Spy Line (12 page)

He said, ‘Andras has had a disappointing evening, I’m afraid. He has spent ten years trying to get his string quartet performed. Tonight it was. His loyal friends went but there were not enough of us to fill the hall.’ He sipped his drink.
‘Worse still, I think Andras realized that his composition wasn’t really very good.’

‘Poor Andras,’ I said.

‘His parents own the Scolik Konditorei,’ said Staiger ironically. ‘Know it? Each afternoon old ladies stand in lines to devour that superb Scolik poppy-seed strudel with a big dollop of Schlagobers. It is like owning a gold mine. The strudel will help him survive his crisis of confidence.’

‘Is that what he’s having?’

‘Strudel?’ he asked mockingly. ‘No, you mean a crisis of confidence. Tomorrow he will face the music critics,’ said Staiger. ‘And Vienna breeds a savage race of critics.’

‘Karl!’ said a small sharp-featured woman who soon made it evident from her manner that she was Staiger’s wife. Ignoring me she said, ‘Anna-Klara has arrived, Karl.’ She touched his arm. I wondered if she knew about her husband’s other lives. Perhaps she thought I was a part of them.

Staiger smiled in a satisfied way. ‘She has?
Kolossal
!’ I was later to discover that he considered this lady’s visit a social coup of some magnitude. He looked round to make sure that there was no aspect of the room that would disgrace him in the eyes of this renowned visitor, and found only me. For a moment I thought he would hide me in a cupboard, but he swallowed, looked at his wife apologetically and – as if explaining his predicament – said, ‘When the guests have gone home, I have some work to do with Herr Doktor Samson.’ He smoothed his thinning hair as if checking that it was in place.

The wife looked at me and nodded grimly. She knew I wasn’t really a Doktor, a real Doktor would have been called ‘Baron’ and a real Baron ‘Prince’. That’s how things worked in Austria. I smiled but she didn’t respond. She was a dutiful Austrian wife who let her husband make decisions about his work. But she didn’t have to like his down-at-heel workmates. ‘Here comes Anna-Klara,’ she said.

The arrival of the guest of honour was what they had
all been waiting for. This soprano had been performing at the opera that night, and when she came into the room it was an entrance befitting the reverence that this assembled audience afforded her. She swept in with a flourish of the long flowing skirt. Her yellow hair was piled high and glitter ing with jewels. Her make-up was slightly overdone, but that was de rigeur for someone who’d hurried from the opera stage.

Her fellow guests greeted her with a concerted murmur of awe and devotion. With the Staigers at her side, the
gnädige Frau
went from one to another of them like a general inspecting a guard of honour. Here, bowing low, was a
Doktor Doktor
and a
Frau Doktor,
his wife; the bureaucrat’s wife –
Frau Kommerzialrat
– gave a sort of a curtsy; the
Hofrat
– court adviser for a Habsburg Emperor long since dead and gone – kissed her hand. Anna-Klara had gracious words for all of them, and special compliments for Andras Scolik and the string quartet performance she’d missed. Scolik brightened. Anna-Klara had praised him. And, after all, there was always the strudel.

It was a bravura performance, and with impeccable instinct Anna-Klara stayed for only one glass of champagne before departing again. Once she had gone the party broke up quickly.

It was midnight when I sat down with Karl Staiger in his office at the back of the shop. All the church clocks in Vienna were proclaiming the witching hour. The room smelled of varnish, and Staiger opened the window a fraction despite the bitter cold night outside. Then he moved a lot of unopened mail from where it was leaning against an antique carriage clock and compared the time with that on his wristwatch. It was a beautiful clock, its face decorated with dancing ladies. The movement ticked happily inside the glass-sided case. He nodded proudly at me as a father might smile to see his child play the piano for guests. Satisfied, he moved more books and papers to clear a space
on his desk where a green-shaded lamp made a perfect circle of light upon a pink blotter.

‘What happened?’ said Staiger.

