‘Come along, Bernard,’ said Bret. ‘You know how these folk operate. They are helping him. I’m asking you why.’
‘They want to monitor him, I suppose. George has money, and money talks in the intelligence game. It’s what makes the wheels go round. George can afford the best. He employed “Tiny” Timmermann to go over there and find out how his wife died. Tiny was a pro, a tough old-time CIA man who burrowed his way right into the Smersh compound in Magdeburg. Tiny was worth his pay. How would we feel if some joker was employing some capable rent-a-spies to come digging in our vegetable patch?’
Bret nodded. There was no need to draw a diagram for Bret, but Dicky made sure I didn’t come out of the story unsullied: ‘And the Stasi blew the top of Tiny’s head off and left him for you to find. Except that you misidentified the corpse and played right into their hands.’
Bret ignored Dicky and said: ‘If George was giving the other side a headache wouldn’t they just blow him away?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Not in Poland, and George knows that. George has a brother, very influential, very pally with the army regime in Warsaw. With things getting tough for commies everywhere these days, Normannenstrasse need all the help and goodwill they can get from the Poles. None of them are going to be cheering when George sends pensioned-off CIA men to probe their secrets – it sticks in our throats too, doesn’t it? But they probably figure that the way to counter a crazy man like George is to cosy up to him; to help and advise him, and make George a good friend.’
‘Quite a turnaround,’ said Dicky. ‘How would they start on that one?’
‘They go to George and say don’t waste your money on private investigators who just make trouble for everyone. We are just as interested in getting to the truth about Tessa Kosinski as you are. Let us prove to you that we are not bad people.’
‘But the Brits and the Yanks are bad people.’ Bret finished the story for me. ‘Drip by drip they poison his mind against us. Yes, I’ll buy that one. Patience and planning: that’s always been the Moscow method, and it’s the way all their stooges do it. While we run around in a constant panic, putting Band-Aids on wounds that need major surgery, our opponents are screening and recruiting university students who will be agents of influence in twenty years’ time.’
I said: ‘Is this an official abandoning of the theory that George ran away because the stock-market crashed?’
Dicky, who had been clinging to that theory for some time, decided that his best course of action was to throw a spanner into the works. He said: ‘Bernard believes Tessa Kosinski is still alive.’
Bret didn’t ask me if that was what I thought. He looked at me and said: ‘George Kosinski has been told that a contract killer named Thurkettle killed his wife.’ He finished his drink and waited for me to respond. Looking up, he said: ‘No reaction, Bernard?’
‘Told?’ I said. ‘Who told him?’
Bret responded to that question with one of his own. ‘Could he be persuaded to come back?’
‘George Kosinski?’ I said.
‘As you convincingly surmise, the Stasi and their Bezpieca buddies will be playing with him. We hear stories that they may have promised to finger Tessa’s killer for George, and we wouldn’t like that. I don’t want anyone standing in the dock in Warsaw facing murder one, and making headlines in a trial that has a feature role for Fiona’s sister. The Department couldn’t handle that kind of exposure. We’d have bus-loads of Japanese TV crews sorting through our shredder bags, and airing talking heads of your Portuguese help.’ A pause. ‘Do you hear me, Bernard?’
I said: ‘And George has been spotted?’
Rupert spoke: ‘By one of our people.’ Did I hear a measure of reservation?
‘Someone who knows George Kosinski?’ I asked him.
Dicky interposed: ‘It’s a positive identification. There can’t be two people who look like George Kosinski.’
‘Three Warsaw purchases for which George Kosinski’s Visa card was used,’ said Rupert, looking at me quizzically. ‘Two high-priced restaurants and a man’s shop.’
‘Sounds like George,’ I said. I was flattered that they were all regarding me as the person who had to be convinced, but then I saw that this was because I was going to be the idiot who returned there, trudging through the snow and ice, and resuming the goose chase for a man who’d already demonstrated commendable skill at hiding.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll go to Poland, if that is what it’s all about. Can I have authority to look at all the Berlin monitoring traffic?’
‘Anything you want; make a list,’ said Bret. ‘When would you plan to be in Warsaw?’
‘Right away, Bret,’ I said, not without a touch of sarcasm. With Christmas only days away I felt a resentment at the way I was being steamrollered.
‘Good,’ he said, and got to his feet and went to rip open another can of chilled Pepsi, giving me a mangled kind of smile in passing. ‘You’ll have diplomatic cover, but Copper will be de facto case officer. Can you hold still for that, Bernard?’
‘Okay.’
‘Diplomatic cover,’ said Bret. ‘You won’t be deniable; so play safe.’ He held his glass, and the rum bottle, high so that he could accurately measure the amount of booze he was pouring.
‘Play safe,’ I said and nodded. That summed up the top floor’s win-without-risk philosophy. Do the impossible but play safe.
‘Copper will keep in touch with Dicky,’ said Bret. ‘Do as you are told and don’t argue.’
‘Could you top this one up too, Bret?’ I said, holding out my empty glass.
Rupert gave me a lift home in his rented Ford when he heard I had no car. He was staying with his sister in Fulham. He said that Mayfair was on his way, and took me right to my door. I noticed him studying the quiet grandeur of the portals of my apartment block but he didn’t comment. Like everyone else in the Department, he knew it was Fiona’s legacy.
‘Thanks for the ride home,’ I said. I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock in the morning.
