Spy Line (9 page)

Dicky’s face went bright red with anger, or with embarrass ment, or perhaps a combination of those emotions over which English gentlemen have been supposed to exercise complete control. No doubt my presence added to his discomfort. ‘Did Sir Percy tell you that?’ Dicky stammered.

‘A little spy told me,’ said Stowe abrasively. Then: ‘Yes,
what do you think Sir Percy and I talk about at the briefing, except what all you bloody Controllers go snivelling to him about?’

Dicky was standing now, and he gripped the back of the chair he’d been occupying, like a prisoner in the dock. Flustered he said, ‘I merely said, confirmed that is…I told Sir Percy no more than I told you…that…’

‘That Bernard could manage it? Yes, right. Well, why come in here pretending you hadn’t already gone above my head?’ The fly appeared, did a circuit and went into a holding pattern around Stowe’s cranium.

‘I assure you that using Bernard was not my idea,’ said Dicky indignantly. Stowe smiled grimly.

So that was it. This meeting had been called specifically to stage a Departmental brawl, and it was now evident that the clash was not really about who should attend an off-the-record meeting with a KGB delegation. This bare-knuckle contest was calculated to rebuff some rash attempt by Dicky to assail Stowe’s territory. It was my bad luck to be the blunt instrument that Stowe had chosen to beat upon Dicky’s head.

In the manner of the English, Dicky’s voice had grown quieter as he became angry. Now he weighed his words carefully as he went into an involved explanation. Dicky was so offended that it made me wonder if he was telling the truth. In that case it would mean that the Deputy had arranged my recall, and pretended that it was at Dicky’s request to conceal the fact from Stowe.

I was determined to get out of this quarrel. ‘May I get back to my desk?’ I asked. ‘I’m expecting an important phone call.’ Stowe waved a hand in the air in a gesture that might have signalled agreement to my leaving the room but which might have been rejecting something Dicky was saying. Or might have been a bid for the fly.

As I was leaving the room, Stowe’s words overlaid Dicky’s and Dicky said, ‘Look here, Gus, I give you my solemn
word that Bernard wasn’t mentioned…’ and then sat down again as if he was going to be there a long time.

With a sigh of relief I stepped out into the corridor. The fly came with me.

That evening I was very happy to get back to my little house in Balaklava Road. Until now I had not felt much affection for this cramped and inconvenient suburban house, but after my cold and lonely bed in Berlin it had become a paradise. My unexpected arrival the previous evening had been discounted. Tonight was to be my welcome home.

The children had painted a bright banner – Welcome Home Daddy – and draped it across the fireplace where a real fire was flickering. Even though half of me was a Berliner, the sight of a coal fire always made me appreciate the many subtle joys of coming home. My wonderful Gloria had prepared a truly miraculous meal, as good as anything any local restaurant could have provided. She’d chilled a bottle of Bollinger and I sat in our neat little front room with the children squatting on the carpet and demanding to hear about my adventures in Berlin. Gloria had told them only that I was away on duty. After a couple of glasses of champagne on an empty stomach, I invented an involved story about tracking down a gang of thieves, keeping the narrative sufficiently improbable to get a few laughs.

I was more and more surprised at the manner in which the children were maturing. Amongst their ideas and jokes – comparatively adult and sophisticated for the most part – the evidence of some childish pleasure would break in. Requests for a silly game or a treasure hunt or infantile song. How lucky I was to be with them while they grew up. What misplaced sense of patriotic duty persuaded Fiona to be elsewhere? And was her choice of priorities some bounden commitment that enslaved only the middle classes? I’d grown up amongst working-class boys from communities where nothing preceded family loyalty. Fiona had inflicted her moral
obligations upon me and the children. She had forced us to contribute to her sacrifice. Why should I not feel grievously wronged?

A timer pinged. Effortlessly Gloria led the way into the dining room where the table was set with our best china and glass. When the dinner came it was delicious. ‘Would champagne be all right with the whole meal?’ ‘Can a fish swim?’ Another bottle of Bollinger and a risotto made with porcini. After that there was baked lobster. Then a soft Brie with French bread. And, to finish, huge apples baked with honey and raisins. A big jug of rich egg custard came with it. It was a perfect end to a wonderful meal. Sally sorted out each and every raisin and arranged them around the edge of her plate but Sally always did that. Billy counted them, ‘Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief…’ to foretell that Sally would marry a beggarman. Sally said she’d always hated that rhyme and Gloria – optimist, feminist and mathematician – rejected it as inaccurate on the grounds that it gave a girl only one chance in four of a desirable partner.

The children were both in that no-man’s-land between childhood and adult life. Billy was dedicated to motorcars and beautiful handwriting. Sally was chosen to play Portia in
Julius Caesar
and gave us her rendition of her favourite scene. Her Teddy Bear played Brutus.