‘I haven’t got it,’ I said. I had no intention of talking to him about the death of Johnson, or mentioning Thurkettle and his possible role in the murder.

‘Haven’t got what?’ He had his arms loaded with books.

From my jacket pocket I produced my wallet and I laid the coloured photo of the cover exactly in the centre of the pool of light. ‘This,’ I said, smoothing it out. ‘I haven’t got this.’

He put the books on to a cupboard and looked down at the photo. Then, without speaking, he took the bundle of unopened mail propped against the clock. Going quickly through it, he chose a packet that bore the large and impressive-looking labels of a courier company. It was a small padded bag secured with metal staples. He tore it open with an effortless twist and shook the contents from it.

On to the table slid a blue envelope with Paraguay stamps and Zeppelin marks: the same cover as that depicted in the colour photo upon which it fell.

‘But I’ve got it,’ said Staiger with a satisfied smile.

‘What’s the story?’ I picked up the cover that had caused so much trouble and probably brought about the amiable Johnson’s death. I turned it in my hands. It seemed such a useless piece of paper to be sold for such a high price.

‘I only know what I can read between the lines,’ he said. ‘But I think the Americans sent someone to buy it over your head. I had to get on to one of the biggest dealers in Vienna – an old friend – and ask him to get it at all costs.’

‘He must have phoned his bids.’

‘There was no time for anyone to get to Salzburg.’

‘The room bidder was chiselled, the auction was rigged. At least, that bid was.’

‘These things happen,’ said Staiger. ‘I had no idea the Americans would try to intervene or I would have given
you more cash. But it turned out all right. I was told to get it; I got it.’ He picked up the cover and held it against the light.

‘Is there something inside?’

‘Usually there is some stiffening to protect such covers, a piece of card, sometimes one that advertises some long-forgotten stamp dealer.’ But while saying this he took from the drawer of his desk a beautiful ivory letter opener and tapped it against his hand. ‘You know that the best items in the sale were from a private collection put together in the nineteen thirties by a famous Hungarian airpost dealer named Zoltan Szarek. He was the author of the 1935 Szarek Airpost Manual, long out of print. Now that the Szarek collection is broken up it is the end of one of the world’s greatest.’ He turned the letter opener round. One end of it concealed a tiny penknife blade. He opened the blade and to my surprise cut open the precious Paraguay envelope.

Having seen the sort of passion that these philatelic objects aroused in men like Staiger I was amazed at this vandalism. But there was a surprise to come, for inside the blue envelope there were two passport-sized photos. The photos were obviously recent ones. The people had grown older since the last time I’d seen them and the photos were dull and lacking in true blacks because they were printed on that sort of grey-toned photo-paper that is used in countries that can’t afford much silver. He placed them on the blotter in front of me. ‘Anyone you know?’

Two people stared back at me: a man and a woman. One was a Russian KGB man who operated under the name of Erich Stinnes. It was a stiffly posed version of the photo Bower had shown me in Berlin. The other was my wife.

That was not all. The ‘stiffener’ was provided by the presence of two small identity cards. They were pink: both printed on a typical example of the coarse stock standard for Eastern Europe’s endless flood of official paperwork.
Each was a specific journey visa: one person, one journey, one admission to the socialist people’s republic, one exit. The rubber stamp was that of the
Statni Tajna Bezpecnost,
Czechoslovakia’s Secret Security Organization. One card bore Staiger’s photo, the other mine.

The region of Czechoslovakia that borders Austria’s northern frontier is Moravia. Somewhat surprisingly, it is a short drive from downtown Vienna. Or would have been, had we not run into the Haydn festival. Once at the border we’d passed through the Austrian controls with no more than a moment’s pause while Staiger waved his papers at them. But the Czechoslovak checkpoint was a different matter entirely.

