Читать книгу Mexico Set - Len Deighton - Страница 10

I didn’t sleep again after they departed. I dozed fitfully but imagined I could hear their diesel car returning, with the alternate roars and screams that a really bad surface racks from a small engine. But it was just the wind, and then, as dawn came and the storm passed over, I was kept awake by the screeching and chattering of the animals. They came right down to the water through the thick undergrowth that bordered one side of the house. There was a stream there; it passed close by a window of Paul Biedermann’s study. I suppose he liked to watch the animals. It was an aspect of Biedermann’s character that I’d not yet encountered.

Dawn shone its hard grey light and made the sea look like granite. I went down to the kitchen and found some canned food: beans and tomatoes. I could find no way of warming the mixture so I ate a plateful cold. I was hungry.

From the kitchen window there was a view back towards the village. That way the sky was light pink. I counted seven vultures, circling very high and looking for breakfast. Nearer to the house there were birds in the trees making a lot of noise, and monkeys scrambling about in the lower branches with occasional forays into the garden.

I would have given a lot for a cup of coffee, but instant powder stirred into cold tinned milk did not appeal. I made do with a shot of Biedermann’s brandy. It was everything Stinnes said about it. So good, in fact, that I took another.

Fortified by the strong drink, and one of Biedermann’s fancy striped sweaters chosen from his wardrobe, I went outside. The sky was overcast to give a cold shadowless light and, although the black clouds had gone, there was still a cold wind from the ocean. The tyre marks of the jeep were to be seen on the roadway. I followed the new macadam road to the entrance gate. It was open, its chain freshly cut. Despite the borrowed sweater I was cold, and colder still as I circled the house completely, crossed the patio that was sheltered from the wind, and climbed up the hill at the back to the highest point of rock. I couldn’t see the road or the village but there was a haze of woodsmoke rising from where I guessed the village must be. I couldn’t see any sign of Biedermann or his car. That was the first time I’d noticed the swimming pool. It was about two hundred metres from the house and hidden by a line of junipers planted by some landscape gardener for that purpose.

The pool was big, and very blue. And full length on the bottom, at the deep end, was a human figure. At first I thought it was a drowning case. Wrapped in cheap grey blankets, the figure made a shapeless bundle that almost disappeared in the dark depths of blue shade. It was only when I got past the wooden building that housed four changing rooms and filtering and heating equipment that I was sure that the pool was dry and drained.

‘Hey!’ I shouted at the inert figure. ‘Tu que haces?’

Very slowly the blankets became unravelled to reveal a man dressed in badly wrinkled white trousers and a T-shirt advertising Underberg. One of his bare sunburned arms bore a lacework of neat white scar tissue, and so did one side of his face. He blinked and squinted into the light, trying to see me against the glaring sky.

‘Paul Biedermann,’ I shouted. ‘What the hell are you doing in the pool?’

‘You came,’ he said. His voice was hoarse and he coughed to clear his throat. ‘The others have gone? How did you get here?’

‘It’s Bernd,’ I said. ‘We spoke on the phone; Bernd Samson. I walked. Yes, the other two drove away hours ago.’ He must have been watching the road. My approach along the track had gone unobserved from wherever he’d been hiding.

Wrapped into his blanket I could see a hunting rifle. Biedermann pushed it away as he bent his head forward almost to his knees and stretched his arms. Then he rubbed his legs and arms, trying to restore his circulation. It must have been very uncomfortable on the hard, cold surface of the concrete pool all night. He looked up and then smiled as he recognized me. It was a severe smile, twisted by the puckered scars that marked one side of his face.

‘Bernd. Are you alone?’ he said, trying to make it sound as if it meant no more to him than how many cups of coffee to order. His face and arms were blue; it was the light reflected from the painted sides of the pool.

‘They’ve gone,’ I said. ‘Come and switch the electricity on, and make me a cup of coffee.’

He slung the rifle on his shoulder and climbed up the ladder of the empty pool. He left the blanket where it was. I wondered if he intended to spend another uncomfortable night here.

