Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  27

  ON THE MORNING of the meeting, it is innocently bright, the sunlight dapples the street through the branches of the trees. On Geneva’s bridges couples are walking, hanging around each other’s shoulders, and tourists wander aimlessly or look over on to the huge fountain and Lac Leman.

  Finn is staying in a different hotel now under his new name of Robinson.

  On this morning Finn dresses, as he puts it, ‘like one of your buzinessmen, Anna, like an assassin in a seventies TV show, rather than an investor’ by which he means ostensibly expensive casual, with one or two loud additions; he wears a polo neck and a blazer with ‘yachting’ buttons; a slightly ridiculous Piaget sports watch–like the one Putin wears, he says; a Swarovski solid gold bracelet. A set of Mont Blanc pens is tucked into an inside breast pocket. Liakubsky’s funding has taken a serious knock.

  He has ordered a chauffeured black Mercedes limousine, with darkened windows, and he has been to the barber.

  At just after ten o’clock, he leaves in the limousine for a drive around town. He tells me he needs to settle his nerves. I take a car James has procured and pick up James and the Troll at a café in the old town. We park up near Geneva’s railway station and the Troll sits drinking coffees and smoking cigarettes in the car, while James buys a paper and strolls back down the hill towards the bank. At eleven, the Troll and I drive past the bank to see James chatting at the car park’s booth with the chauffeur and the attendant. Once they have become acquainted he will ask to use the chauffeur’s mobile phone, and leave it unable to receive calls.

  We see Finn stepping out of the limousine, his driver holding the door, and then he walks up to the bank’s front entrance. The Troll gets out of the car and leans against it looking at a map. I watch James leave the booth, the chauffeur’s phone disabled, and walk around to the far side of the car park nearest the bank.

  The bank’s doorman, evidently expecting Finn, nods to him and presses a buzzer and that is the last we see of him as he enters the building.

  From the car where I’m sitting–a little too far from the bank for my liking–I scan the front of the building and look for anything unusual. The Troll is back in the car smoking incessantly and rattling through several puzzles in a newspaper before it is time for him, too, to enter the bank. As I watch him finally crossing the road, I think that nobody will believe he has ever worn this suit or any other suit in his life.

  Less than three minutes after Finn entered the building he was in the lift to the top floor in the company of a dark-suited man Finn later described as the maitre d’hotel or butler. The Banque Leman devoted a sizeable proportion of its staff to the greeting and general welfare of its wealthy clients, rather than to actual banking.

  The two of them emerged on to a thick-carpeted hallway, a private floor within the private bank, dotted with priceless antiques, Chinese vases, prints and paintings collected during the bank’s illustrious history. Another uniformed butler appeared to receive Finn from the first man, who silently disappeared, and the butler beckoned him to an ornate Louis Quatorze chair. The butler made the quietest knock on a pair of black lacquered double doors, gesturing to Finn to step inside the president’s office. The butler announced Finn like a hushed party greeter and silently withdrew, closing the doors behind him.

  The room was in a different style to the hallway, decorated with early Art Deco masterpieces and French Empire furniture. A lion’s head, the bank’s symbol, was mounted on a wall to the far left of the room, and a drinks cabinet was tucked away discreetly in the opposite corner. In the centre of the far wall was a long, finely polished antique desk that looked as if no actual work had been done on it for at least a couple of centuries. In front of the desk was a broad guest’s armchair designed to make the bank’s fattest customers feel comfortable. To the left of the room was a seating area of comfortable softer armchairs, and to the right an aquarium, the bottom of which seemed to have been scattered artfully with real gold coins.

  Finn noted two cameras; one was trained on the desk and the area around it, the other on the doors through which he’d entered. There seemed to be no coverage of the armchairs to the left.

  Clement Naider stood up from behind his ornamental desk and came round to the front to shake Finn’s hand. White-haired, somewhere in his mid-sixties, he wore a three-piece pin-striped suit of the faintest chalk against dark blue. His hand was tanned, warm and manicured. He smelled of cigars and polished leather. His face had the soft, bronzed cragginess of a well-pampered social skier, a face like those described by Finn of the wealthier inhabitants of Tegernsee.

