Samson 01 - Berlin Game, page 22
‘It doesn’t matter who said it,’ replied Rolf.
‘So it was Werner. And we both know who told him, don’t we, Rolf?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rolf staunchly, although his eyes said different.
‘That bloody wife of his. That bloody Zena,’ I said. I cursed Frank Harrington and his womanizing. I knew Frank too well to suspect him of revealing to her anything really important. But I’d seen enough of Zena Volkmann to know that she’d trade on her relationship with Frank. She’d make herself sound important. She’d feed Werner any wild guesses, rumours and half-truths. And Werner would believe anything he heard from her.
‘Zena worries about Werner,’ said Rolf defensively.
‘You must be very stupid, Rolf, if you really believe that Zena worries about anything but herself.’
‘Perhaps that’s because no one else worries about her enough,’ said Rolf.
‘You’ll break my bloody heart, Rolf,’ I said.
I’m afraid we parted on a note of acrimony. When I looked back, he’d still not boarded the bus. I suspected that he had no intention of boarding any bus. Rolf Mauser could be a devious devil.
19
Some of the most secret conversations I’d ever heard took place not in any of the debugged ‘silent rooms’ under the Department’s new offices but in restaurants, St James’s clubs or even in the backs of taxicabs. So there was nothing surprising about Dicky Cruyer’s suggestion that I go to his house about nine ‘for a confidential chat’.
A man repairing the doorbell let me in. Dicky’s wife, Daphne, was working at home that morning. A large layout pad occupied most of the corner table in the front room. A jam jar of coloured felt-tip pens was balanced on the TV, and scattered across the sofa were scribbled roughs for advertising a new breakfast food. Daphne’s art-school training was everywhere evident; brightly painted bits of folk art and crudely woven cushion covers, a primitive painting of Adam and Eve over the fireplace and a collection of matchbox covers displayed in an antique cabinet. The only personal items in the room were photos: a picture of the Cruyers’ two sons amid a hundred other grim-faced, grey-uniformed boys in front of the huge Gothic building that was their boarding school; and, propped on the mantelshelf, a large shiny colour photo of Dicky’s boat. There was some very quiet Gilbert and Sullivan leaking out of the hi-fi. Dicky was humming.
Through the ‘dining area’ I could see Daphne in the kitchen. She was pouring hot milk into large chinaware mugs. Looking up she said ‘Ciao!’ with more than her usual cheerfulness. Did she know her husband had been having an affair with my sister-in-law? Her hair was that straggly mess that only comes from frequent visits to very expensive hairdressers. From what little I knew about women, that might have been a sign that she did know about Dicky and Tessa.
‘Traffic bad?’ said Dicky as I threw my raincoat onto a chair. It was his subtle way of saying I was late. Dicky liked to have everyone on the defensive right from the start. He’d learned such tactics in a book about young tycoons. I secretly borrowed it from his office bookshelf one weekend so that I could read it too.
‘No,’ I lied. ‘It only took me ten minutes.’
He smiled and I wished I’d not got into the game.
Daphne brought cocoa on a dented tin tray advertising Pears soap. My cup celebrated the silver jubilee of King George V. Dicky complimented Daphne on the cocoa and pressed me to have a biscuit, while she gathered up her pens and paper and retreated upstairs. I sometimes wondered how they managed together; secret intelligence was a strange bedfellow for a huckster. It was better to be married to a Departmental employee; I didn’t have to ask her to leave the room every time the office came through on the phone.
He waited until he heard his wife go upstairs. ‘Did I tell you the Brahms network was going to fall to pieces?’
It was, of course, a rhetorical question; I was expected to confirm that he’d predicted that very thing with uncanny accuracy a million times or more, but I looked at him straight-faced and said, ‘You may have done, Dicky. I’m not sure I remember.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Bernard! I told Bret only two days ago.’
‘So what’s happened?’
‘The people have scattered. Frank is here.’
‘Frank is here?’
‘Don’t just repeat what I say. Yes, dammit. Frank is here.’
‘In London?’
‘He’s upstairs taking a bath and cleaning up. He arrived last night and we’ve been up half the night talking.’ Dicky was standing at the fireplace with fingers tapping on the mantelshelf and one cowboy boot resting on the brass fender.