‘Within the bond of marriage, tell me, Brutus,

Is it excepted I should know no secrets

That appertain to you?’

Dismissing the marital prophecy we all declared it to be a memorable family occasion.

‘The children are old enough now to enjoy celebrating together as a family,’ said Gloria after they had been put to bed. She was standing looking into the dying embers of the open fire.

‘I’ll never forget this evening,’ I said. ‘Never.’

She turned. ‘I love you, Bernard,’ said Gloria as if she’d never said it before. ‘Now before I sit down. Do you want a drink or anything?’

‘And I love you, Gloria,’ I said. I’d resisted voicing my feelings for too long because I still felt a tinge of guilt about the difference in our ages but my time away from her had changed things. Now I was happy to tell her how I felt. ‘You are wonderful,’ I said, taking her hand and pulling her down to sit with me on the sofa. ‘You work miracles for all of us. I should be asking you what I can do for you.’

Her face was very close. She looked sad as she put a hand on my cheek as if touching a statue, a precious statue but a statue nevertheless. She looked into my eyes as if seeing me for the very first time and said, ‘Sometimes, Bernard, I wish you would say you loved me without my saying it to you first.’

‘I’m sorry, darling. Did the children thank you for that delicious meal?’

‘Yes. They are lovely children, Bernard.’

‘You are good for all of us,’ I said.

‘I got all the food from Alfonso’s,’ she confessed in the little-girl voice she affected sometimes. ‘Except the baked apples. I did the baked apples myself. And the egg custard.’

‘The baked apples were the best part of the welcome home.’

‘I hope the best part of the welcome home is yet to come,’ she said archly.

‘Let’s see,’ I said. She switched out the light. It was a full moon and the back garden was swamped with that horrid blue sheen that made it look like a picture on television. I hate moonlight.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s good to be home,’ I said, staring at the ugly little garden. She came up behind me and put her arm round me.

‘Don’t go away again,’ she said. ‘Not ever. Promise?’

‘I promise.’ This was no time to reveal that Dicky and
Stowe had got a little jaunt to Vienna lined up for me. She might have thought that I welcomed the prospect and the truth was that I had some irrational dread of it. Vienna was not a big city and never has been: it is a little provincial town where narrow-minded peasants go to the opera, instead of the pig market, to exchange spiteful gossip. At least that’s the way I saw it: in the past Vienna had not been a lucky town for me.

I remember telling a young probationer named MacKenzie that the more casual the briefing was, the more hazardous the operation you were heading into. It was the glib sort of remark that one was inclined to provide to youngsters like MacKenzie who hung upon every word and wanted to do everything the way it was done in the training school. But I was to be given plenty of time to think about the truth of it. When, afterwards, I considered the way in which I’d been brought into the Vienna operation, I inclined to the view that Stowe had been given no alternative: that he was instructed to choose me to go.

The operation was called Fledermaus, not ‘Operation Fledermaus’ since it had been decided that the frequency rate of the word ‘operation’, and the way in which it was always followed by a code name, made it too vulnerable to the opposition’s computerized code breaking.

Certainly Fledermaus was cloaked in Departmental secrecy. These BOA – Briefing On Arrival – jobs always made me a little nervous, there being no way of preparing myself for whatever was to be done. It seemed as if the determination to keep this task secret from the Americans had resulted in a strictness of documentation, a signals discipline and a delicacy of application that were seldom achieved when the aim was no greater than keeping things secret from the KGB.

I flew to Salzburg, a glittering toytown dominated by an
eleventh-century fortress with a widely advertised torture chamber. The narrow streets of the town are crammed with backpack tourists for twelve months of every year, and postcards, icecreams and souvenirs are readily available. My hotel – like almost everywhere else in Austria – was not far from a house in which the seemingly restless Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart once resided.

My arrival, had been timed to coincide with an important philatelic auction and I checked into the hotel together with a dozen or more stamp dealers who’d come in on the same flight. Their entries in the book showed a selection of home addresses including Chicago, Hamburg and Zurich. On the reception desk a cardboard sign depicted a youthful Julie Andrews, arms outstretched, singing ‘The Sound of Music tour – visit the places where the film was shot.’ Behind the desk sat a fragile-looking old man in a black suit and stiff collar. He used a pen that had to be dipped in an inkwell and rocked a blotter upon each entry.

The hotel was gloomy, spacious and comfortable. It was the old-fashioned sort of grand hotel still to be widely found in Austria, and the sweet synthetic scent of polish hung in the air: an indication of manual work. An ancient lift, crafted of brass and mahogany, lurched upwards inside a wire box with a wheezing sound, and sudden rattles, that persuaded me to use the stairs for the duration of my visit. There was even a man in black waistcoat and green baize apron to carry my bag.

