Red to Black f-1

by Alex Dryden

  ‘The night we left each other in Basle,’ I said, ‘did you take the train to Frankfurt with Karin that night?’

  ‘Karin?’ he said.

  I could have thrown him off the balcony.

  ‘The Swiss girl we met in Geneva, Finn,’ I said. ‘That Karin.’

  ‘Oh, that Karin,’ he said.

  It was such a typical response of Finn’s and always a fall-back position for him, even if he had nothing to hide. He did it in order to ponder any question, no matter how trivial.

  ‘Well, did you?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s what they say in Moscow, is it?’

  ‘They showed me a photograph of the two of you. You had the bag with you you’d bought with me the day before in Gstaad.’

  ‘Christ Almighty.’ Finn looked up at the sky, then scratched some peeling paint from the balcony’s railing.

  ‘So did you?’

  He looked me straight in the eyes. ‘Of course I didn’t, Rabbit.’

  ‘Why, “Of course not”?’

  ‘They faked up a photo, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that the answer you know to be true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He tried to put his arms around me but I pushed him away.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘This is exactly what they want.’

  ‘That’s convenient, too.’

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘That wasn’t all,’ I said. ‘They also provided me with a new background for you that denies everything you’ve said about yourself. Everything you’ve said to me.’

  ‘So what do they say I am now? A trust-fund kid with a stockbroker father and a charity-worker mother living in a Queen Anne hall in Surrey?’

  ‘Pretty much, yes.’

  ‘So their fakes aren’t getting any more convincing at the Forest, then.’

  ‘Which is true?’

  ‘Everything I’ve told you is true.’

  We sat in silence and the first specks of rain began to fall. ‘You’re going to have to think about this,’ he said. ‘You know the answer. Just think about it. Think what’s preventing you from accepting what you know.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  I thought about how our profession allowed the lies and deceit to creep through the rest of our lives until it was hard to know what was true and what was a lie. For a moment I almost wanted my relationship with Finn to have been a fantasy, just to stop the uncertainty.

  ‘Everything is so convenient,’ I said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘What they say, that’s convenient, of course, from their point of view. And your denial, that, too, is convenient. It relies on us both knowing that they are more than capable of faking everything.’

  I let him take me by the shoulders then.

  ‘I love you, Anna,’ he said, and I looked deep inside him. I felt our lives come together with the contact of his hands.

  ‘I love you too,’ I said.

  He grinned.

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then,’ he said.

  We sat in the rain and held each other awkwardly. I knew I couldn’t bear to be without him then.

  In the silence, with just the patter of the raindrops and the steady drone of traffic which becomes, in a city, like a kind of silence, he echoed my thoughts.

  ‘I can’t bear to be without you,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what Nana always said was the only test of love,’ I replied.

  Finn and I went to bed just before midnight. He turned to me in the bedroom, looked me in the eyes, and asked me to marry him.

  It was the most direct question he’d ever asked me and I said yes immediately, without thinking. It was as if someone had asked me if I wanted a glass of water when I was dying of thirst.

  And so Finn and I got married, just as the year 2006 began.

  33

  AT THE END OF APRIL, Finn told me we were to travel to Liechtenstein. He said we should go by separate routes, as we usually did, but I thought that now it seemed like we were two parents who travel separately so that their children aren’t left orphaned.

  I flew to Zurich and Finn to Munich. We were to meet at the Café Sacher in Vaduz, Liechtenstein’s capital, at 4.20 p.m. on 4 May. Failing that, our fall-back plan was to return at staggered hours over the next three days. I don’t know why Finn made these complex arrangements, he never had before, but I should have guessed that he knew he was getting close to danger. I never saw him making a call, doing anything that concerned the Plan, but I guess he was setting up what was to be the final act, out of my sight.

  We met at the time appointed in the Café Sacher, an ancient building which sagged over a cobbled street off the main square in Vaduz.