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ Naider said in a soft German accent and beckoned to the chair where Finn would sit. But Finn didn’t sit. When Naider had already sat down on the other side of the desk and pressed a concealed buzzer underneath it, which Finn mentally noted along with the cameras, Naider saw him still standing and a look of mild consternation crossed his face.

  ‘I’d prefer the softer chairs, if you wouldn’t mind,’ Finn said. ‘It’s my back. I’m recovering from a recent car accident.’

  Naider’s expression immediately cleared to be replaced by one of unctuous understanding of his guest’s requirements.

  ‘Of course,’ he said and, standing up, gestured to Finn to lead the way. ‘Nothing too serious, I trust,’ Naider said.

  ‘A small injury in the middle lumbar region, that’s all,’ Finn replied. ‘Certain chairs are easier on it. The doctor tells me I’ll be fine in two weeks.’

  ‘Good, good. But how very frustrating.’

  Finn took one of the four chairs and Naider sat opposite him. A small round table stood between them.

  The double doors to the room opened and a second butler, summoned by Naider’s discreet buzzer, entered carrying an empty silver tray. Finn asked for a whisky and soda and Naider repeated the same for himself.

  ‘How often do you visit Geneva, Mr Robinson?’ Naider asked.

  ‘Several times a year,’ Finn said. Behind the desk across the room he saw a safe in the wall, and on the far side where the butler was pouring the drinks, a wooden filing cabinet with locks. The butler delivered the drinks in heavy crystal tumblers and left the room.

  ‘We’re delighted to be able to offer our services to you,’ Naider said. He raised his glass. ‘To your swift recovery.’

  Finn responded and they drank.

  ‘And after we’ve had our chat here, perhaps you would like to accompany one of my directors to the vaults,’ Naider said. ‘If you do us the honour of acting for you, I would like you to see the security that comes with our service.’

  Finn nodded, only half listening now, as he reached inside the leather case he was carrying, withdrawing a brown envelope. He placed it on the table in front of Naider.

  ‘I’d like you to have a look at some proposals which weren’t in my lawyer’s letter,’ he said.

  Naider seemed surprised but not unduly troubled. Perhaps he had a client with some very special request that could only be mentioned in a private meeting, it was not unusual. He replaced the tumbler of whisky on to the table and picked up the envelope.

  When he withdrew the pictures, wrapped in photographic paper, he seemed interested. When he unfolded the thin sheet to reveal the first photograph, Finn had his hand in his pocket ready to press the agreed mobile number in the Troll’s pocket, the signal to break the fire alarm downstairs.

  But Naider simply stared at the first picture. His life seemed slowly and visibly to drain from him, leaving the soft flesh of his craggy features to sag as if into an empty carcass. His suit crumpled from its perfectly measured and ironed state into something Naider might have bought at a second-hand store. The tan leached down his face into the collar of his sparkling white shirt.

  ‘There are six pictures altogether,’ Finn said. He paused. ‘I want you to move slowly to the safe. I want you to open it and retrieve the file marked “Dresden”. Then you will close the safe and bring the file here. G
o now.’

  Naider didn’t move, didn’t look beyond the first photograph.

  ‘Do it now,’ Finn said. ‘I have to be out of here in five minutes with the Dresden file, or the pictures will be wired right around the world.’

  He watched Naider struggle with the enormity of the blow. How many years had he lived with the secret of his sexual perversion? And how many years had he lived with the fact that others, his Russian masters, knew his secret well enough to have finally trapped him?

