Mexico Set

by Len Deighton

  There were murmurs of agreement and appreciation. Then they all drank to Goethe. As they all trooped off to the bar, I said to Werner, ‘I never feel more English than when I hear someone quoting your great German poets.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Werner, with more than a trace of indignation.

  ‘Such ideas would win few converts in England at any level of intellect, affluence or political thought. Consider what our friend just proclaimed so proudly. In English it would become something like “Employ each hour which so quickly glides away…” So far, so good. But then comes “…but learn through order how to conquer time’s swift flight.”’

  ‘It’s a rotten translation,’ said Werner. ‘In the context gewinnen is probably meant as “reclaim” or “earn”.’

  ‘The point I’m making, my dear Werner, is the natural repulsion any Englishman would feel at the notion of inflicting order upon his time. Especially inflicting order upon his leisure time or, as is possibly implied here, his retirement.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For Englishmen order does not go well with leisure. They like muddle and disarray. They like “messing about in boats”, or dozing in a deckchair on a beach, or pottering about in the garden, or reading the newspapers or some paperback book.’

  ‘Are you trying to persuade me that you are very English?’

  ‘That fellow Henry Tiptree is in Berlin,’ I said. ‘He’s that tall friend of…’

  ‘I know who he is,’ said Werner.

  ‘Tiptree asked me if I was German.’

  ‘And are you German?’

  ‘I feel very German when I’m with people like Tiptree,’ I said. Konrad came to the table brandishing his menu. He was looking at Werner with great interest.

  ‘So if Tiptree starts quoting Goethe at you, you’ll have a nervous collapse,’ said Werner. ‘Do you want a dessert? I don’t want a dessert, and you’re getting too fat.’

  ‘Just coffee,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what I am. I see those people from Silesia. You tell me about Zena’s family. I look at myself and I wonder where I can really call home. Do you know what I mean, Werner?’

  ‘Of course I know what you mean. I’m a Jew.’ He looked at Konrad. ‘Two coffees; two schnapps.’

  Konrad did not hurry us to leave the dining room after he brought the order. He poured the coffees and brought tiny glasses of clear schnapps and then left the bottle on the table. It was of local manufacture. Konrad seemed to think that anyone who’d come from ‘over there’ would need an ample supply of alcohol. But I had to wait until we were quite alone before I could get down to business. I looked round the room to be sure there was no one who could hear us. There was no one. From the next room came the loud voices of the Silesians. ‘What about Stinnes?’

  Werner rubbed his hands together and then sniffed at them. There was still the fishy smell of the smoked eel. He splashed some of the alcohol on his napkin and rubbed his fingers with the dampened cloth. ‘When I went over there I thought it would be a waste of time.’

  ‘Did you, Werner?’

  ‘I thought if London Central want me to go there and cobble up some sort of report I would oblige them. But I didn’t believe I could find out very much about Stinnes. Furthermore I was pretty well convinced that Stinnes had been leading us up the garden path.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind on both scores.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You’re concerned about him aren’t you?’ said Werner.

  ‘I don’t give a damn. I just want to know.’

  ‘You identify with him.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said.

  ‘He was born in 1943, the same year that you were born. His father was in the occupying army in Berlin, just as your father was. He went to a German civilian school just as you did. He is a senior-grade intelligence officer with a German speciality, just as you are a British one. You identify with him.’

  ‘I’m not going to argue with you, Werner, but you know as well as I do that I could prepare a list a mile long to show you that you’re talking nonsense.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘Stinnes has also had a Spanish-language speciality for many years, and seems to be a KGB expert on Cuba and all things Cuban. I’ll bet you that if Stinnes was lined up for a job in Moscow it was to be on their Cuba Desk.’

  ‘Stinnes didn’t originally go to Cuba just because he could speak Spanish,’ said Werner. ‘He went there primarily because he was one of Moscow’s experts on Roman Catholicism. He was in the Religious Affairs Bureau; Section 44. Back in those days the Bureau was just two men and a dog. Now, with the Polish Church playing a part in politics, the Bureau is big and important. But Stinnes has not worked for Section 44 for many years. His wife persuaded him to take the Berlin job.’

