Spy hook: a novel (18 page)

Oh, no, I thought. Not an evening of talking about that wife of his, it was more than even a best friend should be expected to endure. “What about Zena?” I said, trying to make my voice warm and concerned.

“More precisely, that damned Frank Harrington,” said Werner bitterly. “I know what Frank means to you, Bernie, but he’s a bastard. He really is.” He watched me to see if I would take offence on Frank’s behalf, and he pinched his nose as he often did when distressed.

“Frank?” Frank Harrington was an amazingly successful womanizer. Linking Frank and Zena’s names meant only one thing to me. Some years back, Frank and Zena had had a tempestuous affair. Like some nineteenth-century rake, he’d even set her up in a little house to await his visits. Then - the way I heard it - Zena got fed up with sitting waiting for Frank to find time for her. There was nothing of the nineteenth-century mistress about Zena. Since then I suspected that Zena had found other men, but always she returned to poor old Werner. In the long term he was the only one who would put up with her. “Frank and Zena?”

“Not like that,” said Werner hurriedly. “He’s using her for departmental work. It’s dangerous, Bernie. Bloody dangerous. She’s never done anything like that before.”

“You’d better start at the beginning,” I said. “Zena has relatives in the East. She takes them food and presents. You know . .

“Yes, you told me.” I reached for the little bowl of salted almonds but there were only a couple of broken pieces left buried under salt and bits of skin. I suppose Werner had eaten them while sitting here waiting for me and worrying. “She went over there last week.” In German over there - “druben’- meant only one thing, it meant the other side of the Wall. “Now I’ve discovered that that bloody Frank asked her to look up someone for him.”

“One of our people?” I said guardedly.

“Of course. Who else would they be if Frank wants her to look them up for him?”

“I suppose so,” I conceded.

“Frankfurt an der Oder,’said Werner. “You know what we’re talking about don’t you?” Despite the level voice he was angry now: damned angry, and somewhere in the back of his mind he was implicating me in this development of which I knew nothing, and preferred to know nothing.

“That’s just speculation,” I said and waited to see if he’d say it wasn’t.

“Why ask Zena?” His face was distorted as he bit his lip with rage and anxiety. “He has his own people to do that kind of work.”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“It’s Bizet. He’s trying to reopen a contact string.” “She’ll be all right, Werner,” I said. I sympathized with Werner’s anger but I’d been at the sharp end of operations. From the field agent’s point of view it sometimes looked like good sense to send legitimate travellers such as Zena into these touchy situations. They are told nothing, so they know nothing. Usually they get away scot-free.

My apparent indifference to Zena’s plight made him angrier than ever but as usual he smiled. He leaned back on the sofa and stroked the house-phone as if it was a pet cat. From the street outside there was the growling sound of the long-distance buses that had to turn into a narrow sidestreet to get to the bus terminal. “I want you to do something,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Get her out,” he said. His fingers were twitching on the phone. He reached for the handpiece, called reception and, without asking me what I wanted to eat, told them he wanted the restaurant dinner sent round for us. He spoke rapidly into the phone ordering two portions of the very good salmon Mousse and a couple of fillet steaks - one rare and one well done - and whatever went with it. Then he put the phone down, turned and looked at me. “It’s getting late,” he explained, “the kitchen will close soon.”

I said, “You don’t really want the Department to bring her out, do you? From what you’ve told me, there’s nothing to suggest she’s in any kind of danger. I imagine Frank just asked her to make a couple of phone calls, or knock at a door. If I go rushing in to the office demanding a full-scale rescue attempt, everyone will think I’ve taken leave of my senses. And, quite honestly Werner, it might be putting Zena into a worse position than she is.” What I didn’t add was that there was no chance at all that Dicky, or anyone in authority at the office, would countermand Frank’s actions on my say-so. It sounded as if Frank had been made “file officer” and his word would be law.