It is a busy place, for it lies on the direct route from Vienna to Prague, and beyond that Berlin. Here, through the gap between Alps and Carpathians, the wind from the Russian steppe brings sudden drops in temperature and bites through even the warmest of clothes to chill the bones. As well as the cars, on this day about twenty or so articulated heavy trucks from all corners of Europe were lined up nose to tail. Inside their vehicles, windows tightly closed, the drivers dozed, chatted and read, patiently waiting their turn in the large grey-painted hut where the cargo manifests and vehicle documentation were slowly read, incessantly queried and reluctantly rubber-stamped by uniformed bureaucrats, beady-eyed men with inky fingers and regularly oiled guns.

Baron Staiger, aka Otto Hoffmann, this morning wearing a wavy brunette toupee, had collected me from the Vienna hotel where I’d spent the night after leaving his home. We were in a white jeep-like Subaru, and somewhat conspicu ous amongst the exotic collection of Eastern bloc vehicles.
There were mud-spattered Ladas, smelly two-stroke Wartburgs, a Skoda cabriolet repainted bright pink, and a wonderful old Tatraplan with a long fin marking the air ducts of the rear engine compartment. With imperious disregard of the other drivers Staiger drove to the head of the line and parked carelessly alongside the glass-sided box from which half a dozen Czech officials surveyed the landscape with impassive disdain.

Staiger said, ‘Wait in the car,’ and went over to engage the sentry in animated talk while tapping the pink identity cards. Whatever dialect the sentry spoke Staiger seemed to speak it too, for the response was warm and immediate. The sentry nodded at Staiger and looked up and waved in the direction of a large green car on the Czech side of the border. Two men in civilian clothes hurried over to Staiger. They were tall, bulky men in trenchcoats, the sort of men who want everyone to know they work for the ‘First Section’ of the STB: that most effective of all the East European secret police services which – significantly perhaps – chose an ancient Prague monastery as its headquarters. The barrier was immediately raised.

‘All okay,’ said Staiger as he climbed back into the driver’s seat bringing with him a breath of chill winter air.

‘All okay,’ I echoed. ‘Well, that’s a nice change.’

‘What?’

‘All that tomfoolery with the stamp auction…and at the end it went wrong.’

‘It’s a regular route for our documents,’ he said smugly. ‘The Prague office arranged it; usually it goes like clockwork.’

‘Maybe someone should tell them that we live in the age of quartz crystals,’ I said.

‘The Americans were bidding against us. They got wind of what was happening. The Vienna CIA office sent a man with a pocketful of money.’

‘And that’s not the way we work,’ I said bitterly, remembering my inadequate allotment of schillings.

‘No one can outbid the Americans,’ he said. ‘It was lucky that I could fix it.’

The green car was on the road ahead of us as we went through the crossing point and through the frontier zone where trees and bushes have been cleared and mines sowed.

‘They’ll stay with us.’

‘Will they?’ I said and tried to sound pleased.

We followed them into the Moravian countryside. Eventually their green car turned off the main Prague road. The track was poorly maintained and to keep behind them Staiger had to engage the four-wheel drive.

This is a strange and baleful landscape: a sinister legacy of history. Until a generation ago some of these border regions were as prosperous as any in the whole land. Since the time of the Empire, German-speaking people lived in these lovely little towns with tree-lined thoroughfares and baroque houses set around grand squares.

But Adolf Hitler used the
Volksdeutsche
as an excuse to add these border lands to his Third Reich. This was the ‘far-away country’ that Britain’s Prime Minister – having contrived the modern world’s first summit meeting – would not go to war for. This was where ‘appeasement’ got a new pejorative meaning and ‘Munich’ became a way of saying surrender. Here lived the Czechs who waved swastika flags and welcomed the German invaders in their own language.

But after Hitler was defeated, the Stalinist government in Prague ruthlessly pushed the three and a half million German-speaking Czechs out of the country. Given only a few hours’ notice the exiles were permitted to take only what they could carry. They hiked across the border to find a new homeland. The vacated homes were ransacked by authorized officials and looters too. In a gesture more political than practical the houses were eventually turned over to vagrants and gypsies. Now few of even those residents remain.