  Finn had rented a car and after we’d had coffee and some pastries he’d bought at another café–which irritated the proprietor–we walked down the hill to a car park, the closest a car could approach the square. It was a beautiful day though, as Finn said later, there was still a hint in the Alpine evenings of the winter just passed. There’d been a huge snowfall in the middle of April.

  We drove out of the city in the last warmth of a bright, clear afternoon and headed up into the mountains that bordered Germany. It was a beautiful drive. The fair-skinned cattle were cropping the early grass on the Alpine pastures where they would remain until the September transhumance, the ancient tradition which brought them down to the lower slopes. We saw few people, hikers mainly, and one or two farmers in the distance. When we passed two seriously equipped hikers, Finn looked at them in astonishment.

  ‘Whatever happened to stopping for a drink?’ he said, and gesticulated at the hoses connected up to their mouths from their backpack water bottles.

  After driving for more than an hour we were very high up and there were fewer barns and even fewer farmhouses. The road we were taking had now become a dirt track and still we climbed until, in the lee of a ridge, we saw a very old wooden barn, with a wooden house attached to it, made in the days when animals and humans lived together.

  Finn had talked for most of the way. He explained that we were on the last lap that would connect the money that came into the Exodi accounts with its destination, and thus the Plan would be laid out for a child to see, let alone Adrian and the Service. He called Exodi’s purpose, the funds paid from Russia and their destination, the in and out trays. As we approached the last few miles towards the distant farmhouse, he began to tell me why we were here.

  ‘Pablo is a very bad Italian,’ Finn said as he drove, in his usual obtuse way, not explaining who Pablo was. ‘In the early seventies he smuggled dope in a yacht he’d stolen. His regular route was up from Morocco to Holland. He made himself a lot of money and lost most of it gambling and drinking and whoring. But he learned some skills that have been invaluable to us…’ by which I assumed he meant the Service ‘…and, no doubt, to anyone else who paid him the right money. Pablo is a Venetian merchant of secrets. When he was finally arrested by the Dutch police, they made a deal with him and he happily turned in his old drug-running comrades to save his own skin. Then the Dutch appointed him their police drug expert. He was a good choice. Pablo was dealing drugs from the sixties and was the first person I ever met who owned a mobile phone. I remember it. It was the size of a radio set.

  ‘So Pablo was living in Holland, under arrest within its borders, until he’d served his time as their drug expert. The last time I visited him at the end of the nineties, he was testing all the drugs that came into police possession, to check their quality in order for the correct prosecutions to be made. The Dutch had also let him cultivate his own marijuana in greenhouses in the east of the country–legally and for medical purposes only.

  ‘I remember Pablo’s kitchen in Nijmegen, something his police employers never saw. It was full of jars of every kind of drug, and every quality of every kind of drug, that he’d skimmed off the top of the smuggled goods the police had seized.

  ‘But then in 2000 Pablo changed. He’d run his term o
f being legally confined to Holland and he came to Liechtenstein. His knowledge of how and who to bribe in national police forces turned out to be even more useful than his knowledge of drugs. Somehow he infiltrated his way into Liechtenstein’s financial authority and he is one of the few outsiders who dines regularly with a member of the committee. Pablo’s the reason we’re here.’

  ‘He doesn’t sound very reliable,’ I said.

  ‘He’s completely unreliable,’ Finn laughed. ‘And that’s why he’s so reliable. If you shout down the stairs to Pablo “Where are you?” and he says, “The kitchen”, you can be sure he’s in the bathroom.’

  ‘So why is he so important to us, to where we’re going?’ I asked. ‘Why are you trusting him?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not trusting him,’ Finn said. ‘He’s told me he won’t say a word until I’m out of the country, that’s all. I believe that. But I know that what he’s given me is so important he must be desperate to pass on to someone else my interest in it. So we’ll go straight into Germany after this.’

  ‘Why would Pablo give you anything?’ I asked.

