Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  Finn pockets the scrap of paper after a brief glance.

  ‘The address is across the bridge, a street behind the railway station,’ Frank says. ‘Let me know what happens. I will look in my files over the next few weeks. See if we have any Exodi for you, Finn.’

  15

  FINN PREFERS TO WALK. Even when he was in Moscow in winter, when even the moderately rich and relatively rich don’t go anywhere without their cars, he preferred to walk. While they kept their chauffeurs running car engines for hours outside bars and restaurants simply to imply the status of urgency, Finn walked. He likes walking. Walking is the appropriate pace of humanity, he says, everything else is too fast for the brain. He always liked the French word for ‘day’–journée- because of its original meaning, the distance a man can walk in a day.

  Like so much about Finn’s own analysis of himself, however, this represents only part of the truth. He likes walking because, as well as giving him time to think, it also delays the moment when he arrives. For Finn the journey- the journée- is always more enjoyable than to arrive. As if somehow his expectations were never quite met.

  Walking also delayed the moment when he needed to act. There was now a reluctance in Finn, as so often on a job. There is a period of time he needs in order to steel himself to act, even in the most trivial actions, even going to the shops or telephoning his aunt. This reluctance reflects the deepest, most concealed aspect of Finn’s nature–a lack of simple, fundamental self-belief that comes from his childhood, from the shocking few minutes of being ringed with adults, the shouting, his childish tears. As an adult he overcame the rising fear by sheer willpower. Most people never saw it.

  So he walks from the main square of Luxembourg’s city and across the long, wide bridge over the gorge that once protected the ancient fortress, until he comes to the Rue de Grèves on the far side of the gorge, behind the station.

  The address is a five-storey, grey-stone building that rambles a long way back. There are twenty or so bells at the main doorway with nameplates that for the most part have no names written on them; small flats or studios for the more modest citizens of Luxembourg, a building for students, perhaps, or older people who have fallen through the net of Luxembourg’s wealth.

  The flat number Frank has written on the scrap of paper is number ten. Finn walks past the door once and then retraces his steps and pauses at the steps leading up to the door. He looks at an estate agent’s sign and copies down the telephone number. He casually scans the street. He thinks about walking up the stone steps, but if he rings the bell now, he risks a rebuttal before he can even get inside. The boy is scared, Frank has said. Why would he let a stranger in?

  There are few people on the street. Finn crosses back over it and studies a few signs belonging to other house agents. Then he settles on the far side of the street, half concealed down some cellar steps, and waits.

  After more than an hour standing in the damp cold, and with several false starts, he sees a man who appears to be approaching the main door of the block that interests him. He is a young man and he carries a small brown bag of groceries. Slowing as he approaches the stone steps, the man fumbles in his coat pocket and halts completely as he reaches the foot of the steps up to the door of the building.

  Finn crosses the road. He is leaping up the steps behind the man as the man reaches the door and, still fumbling, inserts a key.

  Finn stands at the young man’s shoulder, with a genuinely grateful and somewhat foolish smile on his face, and looks with all the charming appeal he possesses into the man’s eyes.

  ‘Thank goodness you’ve come,’ he says, stamping and shaking with cold on the step below him. ‘I’ve been waiting nearly an hour and I haven’t got my key.’

  The young man turns, the door half-open now as he juggles the key and the bag of groceries, and stares at Finn. He’s a student perhaps, Finn thinks, a temporary lodger in the building, and with the carelessness of a student who believes no doors, anywhere, should ever be locked, he silently shrugs and Finn enters after him. They climb the first staircase one after another and then the young man peels off down a corridor on the first floor without a backward glance and, without pausing, Finn climbs up further to the floor above before he stops to check his whereabouts.

  He must be quick. He looks at the first numbers. Eight, nine. Ten is around the corner of a dingy corridor. He walks along a faded, worn red carpet until he stands outside a door with ‘10’ painted roughly in white paint on its peeling blue wood. He hears music playing from behind it, the muffled wailing lilt of a female singer singing a Portuguese song.

