On the wall there was one big painting that dominated the room. It was a typical eighteenth-century battle scene; handsome officers in bright uniforms sat on prancing chargers and waved swords, while far away serried ranks of stunted anonymous figures were killing each other in the smoke. Two white sofas and a couple of matching armchairs were arranged at one end of the room and an old woman in a plain black dress sat in the ugly sort of high chair from which people with stiff joints find it possible to get up.

'How do you do, Mr Samson?' she said as her daughter went through the formalities with us, and studied Gloria carefully before nodding to her. Lisl's sister was not at all like Lisl. She was a slight, shrivelled figure, with skin like speckled yellow parchment and thinning white hair that looked as if it might have been specially washed and set for this visit. I looked at her with interest: she was even older than Lisl, goodness knows how old that would make her. But this was a woman who had come to terms with ageing. She hadn't dyed her hair or painted her face or stuck on to her eyelids the false lashes that Lisl liked to wear if visitors came. But despite all the differences, there was no mistaking the facial resemblance to her sister. She had the same determined jaw and the large eyes and the mouth that could go so easily from smile to snarl.

'So you are a friend of my sister?' Her words were English, her pronunciation stridently American, but her sentences were formed in a mind that thought in German. I moved a little closer to her so she did not have to raise her voice.

'I've known her a long time,' I said. 'I saw her only a couple of weeks ago.'

'She is well?' She looked up at the daughter and said, 'Are you bringing tea?' The younger woman gave a filial smile and went out of the room.

I hesitated about the right way to describe Lisl's health. I didn't want to frighten her. 'She might have had a slight stroke,' I said tentatively. 'Very slight. Even the hospital doctors are not sure.'

'And this is why you have come?' I noticed her eyes now. They were like the eyes of a cat; green and deep and luminous. Eyes of a sort I'd never seen before.

This old woman certainly didn't beat about the bush. 'No,' I said.

'But it means she'll have to give up the hotel. Her doctor insists it's too much for her.'

'Of course it is. Everyone is telling her that at some time or other.'

'It was your father's house?' I said.

'Sure. It has many wonderful memories for me.'

'It's a magnificent old place,' I said. 'I wish I could have seen it in your father's time. But the entrance steps make it difficult for Lisl. She needs to live somewhere where everything is on the ground floor.'

'So. And who is caring for her?'

'Have you heard of Werner Volkmann?'

'The Jew?'

'The boy she brought up.'

'That Jew family she hid away on the top floor. Yes, my sister was completely crazy. I was living in Berlin until 1945. Even me she never told! Can you believe that from her own sister she'd keep such a thing secret? I visited her there, it was partly my house.'

'It's astonishing,' I said dutifully.

'So the Jewish kid she raised is looking after her.' She nodded.

'He's not a kid any more,' I said.

'I guess not. So what's he getting out of it?'

'Nothing,' I said. 'He feels he owes it to Lisl.'

'He figures he's going to inherit the house. Is that it?' She gave a malicious little chuckle and looked at Gloria. Gloria was sitting on a carved wooden chair: she shifted uncomfortably.

'Not as far as I know,' I said defensively. So bang goes the whole purpose of coming all the way here. Did this vituperative old woman deliberately manoeuvre me into that denial? I couldn't decide. I was still thinking about it when the daughter arrived with tea and that sort of open apple tart in which the thin slices of fruit are carefully arranged in fanlike patterns.

'Ingrid made that,' said the old woman when she saw the way I was looking at it.

'It looks wonderful,' I said, without adding that after the 'light meal' on the plane almost anything would look wonderful. Gloria made appreciative noises too and the daughter cut us big slices.