  ‘That’s good work, Werner. His marriage?’

  ‘Stinnes has always been a womanizer. It’s hard to believe when you look at him but women are strange creatures. We both know that, Bernie.’

  ‘He’s getting a divorce?’

  ‘It all seems to be exactly as Stinnes described. They live in a house – not an apartment, a house – in the country, not far from Werneuchen.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘North-east, outside the city limits. It’s the last station on the S-Bahn. The electric trains only go to Marzahn but the service continues a long way beyond.’

  ‘Damned strange place to live.’

  ‘His wife is German, Bernie. She came back from Moscow because she couldn’t learn to speak Russian. She’d not want to live with a lot of Russian wives.’

  ‘You went out there?’

  ‘I saw the wife. I said I was compiling a census for the bus service. I asked her how often she went into Berlin and how she travelled.’

  ‘Jesus. That’s dangerous, Werner.’

  ‘It was okay, Bernie. I think she was glad to talk to someone.’

  ‘Don’t do anything like that again, Werner. There are people who could do that for you, people with papers and back-up. Suppose she’d sent for the police and you’d had to show your papers?’

  ‘It was okay, Bernie. She wasn’t going to send for anyone. She was nursing a bruised face that was going to become a black eye. She said she fell over but it was Stinnes who hit her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Now do you see why it’s better I do these things myself? I talked to her. She told me that she was hoping to move back to Leipzig. She came from a village just outside Leipzig. She has a brother and two sisters living there. She can’t wait to get back there. She hates Berlin, she told me. That’s the sort of thing a wife says when she really means she hates her husband. It all fits together, Bernie.’

  ‘So you think Stinnes is on the level? He has been passed over for promotion and he does want a divorce?’

  ‘I don’t know about the promotion prospects,’ said Werner, ‘but the marriage is all but over. I went to all the houses in that little street. The neighbours are all German. They talked to me. They’ve heard Stinnes and his wife arguing, and they heard them shouting and things breaking the night before I saw her with a battered face. They fight, Bernie. That’s an established fact. They fight because Stinnes runs around with other women.’

  ‘Let me hang this one on you. This business – the arguments with his wife, his womanizing and his being in a dead-end job – is all arranged by the KGB as part of a cover story. At best, they will lead us on into this entrapment to see what we’re going to do. At worst, they’ll try to grab one of us.’

  ‘Grab one of us? They won’t grab me; I’ve just been twice through the checkpoints. I see no reason to think they are going to grab Dicky. When you say grab one of us, you mean grab Bernie Samson.’

  ‘Well, suppose I do mean that?’

  ‘No, Bernie. It’s not just a cover story. Stinnes punched his wife in the face. You’re not telling me that he did that as part of his cover story too?’

>   I didn’t answer. I looked out of the window. Already the workmen were back from lunch and at work on the demolition. I looked at my watch; forty-five minutes exactly. That’s the way it was in Germany.

  Werner said, ‘No one would go home and hit his wife just to fit in with a story his boss invented.’

  ‘Suppose it was all part of some bigger plan. Then perhaps it would be worthwhile.’

  ‘Why don’t you admit you are wrong, Bernie? Even if they thought they were going to get the greatest secrets in the world, Stinnes did not punch his wife for that reason.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Bernie,’ said Werner gently. ‘Have you calculated the chances of my going out to that house and seeing her with a bruised face? A million to one? If we were discussing rumours, I might go along with you. If I had only the reports of the neighbours, I might go along with you. But a man doesn’t smash his wife’s face in on the million-to-one chance that an enemy agent would take what you describe as a dangerous chance.’

  ‘You’re right, Werner.’

  He looked at me a long time. I suppose he was trying to decide whether to say the rest of it. Finally he said, ‘If you want to hear what I really think, it comes closer to home.’