  Finn pauses, catches his breath. Then he knocks twice before he detects the occupant of the room walking towards the door across a wooden floor. A lock is snapped, the door opens a few inches on a chain, and revealed is a tired, pale face with a wispy orange beard that looks like thin tumbleweed.

  ‘I’m from the property agents,’ Finn says. ‘Come to check the windows.’

  ‘The windows are fine,’ the boy says.

  ‘I’m sure they are. But we’re painting the outside. If you wouldn’t mind, I need to make my report.’

  There is a pause while the boy thinks and makes the decision between risking letting a stranger inside and risking offending the property agents. When the latter has overcome his evident reluctance, the boy pulls the chain off its slide and opens the door.

  The room has an old carpet that was once olive-green, Finn guesses, but now wears the scars of many tenants who’ve had no interest in the apartment’s long-term welfare. Dirty net curtains hang off a pole in front of the windows, there is an unmade futon on the floor, a shelf of books above it, and the main part of the room consists of a desk covered with laptop computers, papers, wires, boxes of software and coffee cups. Finn looks around.

  ‘Comfortable here?’ Finn says.

  ‘The windows are over there,’ the boy replies. Finn shuts the door behind him and stands still in front of it.

  ‘Having trouble paying the rent?’ Finn says.

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I would know.’

  ‘Who are you? What’s your name?’ the boy says nervously.

  Finn takes a small transparent plastic packet from his pocket and holds it out. ‘That’s three months’ rent,’ he says.

  The boy doesn’t move.

  ‘We have about ten minutes,’ Finn says, ‘before anyone watching the outside of the building wonders what I’m doing here.’

  He wastes no time now.

  ‘You have a number to call if anyone asks questions about Exodi?’ he snaps.

  The boy looks like he’s been hit.

  ‘Maybe,’ he says faintly. ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘The longer I’m here, the more anyone watching will think you’ve told me. It’s in your interests to be quick. When I leave, call the number they gave you. Tell them exactly what happened. Say, of course, what I asked you and that you told me nothing. Say I was persistent and that it took you ten minutes to get rid of me.’

  Finn throws the money on to the futon but doesn’t move from the door. The boy looks paler than ever.

  ‘What did you do at Exodi?’ Finn says. ‘What was your specific job?’

  The boy doesn’t reply.

  ‘I’m not from here,’ Finn says. ‘I’m not from Luxembourg. I’m nothing to do with them. But if you don’t talk to me, I will tell them you did talk to me. Got it? You have a few seconds to start answering my questions. After that…it’s up to you.’

  The boy hangs his head and looks around for some escape.

  ‘What did you do at Exodi?’ Finn repeats. ‘We’re wasting valuable time.’

  ‘I was hired on a salary to service the computers,’ came the faint and angry reply.

  ‘For what kind of business?’

  ‘The company didn’t seem to do much.’ The boy sits down at his desk, apparently exhausted, and faces Finn.

  ‘What did it do?�
�

  ‘It didn’t do anything that I could see,’ the boy almost shouts.

  ‘Why did they hire you, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe they thought they’d be busy and then weren’t.’

  ‘Nothing coming in or out of the office, nothing on the computers you serviced, no one visiting for meetings?’

  ‘That was the thing,’ the boy protests, and Finn sees that it is genuine. ‘There didn’t seem to be anything going on at all. It wasn’t like a normal office. There was no business in or out. No one ever came. Just once…’ The boy’s voice fades out.

  ‘What?’ Finn prompts.

  ‘A couple of guys came into the office. They said they were from Exodi in Paris. I was introduced to them. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Who were they?’

  ‘I don’t know. Like you, they spoke lousy French. One might have been from Eastern Europe. They looked rich,’ he adds.

  ‘Where in Paris?’ Finn says.

