Spy Line (27 page)

‘Good to see you, Bernie,’ he said and gave me a sincere
handshake and fixed me with his eyes, in that way that Americans do when they are trying to recall your name. ‘I’m sitting in.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Later this morning. You, me and Bret: okay?’

‘Good,’ I said, uncertain of what was expected of me. I thought he must have come to talk with Fiona but she was taking breakfast in bed having been given a morning of ‘free activity’.

Bret Rensselaer went into secret session with Jim Prettyman and I was summoned to join them at ten o’clock. The remains of their breakfast were still distributed around the room. Bret couldn’t think without striding round the room so there were plates of half-eaten corn muffins, cups and unfinished glasses of orange juice on every side. I poured myself coffee from the vacuum jug and sat down. I reached for the cream jug but when I poured from it only a drip or two remained.

Bret Rensselaer said, ‘Jim would like to hear your version of what happened.’

I looked at Bret and he added, ‘On the Autobahn.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘On the Autobahn.’

‘Who was this man on the motor cycle?’ said Prettyman.

‘No one seems to know,’ I said.

‘I told Jim you had theories,’ said Bret. ‘And I told him you wouldn’t open up.’

Jim said, ‘Off the record, Bernie.’

‘It was a dark night, Jim,’ I said.

He leaned forward and switched off the tape recorder and said, ‘Off the record.’

‘Oh, that kind of off the record,’ I said. I drank some coffee. It was cold. ‘I think your vacuum flask is on the blink,’ I said. ‘Yes, well…He had an American accent.’

‘They’ve all got American accents,’ said Bret. ‘It’s the teaching machines.’

‘So I hear,’ I said.

‘Did you recognize the voice?’ said Prettyman.

‘Are you putting me on?’ I asked. ‘Do we have to go through with this nonsense?’

‘Who was it?’

‘Jesus, Jim! You know who it was. It was a thug named Thurkettle, a renegade American. A hit man the Department brought in to make sure Tessa Kosinski was blown away.’

‘Why you dumb…’ started Bret, but Prettyman waved a hand that silenced him.

‘Tell me more,’ said Prettyman. ‘Why would the Department want to kill Fiona’s sister?’ It was casually put, but in his voice there was that specially kindly tone with which psychiatrists coax maniacs.

‘The car burned,’ I said. ‘Tessa Kosinski’s remains – no more than a few bone fragments and ashes – will be identified as her sister Fiona. Fiona is hidden here: Moscow won’t know that she is alive and well and spilling everything to you guys.’

‘You’re forgetting the teeth,’ said Bret. ‘They are sure to find some jawbone. Fiona had dentistry – a crown and a filling – while she was over there in East Berlin.’ If anything was needed to convince me that my theory was right, it was Bret’s remarkable knowledge of Fiona’s dental chart.

Prettyman looked at Bret and then at me and then sneaked a quick look at his wristwatch.

‘I’m forgetting nothing,’ I said. ‘Let’s suppose a skull, suffici ently like Fiona’s, was fitted with dental work that exactly matched hers. That would have been put into the car.’

‘Two women’s skulls in the car?’

‘That’s why you need a madman like Thurkettle. Hacking a head from a body is covered by his all-inclusive fee.’

‘Thurkettle is the one who wasted the CIA man in Salzburg,’ said Prettyman, as if remembering the name from something in the dim and distant past. Then he said, ‘It would need a lot of planning…a lot of cooperation. Who would put him in position and so on?’

‘There was drug trafficking: officials on both sides. A
scapegoat was needed. All concerned were desperate to close the file. That spot, with the construction work on the highway, would provide a chance to bury any inconvenient evidence.’

‘Where did you get all this?’ said Prettyman.

I said, ‘It’s the only feasible explanation.’

‘You’ll have to do better than that, Bernie,’ said Prettyman in a voice that seemed truly friendly. ‘I’ll listen to anything you have to say. I learned what I know from you: all of it. But you’ll have to do a rewrite for that cockeyed script.’

‘So what in hell was Tessa doing there?’

It was Bret’s turn to speak. ‘Isn’t that a question for you to answer, Bernard? You took her there with you. Remember?’

‘Will you go and see Gloria?’ I asked Prettyman on a sudden and desperate impulse. ‘Tell the children I’m well and that I love them?’

Bret said nothing.

Prettyman calmly said, ‘There’s not much chance of me getting a trip to London anytime in the foreseeable future, Bernie.’

I drank my tepid black coffee and didn’t answer.

‘I’ll be back,’ Prettyman told me like a dutiful son visiting a difficult octogenarian. ‘But I have to be at Camarillo Municipal Airport by two. Next month maybe…Good to see you, Bernie. Really good! I mean that sincerely.’

‘Get stuffed!’ I said.

Prettyman looked at Bret. Bret responded with a tiny shrug as he was showing Prettyman out. I remained where I was but I could hear them in the next room. As they parted I heard Prettyman say, ‘What a tragedy. Both of them.’

I heard Bret reply, ‘It’s not too late. Let’s see what happens.’

It was a week afterwards that I learned that Camarillo Municipal Airport used to be a fully equipped US Air Force operational base and that the runways are still in good order. So when Prettyman went there he hopped back into the
supersonic military jet that had brought him, and he was in Washington for happy hour. I suppose it was something that Fiona had said to Bret and Washington had to be told double quick.

