The Labyrinth Makers (11 page)

'He may have done. I shall know later this evening.'

She stopped work and faced up to him.

'If I'm going to help you, you know, David, you're going to have to take me into your confidence. If that poor man really was killed this afternoon I've a right to know what I'm letting myself in for. And I'd prefer to know what I'm doing.'

'That's reasonable enough. Providing, of course, that I can trust you.'

'You want me to tell you that I'd fight for Queen and Country no matter what?'

'Would you?'

'No, I wouldn't. Would
you
?'

Audley shook his head.

'The same question doesn't apply to me. I'm old-fashioned. But I didn't put the question properly. Can I trust you to trust me?'

Faith made a sour face. 'That's a hard one, isn't it! And a dirty one, too.'

'I don't see why it should be. You'd give me answers on much more difficult questions. You'd tell me that the Americans were wrong in Vietnam. You're sure that Porton is as wicked as Aldermaston. You think moon rockets ought to be beaten into ploughshares. But it doesn't matter, because I'm not putting the question to you–I have to put it to myself.'

He took the cutlery from her and continued the work.

'Who cut my lawn today?'

She shook her head in disbelief. 'What an odd person you are! I cut your lawn for you. When Mrs Clark came with your groceries this morning and found you gone she practically ordered me to do it. She even showed me how to start the mower. What's that got to do with trusting me?'

'Mrs Clark is a good judge of character. If she trusts you with the mower and the lawn, then perhaps I can trust you in other matters. Are you willing to find out exactly what your father did, for better or worse?'

'I want to. And I can't see the harm in that.'

'There could be more to it than that. I told you last night that your father took something. There's a Russian who knows what it was. And he wants it so badly that he's willing to ask us to help him find it. At least, that's what we think he's going to ask us.'

'Is he a good man or a bad man?'

'He's a very important man.'

Faith shivered. 'If good and bad aren't words that mean anything to you, then you'd better not trust me. Because I'd be an idiot to trust
you
.'

Audley caught himself on the very brink of accusing her of naivete. Of course she was naive–and so was he to expect anything else. Again, too, that unforgivable crime: if he was to use her he had to persuade her first.

'We just don't know about him, except that he has great power and influence in his own country. And that's why we've got to find out what it is and why it's so important to him. We'd like him for a friend, but we can't trust him. You must see that!'

'It always comes back to trusting people. You never trust them and they never trust you! It's just a game to you!'

'Trust them!' He felt the anger he couldn't stifle tighten his throat. 'Be like Dubcek? Or like Nagy and Maleter? And Jan Masaryk? Christ, woman, we don't have the
right
to trust them.'

He could see the pit ahead of him, but he was no longer able to avoid it. He didn't even want to avoid it now, anyway.

'Of course it's a game. And if everyone played it sensibly we'd be a damn sight better off. It's the people who try to turn the pie-faced noble sentiments and the crude doctrinaire slogans into practice who start the shooting. So you'd better pack up your cosy scruples and your moral dilemmas and take them back to school with you, Miss Jones. They'll look better on a blackboard.'

He paused for breath, and despised himself. There was a flush on her cheeks, the colour spreading as though he had hit her. Shopkeepers and schoolteachers were easy game. And tempting game, too, after the Stockers and Joneses, who could always keep him in his place.

'I'm sorry, Miss Jones. None of that was fair. And you could be right,' he said dully. 'But I do care about the game I play–or used to play. In fact, I think I've been landed with your father because I cared too much about it: I hated to see the Middle East turned into a Tom Tiddler's ground–mostly by your friends the Russians, but by us and the Americans too. I've no right to take it out on you, though.'

She turned, and he thought for a moment that she was simply going to leave the room. But instead she reached for a chair and settled astride it, resting her chin on the back.

'What do you want me to do, then?' she said.

He regarded her with surprise. She had not seemed the sort of person to submit to bullying.

'You mean that you're still willing to help me?'