We drove through villages that reflected the ambivalence the authorities showed towards this old ‘German region’.
Stop and go; push and pull; here were the fits and starts of a ponderous socialist bureaucracy burdened by its own historical perspective. Old buildings were half demolished and new ones half built. Piles of rubble spewed out into the roadway and abandoned cinder-block frameworks waited for roofs and windows that would never come.

We bumped through a little ghost town, disturbing a slumbering pack of gaunt dogs that slipped away without even barking. There were no people anywhere. The houses on the main square – their regal ‘Maria Theresa yellow’ stucco faded into a pox of chalky scars – were boarded up. So were the shops.

I pushed at the heating control again. ‘For the last time, Staiger. When are you going to tell me what this is all about?’ In London I had been told to do whatever he said. I was doing so but I did not enjoy being kept in the dark.

He shifted in the driver’s seat as if his spine was becoming stiff. ‘I cannot do that,’ he said affably, as he’d said it so many times before on this endless and uncomfortable journey. ‘My orders are to take you to the place we have to visit: nothing else.’

‘And bring me back?’

He smiled. ‘Yes. Bring you back too. At four o’clock. That’s all I know.’

Until now the few bits of conversation we’d exchanged had been only Viennese gossip, mostly concerning people I knew only slightly or not at all. Even worse, I’d heard Staiger’s detailed observations on Vienna’s confectionery, in particular its
Torten.
He’d explained exactly why he preferred the single-layer simplicity of the
Linzertorte
to everything else at Sacher. He revealed every last secret of Demel’s delicate
Haselnusstorte
and told me which of their vast selection of Torten benefited from the addition of a portion of whipped cream, and which would be spoiled by such a garnish. He even gave me the address of a little café where the extra ordinary quality of the apricot filling they put in
their Sachertorte made it preferable to the one they served at Sacher’s.

‘What do I have to do at this meeting? Did they tell you that in your orders?’

He wrenched his mind away from the cakes. ‘They said you would know.’

‘Is it a Russian?’

‘I say I don’t know. This is the truth; I don’t know. Soon we will be there.’ He was disappointed that his thesis on pastries had been so coolly received. Perhaps at some other time I would have enjoyed his dissertation, even joined him for a Kaffeeklatsch tour of the city. But not today.

The clouds were dark and in the dull light the distant mountains loomed unnaturally large. Everything was grey: the sky was grey, the mountains were grey, the farm buildings were grey: even the snow was grey. It was like a poorly printed snapshot: no black nor white anywhere. Life in Eastern Europe was like that nowadays. Belief had gone. Communism had faded but capitalism had not arrived: everyone muddled along, complying but not believing.

On and on we went, slower now that the road was bad. We came to a road junction where two khaki-coloured trucks were parked at the roadside. Three men in camouflaged battle smocks and netted helmets stood by the tailboard of the rearmost vehicle. As we got closer I could see one of them was an officer, the other two were NCOs with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. They turned to watch us pass.

It was at this junction that we turned on to an even worse road. Soon the green car stopped and pulled aside so that we could pass. As we overtook it the men inside stared at us with a curiosity seldom displayed by such people. Staiger seemed undismayed. The road climbed and we bumped and rattled along a pot-holed path where muddy pools were glazed with patterned ice. In the fields, islands of ancient snow had shrivelled to reveal the hard earth. Birds circled
in the sky, already deciding where to spend the night. Snow remained everywhere. Alongside this remote and narrow track, drifts of it piled high, its surface shone with tiny diamonds of ice and showed none of the accumulated carbon stains that passing traffic deposits.

‘They’re there,’ said Staiger. ‘See the tyre tracks.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Or perhaps it was the debugging team.’

‘Did you bring anything to eat?’ I asked.

‘I thought we’d have time to stop on the Austrian side. I didn’t expect we’d be this late,’ he said with solemn regret. He lifted his hand from the wheel to indicate another farm ahead.