  ‘It was an address near the George V Hotel, I remember that, because one of them was staying at the hotel and said it was handy for the office.’ The boy tries to find some strength. ‘Why don’t you leave. I’m nothing to do with them.’

  ‘I’ll leave when I’ve finished and that’s up to you. But remember. Be quick, or they won’t believe you.’

  ‘You bastard,’ he said, but the weakness behind his voice contained no threat.

  ‘Who told you not to speak about Exodi?’ Finn snaps. ‘Who called you?’

  ‘Oh Jesus.’

  ‘Who was it?’ Finn persists. ‘If you’re interested in keeping your skin safe for any length of time tell me now before I walk out and it’s too late.’

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ the boy repeats and waves his head from side to side like a distressed zoo animal.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘All right, all right. I was called by a man called Philippe Pou-lain.’

  ‘The MP?’

  ‘Yes, here in Luxembourg.’

  The boy looks utterly defeated.

  ‘Give me the phone number,’ Finn says urgently.

  The boy wearily threads his bony hands through a pile of papers and finally finds and holds up a sheet of A4 with nothing but a number written on it. Finn walks across the room, memorises it and looks down at the boy.

  ‘Just do as I told you and they’ll know they can rely on you,’ he says.

  As Finn turns and walks quickly out of the room the boy doesn’t move. Finn shuts the door and, without pausing, descends the two floors two steps at a time and exits on to the street. He doesn’t look up, or in either direction, but walks fast to the left, his face to the pavement but his eyes looking carefully to the right. There is nobody sitting in the parked cars on either side of the street. After a hundred yards, he stops sharply, puts his hand inside his coat as if he’d forgotten something, and turns back. But there is nobody there.

  ‘Luxembourg is run by a small, tight group of people,’ Finn writes. ‘It is a small, tight state. Its MPs are businessmen, financiers, their interests lying principally with the interests of the ruling elite rather than with their constituents’ complaints about road-widening or the provision of extra waste bins for dog faeces. And the interests of the ruling elite–as well as of ordinary citizens, it must be said–is the furtherance and increase of Luxembourg’s share of the world’s wealth. That is what national legislators should be interested in.

  ‘But in order to do this patriotic task, because so much of what Luxembourg does for a living is secret, all branches of the state must be tightly controlled. The press, for example, is often told by the chief of police to bury a story that might otherwise damage the image of Luxembourg as a guardian of wealth. Many of the stories the police chief has buried in recent years concern a prominent member of the royal family who has been cut out of the line of succession to Luxembourg’s duchy. There have been stories the police chief has buried that show bombings in Luxembourg and arson at the national airport in the mid-eighties, for example, in which he was allegedly implicated. There are many strange allegations that are buried here.

  ‘But the culture of suppressing press stories doesn’t stop with the Duke’s family. Luxembourg and its parliament are so small that everyone is bound closely to everyone else. They are in it together. There is much more to conceal than just the prince’s antics. If Westbank, one of the world’s two clearing banks, can behave illegally, nearly everyone knows about it—everyone in Luxembourg’s elite, that is.

  ‘And so now, what do we see? We have a set of companies-Exodi. Exodi with a long “i”. They are Schmidtke’s companies, bequeathed to Otto Roth at the demise of Soviet Russia, wound up in 1989 and re-formed in 1991. Their true origins back in the mid-seventies, however, have been disguised by senior figures in the financial administrations of both Liechtenstein and Switzerland. And here in Luxembourg, thanks to this afternoon’s work, we have the edifying sight of a Luxembourg MP telephoning this boy, a former employee of Exodi with its illegal accounts, to warn him to say nothing.

  ‘And how beautiful is this? The father of this Luxembourg MP was a senior European commissioner. The father’s term ended in a welter of fraud allegations, missing public money, and attempts to silence the guardians of the EU budget who tried to blow the whistle on him. Exodi must indeed be important to have such protection.’

  Finn describes this as a classic case of the overkill of secrecy I too know so well: when secrecy, for its own sake, reveals precisely what it is trying to conceal.