  ‘OK, not given, exactly, of course not, no. He’s the great Venetian merchant. We’ve exchanged what each of us wants with the other. I’ve given him some very valuable knowledge. It would get me thrown in jail if they knew in London I’d done it. No, Pablo never gives anything away. He’ll already be selling my information now, I should think. It’s taken me a long time to set this up,’ Finn added.

  I didn’t ask him what state secret he’d sold to Pablo in return for whatever information brought us here.

  ‘So we’ve come to meet Pablo, have we? Up here?’ I said.

  ‘No. The man we’re meeting is part of the information Pablo’s given me,’ he replied. ‘According to Pablo, the man we’re seeing has hard information that links the KGB and the Russian mafia with their agents in the West. This is where we will find how Exodi works.’

  ‘From a farmer in a barn in the Alps?’ I asked doubtfully.

  ‘That’s right.’ Finn grinned.

  Finally, we came around a wide sweep of track near the top of a grassy mountain which brought us up to the wooden barn and the house we’d seen a while earlier. The track ended here. It was as remote a place as you could find in Western Europe.

  Finn and I got out of the car. There was an old Toyota truck in front of the barn house and a small tractor parked on a grass slope that had animal dung on a rickety wagon behind it. From the open doors of the barn section of the building, we could hear the sound of a welding torch.

  When we walked up to the entrance we saw a man with his back to us, wearing pale trousers, covered in grease and motor oil, and a blue shirt. He was crouched over a piece of red-painted metal on to which he was welding another, similarly shapeless piece of red metal. When the torch stopped and Finn shouted, the man turned, but his face was obscured by a plastic visor. When he lifted the visor I saw he was a man in his late fifties with a face so brown and lined that he looked like part of the old carvings on the barn’s wooden walls.

  He stood still. Then he walked unhurriedly away from the workbench, seemingly unsurprised to have visitors-or maybe unsurprised by anything at all. He came towards the barn entrance, slotting the welding torch on to a metal trolley that held the gas bottle. When he stood in front of us, he slipped the visor off completely. I saw he had a big face; he was a big man, but completely quiet in himself.

  ‘Missed the road?’ he said, in thick, placeless German.

  ‘No. We came to see you,’ Finn said in English and I translated.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘It’s a lonely spot up here,’ Finn said.

  ‘Maybe you want to rent it,’ the man answered in a mocking voice.

  ‘I want to know who rents it,’ Finn said. ‘We’re passing through to the lakes on the other side.’

  This, I knew later, was the phrase which identified Finn to the farmer.

  On hearing the words, the man stiffened and his air of quiet self-sufficiency deserted him. He walked past us, a little closer to Finn than was normal, like a big dog that wants its presence felt among potential rivals.

  He said nothing and Finn and I followed him. He threw the visor on to a table by the door of the house and opened the door on a latch. He left it open and we followed behind him.

  The light was dim inside- the place had been built against the winter- and we could barely see after the sunshine outside. When my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I saw on another wooden table which looked about a thousand years old, a rifle that was halfway through being cleaned, a hurricane lamp, likewise, and a few empty bottles of beer. The single large room was otherwise sparse. There was no kitchen, or any obvious room at all which could be described as such by an estate agent. There was no electricity. The place was bare but for half a dozen chairs in various states of repair, an old sofa on which a huge wolfhound was lying, and some artfully placed oil lamps.

  ‘You have the money?’ the man asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bring it.’

  Finn left the room and walked to the car. I saw him open the boot and bring out a black plastic briefcase which shone unnaturally in the dying rays of the sunset. As Finn walked back, the man disappeared through a door and by the time Finn was in the gloomy long room, the man was coming back through the door again carrying some beers in the crook of his arm. He snapped the tops off with a Swiss army knife and put them on the table. The beers were very cool, and came, perhaps, from a deep cellar.

