She said, “Oh, now that’s what I call a lucky coincidence.” I asked what she meant. She glanced at Ninoshvili and then smiled at me. “David was thinking of going there on Friday too. He’s interested in a tournament taking place there, not for young people this time. Rapidplay or something like that.” She looked enquiringly at Ninoshvili, and the viper nodded.
Julia hesitated for a moment, and then said, “I was already wondering whether I could drive him there on Friday afternoon; it’s quite difficult getting to the little place. And I was going to ask if then you could perhaps fetch them both on Sunday.”
“No problem. He can drive there and back with me.”
Erika asked, “So you can bring yourself to leave Julia and me on our own all weekend, can you? What are we going to do without a man in the house?”
Julia drank a sip from her glass. “Don’t complain… we can have a really good gossip at last.” She patted my hand. “Thank you, Christian, that’s really very nice of you.”
The viper said, “Yes, very nice. Really.” He mashed a potato on his plate, and then asked, “Will you be able to find somewhere to stay there?”
“I already have.”
You’re going to be surprised, I thought.
It may be that what I have now set in motion is exactly what Dr Schmidt and Herr Hochgeschurz wanted. They cannot seriously have meant to rope in Ralf; they wanted to mobilize me, not him. Very well. I’m not going to SchwitteMinnenbüren to help Internal Security. I’m going there to defend my family. And if that happens to do Internal Security some good—well, why not, just so long as my family benefits. But I’m going to decide on that, not Internal Security.
Chapter 49
Ninoshvili is staying on the second floor of the River Laaxe Sports Hotel, along with other players in the tournament. I am on the fourth floor. After unpacking my case and washing my hands, I went down and knocked at the door of his room. How about a drink in the bar before dinner? I called. He had left his room already, or at least, no one answered. I didn’t see him in the bar either.
I walked over to the youth hostel and found Ralf just going out. He was standing outside the entrance to the hostel with six or seven lads of his own age. They were amusing themselves by handing around the headgear of the smallest, a red baseball cap, and trying it on. The smallest boy, whose hair was cut very short, reached in vain for his property, shouting, “Stop that crap, my brain will freeze!” Ralf replied, “You don’t have one!” A couple of other youthful chess players, hanging out of a window in the hostel, were killing themselves laughing.
Ralf didn’t seem to be unpleasantly surprised to see me. I said I had come with Ninoshvili, who was going to take part in the Rapidplay tournament. Ralf nodded. “Yup, I saw him on the list. But he’ll be wiped out here.” I asked how he himself was doing. He said that if he wins again tomorrow he could be among the top ten.
The boys had already set off along the path. One of them stopped and called, “Hey, Ralf, what about it? Coming?” I told him he mustn’t let me keep him. He nodded, raised his hand, and said, “See you tomorrow, then.”
I walked along the Laaxe for a little way, turned when I began to feel chilly in the cool mist now rising from the river, and ate dinner in the hotel restaurant that evening. Ninoshvili was nowhere to be seen. I found him only when I looked in at the bar after my meal. He was sitting in a niche with a brown-skinned, black-haired man of about thirty-five. Ninoshvili waved to me, but the gesture wasn’t to be taken as an invitation to join them.
I went over to them. The man inspected me. Ninoshvili introduced me, then indicated his friend. “This is Herr Ohannissian; you’ll probably know his name.” I said, “Yes, of course!” and nodded to him with a smile. He showed no reaction, and Ninoshvili said no more either. It was a question of nerves, and mine proved the weaker. I wished them a good evening and sat down at the bar.
About five minutes later a slender man of around forty with a pale face and very fair hair appeared in the entrance of the bar, looked around, and went over to the two of them in their niche. They exchanged a few words, then Ninoshvili beckoned to the waitress, a chubby-cheeked girl in a red blouse and black velvet waistcoat. The two of them paid separately, and then they went out with the fair-haired man. Ninoshvili smiled at me.
This is the Russian who is already well known to Herr Hochgeschurz, presumably, who else? He’s only just arrived. The three of them go to the Armenian’s room. In broken English, the Armenian orders a bottle of vodka and a sliced cucumber from room service. He asks what it will cost. Ninoshvili and the Russian give him one third each, counting out cash on the table.