  ‘What do you really think, Werner?’ Now that the last remaining wall was down, they had started to bulldoze the rubble into piles.

  ‘I think Stinnes was in charge in Berlin until your wife took over his department. She told you Stinnes was her senior assistant…’

  ‘That was obviously not true. If Stinnes was her senior assistant the last person she’d tell would be me.’

  ‘I think she threw Stinnes out. I think she sent him off to Mexico to get him out of her way. It’s the same when anyone takes over a new department; a new boss gets rid of all the previous top staff and their projects.’

  ‘Maybe.’ I looked at the workmen. I’d always thought that old buildings were better made than new ones. I’d always thought they were solid and well built but this one was just as flimsy as any of the new ones that greedy speculators threw together.

  ‘You know what Fiona is like. She doesn’t care for competition of the sort that Stinnes would give her. It’s just what Fiona would do.’

  ‘I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what Fiona might do,’ I said. ‘And I think you’re right about her wanting to get rid of Stinnes. Maybe she’s decided to get rid of him for good and all.’ Werner looked up and waited for the next bit. ‘Get rid of him to us by letting him get enrolled.’

  Werner closed his eyes and pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger. He said, ‘A bit far-fetched, Bernie. She went to England to warn you off. You told me that.’ His eyes remained shut.

  ‘That might be the clever part of it. She warns me to lay off Stinnes; she knows that it will have no effect on me.’

  ‘And her threats to kidnap the children?’

  ‘There were no threats to kidnap the children. I was thinking back to the conversation. She offered to let things stay as they are for a year.’

  He opened his eyes and stared at me. ‘Providing Stinnes was left alone.’

  ‘Okay, but it was all very negative, Werner, and Fiona is not negative. Normally I would have expected her to say what I must do and she’d say what she’d do in return. That’s the sort of person she is; she makes deals. I think she wants us to enrol Stinnes. I think she’d like to get rid of him permanently. If she really wanted to stop us enrolling him she’d send him to some place where we couldn’t get our hands on him.’

  ‘And killing the boy, MacKenzie. How does that fit into the theory?’

  ‘She had a witness with her all the time – the black girl – and there were others too. That’s why she was talking in riddles. She didn’t want to see me alone so there was no chance of them suspecting her of double-crossing them. I think the MacKenzie murder was a decision made by someone else; the back-up team. She’d have a back-up team with her. You know how they work.’

  Werner sat motionless for a moment as he thought about it. ‘She’s ruthless enough for it, Bernie.’

  ‘Damn right she is,’ I said.

  He waited a moment. ‘You still love her, don’t you?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Whatever you want to call it, something prevents you thinking about her clearly. If it came to the crunch, that something would prevent you doing what needed to be done. Maybe that wouldn’t matter so much except that you are determined to believe that she feels the same way about you. Fiona is ruthless, Bernie. Totally dedicated to doing whatever the KGB want done. Face it, she’d eliminate MacKenzie without a qualm and, if it comes to it, she’ll eliminate you.’

  ‘You’re an incurable romantic, Werner,’ I said, making a joke of it, but the strength of his feelings had shaken me.

  Now Werner had said what he thought about Fiona, he was embarrassed. We sat silent, both looking out of the window like strangers in a railway carriage. It was still raining. ‘That Henry Tiptree,’ said Werner eventually. ‘What does he want?

  ‘He doesn’t like super-luxury hotels such as the Steigenberger, with private baths, and room service, disco and fancy food. He likes the real Berlin. He likes to rough it at Lisl’s.’

  ‘Crap,’ said Werner.

  ‘He tried to get me drunk the other night. He probably thought I was going to bare my soul to him. Why crap? I like Lisl’s and so do you.’

