A Matter of Honour (11 page)

“No, no,” said Adam, as she took Lawrence’s
place at the table. “He’s already late for his girlfriend. Charming girl called
Carolyn, a social worker.” He quickly topped up her wine, pretending it hadn’t
already been poured.

“So I am going to eat my own sausages, after
all,” she said, laughing. And the laughter didn’t stop for the rest of the
evening, as Adam learned about Heidi’s life in Germany, her family and the
holiday job she had taken while on vacation from Mainz University.

“My parents only allow me to come to England
because my brother is already in London; it is to help my languages course. But
now, Adam, I would like to know what you are doing when you are not picking up
girls in food stores.”

“I was in the army for nine years and I’m
now hoping to join the Foreign Office.”

“In what capacity, if that is the right
expression?” Heidi asked.

“It’s the right expression, but I’m not sure
I know the right answer,” said Adam.

“When someone says that about the Foreign
Service it usually means they are a spy.”

“I don’t know what it means, to be honest,
but they’re going to tell me next week. In any case, I don’t think I’d make a
very good spy. But what are you going to do when you return to Germany?”

“Complete my final year at Mainz and then I
hope to find a job as a television researcher.”

“What about Jochen?” asked
Adam.

“He will join my father’s law practice as
soon as he is arriving home.”

“So how long will you be in London?” he
found himself asking.

“Another two months,” she said.
“If I can stand the job.”

“Why do you carry on with it if it’s that
bad?”

“There is no better way to test your English
than impatient shoppers who speak all different accents.”

“I hope you stay the full two months,” said
Adam.

“So do
I
,” she
replied, smiling.

When Jochen arrived back punctually at
eleven o’clock, he found Adam and Heidi washing the dishes.

“Thank you for a most interesting evening,”
she said, wiping her hands.

“Not a good word,” reprimanded Jochen. “Not
interesting, I think.
Lovely, happy, delightful, enjoyable
perhaps, but not interesting.”

“It was all those things,” said Adam, “but
it was also interesting.”

She smiled.

“May I come and buy some more sausages
tomorrow?”

“I would like that,” said Heidi, “but don’t
hold up any sour old women this time with translation demands. By the way, you
never tell me why you needed the strange paragraph translated. I have been
wondering who
is
this Rosenbaum and what it is he left
to someone.”

“Next time perhaps,” said Adam, looking a
little embarrassed.

“And next time you can bring my sister home
yourself,” said Jochen, as he shook Adam’s hand firmly.

After Heidi had left, Adam sat down and
finished off the last glass of wine, aware that he hadn’t spent such a lovely,
happy, delightful, enjoyable and interesting evening for a long time.

A black limousine with dark windows and
unlit number plates remained parked in the VIP area of Zurich Kloten.
Fastidious Swiss policemen had twice gone up to the car and checked the driver’s
credentials before Major Romanov and Anna Petrova emerged from the customs hall
and took their places in the back of the car.

It was already dark as the driver moved off
towards the neon glow of the city. When the car drew up outside the St Gothard
Hotel the only words that passed between Romanov and the driver were, “I shall
return to Moscow on the Tuesday morning flight.”

Jacques Pontin, the manager of the hotel,
was stationed at the door waiting to greet the new arrivals; he introduced
himself immediately, and as soon as he had checked them both in he banged a
little bell with the palm of his hand to summon a porter to assist the guests
with their bags. A moment later a young man in his early twenties, dressed in
green livery, appeared.

“Suite seventy-three and room seventy-four,”
Jacques instructed before turning back to Romanov. “I do hope your stay will
prove to be worthwhile, Herr Romanov,” he said. “Please do not hesitate to call
upon me if there is anything you need.”

“Thank you,” said Romanov as he turned to
join the porter who stood sentinel-like by the door of an open lift. Romanov
stood to one side to allow Anna to go in first. The lift stopped at the seventh
floor and the porter led the way down a long corridor to a corner suite. He
turned the key in the lock and invited the two guests to go in ahead of him.
The suite was as Romanov had expected, in a different league from the finest
hotels he ever experienced in either Moscow or Leningrad. When he saw the array
of gadgets in the marble bathroom he reflected that even prosperous travellers
to Russia, if seasoned visitors, brought their own bath plugs with them.

“Your room is through there, madam,” the
porter informed the researcher, and unlocked an adjoining door. Although
smaller in size, the room maintained the same unassuming elegance. The porter
returned to Romanov, handed him his key and asked if there would be anything
else he would require. Romanov assured him there was nothing and passed over a
five-franc note.

Once again the porter gave a slight bow, and
closing the door behind him, left Romanov to unpack while Anna Petrova went to
her own room.

Romanov started to undress and then
disappeared into the bathroom. He studied himself in the mirror. Although he
was vain about his looks, he was even
more vain
about
the state of his physique. At twenty-nine, despite being six feet, he still
only weighed 165 pounds on Western scales, and his muscles remained hard and
taut.

By the time Romanov had returned to the
bedroom, he could hear the shower beating down in the adjoining bathroom. He
crept over to the door and edged it open. He could see quite clearly the
outline of Anna standing in the steaming shower. He smiled and noiselessly
moved back across the thick carpet, slipped under the sheets and into the
researcher’s bed. He waited for her to turn off the steaming shower.

Adam stepped out of the freezing shower.
Within minutes he was dressed and joined Lawrence in the kitchen for breakfast.

“Still unable to charge you for hot water,
am I?” Lawrence said as Adam peered over his flatmate’s shoulder, trying to
take in the latest Test score.

“Why can’t we produce any really fast fast
bowlers?” he asked rhetorically.