  Finn put the briefcase on the table and picked up one of the bottles. The man sat down, without asking us to join him. He opened the case and I could see from the angle at which I was standing, that it was full of bundles of cash. The man counted each row of bundles out in front of us and put them back in the case before counting the next row. When he’d finished, he snapped the lid of the case shut and picked up a beer and sat with his elbows on the table, sipping from the neck of the bottle.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said at last, and gave a low whistle. The wolfhound which had apparently been sleeping came immediately over to the table and sat on the floor beside him. Finn and I pulled up the chairs most likely to survive our weight and sat opposite him.

  ‘So. Who’s this Pablo?’ the man asked, and I translated for Finn. ‘How does he know of me?’

  ‘I don’t know how he knows you. He’s a cheat and a liar,’ Finn said. ‘That’s why the British employ him,’ he added.

  ‘The British?’

  ‘And others,’ Finn said. ‘Anyone who’ll pay him enough, in fact.’

  ‘How does he know about this place?’

  ‘I don’t know. He makes it his business to collect valuable information, that’s all I know.’

  ‘Maybe my father spoke to him once,’ the man said vaguely.

  He pushed the briefcase to the centre of the table, as if he hadn’t yet decided whether to take the money or not, but Finn didn’t react. He just said, ‘I’ve told Pablo that if any accident happens to you, he’ll be dead in days.’

  I looked at Finn in astonishment and saw that he was serious. It made me scared. But the man also saw he was serious and made the decision that Finn wanted.

  ‘I’ll show you something, then,’ he said.

  He got up and walked through the door where he’d gone to get the beers. He was gone a long time, as if what he was bringing was buried very deep somewhere. Outside the sunset was now turning into a dull glow. I saw stars through the open door and a chill air was creeping into the house.

  When he returned he was carrying an old leather knapsack of the kind one of his ancestors might have worn while sitting out on the mountain, guarding his flocks against wolves. He sat down and undid the one buckle that still worked and withdrew a waterproof plastic folder; from inside that he took out a buff A4 reinforced envelope for photographs.

  He put five photographs on to the table, looked at them keenly, then pushed them across the table to Finn. He got up and fetc
hed a bottle of some home-made mountain liqueur with what looked like a sprig of rosemary inside the bottle. It was dark now and he shut the door. He lit a fire already laid in a rough brick fireplace in the corner of the room.

  Finn looked at the pictures. Three were faded and were older than the other two, which looked very recent; different paper, sharp and with a glossy look to them as if they’d recently been developed.

  The farmer poured three shots of the liqueur and raised his glass.

  ‘To what are we drinking?’ he said.

  Finn and I raised our glasses.

  ‘Let’s drink to your father,’ Finn said.

  The farmer levelled his eyes at Finn.

  ‘It’s a good toast,’ he said finally, and we drank. Then the man began to speak.

  ‘In the spring of 1989,’ he began, ‘my father was working this farm. I wasn’t here back then. I was working in Switzerland. An intermediary, who my father later discovered was acting for one of the men in the pictures, came to him and requested that he rent this house for a weekend in that June. In return for the rent of the farmhouse here, he offered my father a hundred thousand dollars and also a week in the Canary Islands for him and his wife, which they were to take over the period of the weekend when the farmhouse was rented. My own mother died many years ago and this was his second wife,’ the man explained.

  ‘My father accepted the deal and the money was paid into an account set up for him in Vaduz. The two of them were given air tickets and a room was booked at the most expensive hotel on an island called Hierra. Very remote, even by the standards there. But my father didn’t go. Instead, he called me. I was working at the time on a dairy farm belonging to a distant relative over the border in Switzerland. I hadn’t been up here for many years at the time. I didn’t like his wife.

  ‘I met my father in Vaduz and he asked me to go with his wife on this holiday instead of him. We had the same first names and it would be easy for me to simply substitute myself for him. I didn’t want to. The idea of spending a week with his woman was repugnant to me. He offered to buy me a new car and I accepted. I was broke. So I went to Hierra and had a horrible time, drinking too much and trying to get away from her. We had to share a room to make it look right on the bill that the intermediary was paying. It wasn’t an enjoyable week.