  ‘This boy knew nothing about Exodi, apart from the relatively trivial detail that it failed to pay its own employees’ insurance contributions.’

  And so the attempt to keep the boy silent about something he knows nothing about has pulled back the carpet for Finn, to reveal that Exodi is not just a set of front companies which handle KGB money, first through Schmidtke and then through his successor Roth; not just a set of companies that has illegal secret accounts at Westbank, but a very deep and dirty set of companies which has the highest KGB connections to figures in the West who are central to the defence of Western Europe’s interests. Does this lone Luxembourg MP know what he is protecting? And is he indeed acting alone, not a rogue figure at all who is divorced from Luxembourg’s interests? Everything about the way that this city state operates suggests ‘Yes, he knows’ and ‘No, he is not acting alone.’ But that is not enough, not yet.

  I am about to go to bed in the pink house. It is late, I’m tired and I haven’t found what I desperately want. Can there even be a clue, from all these years back in time, to where Finn is now? I must not be disheartened. I may be Finn’s only chance.

  It’s strange being here, with so many of Finn’s things, in a place we never shared, but which has Finn everywhere. I look around the bedroom with its huge and comfortable bed- always Finn’s first preoccupation in a house. There are some novels he has read and I study closely where he thumbed them. There is a second-hand French wristwatch I gave him, an Emerich Meerson- and that he rarely wore because he said it was too beautiful to wear except on special occasions. There are his things in the bathroom- a razor, used, an empty tube of toothpaste which he seems still to have been squeezing long after any toothpaste could be extracted, an airline spongebag. I see his hairs in the razor.

  I’m too tired, but can I afford even a few hours’ sleep? How much time do I have? Who else will find this house and how long will it take them?

  16

  FINN WAS BACK in London on the first Eurostar train from Paris the following morning. He was taken, almost forcibly, at Waterloo station by two look-outs from the Service who picked him up without breaking step and marched him to a car, the two of them standing a little too close to him all the way until they were sitting in the back, one on either side, and the man on the right had given the driver an instruction. Finn was caught off balance by the reception, but unsurprised.

  They returned not to the house in Norwood but to another Service safe house in Hackney. T
hey drive in silence, Finn making no attempt, for once, to poke fun or to undermine his own situation.

  It is a once-elegant house with chipped white cornicing and broken steps that lead up to it, and with weeds sprouting from the basement steps. The neighbours are plumbers and poets, actors, waitresses and the unemployed.

  Finn is escorted up the broken steps a little too fast for comfort and, once the door is secured behind him, down some stairs inside the house which have peeling white banisters, until he finds himself half pushed, half guided into a room with a steel door and without windows.

  Standing behind a desk and talking into a mobile phone is Adrian, the head of the Moscow desk and always Finn’s handler. He has been Finn’s mentor since the beginning and maybe, too, his substitute father.

  With Adrian is a new young Russia recruit just out of Oxford who reminds Finn of himself, back in 1989, being taken to witness the interview with Schmidtke at Belmarsh prison. There is also a woman whom Finn hasn’t met but who, it transpires, speaks good German. The room is bare but for three chairs, the desk and a metal box containing routing equipment and perhaps a scrambling device fixed to the wall at the back

  Finn is offered a chair and the handlers are sent back upstairs, one to find a fourth chair. He is then told to wait outside the door ‘in case we need you’, as Adrian puts it ominously.

  They sit down. Finn is in front of the desk, and his three colleagues sit opposite, almost like a respectful interview committee, except that Adrian is picking his teeth with a toothpick. The woman speaks first. She asks Finn in German where he’s been, who he’s seen, why he’s gone to Germany.

  Finn speaks of a visit to Frankfurt, on his way to the Hartz Forest, where’s he’s been enjoying the hiking.

  ‘Why are we speaking in German?’ he asks Adrian, but Adrian hasn’t finished with his teeth, as though they may play a part in the proceedings.