  Werner didn’t bother to answer my question. We both knew that Henry Tiptree was not like us and was unlikely to share our tastes in anything from music and food to cars and women. ‘He’s spying on you,’ said Werner. ‘Frank Harrington’s sent him to Lisl’s to spy on you. It’s obvious.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Werner.’ I laughed. It wasn’t funny. I laughed just because I was sitting across the table from Werner, and Werner was sitting there safe and sound. I said, ‘To hear you talk, Frank Harrington rules the world. Frank is only the Berlin Resident. All he’s interested in is nursing the Berlin Field Unit along until he retires. He’s not training his spies to chase me across the world from Mexico City to Tante Lisl’s in order to get me drunk and see what secrets he can winkle out of me.’

  ‘You always try to make me sound ridiculous.’

  ‘Frank isn’t out to get you. And he’s not trying to get me either.’

  ‘So who is this Henry Tiptree?’

  ‘Just another graduate of the Foreign Office charm school,’ I said. ‘He’s helping to write one of those reports about the Soviet arms build-up. You know the sort of thing; what are the political intentions and the economic consequences.’

  ‘You don’t believe any of that,’ said Werner.

  ‘I believe it. Why wouldn’t I believe it? The department is buried under the weight of reports like that. Forests are set aside to provide the pulp for reports like that. Sometimes I think the entire staff of the Foreign Office does nothing else but concoct reports like that. Do you know, Werner, that in 1914 the Foreign Office staff numbered a hundred and seventy-six people in London plus four hundred and fifty in the diplomatic service overseas. Now that we’ve lost the empire they need six thousand officials plus nearly eight thousand locally engaged staff.’

  Werner looked at me with heavy-lidded eyes. ‘Take the Valium and lie down for a moment.’

  ‘That’s nearly fourteen thousand people, Werner. Can you wonder why we have Henry Tiptrees swanning round the world looking for something to occupy them?’

  ‘I don’t like him,’ said Werner. ‘He’s out to make trouble. You’ll see.’

  ‘I’ll ask Frank who he is,’ I offered. ‘I’ll have to make my peace with Frank. I’ll need his help to keep London off my back.’ I tried to make it sound easy, but in fact I dreaded all the departmental repercussions that would emerge when I surfaced again. And I was far from sure whether Frank would be able to help. Or whether he would want to help.

  ‘Are you driving back to Berlin? I had to leave the car in the East, of course. I’
ll phone Zena and say I’ll be back for dinner. Are you free for dinner?’

  ‘Zena will want you all to herself, Werner.’ Surely Frank Harrington would stand by me. He’d always helped in the past. We had a father-and-son relationship, with all the stormy encounters that that so often implies. But Frank would help. Within the department he was the only one I could always rely upon.

  ‘Nonsense. We’ll all have dinner,’ said Werner. ‘Zena likes entertaining.’

  ‘I’m not too concerned about Tiptree,’ I said. It wasn’t true, of course. I was concerned about him. I was concerned about the whole bloody tangled mess I was in. And the fact that I’d denied my concern was enough to tell Werner of those fears. He stared at me; I suppose he was worried about me. I smiled at him and added, ‘You only have to spend ten minutes with Tiptree to know he’s a blundering amateur.’ But was he really such a foolish amateur, I wondered. Or was he a very clever man who knew how to look like one?

  ‘It’s the amateurs who are most dangerous,’ said Werner.

  17

  Zena Volkmann could be captivating when she was in the mood to play the gracious hostess. This evening she greeted us wearing tight-fitting grey pants with a matching shirt. And over this severe garb she’d put a loose silk sleeveless jacket that was striped with every colour in the rainbow. Her hair was up and coiled round her head in a style that required a long time at the hairdresser. She had used some eyeshadow and enough make-up to accentuate her cheekbones. She looked very pretty, but not like the average housewife welcoming her husband home for dinner, more like a girlfriend expecting to be taken out to an expensive night-spot. I delivered Werner to the apartment in Berlin-Dahlem ready to forget his invitation. But Zena said she’d prepared a meal for the three of us and insisted earnestly enough to convince me to stay, loudly enough for Werner to be proud of her warm hospitality.