  The life of Clement Naider did not pass before his eyes. By this time, there was only one thing left in it. Locked inside him, the citadel of his terrible secret now protected only outlying areas of his being. The inside had been laid waste long ago, scorched to oblivion with nothing left alive. And as he had compensated for this empty interior by cultivating his fine exterior with each stroke of the manicurist’s brush, each fine cut of the tailor’s scissors, each expensive plucking of the barber’s instruments–the pruning, the tanning, the aromatic oiling of Clement Naider, and finally the clothing of him in distinguished dummy’s inch-perfect cloth–his interior had responded by withering still further so that now it lay untended, poisoned and finally devoid of human life. The Clement Naider Finn saw in the flesh had become an expensive mechanical doll and nothing else.

  Finn wondered if the banker had even the strength to stand. But slowly, without letting go of the pictures in his hand, Naider got to his feet. He never looked at Finn. He walked slowly towards the safe.

  ‘Touch nothing but the safe,’ Finn said softly. ‘If I’m not on the street in ten minutes, the pictures get wired anyway.’

  He watched Naider move into the arc of the camera’s view and stoop slightly to turn the dial on the safe. He watched Naider swing open the door and reach into the dark interior. He saw the file in Naider’s hand as he withdrew it, closed the safe, and walked back across the room, clutching the file in one hand and the pictures in the other. Naider sat down in the same chair and placed the file on the table. Still he didn’t look at Finn.

  Swiftly Finn emptied the file of a sheaf of documents and placed them on to the table, flicked through them while keeping an eye on Naider, and then took out a small camera and photographed sixteen sheets in all.

  ‘Sit still,’ he said.

  He walked to a window which was open at the rear of the office, slipped the camera into a reinforced bag in his pocket and lobbed it out. Somewhere below, James was there to break its fall. Then he replaced the documents and told Naider to return them to the safe. It took five minutes in all and Finn told Naider to hurry now or it would be too late. Naider still didn’t speak or look at Finn.

  Finn drank the remainder of his whisky and soda in one gulp and slipped the crystal glass into his leather case. The courtesy of Naider’s servants in opening the doors did not require him to brush the surfaces in the room for fingerprints. He stood and walked to the desk.

  ‘My envelope,’ he said. Naider didn’t want to part with the pictures, his last hope being, perhaps, that there was just one set, and he held his safety in his hands. But he saw the pointlessness of this and let them fall on to the desk. Finn picked them up.

  ‘Press the buzzer.’

  Naider pressed it.

  ‘Now sit back over there.’

  Naider obeyed, a slave for so long to his secret.

  And the butler appeared, ushering Finn from the room. Naider sat bent over in the armchair, speechless and dazed, as if he’d had a seizure.

  The butler escorted him to the lift, pressing the buttons for the distinguished customer.

  And as he stepped inside the lift, Finn heard the double doors closing behind him, as Naider attempted to place another layer between himself and the world and to shut himself away from its cruel glare.

  28

  THE DRESDEN FILE gives us five names,’ Finn says. He pushes the small camera he used to photograph the file at the bank across the table towards me, leans back in his chair, and looks out of the window of the inn towards the mountains. ‘Five names, five account numbers that correspond to the names, and monthly payments of twenty-five thousand euros into each account.’

  I look at the names, clicking through the first five pictures he took.

  ‘German?’ I say.

  ‘Looks that way. Maybe Swiss-German.’

  ‘Twenty-five thousand euros a month paid to five people is hardly an explanation of Exodi,’ I reply.

  ‘On the face of it, no.’

  ‘And yet it must be.’

  ‘Mikhail says so,’ Finn grunts. ‘Mikhail said the file is the explanation. So it must be.’

  I take a laptop from my bag and begin to Google the names.

  When Finn left the bank, he and I took a taxi out of Geneva and then the slow red train from Montreux that heads up over the passes to the Bernese Oberland. There were a few hikers on board on their way to the small, rich resorts of Chateaux d’Oeux, Gstaad and beyond, and some tourists who simply wanted the thrill of seeing the high pass from the train.

  The train hauled itself up to its highest halt, where it stopped to pick up and drop off the mail, and we looked over the great expanse of cragged mountains that stretched eastwards.