An Austrian named Otto Hoffmann had met me at the airport and made sure I got a comfortable room in the hotel. ‘At the back overlooking the river,’ he said in his powerful Austrian accent, and a chilly draught hit me as he opened the window and peered out to be sure the water was still there. ‘No traffic noise, no smells of cooking, no noise from the terrace café. Tip the porter ten schillings.’ I did so.

Hoffmann was about forty years old, a short, hyper-active man with merry little eyes, a turned up nose and smiling
mouth. His manner plus his large forehead, his pale unwrinkled skin, the way his small features were set in his globular head, and his sparse hair, all gave him the appearance of an inebriated baby. I don’t know how much Hoffmann had been told about ‘Fledermaus’ but he never mentioned that name. He knew that my cover story of being a stamp dealer was completely untrue and he’d obviously been chosen for his knowledge of philately.

‘And now I shall buy you a drink,’ he said as he closed the inner window and put his hand on the radiator to be sure the furnace was working. He meant a cup of weak tea. Because he kept his money in his back pocket, in a large roll secured with a rubber band, he had a disconcerting habit of tapping his behind to make sure his money was still there. He did this now.

He briefed me while we were sitting in the hotel lounge. It was a cavernous place with a celestial done where angels cavorted and from which hung an impressive cut-glass chandelier. Around the walls there were potted plants set between other small tables and soft chairs where fellow guests, unable or unwilling to face the crowded streets, sat drinking lemon tea in tall glasses together with the rich pastries, or gargantuan fruit and icecream concoctions, that punctuate the long Austrian days.

He ordered two teas and a rum baba. He told me they were delicious here but I was trying to give up rum babas.

‘The auction sale consists almost entirely of Austrian and German material,’ he told me. ‘Of course the biggest market for that is Austria and Germany, but there will be American dealers, bidding as high as the present exchange rate of the dollar permits. Also there will be compatriots of yours from London. London is an important trading centre for philatelic material, and there are still many important German and Austrian collectors there. Mostly they are refugees who fled the Nazis and stayed in England afterwards.’

The waitress brought our order promptly. The tea came in a glass, its elaborate silver-plated holder fitted with a clip from which a spoon was suspended. She put two large chunks of lemon on the table and splashed a generous amount of an alcoholic liquid upon a shiny sponge cake which bore a crown of whipped cream. ‘Are you sure…?’ Hoffmann asked again. I shook my head. The waitress scribbled a bill, put it on the table and sped away.

‘And what am I doing here?’ I asked, keeping my voice low.

He frowned. Then, as he understood me, he twitched his nose. On the table he had two beautiful catalogues. He passed one to me. It was an inch thick, its coloured cover, magni ficent art paper and superbly printed illustrations, making it look more like an expensive book of art reproductions than a commercial catalogue. They must have cost a fortune to produce. He opened it to show me the pictures of stamps and old envelopes, tapping the pages as some picture caught his attention. ‘Most of the really good items are from the old German states. Württemberg and Braunschweig, with a few rarities from Oldenburg, Hannover and so on. Here too are some choice things from old German colonies: mail from China, Morocco, New Guinea, Togo, Samoa.’

As he leafed through the catalogue Herr Hoffmann lost the thread of his conversation. His eyes settled upon one page of the catalogue. ‘Some of these Togo covers sound wonderful,’ he said in an awed voice, and read the descriptions with such concentration that his lips quivered. But he tore himself away from the wonderful offerings to show me the auction schedule printed on the inside cover. The hours – eight o’clock in the morning until approximately three o’clock in the afternoon, with an hour off for lunch – were listed to show the numbered Lots that would be offered in each session. There were several thousand Lots for the sale, which would last five days. ‘Some rich collectors employ agents to come to the auction and buy selected items on
their behalf. The agent gets a nice fee. You will be such a person.’

‘Why don’t they bid by post?’

He gave a slight grin. ‘Some collectors are suspicious of these auctions. When you bid by post the amount you authorize the auctioneer to spend is supposed to be your tip-top offer. The auction house undertakes to charge you no more than one step above the next best bid.’ He squeezed lemon into his tea and chased a pip around with his spoon but, after testing the side of his glass with his fingertips, decided it was too hot to drink.

‘And?’

He gave another sly grin; his face slipped naturally into this expression, so that it was hard to know whether he was amused or not. ‘Whenever I bid by post it always seems that someone has mysteriously kept bidding right up to one step below my maximum offer. I find I always pay the whole of whatever I bid.’ He picked up his fork and looked at his cake with the concentration a demolition expert gives to placing dynamite.

‘So collectors have agents who make sure the bids and the bidders are real?’ I said.

‘Exactly. Even then it is difficult to know if there is a swindle. Sometimes there will be an auction official on the phone taking phone bids and the auctioneer will have in front of him the postal bids. It is difficult to be sure exactly what is happening.’ His conversation had been marked by the little smiles but now he became serious as he took his fork and ate a section of his rum baba. ‘The pastry chef is Viennese,’ he confided as he savoured it.

