‘What are you implying, József? I thought it was a road traffic accident. In case you haven’t heard, I don’t drive.’
Báthory did his best to give her a searching look and tightened the screws. An obscure organisation called The Lord Alone claimed that Stenvik had been taken out by one of their number. So the question arose, how did they know where he would be?
‘Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? I arranged to meet the guy and tipped them off.’
Knowing irony when he heard it, Báthory offered her some advice.
‘It is not a good idea to joke about such things: someone might take you seriously.’
‘Fair enough, but if these people are claiming credit where none is due, this theory of yours leaks like a sieve. You do realise that?’
He did, but the Norwegians, covering all the angles however obtuse, had asked him to check it out.
‘Possibly,’ he looked up from his phone, ‘but what I still can’t get my head round is your interest in nanotechnology.’
Horváth smiled; this was too easy.
‘Well, József, come on, I make a living translating technical texts from English to Hungarian. In any given case, I can’t do that without some sort of handle on the subject. Could you?’
‘So you visited Stenvik.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Stenvik passed your contact details to Channing.’
‘Probably. I don’t know.’
‘You may not, but I do.’
‘Okay.’
Báthory looked down at his phone again, his stubble like sandpaper, rough and abrasive. Really, what had she been thinking about that night?
‘And the meeting with Stenvik was arranged by, let me see, a German national by the name of Catherine Cooper. A friend of yours?’
For the first time, Horváth was alarmed. Her meeting with Báthory at Peaches and Cream might not have been the accident it seemed; so what was the nature of his interest, what was he really investigating? Since she had no intention of telling him anything about Catherine Cooper, she deflected his question.
‘As far as I can see, you already have all the answers.’
Báthory nodded. ‘Of course. I’m simply trying to determine if you do too.’
33
Peace is much sought after but seldom achieved. Dieter Klein came closest to it in his own apartment, where double glazing excluded the clamour of the world outside. Though he owned both a television and a radio, he seldom used either. The only obstacle to the tranquillity he craved was the extractor fan in his bathroom. This device activated automatically when he switched on the light, an irritation he worked round with a motion-sensing battery-operated light attached to the wall with adhesive pads.
Yet all of these measures taken together, successful as they were, did nothing to protect him from the noise generated between his ears by the incessant mental activity which he could not turn off even in his sleep. And the demands of his work interfered more and more with the effort required by his music, their respective modes of thought so opposed that each inhibited the other. The drudgery of studying the stream of official reports crossing his desk did not sit well with the soaring flights of fancy which overtook him as he composed. Something would have to give, and that would be his job at the BND. After all, anyone could read a report, but it was given only to a few to enrich the world with music.
The case was simple enough. He was too young to retire but couldn’t afford simply to resign. Here on the Kreuzbergstraße, his rent was high and he had no intention of moving somewhere cheaper. Slumming was not in his nature, besides which down-market locations were invariably noisy: heated arguments through one wall, the animal noises of sexual congress through another, children’s feet thundering on the floor above. When you came right down to it, people were disgusting. The only solution was retirement on health grounds. But since there was nothing wrong with his body, those grounds would have to be mental, and there he was in with a shout if he could convince Barbara Grenzenlos that he was losing it. But Grenzenlos was a professional. He couldn’t hope to get one past her just by sitting in her office juggling loose screws. Evidence of his problem should come to her from elsewhere. To which end he had a plan.
He knew that Pearson and Lang were feeding him ludicrous leads they hoped would make him look foolish when he followed them up. And it came to him in his sleep that he could use this to his advantage, hence the report he had submitted to his superiors; a work of fiction to rival, albeit on a smaller scale, the works of Thomas Mann. However, since he was hoping to deceive a professional, Klein was more anxious than usual on his second visit to Barbara Grenzenlos. He was aware of that and worried she’d pick up on it; if a shrink didn’t, who would? And she did, though she’d already marked his card as uptight by nature.
Grenzenlos affected an impression of equality between analyst and client, for example, by not having a desk or filing cabinet in her room, but nonetheless maintained a paper supremacy without which she felt she couldn’t function. On this occasion, she had a document in her hand.
‘You recently submitted a report to the service and, as I hope you will recall, gave me permission to access it.’
Klein nodded: if she hadn’t followed it up, he would have been sorely disappointed.
‘I have since read this paper and, to my mind at least, it raises certain issues.’
He rewarded her with a sceptical look. She’d have to do better than that.
‘A report which failed to raise issues would not be worth writing in the first place.’
This statement of the obvious, so typical of Klein, obliged Grenzenlos to clarify.
‘Undoubtedly, with respect to content, but here we are concerned more with what the report might tell us regarding its author’s state of mind.’
Sitting in her chair, elegant legs crossed, Grenzenlos was as desirable as ever to someone that way inclined. She asked him to consider his lengthy analysis of the function of the many species of grass on the planet: if there was no significant threat, either viral or fungal, some might consider that time expended on this subject could have been better spent. Since Klein had hoped she would arrive at this conclusion, he defended himself with a weak reference to Dutch elm disease but otherwise let it pass.