  We got off the train in Gstaad after a winding descent into the high valley. A taxi took us a dozen miles beyond the town to the Bären Inn at the foot of the road’s long ascent to the glacier of Les Diablerets. We ate supper in a wooden dining room with a slow log fire that crackled and spat its pine sap, and then went up to bed in another wooden room which had red-and-white chintz curtains with shepherdess prints and a faux wooden spinning wheel in the corner. We didn’t talk much. Making love with Finn that night was a ritual of purification for both of us.

  It is late on a fine summer’s morning and we have eaten breakfast in the room. Finn then gently cuts the lining of an old, oiled coat that was so thick it stood up on the floor by itself.

  From inside the lining he extracts the camera and mobile phone and places them on the pine table. The first five photos are the five names with their account numbers. A further four pictures of the Dresden file are a list of transactions, all of which consist of money paid into the accounts of the five names. Twenty-five thousand euros a month. The rest of the ‘pages’ are a long list of the names of companies.

  ‘Each name receives his or her monthly payments from a bank affiliated with Clement Naider’s Banque Leman,’ Finn says. ‘This bank is a small regional bank that deals with local agricultural loans, mortgages and meagre personal savings. Way below the radar, in other words. It’s on the far side of the mountains from here, in the canton of Valais, and is called the Banque Montana.’

  Valais, Switzerland’s poorest canton, is free with handing out residency permits compared to the rest of Switzerland, particularly with permits for Russians since the Wall came down. And there was a KGB-owned ski hotel there, from long before the end of the Cold War. We used it to entertain officers from the American Sixth Fleet based in Naples.

  ‘Clement Naider has a seat on the board of the Banque Montana,’ Finn says.

  ‘A bit below his status, isn’t it?’ I say.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So Naider sits on the board of an insignificant bank in the backwoods…’

  ‘…and his presence on the board is for just one purpose, to oversee these payments,’ Finn says, completing my own thought.

  ‘From an Exodi account?’

  ‘I think the Troll will find that it’s Exodi in Geneva which is making these payments,’ Finn says. ‘But it hardly explains the vast sums that Exodi controls.’

  I have found the five names on my laptop. Four men, one woman. Each has a list of company directorships to their name, all German companies, some companies that Finn or I or both of us know-big, international names-others that neither of us have heard of.

  Finn looks over my shoulder.

  ‘Dieter will understand this better,’ he says.

  Finn sits on the bed and
begins to compose a message for Dieter. He leaves the coding books open so that I can see his workings.

  I’ll give you plenty of opportunity to betray me. His words on the night in Geneva came back to me, and he is being true to them. How can he be so sure, I wonder, that I won’t betray him? Or is it a leap of faith, a necessary passage on his intended journey for us to be one?

  When he’d completed the message to Dieter, Finn wanted to get away from the room, the file, the names. We both did. He suggested we try some summer skiing up at the glacier and we eventually find some boots and skis for rent and take a taxi up to the cable car. It is a clear blue day and the cable car takes us to the top and we ski a few hundred yards and admire the view, the wind blowing out the intensity of the past few days and restoring some kind of sanity, clarity perhaps. We find a rock to shelter from the wind and Finn puts his arms around me.

  ‘I love you, Rabbit,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘So you win the bet,’ he says. ‘I told you first.’

  I look down at the snow beneath my skis.

  ‘I knew I’d win,’ I say.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder what you feel.’ He looks at me. ‘Whether your feelings flit across your surface like a breeze on the sea, or whether they take a hold somewhere below the surface.’

  I take his hand in mine.

  ‘You have a glass wall around you, Rabbit,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I can get behind it. Sometimes you lower it a little, but you never lower it altogether. I want you to understand you can trust me. Telling you I love you is the freest thing I’ve ever done.’

  ‘I’ve decided to leave,’ I say finally.

  ‘Leave?’

  ‘I’ve decided to come over.’

  Finn is silent and we listen to the wind whistling around the rock.

  ‘Are you leaving Russia, or coming to me?’ he says eventually.

  ‘It’s the same.’

  ‘Not quite. You’re leaving because of the pictures of Naider.’