He moved about like an automaton. Once inside the house he showed me all the things I should have found for myself. There was bottled gas for cooking, a generator for lighting, and a battery-powered Sony short-wave radio. He boiled water and measured out coffee in silence. It was as if he wanted to take as long as he could to defer the start of the conversation. Even when we were both seated in his study, hands clasped round cups of strong black coffee, he still didn’t offer any explanation about his curious behaviour. I said nothing. I waited for him to speak. It was usually better that way and I wanted to see how he would start, and even more importantly what he would avoid.

‘I’ve got everything,’ said Paul Biedermann. ‘Plenty of money, my health, and a wife who stood by me after the accident. Even after that girl was killed in my car.’ It was hard to believe that this was the nervous schoolboy I’d known in Berlin. It was not just the strong American accent he’d acquired at his expensive East Coast school but something in his poise and his manner too. Paul Biedermann had become unreservedly American in a way that only Germans are able to do.

‘That was a nasty business,’ I said.

‘I was unconscious three days. I was in hospital almost six months altogether, counting the convalescence. Six months; and I hate hospitals.’ He drank some coffee. It was a heavy Mexican coffee that Biedermann had turned into a devil’s brew that made my teeth tingle. ‘But then I got entangled with those bastards and I haven’t slept properly ever since. Do you know that, Bernd? It’s the literal truth that I haven’t slept really well since the start of it.’

‘Is that so,’ I said. I didn’t want to sit there with my tongue hanging out. I wanted to sound casual; bored, almost. But I wanted to know, especially after I’d heard Stinnes and his pal talking about Biedermann as if he was a KGB agent.

‘The Russians,’ said Biedermann, ‘spies and all that. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’ He was looking over my shoulder as if he wanted to see the animals and birds in the trees outside.

‘I know what you’re talking about, Paul,’ I said.

‘Because you’re in all that, aren’t you?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ I said

‘I was talking to my sister Poppy. She met you at a dinner party at the house of one of the big Berlin spy chiefs. You’re one of them, Bernd. You probably always have been. Was that why your father sent you to school in Berlin, instead of sending you back to England the way the other British families sent their kids back there to go to school?’

‘Who were they, Paul? Who were those men who came in the night?’

‘I didn’t see you arrive. I was out with the gun, shooting lizards. I hate lizards, don’t you? Those Russkies are like lizards, aren’t they? Especially the one with glasses. I knew they would come, and I was right.’

‘How well do you know them?’

‘They pass me around like a parcel. I’ve dealt with so many different Russians that I’ve almost lost count. These two were sent from Berlin. The one with the strong Berlin accent calls himself Stinnes but he’s not really a German, he’s a Russian. The other one calls himself Pavel Moskvin. It sounds like a phoney name, doesn’t it? I still haven’t figured out if they work from Moscow or are part of the East German intelligence service. What do you think, Bernd?’

‘Moskvin means “man from Moscow”. It could be a genuine name. Do they have diplomatic cover?’

‘They said they do.’

‘Then they are Russians. The KGB give almost all their people diplomatic cover. The East Germans don’t. They work mostly in West Germany and infiltrate their agents among the refugees going there.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s part of the overall contingency plan. East German agents in West Germany are hard to find. They don’t need the cover. And in other parts of the world East German networks survive after Russians with diplomatic cover are discovered and kicked out.’

‘They never answer any questions. I thought they’d leave me alone, now that I spend most of the year in Mexico.’ Not most of the time but most of the year. Most of the financial year; it was a fiscal measurement of time.

‘How did you get entangled with the Russians, Paul?’ I asked, carefully using his own words.

‘What am I supposed to do? I’ve got half my family still living over there in Rostock. Am I supposed to tell them to go to hell so that they take it out on my aunts and uncles?’

‘Yes, that’s what you’re supposed to do,’ I said.

‘Well, I didn’t,’ said Biedermann. ‘I played along with them. I told them I’d do nothing serious but I played along when they asked for run-of-the-mill jobs.’