‘Aren’t you going into the office?’ I cradled the cocoa in my hands, but it wasn’t very hot so I drank it. I hate cold cocoa.
Dicky tugged at the gold medallion hanging round his neck on a fine chain. It was a feminine gesture and so was the artful smile with which he answered my question.
I said, ‘Bret will know Frank is in London. If you are missing from the office, he’ll put two and two together.’
‘Bret can go to hell,’ said Dicky.
‘Are you going to drink your cocoa?’
‘It’s real chocolate, actually,’ said Dicky. ‘Our neighbours across the road brought it back from Mexico and showed Daphne how the Mexicans make it.’
I recognized Dicky’s way of saying he didn’t like it. ‘Here’s health,’ I said, and drank his cocoa too. His mug was decorated with rodents named Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter. It was smaller than mine; I suppose Daphne knew he didn’t much like cocoa the way the Mexicans fixed it.
‘Yes. Bret can go to hell,’ repeated Dicky. The gas fire wasn’t on. He gently kicked the artificial log with the tip of his boot.
If Dicky was hell-bent on a knock-down-drag-out fight my money would be on Bret Rensselaer. I didn’t say that; I didn’t have to. ‘This is all part of your plan to keep Bret out of things?’
‘Our plan,’ said Dicky. ‘Our plan.’
‘I still haven’t had that confidential memo you promised me.’
‘For God’s sake. I’m not going to let you down.’ From upstairs there came the sound of the Rolling Stones. ‘It’s Daphne,’ explained Dicky. ‘She says she works better to music.’
‘So what is Frank up to? Why come here to whisper in your ear? Why not report to the office?’
Again came Dicky’s artful smile. ‘We both know that, Bernard. Frank is after my job.’
‘Frank is a hundred years old and waiting for retirement.’
‘But retiring from my desk would give him another few thousand a year on his pension. Retiring from my desk, Frank would be sure of a CBE or even a K.’
‘Have you been encouraging Frank to think he’s getting your job? There’s not a chance of it at his age.’
Dicky frowned. ‘Well, don’t let’s rake that over, at least not for the time being. If Frank has unspoken ambitions, it’s not for us to make predictions about them. You follow me, don’t you?’
‘Follow you, I’m way ahead of you. Frank helps you to get rid of Bret Rensselaer. Then you get Bret’s job and Frank gets yours - except that Frank won’t get yours.’
‘You’ve got an evil mind,’ said Dicky without rancour. ‘You always think the worst of everyone around you.’
‘And the distressing tiling about that is the way I’m so often proved right.’
‘Well, take it easy on Frank. He’s shaken.’
Dicky was of course exaggerating wildly, both about the disintegration of the Brahms net and about Frank Harrington’s morale. Frank came downstairs ten minutes later. He looked no worse than I would have looked after sitting up with Dicky all night. He was freshly shaved, with two tiny cuts where he’d trimmed the edges of his blunt-ended moustache. He wore a chalk-stripe three-piece suit, clean shirt and oxford shoes polished to a glasslike finish, and he was waving that damned pipe in the air. Frank was tired and hoarse with talking, but he was an expert at making the best of himself and I knew he’d display no sign of weakness in front of Dicky and me.
Frank seemed pleased to see me. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Bernard. Has Dicky put you in the picture?’
‘I’ve told him nothing,’ said Dicky. ‘I wanted him to hear it from you. Drinking chocolate, Frank?’
Frank looked quickly at his gold wristwatch. ‘A small gin and tonic wouldn’t go amiss, Dicky, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘It’s cocoa, Frank,’ I said. ‘Made the way they drink it in Mexico.’
‘You said you liked it,’ said Dicky defensively.
‘I loved it,’ I said. ‘I drank two of them, didn’t I.’
‘If you’ve got Plymouth gin,’ said Frank, ‘I’ll have it straight or with bitters.’ He went over to the fireplace and knocked out his pipe.
When Dicky came back from the drinks wagon and saw the charred tobacco ashes in the hearth, he said, ‘Christ, Frank! Can’t you see that that’s a gas fire.’ He handed Frank the gin and then went down on his knees at the fireplace.