“How dare Frank ask Zena to help him?” Was that the real focus of Werner’s rage: Frank Harrrington? They’d never seen eye to eye. Even before Frank stole Werner’s wife, he’d eased Werner out of the Berlin Field Unit. Now there was no way to convince Werner that Frank was what he was: a very experienced departmental administrator, and an archetypal “English gentleman” who not only knew how to attract adventuresome young women but often fell prey to them.

And I could hardly tell Werner that his wife should have learned to stay away from Frank by now. So I said,’ When is she due back?”

“Monday.” He touched his beard. Glenn Gould finished playing but after a couple of clicks Art Tatum started. Werner liked the piano. In the old days he used to play at all the most rowdy Berlin parties. Seeing him now it was difficult to believe the things we had done in Berlin back in those days when we were young.

“She’ll be all right,” I said.

Unconvinced by my reassurances he nodded without replying , and studied his glass of mineral water suspiciously before taking a sip of it. We sat for a moment in silence. Then he looked at me, gave me a little shrug and a smile and, noticing that my glass was empty, he got up and went to the refrigerator and brought more wine for me.

I watched him carefully. There was more to it - some other aspect to the story - but I didn’t press him for more details. His anger had peaked. It was better for him to simmer down. There was a tap at the door and - like some sort of well rehearsed cabaret act - a uniformed man from the reception desk helped a restaurant waiter to set up two folding chairs, a folding table, and an array of tableware. There were steaks and some spinach keeping warm on a chafing dish. The portions of fish mousse, which the waiter insisted upon showing us, were under the heavy dome-shaped silver covers that are always needed to keep microscopic portions of food from escaping. It wasn’t until they’d gone and we were seated at the table eating the mousse that Werner mentioned Zena again. “I love her. I can’t help that, Bernie.”

“I know, Werner.” The salmon mousse was sinking into a puddle of bright green sauce; a pink, tilted slab with fragments of vegetable looking out of it, like passengers waiting for a rescue boat. I ate it quickly.

“So I worry,” said Werner, and he shrugged in a gesture of resignation. I felt sorry for him. It wasn’t easy to imagine being in love with Zena. That some man might murder her, or join the Foreign Legion to escape her, was simple to envisage. But love her: no. “She’s the only woman for me.” He said it defensively, almost apologetically.

Sometimes I think he loved her because she was incapable of loving anyone. A friend of mine once explained the lifetime he’d given to the study of reptiles by saying that he was fascinated by their complete lack of any response to affection. And I think Werner’s relationship with Zena was like that. She seemed to have no real feelings about anyone alive or dead. People were all the same for her, and she dealt with them by means of a curious highly developed sense of self-imposed and carefully apportioned justice that some of her critics had called “fascistic”.

But it was no use talking to Werner about Zena. For him she could do no wrong. I remember him falling in love with girls at school. His love was boundless; the respect he showed for them usually earned only their withering contempt, so that eventually Werner’s ardour faded and died. So I thought it would be when Zena came along. But Zena wasn’t so proffigate with Werner’s love. She welcomed his affection, she encouraged him and knew how to handle Werner so that she could do almost anything with him.

Werner picked at the fish mousse. It was dry and completely tasteless, only the creamy watercress sauce had any flavour. It was salty. “Refrigerated and then warmed in a micro-wave,’ said as s Werner knowledgeably. He pushed the mousse aside and started on the steak as I’d already done. “It looks as if you liked the mousse,” he said accusingly.

“It was delicious,” I said. “But I’m beginning to think that this is your well-done fillet.” But that time I’d already eaten some of his steak. Silently he passed the untouched underdone one to me and took what was left of the steak I’d half-eaten. “Sorry, Werner,” I said.

“You eat everything,” he said. “Even at school you ate everything.”

“You won’t like the underdone one,’ I told him, and offered it back to him.

He declined. “I know,” he said.

To change the subject I said, “How is the hotel?” “It’s going all right,” he said sharply. Then he added. “Did I tell you that that damned woman Ingrid Winter insists on coming to Berlin?”

“She wants some things,” I said, keeping it vague. “She wants to help,” said Werner as if it was the direst threat in his vocabulary.