The Russian lifts the net curtain and glances out of the window. A taxi is coming up the drive, passes the yellow globes of the mushroom-shaped lights, and disappears under the awning over the hotel entrance. The Armenian, who has counted and pocketed the money, takes off his shoes, sits down on the bed and massages his feet in their black socks. Ninoshvili drops into an armchair, puts his hand in his jacket pocket, and brings out the papers that, as soon as the Stasi captain was lying on the floor in her blood, he looked for in her hotel room, found and took away. He gets the papers out of sight again when the room waiter knocks.
Around ten-thirty, after three whiskies at the price of ten marks each, I left the bar. Ninoshvili had not reappeared. I went to bed.
On Saturday I moved back and forth between the comprehensive school’s Sports Hall and the Banqueting Room of the hotel, where the Rapidplay tournament was being held. Ninoshvili won in the first two rounds, in the second because he had his opponent in such difficulties that the latter overstepped the thirty minutes allowed for considering his next move. Ralf lost in the last round of the Youth Open, and told me he could have taken a piece in the fifteenth move but can’t have been concentrating. “Shit.” I tried to cheer him up.
I didn’t see Ninoshvili outside the tournament hall either during the lunch break or on Saturday evening. He suddenly disappeared around midday. I knocked on the door of his room, meaning to ask if he’d like to eat lunch with me, but no one answered. On the way back to the lift I met the Armenian, who didn’t seem to recognize me, and passed me with an absent look when I greeted him.
On Saturday evening the top chess players disappeared into a side wing of the restaurant that had been partitioned off by a folding wooden screen. Herr Friedrich Hünten had invited them to dinner. I ate something light at a table not far from the screen; I didn’t have much of an appetite.
Now and then the voices of people making speeches reached my ears. Presumably both Herr Hünten and the chairman of his chess club, as well as the mayor of SchwitteMinnenbüren or the local MP or all of them, were paying tribute to the guests. A lady who was sitting with another woman over a half-litre of wine got up whenever one of the gentlemen came out of the side wing on his way to the men’s room and asked for his autograph, while the other lady turned her head aside, covered her mouth with her hand and giggled.
After a while I tired of the giggling. I abandoned my observation post and walked along the banks of the Laaxe for a good half an hour. I didn’t meet a human soul on the footpath to which the asphalt road led. A thin veil of white hovered over the meadows, and the woods stood like a black wall beyond it. I looked at the lighted windows of the youth hostel. Ralf was probably still enjoying the disco, where the lads sat side by side, cracking jokes about the local beauties and their dancing partners, trying to see how far they could get away with behaving badly on foreign territory.
I went back to the hotel and into the bar. The chess masters’ festivities seemed to be over. Some of the gentlemen I had seen at the chessboards were sitting in the niches in the bar. Ninoshvili was not among them, nor were the Armenian and the Russian. There were no women present except for the little waitress. I sat at the bar. A pale man with a moustache, two stools further away, smiled at me, raised his beer glass and drank to me. I remembered seeing him too in the tournament hall, and returned his
smile. He drank some more beer, then changed to the stool next to mine and asked what had brought me to this dump. I said I’d been watching the chess. He raised his glass again and drained it.
I asked him if he’d have another beer with me. “Well, why not?” he said. The man was a Czech or a Slovak with an unpronounceable name. I don’t know what kind of master he was, a Grandmaster or International Master or whatever, I didn’t want to ask because I assumed the fact that I didn’t know might hurt his feelings. I tried questioning him about his colleagues, and even asked what he thought of David Ninoshvili. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Must be Georgian. I’ve never played him. Maybe tomorrow.”
After he had asked, “Let’s have another beer, shall we?” causing me to order for the third time, I gave up. Ninoshvili hadn’t shown his face. I paid. My companion didn’t seem to worry about the state he would be in on Sunday morning, and said he was going to have another beer.