‘What did they get you to do?’

‘Laundering money. They never asked me to give them money – they seem to have plenty of that to throw around. They wanted Deutschmarks changed into dollars, Swedish kronor changed into Mexican pesos and vice versa, Latin American currencies changed into Dutch guilders.’

‘They could have all that done at a money exchange in West Berlin.’

He smiled and stared at something beyond me and drank his coffee. ‘Ja,’ he said, forgetting for a moment that we were speaking English. He touched the side of his face as if discovering the terrible scars for the first time. ‘There was a difference; the money was sent to me in large cash transfers and I had to pass it on in small contributions and donations.’

‘Pass it on how?’

‘By mail.’

‘In small amounts?’

‘One hundred dollars, two hundred dollars. Never more than five hundred dollars – or the equivalent amount in whatever currency.’

‘Cash?’

‘Oh yes, cash. Strictly no cheques.’ He shifted uneasily in his seat, and I had the feeling that he now regretted this confession. ‘High-denomination notes in plain envelopes. No registered letters; that would mean a lot of names and addresses and post-office forms. Too risky, that sort of thing, they said.’

‘And where has all this money been going to?’

He put his coffee on the table and began searching the pockets of his pants as if looking for a cigarette. Then he stood up and looked round. Eventually he found a silver box on the table. He took one for himself. Then he offered the open box to me. It was, of course, that sort of evasive temporizing that armchair psychologists call ‘displacement activity’. Before he could repeat the whole performance in pursuit of matches, I threw him mine. He lit his cigarette and then waved the smoke away from his face nervously. ‘You know where it’s been going to, Bernd. Trade unions, peace movements, “ban the bomb” groups. Moscow can’t be seen making donations to them. The money has to come from “little people” all over the world. You weren’t born yesterday, Bernd. We all know the way it’s done.’

‘Yes, we all know the way it’s done, Paul.’ I swung round to see him. On the side-table there was the bottle of brandy that Stinnes and I had plundered. I wondered if that was what had attracted his gaze when he had stared over my shoulder. He wasn’t looking at it now; he was looking at me.

‘Don’t damn well sneer at me. I’ve got my relatives to worry about. And if I hadn’t koshered their bloody contributions someone else would do it for them. It’s not going to change the history of the world, is it?’ He was still moving round the room, looking at the furnishings as if seeing them for the first time.

‘I don’t know what it’s going to do, Paul. You’re the one that had the expensive education: schools in Switzerland, schools in America and two years’ postgraduate studies at Yale. You tell me if it’s going to change the history of the world.’

‘You weren’t so high and mighty in the old days,’ said Biedermann. ‘You weren’t so superior when you sold me that old Ferrari that kept breaking down.’

‘It was a good car. I had no trouble with it,’ I said. ‘I only sold it because I went to London. You should have looked after it better.’ What a memory he had. I’d quite forgotten selling him that car. Maybe that’s how the rich got richer – by remembering in resentful detail every transaction they made.

He kept his cigarette in his mouth and, still standing, fingered the keys of the computer as if about to use it. ‘It’s getting more and more difficult,’ he said. He turned to look at me, the smoke of the cigarette rising across his face like a fine veil and going into his eyes so that he was squinting. ‘Now that the Mexicans have nationalized the banks, and the peso has dropped through the floor, there are endless regulations about foreign exchange. It’s not so easy to handle these transactions without attracting attention.’

‘So tell your Russians that,’ I suggested.

‘I don’t want them to solve my problems. I want to get out of the whole business.’

‘Tell them that.’

‘And risk what happens to my relatives?’

‘You talk as though you are some sort of master spy,’ I said. ‘If you tell them you’ve had enough, that will be the end of it.’

‘They’d kill me,’ he said.

‘Rubbish,’ I said. ‘You’re not important enough for them to waste time or effort on.’

‘They’d make an example of me. They’d cut my throat and make sure everyone knew why.’