‘More interesting, to me at any rate, is your attitude to this author of yours, Mr Youd, his possible ethnicity and his use of pseudonyms. You appear to believe that anyone working under a pseudonym must harbour a fraudulent intent.’
‘Yes,’ Klein agreed, ‘exactly.’ He looked hard at Grenzenlos, whose real name he now knew to be Schmidt. ‘What other reason could there be?’
Grenzenlos could think of several but attempted to entangle him only in one.
‘You have come across cases of multiple personality?’
‘In psychiatric literature, not in real life.’
‘So we may say that there is only one Dieter Klein.’
Klein looked pleased with himself. ‘I like to think so, yes.’
‘From which it follows that he behaves in exactly the same way across the entire range of his social interactions. For example, this Herr Klein of ours converses with his cleaner in exactly the same way as he does with his superiors here at the BND.’
Klein, who had never talked to a cleaner in his life, was on the point of contesting this assertion when he remembered his objective in these meetings. So he lied.
‘Pretty much, yes.’
‘In that case, let us pursue this a little further by applying, as it were, a stress test. Our friend, Herr Klein, would converse with his cleaner in exactly the same way as he would with his significant other.’
But our friend, Herr Klein, knew a trap when he heard one. Having access to his file, Grenzenlos knew that there was no known significant other. In itself this proved little, it could happen to anyone at any time, but the f
act that there never had been such a person attested to an unusual degree of insularity.
‘Dr Grenzenlos, I am well capable of achieving significance without the assistance of another party.’
Grenzenlos noted the implicit hostility in Klein’s reversion to the formal, but for her this was minor and easily dealt with.
‘I’m pleased to hear that. Really. It says a lot for you.’
But even as she said it, she noted in her little book, purely as an aide-memoire, that the only person Klein was capable of loving was himself. She had never met anyone quite so self-absorbed. And he wasn’t finished yet.
‘My given name is quite enough for me. I have no need of others.’
Unfortunately, this bold claim was at odds with the facts.
‘So correct me if I’m wrong, but when you were investigating an animal rights group some years ago, you did not operate under the name Wolfgang Cramm?’
‘Not to the best of my recollection.’
‘Yet at the trial, a number of defendants, including, let me see, Werner Haller, Ignatz Radziwill and Trudi Kirsch, all testified that you infiltrated their group under that name.’
‘That may have been the case, but you will appreciate that I was acting under orders at the time.’
Grenzenlos smiled. ‘This is not Nuremberg and you are not on trial.’
Klein took this observation as an insult and was duly offended.
‘I reject out of hand any comparison of my behaviour with that of the security forces under the Third Reich.’
‘Of course you do, Herr Klein; that is only to be expected.’
But if Klein had a weakness, it was pursuing a line of thought to its destruction, something he risked doing now.
‘Very well. A second name, perhaps, in the course of official business. But Youd uses seven. Seven! Surely that is taking multiple personalities too far. There has to be something else going on here, something behind it.’
‘And that would be?’
Since Klein had created a conspiracy where none existed, he referred to the report in which he’d given it full expression. The gentleman in question was plainly an agent of Mossad, Sam being short for Samuel. Or he had been till his death in 2012. Doing his best to appear articulate and unhinged at the same time, Klein attributed a range of activities to this man, foremost among them attempts to destabilise the Middle East peace process. His books were a front, nothing more, and so numerous he couldn’t have written them all himself. They’d been composed by others and distributed across his several pen names.
Considering what to buy at the deli on her way home, Grenzenlos listened to all this with half an ear. Since his superiors wanted to wave Klein goodbye, all she had to do was write a persuasive report, and Klein was making it easy for her. But as he prepared to leave, she widened the discussion: the more material she had the better.
‘You mentioned last time that you’d no interest in vocal music – I couldn’t help wondering why that was.’
Klein had not been expecting an irrelevant question and considered for a moment if some deeper purpose was at work, something along the lines of a musical inkblot test.
‘It’s really not so interesting.’
Grenzenlos rewarded him with a reassuring smile and, hoping to tempt him, left him a silence to fill.
‘Well, since you ask, there are three reasons, the first being technical.’
He explained, in too much detail, that the sampling process, while it could handle the human voice, could not deal with words, which were entirely different from a succession of notes played on a flute.
‘I mean,’ he pointed out, ‘a flute does not emit a vowel one second and a consonant the next. Further to that,’ he continued, ‘a flute has no truck with the velar fricative, voiced or not.’
Grenzenlos could see the force of this argument but suggested that Klein preferred instrumental music anyway.
‘That’s true.’
‘And there are reasons for that?’
‘I have given this question some thought.’
Grenzenlos nodded; she believed him.
‘Firstly, and while there may be honourable exceptions, singers tend to employ a vibrato so wide you can drive a coach and horses through it. They give you above the note, below the note, but leave you screaming for the note itself. I find this unsatisfactory, not to say downright distressing.’