As I waited for the lift, I wondered whether to get out at the second floor again. Go down the corridor, only dimly lit for the night hours, and stand at Ninoshvili’s door. Glance around and then put my ear to the door.
Hochgeschurz would probably do that. But no, much too primitive. Herr Hochgeschurz would put his hand in his pocket as he passed, bring out a mini-transmitter and, with a quick movement of his fingers, fit it in the angle of the doorway, where it was barely visible. Then he would go to his room and switch on his mini-receiver, his plump red ear bent over it.
No again, of course not. The Armenian and the Russian might only now be going to join Ninoshvili, waiting for the corridors to be deserted. They would see the mini-transmitter at a glance, remove it and show it, in silence, to their Georgian partner. Still too primitive.
Hochgeschurz probably wouldn’t take the risk of operating on the floor of the hotel where the KGB agents were by night, when most people were in bed. Perhaps he would be standing, warmly wrapped up, on the balcony of his room in the darkness. He has put out the lights in his room, he is holding a directional microphone, he carefully lets it down on a rope until it’s dangling over the top of Ninoshvili’s window frame. Hochgeschurz fixes the cord of the microphone in place, goes back into the room and switches his receiver on. After a while the loudspeaker crackles, and then the furtive discussion in Ninoshvili’s room is audible.
The Russian, the Armenian and the Georgian are speaking Russian. Never mind, Hochgeschurz knows Russian. He learned the language on an intensive course run by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
I don’t know Russian. And I’m not Herr Hochgeschurz, in either this or any other connection.
I press the lift button for the fourth floor, go into my room, and get into bed without indulging in any more nonsense.
Chapter 50
Ninoshvili has won third prize in the Rapidplay tournament, 2,000 marks in a sealed envelope and an occasional table (we left it behind after Ninoshvili had failed to get its value in cash), plus a certificate and a cup engraved Friedrich Hünten Furnishings Ltd. Ralf came nineteenth in the Youth Open. He too received a certificate and one of the two dozen bedside lamps donated by Herr Hünten as consolation prizes.
On the drive back, Ninoshvili asked to see the notation of Ralf’s last game, which cost my son a place in the top ten and a modern yet attractive table lamp. He analysed the match from the notation, did not agree with Ralf’s claim that he could have taken a piece in the fifteenth move, but assured him that he hadn’t played badly, and might even have achieved a draw. Ralf listened with interest, asked a couple of questions, but then he didn’t go on talking to the IM. Instead, he leaned back and closed his eyes.
When we got back Julia was alone. Erika had left. Julia was not particularly informative; she just said Erika hadn’t wanted to keep David out of the spare room any longer, so she thought it better to cut her visit short and go home. Ninoshvili didn’t seem to have any views on the matter, and moreover he found another subject which no one could have expected to interest him less than the occupation of our spare room.
The Georgian government troops, Shevardnadze’s fighting force, have put the Abkhazians and Zviad Gamsakhurdia to fight, they have retaken the harbour town of Poti and are now marching on Zugdidi, Gamsakhurdia’s strongest base, his home town. The people of Poti, over which there has been fighting for days, have shown no enthusiasm about their liberation. “I wouldn’t be too happy in their place either,”
admitted Kako Chogoshvili, a brigade commander of the liberating forces, speaking on television.
The government troops wreaked no less havoc in Poti than Gamsakhurdia’s ill-disciplined men. The freedom fighters on both sides got drunk, committed rape, stole and looted, four civilians were murdered, including a young woman who wouldn’t stand by and see her apartment cleared. An old Georgian woman told the reporter, weeping, “I’m so ashamed. Our country is a disgrace to the whole world.”
After we had watched this news on three different TV channels, we sat down to supper at the dining table. Only Ralf ate heartily. Ninoshvili looked at his plate, deep in thought, and ate in silence. He was obviously lost for words. I thought there was only one conclusion to be drawn from this behaviour. He belongs to the party of the paranoid nationalist Gamsakhurdia, and very likely to the associates of the KGB whom the victorious president has accused in Tbilisi of being a fifth column of the rebellion. Now he sees the moment when he is unmasked approaching, and he fears for his neck.