Built in some ancient time when a farmer’s life was punctu ated with the role of warrior, it was sited to command a field of fire upon the full extent of the wide valley behind us. The cluster of buildings included two enormous barns, their roofs covered with snow. There was an entrance gateway of considerable grandeur, whose sculptured coat of arms had been deliberately chiselled away but not entirely obliterated so that a decapitated lion clung precariously to half a shield. Tucked away from the wind on the lee side of the ruined gate lodge there were two Czech traffic policemen sitting astraddle motorcycles. They watched us pass.

After the gate a long approach road led past wooden troughs, which steamed gently, and corrugated iron pigsties, to what once had been the central building of a fortified farmhouse.

The car only just squeezed through the low narrow archway, bumped over the cobbles into an enclosed yard and stopped at the back door of a farmhouse upon the walls of which the floral patterns of folk-art paintings could barely be discerned. The yard was big, a huge piece of farm machinery was quietly rusting away in the corner, and some chickens – flustered momentarily by the car – resumed their
search for sustenance between the stones. There was a smell of rubbish burning or perhaps the stove needed cleaning.

Scrambling about on the roof there were two men, each equipped with powerful binoculars. Two more men, in short leather overcoats and large boots, sat on a bench in the yard. Hats tipped forward over their eyes, they sprawled like drunken sunbathers, but I noted the relaxed postures of men who remained still for long periods. And I noticed the undone top buttons that would make it easy for them to pull something from a shoulder holster in a hurry.

Without moving they watched us from under lowered eyelids. I got out and waited for Staiger as he carefully locked the doors of his car.

Suddenly a large black mongrel dog came flying out from a doorway, barking and snarling. With reckless speed, and suicidal disregard for its leash, the hound threw itself at my throat. But as the long chain reached its fullest extent the dog choked and toppled sideways, its bark strangled. Tugging ferociously at the chain it crouched low and continued to snarl and bare its teeth, making an exaggerated display of aggression as many creatures do when their anger is constrained.

The men seated on the bench had hardly moved during this display of canine fury. Now Staiger laughed nervously and made sure his hat was balanced on his toupee. ‘Go in,’ said Staiger. ‘I will be waiting for you.’

By that time I had begun to guess what was to come. Inside, the farmhouse was dark, its tiny windows set low in the thick walls. The floor was rough worn tiles and there was not much furniture except a refectory table, pushed back against the wall because it was so big, and some old chairs with rush seats.

She was standing in the gloom. She spoke in a whisper. ‘Bernard!’ My first impression was that Fiona was shorter and thinner than I remembered. Then, with a twinge of guilt, I realized that this was because I’d been with Gloria so long.

‘What bloody mad game are you up to now?’ I said. The words emerged as a mumble, revealing I suppose my con fusion. I still loved her but I was wary of her, unable to decide what she wanted of me, and unwilling to provide for her another chance of duping me in some way or other.

‘Don’t be angry.’

‘Don’t be angry,’ I said wearily. Her deliberate passivity fuelled my rage and suddenly I shouted, ‘You stupid devious bitch. What are you up to now? Are you raving mad?’

She looked me up and down and smiled. Who knows what kind of animosity lay concealed within her? If she was equally angry with me, she disclosed no sign of it. She waited for the steam to go out of me, as she knew it would, and smiled again. She still had that wonderful smile that had devastated me the first time I met her. It was a humorous smile, with a trace of mockery in it, but it was an invi tation to join her in her view of the world about us, and it was an invitation I never could resist. ‘There is nothing to eat here. Nothing at all. I knew you’d be hungry.’ Her voice was flat, perhaps deliberately so, and even though she was my wife I could not tell what emotions were in her mind. It had always been so. Sometimes I wondered whether this enigmatic quality was what made her so attractive to me and I wondered to what extent she failed to understand me in return. Not much I think.

‘Bernard, darling.’ She tried to put her arms round me but I shrank away.

She said, ‘How are the children?’ and I was burned by the warmth of her body; overwhelmed by a perfume I’d almost forgotten.