Grenzenlos pretended to write this down, but considered it offered no way in for a more profound analysis.
‘But altogether more serious from my perspective,’ Klein continued, ‘is what we may term a more philosophical point.’
‘And what might that be?’ Grenzenlos enquired, by now hoping not to find out.
‘It is not possible to lie or dissimulate in a musical composition which is entirely instrumental,’ he announced to her and her consulting room in ex cathedra tones.
‘And why might that be, Herr Klein?’
He had given this a great deal of thought too, much of which had found its way into a paper he was currently working on. Not intended for public consumption, its purpose was to clarify the subject to himself.
‘I would have thought that was obvious: unlike a word, a musical note has no meaning.’
34
Delay can be exploited by any organisation on a tight budget. But with a report from Barbara Grenzenlos to the effect that such was his level of self-regard, Dieter Klein would be happiest in a room full of mirrors, his employer not only allowed him to retire on health grounds but agreed to let him do so without working the period of notice specified in his contract.
Her reasoned analysis concluded that the subject exemplified a narcissistic personality disorder towards the God-complex end of the spectrum. He ticked most of the boxes in the latest edition of the shrink’s bible, DSM 5, and while he was at it, ticked off his colleagues as well. In particular, he was preoccupied with a fantasy of success as a composer, in which connection he greatly exaggerated his own ability, not to say world-historical importance, in the pantheon of the greats. Events could yet prove her wrong, but she did not expect him to succeed. Such a person, she pointed out, always believed himself to be in the right, however strong the evidence to the contrary. Could there be a worse trait for a member of the security services? Dr Grenzenlos didn’t think so.
But the kindness afforded Klein was offset by the BND’s treatment of Ursula Lang, not only expected to stand in for him till a permanent replacement could be found but to do so at her existing salary. And they were in no hurry to find a replacement, because the longer they took, the more money they saved. Since Klein had been encouraging Lang to retire for several months, she found this annoying to say the least.
‘This has gone far enough,’ she said to her husband, who agreed but continued to eat his sausages.
‘So, Röschen, what are you going to do?’
‘I shall chair a meeting.’
And she did, summoning her colleagues to BND headquarters, while politely requesting that Adalbert Pearson attend too, the most she could do since he was not on the payroll. Though Pearson claimed to be vacationing on a friend’s yacht off Mindanao, Lang knew he was actually shacked up with an actress in Königswinter whom he did not wish to leave to her own devices, battery-operated or otherwise. But for the acting manager, such setbacks are easily overcome, in this case by innocently enquiring whether he expected further work to come his way.
Having laid several files on the table for each of those expected, she was about to call the meeting to order when, after a mild tap on the door, a woman entered she had never set eyes on before. Yet when Lang suggested she was attending the wrong meeting, the new arrival, a slim individual in a dark pencil skirt, white shirt and tie, assured her this was not the case.
‘Liesl von Eschwege,’ she said, ‘legal department.’
Realisi
ng she would remain, Lang looked at her more closely. A lean young woman without a surplus ounce of flesh on the bone and neat brown hair cut short, von Eschwege was clearly a person who liked to keep things in order. In which case, she had come to the wrong place, because Pearson was in the room too.
‘We are currently undertaking a compliance audit across departments,’ she explained, ‘so please don’t feel singled out in any way. Nothing could be further from the truth.’
So saying, she sat down at the pile of folders intended for Werner Vogt, yet to appear, and started leafing through them. Lang assumed Pearson would be worried by this development, but as he winked at her, a broad grin spread over his face. He looked amazingly cheerful. She had just begun a summary of the position when Vogt entered, this time without Theo, whose coat was thick enough to conceal a microphone and who, in any case, drank so much water the service might conclude there was a leak and waste several hours searching the building to find it.
‘Apologies, Frau Lang.’
And that was it, not a word of explanation; in him, to an extent, the absent Klein lived on. Lang dismissed the apology with a wave of the hand and explained the view which she and Pearson now shared. There was reason to believe that a group of individuals were conspiring to acquire, produce and release a variant of the virus H7N9 with the intention of killing as many people as possible. The likelihood was that they considered the human species an infestation of such magnitude that only its destruction could save the planet from everything from noxious emissions to the death of the oceans by plastic.
‘As the briefing paper on this virus explains, H7N9 is a variant of the avian flu virus. Up till now, it has not spread well from person to person, but work is underway to change that.’
She didn’t recommend that those present knock themselves out reading the relevant paper – it was heavily technical – but instead head straight for the assessment at the end. Which everyone did except Vogt, whose documents were now in the neat though unadorned hands of Liesl von Eschwege. Not a ring in sight. But he held off pointing out his problem to Lang until he knew who the newcomer was. She might be from human resources and already noted a late arrival against his name. Lang smiled to herself as she saw his confusion and left him to stew. Management had its rewards after all.
The Ears of a Cat Page 15