“Tell her you don’t need help.” It seemed simple enough. “I can’t stop her coming. She’s Lisl’s niece . . and she has a claim on the house. Yes, you’d better be nice to her, Werner, or she could upset the whole apple-cart.” “Just as long as she doesn’t get in the way,’ he said ominously.

Werner was in a bad mood.

I decided I might as well face it. He wasn’t going to simmer down. “Are you going to tell me about Zena?” I said as casually as I could.

“Tell you what?”

“You’re not worried about what could happen to her for knocking on the wrong door in Frankfurt an der Oder, Werner. Not Zena, she’d talk her way out of that one with a paper bag over her head.”

He looked at me with that impassive look I knew so well and then chewed a piece of steak before replying. “I should have given you some red wine,” he said. “I’ve got some for you.”

“Never mind the wine. What’s the real story?” He dabbed his lips with a dinner napkin and said, “Zena’s uncle has a wonderful collection of very old books and crucifixes, icons and things . . .” He looked at me. I stared back at him and said nothing. Werner amended it to,’ Maybe he buys them ... I’m not sure.”

“And maybe he’s not her uncle,” I suggested. “Oh, I think he’s her ... Well, yes maybe an old friend. Yes, sometimes he buys these things from Poles who come into East Germany looking for work. Bibles mostly: seventeenth century . He’s an expert on early Christian art.”

“And Zena smuggles them back to the West, and they are sold in those elegant shops in Munich where orthodontists go to furnish their Schl6sser.”

Werner wasn’t listening. “Zena doesn’t understand how they work,” he said lugubriously.

“How who work?”

“The Stasi. If she goes calling, the way Frank has told her to, they’ll just follow her day after day to see where she goes. But Zena won’t realize that. The whole lot of them will go into the bag. They’ll accuse her of stealing State art treasures or something.”

“The People’s art treasures,” I corrected him. “Yes, well they won’t like the idea of her exporting antiques without a licence.” I tried to make it sound like a minor misdeed, a technical infraction of a customs regulation. “But Frank wouldn’t know anything about that, of course.”

Without answering Werner got up and went to the tiny kitchen. He came back with the half-empty bottle of Meursault and a wineglass for himself He poured more wine for me and some for himself too and put the bottle on the table, having put a coaster into position for it. I watched him drink. He pulled a face like a small child asked to swallow some nasty medicine. Werner knew a lot about wine but he always treated it like sour grape juice. “Suppose Frank knew all about Zena and the antique books?” Werner said slowly and carefully. “After all, Frank is supposed to be running an intelligence service, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said, ignoring the sarcasm.

“And suppose Frank had reason to believe that by delivering poor Zena to the Stasi he’d get them to lay off his Bizet people. Maybe let them get away?”

I said nothing. I sipped my wine and tried to conceal my thoughts. Then bloody good for Frank, I thought. But it all sounded highly unlikely. I suspected that Frank was still too fond of Zena to throw her to the wolves. But if he’d worked out some bizarre deal that got two or three of our people off the hook, in exchange for a ring of cheap crooks who were running a racket involving religious antiques, books, and God knows what else, stuff that might well have been stolen in the first place, then good for Frank. I would be all in favour of a deal like that. So I said nothing.

“Don’t forget it’s Zena,” said Werner.

No, don’t forget it’s Zena. That would make a swop like that a real public benefit. “No,” I said. “It’s her I’m thinking about.” “He’s a bloody Judas,” said Werner. He drank some more wine but seemed no more happy with the taste of it than he was the first time.

“Have you got any reason to think so?” I asked.

“I feel it in my guts,’ said Werner in a voice I didn’t recognize. “Frank wouldn’t do a thing like that,” I said, more to calm Werner than because I completely believed it. Frank liked Zena but Frank could be ruthless: I knew it and so did Werner. And so, if she had any brains, did the wretched Zena. “Yes, Frank would!” snapped Werner. “It’s just the sort of thing he would do. It’s the sort of thing the English are notorious for. You know that.”