“Can’t stay and chatter to the unemployed,”
said Lawrence, picking up his briefcase. “Shah of Iran wants to discuss his
financial problems with me. Sorry to rush off before you’ve had your cornflakes
but I can’t afford to keep His Imperial Majesty waiting.”

Left on his own, Adam boiled himself an egg
and burned some toast before he turned to the newspaper to learn of the latest
casualties in Vietnam and President Johnson’s proposed tour of the Far East. At
this rate he decided he wasn’t going to win the
Daily Mail’s
‘Housewife of the Year’ competition. He eventually
cleared away in the kitchen, made his bed and tidied up behind Lawrence – nine
years of self-discipline wasn’t going to change old habits that quickly – then
he settled down to plan another day.

He realised he could no longer avoid making
a decision. He sat once again at his desk and began to consider how to get the
official document translated without arousing further suspicion.

Almost absent-mindedly he removed the Bible
from the bookshelf and extracted the letter he had read the night before. The
final paragraph still puzzled him. He considered Heidi’s translation once
again:

All that will be required of you is to present
yourself at the address printed on the top right-hand corner of the enclosed
document, with some proof that you are Colonel Gerald Scott. A passport should
prove sufficient. You will then be given a bequest that I have left to you in
the name of Emmanuel Rosenbaum.

I hope it will bring you good fortune.

Adam turned his attention to the document.
He was still quite unable to discern what the bequest could possibly be, let
alone whether it was of any value. Adam mused over the fact that such an evil
man could involve himself in an act of kindness hours before he knew he was
going to die – an act that now left him with no choice about his own
involvement.

Romanov gathered the blankets together and
in one movement hurled
them
on to the floor to expose
Anna curled up like a child, knees almost touching her exposed breasts. Anna’s
hand groped for a corner’of the sheet to cover her naked body.

“Breakfast in bed?” she murmured hopefully.

“Dressed in ten minutes, or no breakfast at
all,” came back the reply. Anna lowered her feet gingerly on to the thick
carpet and waited for the room to stop going round in circles before heading
off towards the bathroom. Romanov heard the shower burst forth its jets. “Ahhh,”
came
the pitiful cry. Romanov smiled when he
remembered that he had left the indicator locked on dark blue.

During breakfast in the dining room they
mulled over the approach he intended to take with the bank if Petrova were able
to confirm that the icon was in fact Rublev’s original masterpiece. He kept
looking up from the table and then suddenly, without warning, said, “Let’s
go
.”

“Why?” Anna asked, as she bit into another
slice of toast. Romanov rose from the table and without bothering to offer an
explanation strode out of the room and headed straight for the lift. Petrova
caught up with her master only moments before the lift gate closed. “Why?” she
asked again, but Romanov did not speak until they were both back in his suite.
He then threw open the large window that overlooked the railway station.

“Ah, it’s outside your room,” he said,
looking to his right, and quickly walked through to the adjoining bedroom. He
marched past the dishevelled double bed, jerked open the nearest window, and
climbed outside. Petrova stared down from the seventh floor and felt giddy.
Once Romanov had reached the bottom rung of the fire escape, he ran to a
passing tram. Petrova would never have made it if she hadn’t been lifted bodily
on to the tram by Romanov’s sheer strength.

“What’s going on?” she asked, still puzzled.

“I can’t be sure,” said Romanov, looking out
of the back of the tram. “All I do know for certain is what the local CIA agent
looks like.”

The researcher looked back in the direction
of the hotel, but all she could see was a mass of anonymous people walking up
and down the pavement.

Romanov remained on the tram for about a
mile before he jumped off and hailed a passing taxi going in the opposite
direction.

“Bischoffet Cie,” he said as he waited for
his puffing assistant to join him.

The cab headed back in the direction of the
hotel, winding in and out of the morning traffic, until it came to a halt in
front of a large brown granite building that filled the entire block. Romanov
paid off the driver and stood in front of imposing doors made of thick glass
and covered in wrought iron welded to look like the branches of a tree. By the
side of the doors, carved inconspicuously into the stone and inlaid with gilt,
were the words ‘Bischoffet Cie’. There was no other clue as to what kind of
establishment lay within.

Romanov turned the heavy wrought-iron knob
and the two Russians stepped into a spacious hall. On the left-hand side of the
hall stood a solitary desk behind which a smartly dressed young man was seated.

“Guten
Morgen, mein Herr”,
he
said.

“Good morning,” said Romanov. “We have an
appointment with Herr Dieter Bischoff.”

“Yes, Herr Romanov,” said the receptionist,
checking the list of names in front of him. “Will you please take the lift to
the fifth floor where you will be met by Herr BischofFs
secretary.
”
When the two of them stepped out of the lift they were greeted by a lady in a
neat plain suit. “Will you please follow me,” she said, without any trace of
accent. The two Russians were escorted along a picture-lined corridor to a
comfortable room which more resembled the reception room of a country house
than a bank.

“Herr Bischoff will be with you in a moment,”
the lady said, withdrawing. Romanov remained standing while he took in the
room. Three black-and-white framed photographs of sombre old men in grey suits,
trying to look like sombre old men in grey suits, took up most of the far wall,
while on the other walls were discreet but pleasant oils of town and country
scenes of nineteenth-century Switzerland. A magnificent oval Louis XIV table
with eight carved mahogany chairs surrounding it dominated the centre of the
room. Romanov felt a twinge of envy at the thought that he could never hope to
live in such style.

The door opened and a man in his
mid-sixties, followed by three other men in dark grey suits, entered the room.
One look at Herr Bischoff and Romanov knew whose photograph would eventually
join that of the other three grey, sombre men.