We’d been at the house for over a month before Fiona began to open up to me. Even then what she said was fairly banal stuff about her day-to-day work in Berlin, but it was a start. Then each evening it became routine for us to talk for half an hour or so. Sometimes we’d talk over a drink in our sitting room, and sometimes we’d take a walk around the perimeter fence. Then one evening Fiona almost trod upon a big grey rattlesnake, and after that we kept to the paths and the terrace. It was a big property, and high enough so that on a pitch-black night like this the California coastline shone like a diamond necklace laid out all the way to Los Angeles.

‘What really happened?’ she said one night as we were standing there looking at the view and listening to the ocean.

‘They got you out,’ I said. ‘That’s what happened.’

‘What was Tessa doing there? That’s what I can’t understand. What was Tessa doing there, Bernard?’

‘I told you,’ I said. ‘She was having an affair with Dicky. She thought it would be fun, I suppose.’

‘I loved you so much when I married you, Bernard. I loved you because you were the only man I’d ever met who had a real respect for the truth. You never lied to me, Bernard. I wanted my children to be like you.’

I was holding her hand, staring into the darkness and trying to recognize the distant coastline.

She said, ‘You wouldn’t be working against me, would you, Bernard? You wouldn’t do that?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They haven’t even told George that Tessa is dead.’

‘Why not?’

‘Poor George. He’d never do harm to anyone.’

‘Why haven’t they told him?’

She turned to look at me. ‘He’s been sworn to secrecy and told that Tessa went to Berlin with you and that you’ve run away together…run away somewhere where no one can find you.’

‘So that’s the story,’ I said. It fitted so neatly: the hotel room that Dicky had shared with Tessa was registered in my name.

‘They want Moscow to believe that Tessa is alive. The story is that it was me who was killed at the Brandenburg exit.’

‘The burning car. Yes, that would be it.’

‘Could they get away with such a deception, Bernard?’

‘There was trade in heroin. Could Erich Stinnes have been involved?’

‘Erich? No!’

‘A lot of people think he was,’ I persisted. ‘And he was working for the Department. Do you see how he could have been set up?’

‘Stop worrying about Erich.’

‘Who says I’m worrying about him?’

‘You identify with him…the way he grew up in Berlin with a father in the army…you identify with him.’

I didn’t deny it: she knew. I suppose I’d been shouting in my sleep. I’d had a couple of nightmares. ‘I killed him.’

‘It’s all over, darling. Stop torturing yourself. Why was Tessa there? That’s what I want to find out.’

‘Tessa was an addict, you know.’

‘That’s what Bret said.’

‘That might have been the reason she went to Berlin. There was a man named Thurkettle who probably supplied her. I think he might have cut off her supply to make her follow him there. There were a lot of people involved. A scapegoat was needed. You can bet the official explanation is that you were bringing it in.’

‘That I was bringing it? Heroin? Whose explanation? East or West?’

‘Everyone. It was a chance to close the file,’ I said.

‘How far would the Department go with that?’

‘This is an unprecedented situation. We can’t be guided by past examples.’

‘Uncle Silas knew what I was really doing.’

‘Yes, I know, I talked to him. Uncle Silas said they needed six months with Moscow still believing you remained loyal. They’ll be using all the material that they were frightened of using before in case you were compromised.’

‘You’re saying someone deliberately planned it so that Tessa would die?’

‘I don’t know.’ My answer came too pat and she thought I was not telling her all I knew. ‘I really don’t know, Fi.’

She put her arm round me. ‘I have no one to trust any more. Sometimes that frightens me.’

‘I understand.’

‘Was it like that for you?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Who would plan such a terrible thing?’

‘Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong,’ I said.

‘Bret?’

‘I wouldn’t start going through the possibilities. Probably it was a mixture of planning and opportunity. Maybe it’s nothing like that. As I say: maybe I’ve got it all wrong.’

‘I suppose Tessa did look like me. Daddy always said so.’

‘I have no evidence one way or the other,’ I said. ‘The most important thing is to give Bret the sort of answers he wants. We have to get out of here. The children need us.’

‘I abandoned them,’ said Fiona. ‘They must hate me.’

‘Of course they don’t.’

‘Why wasn’t it me? Tessa so loved life, and you and the children can manage without me. Why wasn’t it me?’

‘You’ve got to start again, Fi,’ I said.

‘I didn’t even recognize her,’ said Fiona. ‘I left her there in the mud.’

I could hear the ocean but I couldn’t see anything there
but darkness. I said, ‘Why don’t we see if Bret would let the children come here for the final three or four weeks?’

‘Bret says we’ll be here for a long time,’ she said casually, as if she didn’t care.

I shivered. I was right. We were imprisoned here. Maybe for years. Maybe indefinitely. I knew of defectors, needing protection, who were tucked away out of sight for a decade or more. ‘Tell Bret you insist upon seeing the children,’ I suggested.

She didn’t reply immediately, and when she did her voice was listless. ‘I love the children and I desperately want to see them. But not here.’

‘Whatever you say, Fi.’

‘I need time, Bernard. I’ll be that lucky joyful girl you married, and the good times will come round again. We’ll live happily ever after. But I need time.’

From the Pacific Ocean there came that smell of salt and putrefaction that is called fresh air. The sky was very dark that night: no stars, no glimmer of moonlight. Even the lights along the waterfront were being extinguished.

Berlin Game, Mexico Set
and
London Match
together cover the period from spring 1983 until spring 1984.

Winter
covers 1900 until 1945.

Spy Hook
picks up the Bernard Samson story at the beginning of 1987 and
Spy Line
continues it into the summer of that same year.

Spy Sinker
starts in September 1977 and ends in summer 1987.
Faith
picks up the story and continues it. The stories can be read in any order and each one is complete in itself.