'More than ever now, David. I don't pretend to understand you. Or maybe, it's just that I don't understand what makes someone like you do this sort of thing. But I somehow don't think you'd commit yourself to what was wrong. And I'm sorry I said it was just a game. That was–well, it was far worse than what you said.'

No olive branch could be more fairly offered.

'Let's eat first,' he said, absurdly relieved that she was not going to pack her bags.

As they ate she chattered unselfconsciously about her day — a strange day among strangers in a strange house. It was curious they had all accepted her, the postman, the Co-op milkman and Mrs Clark. Did people take it for granted now that bachelors would have girls around the house from time to time, or was it that she was unselfconscious? Audley found it soothing except that his first false impression of her haughtiness outside Asham churchyard niggled at his sense of contentment. He wasn't usually so far wide of the mark.

There was a dreamlike quality about the meal. It wasn't just that she was so different from Liz–though without her glasses she was probably as pretty, if considerably less well endowed physically. It was rather that behind this normality, behind the milkman's attempt to sell her double cream and Mrs Clark's assumption of her role as Liz's long-delayed successor, was the cold reality.

They were not friends, or even chance acquaintances: they were links in a chain of events going back half a lifetime, joined by a man long dead–and now by a man newly dead. The tranquillity of small talk and washing up on the draining board was false. Somewhere out there in the growing darkness skilled men were still taking the Dakota to bits. An hour away Morrison was on a slab and Roskill would be waiting for the police surgeon's report; across the Channel Butler was hunting the Belgian who had been scared out of his wits all those years ago. And beyond all of them was Panin.

They were the real world. This was a gentle illusion.

In the end it was the telephone bell which shattered that illusion. He caught Faith's eye on him as he sat willing it to stop, and was startled by the hint of understanding. He shook his head to dispel the idea. Dreams could not be shared so easily. She had more reason to be nervous about any step towards the truth, however much she desired to know it.

The calm, well-bred and rather bored voice on the phone finally snapped him out of his introspection. Dr Audley wished for particulars of G Tower …

'A bomb-proof anti-aircraft complex in Berlin, sir. They started building it in the winter of '41. In the Zoological Gardens — south of the Tiergarten, across the Landwehr Canal. Just beside the zoo's aviaries–nice piece of Teutonic town planning.'

A flak tower. He remembered a monster towering above the ruins of Hamburg in 1948.

'Much bigger than that one, sir. More like a fortress than a flak tower. Every mod con–internal power generators, water supplies, the lot…

'Main battery on the roof–eight heavy guns and four light batteries. Under them the garrison quarters, with ammunition hoists. Then a military hospital, fully equipped, staff of 60. Under that the cream of the Staatliche Museum collections, safe as the Bank of England. And then two floors of air raid shelters, with room for 15,000–though they got twice as many in towards the end. Plus 2,000 dead and wounded. It was safe right up to the end–eight-foot of reinforced concrete and steel shutters–but
not
very pleasant.'

Audley tried to envisage 30,000 panic-stricken civilians crammed into a concrete box with Russian shells and bombs smashing against its sides.

'But quite safe, as I said. It's even thought that Goebbels planned at one time to direct the defence from there–there was an emergency broadcasting station on the ground floor, and the main communications centre–L Tower, that was–was just nearby. But in the end he stayed at the other end of the Tiergarten.

Audley was no longer listening. Instead his mind was racing back over the previous thirty-six hours, to the one assumption he had been at least reasonably sure of, but which was suddenly crumbling before his eyes.

'… also at Friedrichshain, smaller of course. G Tower was by far the biggest. About 130 feet high.'

It had been a preconception, of course. And even if it didn't fit the facts any more, it still rang true.

'And there were animals in the zoo right up to the end.'

The boredom was replaced by incredulity. 'Bloody lions and hippos mixing it with the Russians, I shouldn't wonder.'

Abstractedly he thanked the man, who seemed quite taken with the Wagnerian last hours of the Thousand Year Reich as it affected the unfortunate beasts in Berlin zoo, and replaced the receiver.