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ said Frank.
‘It looks just like a real open fire,’ said Dicky as he used one of Daphne’s discarded breakfast-food roughs to marshal the pipe dottle into a tiny heap that could be hidden under the artificial log.
‘I’m sorry, Dicky. I really am,’ said Frank as he sat back on the sofa with a yellow oilskin tobacco pouch on his knees. He looked at me and nodded before sipping his gin. Then, in a different sort of voice, he said, ‘It could become bad, Bernard. If you’re going over there, this would be the time to do it.’
‘How bad?’
Dicky got to his feet and slapped his hands against his legs to get rid of any ash on his fingers. ‘Bloody bad,’ said Dicky. ‘Tell him how you first found out what was going on.’
‘I’m not sure I know what is going on yet,’ said Frank. ‘But the first real sign of trouble came when I had a call from the police liaison chap in Bonn. The border guards at Hitzacker in Lower Saxony had fished a fellow out of the Elbe. He’d got over the Wall and across all those damned minefields and border obstacles and into the river. He was just about done in, but he wasn’t injured in any way. From the West German police report I gather there’d been no sounds of shooting or anything from the other side. It was as near as you can get to a perfect escape.’
‘Lucky man,’ said Dicky.
‘Or a well-informed one,’ said Frank. ‘The border runs along the northeast bank of the river there, so the East Germans can’t put obstacles and mantraps in the water. That’s why the DDK keep bellyaching about the way the border should run along the middle of the Elbe. Meanwhile it’s a good place to try an escape.’
‘A border crossing? Why did Bonn get involved and why did anyone call you?’
‘Bonn got interested when the interrogator at the reception centre found that the escapee was an East German customs official.’
Frank looked at me as if expecting a reaction. When I gave none, he spent a few moments trying to light his pipe. ‘An East German customs official,’ he said again, and waved the match in the air to extinguish it. He almost tossed the dead match into the fireplace but remembered in time and placed it on the large Cinzano ashtray that Dicky had put at his elbow. ‘Max Binder. One of our people. A Brahms network man.’
Dicky had had a whole night of Frank’s measured story-telling and now he tried to hurry things along. ‘When Frank put in the usual “contact string” for the rest of the Brahms network next morning, he got no response from anyone.’
‘I didn’t say that, Dicky,’ said Frank pedantically. ‘I got messages from two of them.’
‘You didn’t get messages,’ said Dicky even more pedantically. ‘You got two “out of contact” signals.’ Dicky had decided that the failure of the Brahms network was his big chance, and he was determined to write the story his own way.
Frank grunted and sipped his gin.
Dicky said, ‘Those bastards have been working a racket with the import bank credits, and making a fortune out of it. And Bret’s probably been authorizing false papers and the contacts and everything they needed.’
‘Werner keeps complaining about the false papers,’ I said.
‘That was just to put us off the scent,’ said Frank. ‘The false papers were what they needed more than anything else.’
‘We’ve had a lot of unofficial complaints from the DDR about “antisocial elements given aid and assistance”,’ I said.
Frank looked up from his pipe and said sharply, ‘I resent that, Bernard. You know only too well that those East Germans keep up a regular bombardment of complaints along those lines. How the hell was I to know that this time their cocktail-party diatribes were based on fact?’
Dicky could not restrain a grim smile, and he turned away to hide it. The Brahms network being no more than a criminal gang manipulating the Department for its own profit must surely be enough to bring Bret Rensselaer crashing to the ground. And into the bargain Bret would lose his Brahms Four source. ‘Frank says he expects the DDR to prefer murder charges against them,’ Dicky added.
‘Who? Where?’ I said. I immediately thought of Rolf Mauser and was sufficiently surprised to allow my consternation to show. I’d been worrying about the way I’d urged Bret to okay a rollover loan for Werner. Would he suspect that I was a part of this racket? To cover myself, I got up and went over to the drinks wagon. ‘Okay if I pour myself a drink, Dicky?’
‘Has anyone been in touch with you?’ Frank asked me. ‘Rolf Mauser’s son thinks he went to Hamburg. My bet would be London.’
‘Anyone else?’ I said, holding up the gin bottle. ‘No. No one’s contacted me up to now.’