‘And what else will the agent have to do?’

‘He should have examined the Lots for which he is going to bid, to make sure they are not damaged, or repaired or forgeries.’

‘Are there many forgeries about?’

‘There are some Lots in this auction with estimated prices
of about one hundred thousand U.S. dollars. That is a great deal of money by any standards. Many people pay less than that for the lease of a house to live in.’

‘You make your point, Mr Hoffmann,’ I said. ‘But don’t the auction houses have experts? Don’t they know enough about stamps to recognize a forgery?’

‘Of course they do. But auction houses get their percentage of the sale price. What inducement do they have for detecting a forgery? And what do they do then – accuse their customer of dishonesty? If the forgery is sold they get a nice share of the money. If they send it back they lose a customer and make an enemy and lose their percentage too.’ He stopped abruptly and ate some cake. Two men who’d been sitting at a nearby table had got up and were walking out. They were Americans to judge by their clothes and their voices, neatly dressed with fresh faces and polished shoes.

‘You make them all sound like a lot of crooks,’ I said.

‘I hope I don’t. I know dealers I would trust my life to. But it is a precarious trade,’ said Hoffmann and smiled as if that was what he liked about it. I had the feeling that the idea of selling forgeries did not offend him in the way that it should have done. I wondered if he was in some way connected with the forgeries that the Department commissioned from time to time. Reading my mind perhaps, he gave me a sly grin.

‘Are the people here all dealers?’

He looked round the sepulchral lounge. Waitresses in formal black dresses and white starched aprons padded silently to and fro across the white marble floor with trays of teas and cakes. The men, a mixed collection but for the most part middle-aged or elderly, were bent low, scribbling annotations in their catalogues and whispering conspir-atori ally to each other, rather as we were. ‘I know most of them,’ he said.

‘And all men?’

‘Yes, I don’t know of one important female stamp dealer.
There are virtually no female collectors even. Should a woman inherit a collection she sells almost immediately: you can depend upon it.’ He decided his tea was cool enough to drink and tasted it.

I was flipping through the catalogue. ‘How do they decide the estimated price?’ I asked.

‘Don’t take much notice of that,’ he said. ‘That’s just to whet your appetite. The estimated prices are far below what the auctioneer expects to get.’

‘How much below?’

‘There is no way to answer such a question. Auction houses vary. Crazy things happen. Sometimes two agents arrive, both instructed with buy bids.’

‘What is a buy bid?’

‘It means buy at any price.’

‘At any price?’

‘The craving – the reckless lust – that some collectors show for an item they particularly want is difficult to describe. Some collectors become unbalanced, there is no other word to describe it.’ He fastidiously wiped his fingers on the napkin and then brought from his pocket a small folder of tough clear plastic. Inside it there was a used envelope (or what I’d learned to call a cover) with a stamp (or what I’d learned to call an adhesive) on it. ‘Look at that.’

He handed me a white envelope adorned with quite an assortment of stamps and postmarks. Smudged and dis coloured, it had been readdressed twice and was such a mess that I would probably have thrown it straight into the waste bin had I found it on my desk. It meant nothing to me but I looked at it with the kind of reverence he obviously expected of me. ‘Most attractive,’ I said.

‘A man went to prison for that,’ said Hoffmann. ‘A respected man, chief clerk in an insurance office. He was a customer of mine: nearly fifty years old, with three children and a pensionable job. He had a decent little collection. I’d provided quite a lot of the things myself. He was knowledgeable about his
own speciality. He regularly gave talks, and displayed his stamps to philatelic societies. Then he heard that a well-known collector had died and he knew that this cover was amongst the collection. It would be the gem that completed his collection. He asked me if I could find out when it was coming on the market. He was determined. By a lucky chance I knew about it. I guessed the widow would dispose of everything: they always do. You don’t like to go sniffing round too soon. It upsets the family. On the other hand if you wait too long some other dealer will go in there and pick up the whole collection…buy it up for nothing sometimes, when the relatives don’t know what they have inherited. There are some unscrupulous people in this business, I can tell you.’

‘I’m beginning to believe it,’ I said.

‘Is there something wrong with your tea?’

‘No. It’s delicious.’

‘You’re not drinking it.’

‘I’ll get around to it.’

‘The widow was a rich woman. The collection was un important to her. When I went there and asked her about the collection she decided to make me her agent, to value and then sell the whole lot of it. It put me in a difficult position in respect of the other collector but I never really considered that he was seriously in the market for it anyway. There are only thought to be four or five covers like that one. The last time one of them was auctioned it fetched fifty thousand dollars and that was almost ten years ago. Even if this one fetched no more than that one did, my insurance company friend just didn’t have access to that sort of money.’