‘They’d not make an example of you,’ I said. ‘How could they? The last thing they want to do is draw attention to their secret financing network. No, as long as they thought you’d keep their secrets, they’d let you go, Paul. They’d huff and puff and shout and threaten in the hope you’d get frightened enough to keep going. But once they saw you were determined to end it they’d reconcile themselves to that.’

‘If only I could believe it.’ He blew a lot of smoke. ‘One of the new clerks in my Mexico City office – a German fellow – has been asking me questions about some of the money I sent out. It’s just a matter of time …’

‘You don’t let the staff in your office address the envelopes, do you?’

‘No, of course not. But I do the envelopes on the addressing machine. I can’t sit up all night writing out envelopes.’

‘You’re a fool, Paul.’

‘I know,’ he said sadly. ‘This German kid was updating the address lists and he noticed these charities and trade unions that were all coded in the same way. It was in a different code from all the other addresses. I said it was part of my Christmas charity list but I’m not sure he believed me.’

‘You’d better transfer him to one of your other offices,’ I said.

‘I’m going to send him to Caracas but it won’t really solve the problem. Some other clerk will notice. I can’t address the envelopes by hand and have handwritten evidence all over the place, can I?’

‘Why are you telling me all this, Paul?’

‘I’ve got to talk it over with someone.’

‘Don’t give me that,’ I said.

He stubbed out his cigarette and said, ‘I told the Russians that the British secret service was becoming suspicious. I invented stories about strangers making inquiries at various offices.’

‘Did they believe that?’

‘Phone calls. I always said the inquiries were phone calls. So I didn’t have to describe anyone’s physical appearance.’ He went over to the side-table and picked up the bottle of brandy. He put it into a cupboard and shut the door. It looked like the simple action of a tidy man who didn’t want to see bottles of booze standing around in his office.

‘That was clever,’ I said, although I thought such a device would sound very unconvincing to any experienced case officer.

‘I knew they’d have to give me a respite if I was under surveillance.’

‘And talking to me is a part of that scheme? Did you tell them about my phone call? Was it that that gave you the idea? Is that why they came here last night?’

He didn’t answer my question, and that convinced me that my guess was right. Biedermann had thought up all this nonsense about the British becoming suspicious only after I’d phoned him. He said, ‘You’re something in the espionage business, you’ve admitted that. I realize you’re not in any sort of senior position, but you must know people who are. And you’re the only contact I have.’

I grunted. I didn’t know whether that was Paul Biedermann’s sincere opinion or whether he was hoping to provoke me into claiming power and influence.

‘Does that mean you can help?’ he said.

I finished the coffee and got to my feet. ‘You copy that list of addresses for me – London might be interested in that – and I’ll make sure that Bonn is told that we are investigating you. You’ll become what NATO intelligence calls “sacred”. None of the other security teams will investigate you without informing us. That will get back to your masters quickly enough.’

‘Wait a moment, Bernd. I don’t want Bonn restricting my movements or opening my mail.’

‘You can’t have it both ways, Paul. “Sacred” is the lowest category we have. There’s not much chance that Bonn will find that interesting enough to do anything: they’ll leave you to us.’

Biedermann didn’t look too pleased at the idea of his reputation suffering, but he realized it was the best offer he was likely to get. ‘Don’t double-cross me,’ he said.

‘How would I do that?’

‘I’m not up for sale to the highest bidder. I want out. I don’t want to exchange a master in Moscow for a master in London.’

‘You make me laugh, Paul,’ I said. ‘You really think you’re a master spy, don’t you? Are you sure you want to get out, or do you really want to get in deeper?’

‘I need help, Bernd.’

‘Where did you hide your car?’

‘You can drive along the beach when the tide is out.’

I should have thought of that one. The tide comes in and washes away the tyre tracks. It had fooled Stinnes and his pal too. Sometimes amateurs can teach the pros a trick or two. ‘The tide is out now,’ I said. ‘Get it and give me a lift into the village, will you, before someone starts renting my Chevvy out as a bijou residence.’

‘Keep the sweater,’ he said. ‘It looks good on you.’