Frank returned my gaze for a moment before shaking his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I only said that murder charges would be the next step if the net’s been penetrated. It’s a device the DDR use for fugitives,’ he explained. ‘A murder charge automatically makes a fugitive Category One. It gets their descriptions circulated by teleprinter and the call goes out to the armed forces, as well as all the police services and the border guards. And of course there is always more chance of a murderer being reported by the public. These days the man in the East German street has become rather tolerant of black marketeers.’ Frank looked at me again. ‘Right, Bernard?’
I sipped a little of the gin I’d poured for myself and wondered to what extent Frank guessed that I’d seen Rolf or one of the network. Dicky wasn’t suspicious; he could obviously think of nothing except how to use this new situation for his own advancement, but Frank had known me since I was a child. It was not so easy to fool Frank. ‘It had to come,’ said Frank. ‘Brahms have been no use to us except to channel back material from Brahms Four. They’ve got into mischief, and now they’re in trouble. We’ve seen it happen before, haven’t we?’
‘You say they’re running, without backup or any support or anything from us?’
‘No. That’s Dicky’s interpretation. They might simply be taking cover for a couple of days,’ said Frank. ‘It’s what they do when the security Forces are having a routine shakeout.’
‘But no matter how routine the shakeout,’ I said, ‘they might be picked up. And Normannenstrasse will give them an offer they can’t resist and maybe blow another network or so. Is that what you’re thinking, Frank?’
‘What kind of offer they can’t resist?’ said Dicky.
I didn’t answer but Frank said, ‘The Stasis will make them talk, Dicky.’
Dicky poured himself a drink. ‘Poor bastards. Max Binder, old Rolf Mauser - who else?’
‘Let’s leave the mourning until we know they are in the bag,’ I said. ‘Where’s Max Binder now?’
‘He’s still in the reception centre in Hamburg. The interrogation people won’t let us have him until they are through.’
‘I don’t like that, Frank,’ said Dicky. ‘I don’t like some little German interrogator grilling one of our people. Get him out of there right away.’
‘We can’t do that,’ said Frank. ‘We have to go through the formalities.’
‘Our Berlin people don’t go into the reception centre,’ said Dicky.
Patiently Frank explained, ‘Berlin is still under Allied military occupation, so in Berlin we can do things our way. But things that happen in the Federal Republic have to go through the state BfV office and then through Cologne, and these things take time.’
‘When did you see him, Frank?’
Daphne Cruyer tapped and put her head round the door. ‘I’m off to the agency now, darling. We’re auditioning ten-year-olds for the TV commercial. I can’t leave my assistant to face that horde of little monsters on her own.’ She was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, long blue cloak and shiny boots. She had changed her image since her visit to Silas in floral pinafore and granny glasses.
‘Bye, bye, darling,’ said Dicky, and kissed her dutifully. ‘I’ll phone you at the office if I’m working late again.’
Daphne gave me an affectionate kiss too. ‘You men are always working late,’ she said archly. Now I was convinced she knew about Dicky and Tessa. I wondered if her amazing outfit was also a reaction to Dicky’s infidelity.
Only after we’d all watched Daphne climb into her car and drive away did Frank answer my question.
‘The positive identification was enough for me,’ said Frank. ‘No sense in me trailing all the way out to some godforsaken hole in Lower Saxony. I wasted all next day trying to contact the rest of them.’
‘Daphne’s forgotten to take her portfolio,’ said Dicky, picking up a flat leather folder from the table where she’d put it while kissing him. ‘I’ll phone her office and tell them to send a motorcycle messenger.’ It was the sort of solicitude shown only by unfaithful husbands.
Dicky left the room to make his phone call from the hall. His loud voice was muffled by the frosted glass panel.
‘You’d better tell me the real story,’ I told Frank. ‘While Dicky’s phoning.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘A DDR customs man swimming across the Elbe would excite the police liaison man in Bonn like a plate of cold dumplings. And even if this discovery did get him so animated, why would he think of you as someone who must be told immediately?’ Frank didn’t respond, so I pushed. ‘Police liaison in Bonn aren’t given any phone numbers for SIS Berlin, Frank. I thought even Dicky would sniff at that one.’