This idea left me no peace. Oh no, my friend, not again!
After Julia had made an unsuccessful attempt to ask Ralf about his experiences in Schwitte and thus get some kind of conversation going, I cleared my throat and said, “David, if I understand all this correctly, at least now there’s a chance of the war coming to an end sooner or later. Isn’t that something to be glad of ?”
He raised his eyes, looked at me, and went on munching in silence for a long time. Julia cast him a concerned glance. Suddenly I saw tears come to his eyes. He said, in a stifled voice, “You’re wrong, Christian. Don’t you see the suffering? The destruction? Many more are going to be affected. Think of all that human suffering!” He pressed his napkin to his eyes and suddenly sobbed into it. Julia took his arm. Ralf looked down, staring at his plate.
Ninoshvili spoke into the napkin, which made it hard to hear what he was saying. “I have friends, many friends living in Poti. Good friends! I haven’t seen them for a long time. Oh, what suffering!”
He let the napkin drop and went out. It looked as if he had difficulty in finding his way to the door, where he stopped and looked back. “Please forgive me. I feel very bad about this.”
Julia got up and followed him. After a while Ralf put his fork down and left the room as well.
Chapter 51
A number of years ago the American government invested a lot of money in investigating a technological military procedure developed by the Russians. I compiled a piece of reportage about this top-secret venture at the time, but I can’t lay hands on it now. At any rate, the point on which the story depended was that after the CIA had tried and were still trying to solve the riddle, government officials found the miraculous procedure described in minute detail in an outdated Soviet journal.
The journal was stored in a cellar of the US State Department, which subscribed to it. Its issues were supposed to be regularly evaluated by capable linguists, and so they were, but the translators were behind with their work. Only a year or so after the publication of the article did they stumble upon the goldmine it contained.
This grotesque story, which I found in an American magazine, seemed to me to prove what I had long suspected.
The gigantic expenditure devoted both here and on the other side to investigating what the enemy was up to was largely wasted. The apparatus of espionage led a life of its own, circling deliberately around itself, devouring the millions necessary to keep it going, and coming up only with piffling bits of information of no use to anyone.
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Of course the personnel involved developed ingenious techniques for this apparatus to maintain itself. A considerable part of their energy went on checking up on their counterparts on the other side. They knew a great deal about each other, prepared reports on one another, and thus mutually supplied evidence of their right to exist.
I also read, with grim satisfaction, the story of the resident placed by the Federal Intelligence Service in Hong Kong, whose well-paid job consisted in essence of reading the local newspapers, cutting out articles and sending them on to his control centre, with the occasional knowledgeable comment added. I don’t know if the man charged with cutting out the articles also ever fell one or two years behind with his work, but it wouldn’t surprise me, since the newspapers often had large advertising sections in very tiny print where all kinds of significant information could be hidden.
Of course I had also read spy stories which enthralled me because they dealt with vital characters like the unfortunate Margaretha Geertruida Zelle from Leeuwarden, who danced on stage under the name of Mata Hari before she was condemned to death and shot at Vincennes in 1917. But it’s a long time since we’ve heard of such exotic women and demonic men. The fact that a self-satisfied idiot like James Bond had to be kitted out with futuristic equipment to engender suspense seemed to me just one more proof that the activity of real-life spies couldn’t interest anyone but themselves—apart, that is, from the taxpayer financing their useless lives.
Even the top spy Günter Guillaume, a stout man with a crew cut and a pallid wife called Christel, did not convince me that the profession of secret agent is very effective. I don’t want to snipe unnecessarily, but what harm did it do anyone, except Frau Brandt, if Chancellor Willy Brandt had an affair now and then? If the relevant information passed on by Guillaume to the East German Ministry of State Security had been assessed at its true worth, over here it would have been enough to cancel the informer’s entitlement to state benefits, on the grounds that he had thrown a spanner into the works of the Chancellery, and then they could have sent him back to the German Democratic Republic to return to the honest profession of photography for which he was trained. And Herr Brandt could have stayed on as Chancellor, unless he’d lost the taste for it anyway.
David's Revenge Page 18