He began to reach down towards his brief-case, but stopped midway. He knew perfectly well what was in the Panin file, which reposed there entirely against regulations. And it was no use pretending that there wasn't a possible link here between Panin and Steerforth, even if it wasn't the sort of link he had envisaged. Indeed, if it made sense in 1945 it made nonsense in 1969.

But it would have to be checked.

Theodore Freisler might well know the answer. But there was one man who would certainly know it. He took his address book from its drawer and looked at the grandfather clock, weighing the lateness of the time against the slightness of his acquaintance with Sir Kenneth Allen. Their meeting in Rome had been strictly social, but nonetheless daunting; Audley had felt intellectually laundered after half an hour's conversation, then weighed up and courteously dismissed as a middle-weight.

But the great man had been on occasion consulted by the department, and whatever he might think of Audley he would never turn him away. Moreover, if the bored voice was now passing on his G Tower information, then Stocker might come to the same conclusion, and he wouldn't hesitate to haul Sir Kenneth from his high table or senior common room. And if Stocker's was the second call — that rewarding possibility was enough to decide him.

When he returned to the kitchen a quarter of an hour later Faith was just finishing the last of the washing-up. She turned towards him with a look of muted expectation which faded as she saw his own puzzled expression.

'Didn't you get what you wanted?'

'What I wanted?' He sat down at the old kitchen table and stared at the scarred and scrubbed wooden surface. 'I didn't get what I expected, certainly. And I got rather more than I expected, too.'

He looked up at her.

'You know, Faith, I think I know what your father's cargo was.'

'…
we met at Rome at the Egyptian studies symposium, Sir Kenneth
.'

'Indeed, I remember you well, Dr Audley,' That beautiful voice was heavy with authority, but utterly free from arrogance. 'Your paper on Shirkuh was admirable. I entirely agree with you that Nur ed-Din and Saladin have taken too much attention from him. But what can I do for you?'

'I think you may be able to help us with a problem we have in the department
.'

That made it official, but Sir Kenneth was not a man to be hoodwinked anyway.

'Indeed?'

'I believe you were on the Allied Art Treasure Committee in Berlin in 1945
?'

'I was, Dr Audley. A relatively humble member, though
.'

'Do you remember G Tower, Sir Kenneth?'

Faith was staring at him.

'The Schliemann Collection.'

She frowned.

'Troy, Faith–Troy! The topless towers and the windy plains–Troy!'

The frown faded. Her jaw dropped a fraction, and then tightened. She said nothing.

'You've heard of Heinrich Schliemann?'

'Of course I've heard of him,' she said sharply. 'He discovered Troy, everyone knows that.'

'More than Troy, Faith. Much more than Troy. He found the royal treasure–one of the greatest treasure troves of all time.

'He stole it from the Turks and he gave it to the Germans. And after the war the Russians found it, and they took it–and they lost it. No one's set eyes on it since the summer of 1945.'

Anger was not an emotion in which Sir Kenneth Allen indulged, but his displeasure was magisterial: '… in that matter, Dr Audley, the Russian High Command was something less than straightforward with us. I do not question their removal of the Schliemann Collection from G Tower, or their right to it as spoils of war. They had suffered great loss of their own treasures, great loss. They had the right to a measure of recompense.

'But to remove it–and there is no doubt that they did remove it — and then to allow it to be lost: that was an unpardonable act of carelessness.

'Some of my colleagues still believe that it was never lost, and that it rests in the Kremlin vaults. Mere wishful thinking! If it had survived it would have been restored to East Berlin, to the Staatliche Museum, long ago.'

Faith sat down opposite him, her shoulders drooping.

Then she braced herself. 'You said you think you know? But how sure are you–and how do you know, anyway?'

'Nikolai Andrievich Panin, Faith–that Russian I told you about. He's my clue. You see, I thought if I could find out just what he was doing in Berlin back in 1945, before he came looking for your father's Dakota, it might give us a line on what was supposed to be in the plane.'

Her eyes widened. 'It was the same man
then
?'