‘So you lost one of your people? I’m sorry.’ Rupert, suitably unemotional, was staring ahead through the windscreen at the nocturnal comings and goings in the busy street.
‘How did you hear?’
‘Cruyer and Rensselaer were talking about it before you arrived.’ He had never abandoned that Oxbridge habit of referring to his equals by their family names.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I wonder why they said nothing to me about it.’
‘Cruyer’s frightened of you.’
‘That will be the day.’
‘I was at Oxford with him. I knew him well in those days. He’s always dreaded people making a fool of him.’
‘Do I do that to him?’
‘At times you do it to everyone.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said.
A taxi cab swerved and pulled to the kerb ahead of us. An elderly couple emerged. The man cut a dignified figure in evening clothes, the woman in shiny furs. I recognized them as our long-married next-door neighbours. The man dug into his pocket to pay off the cabby. The woman slammed the cab door with an intemperate display of strength. Then, as they passed us, they resumed some bitter argument, their faces contorted with anger. I found something exceptionally gloomy in this demonstration that time brought no mellowing of marital strife.
‘There are photos,’ said Rupert. ‘They decided not to show them to you. Photos of George Kosinski. My people took them four days ago. You want to see them?’
‘Yes, please.’
Rupert reached over his seat for a leather document case on the floor of the car. From it he brought three photos; colour snapshots taken in a busy street. He took a tiny flashlight from the case and shone it for me to see better.
‘George Kosinski,’ said Rupert. ‘Here, and here.’ Leaning across he stabbed a finger at a blurred head and shoulders amid a dozen or more people on a busy street. The picture had been taken on one of those cameras that imprint a date and time on the negative. It was
in any case obviously made recently. The people were bundled up in fur hats and woollen hats, and most of them looked blue with the cold. I recognized shop signs and a section of the Nowy Swiat, Warsaw’s main street.
‘Why didn’t they want me to see these?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t make too much of that. You are more familiar with George Kosinski’s appearance than any of us. If you had dismissed the photos as being of someone else, it would have ended the discussion, wouldn’t it? Cruyer didn’t want to provide you with that amount of leverage.’
‘Can I keep these?’
‘I’m afraid not, old chap. I have to show them to the D-G tomorrow.’
‘I heard he was sick.’
Rupert looked at me as if suspecting that I’d tried to catch him out. ‘I’m invited to the D-G’s home,’ he said very slowly.
‘Take sandwiches,’ I advised. ‘His idea of lunch these days is tea with lemon in it and a dry biscuit.’
‘I owe you a big favour, Samson,’ he said, as if he’d been bottling it up and rehearsing this announcement. ‘I never did say thank you.’
‘A favour?’
‘A long time back, when that ghastly fellow Kosciuszko was blackmailing my chief… Everyone, that is to say everyone who worked in the office at that time, felt deeply indebted to you.’
‘Oh, that,’ I said, although I had only a vague recollection of the business he was talking about.
‘I don’t know what you did, and I don’t care. He was a poisonous reptile. Someone told me you threw the little bastard into the river somewhere and left him swimming for his life through the ice-floes. My God! I would have enjoyed the sight of it. I hope your good deed didn’t go entirely unrewarded.’ I was tired; I didn’t respond. He said awkwardly: ‘And I believe the best way I can return that favour is to speak to you frankly.’ It was a question. I looked at him but made no response. ‘Man to man,’ he added.
I appreciated the effort he was making. Rupert Copper wasn’t the sort of man who readily resorted to man-to-man conversations, especially with outsiders, the sort of outsiders who tossed men into the water for fun and profit. ‘Shoot,’ I said.
‘Tonight I watched you talking to Cruyer, and that chap Rensselaer. And quite honestly, old chap, I wonder exactly what goes on in that head of yours.’
‘Not much,’ I admitted.
‘The whole service, from London to the other side of the world, seems concerned with nothing but rumour after rumour.’
‘It’s what the service does to earn its keep,’ I said. ‘We’re in the rumour business aren’t we?’
‘Rumours about you, Samson,’ he said with emphasis. ‘Rumours about your wife. They are still asking if that business really was… what it was later described to be. Or whether she really defected with a lot of choice material, and then was lured back. No, no…’ He raised his hand, stopping my objections while he went on: ‘I hear more rumours about that girl you lived with, the one that Rensselaer now seems to have some claim upon. That was a somewhat sudden elevation to the top floor, wasn’t it? There are endless rumours about who killed your sister-in-law, and why. And now, a new one going the rounds in the last few days says that she was never really dead. She’s alive and living in Moscow or some bloody nonsense. Now there is all this shenanigan with your brother-in-law. And that’s in my bailiwick, and not something I can ignore. Do you see?’
‘I don’t know what I can do to stop people telling each other ludicrous stories,’ I said.
He sighed and tried again. ‘You’re a danger to all concerned, Samson. To Whitehall and to Normannenstrasse. What do you think would have been the reaction here in London Central, had it been you stretched out dead in the Berlin mortuary tonight, instead of that kid who worked for you?’
I didn’t respond.
‘A yawn,’ said Copper, answering his own question. ‘And have you properly considered Fiona’s position?’
‘In respect of what?’
‘In respect of those Stasi bastards. Remember that poor little Simakaitis? The Lithuanian KGB captain who came over to us with all the wavelengths? A bright fellow who got sick of seeing the rough stuff going on over there. Eight years ago next month, if my memory serves me. We brought all his family out too. It was a textbook operation. Warsaw office handled the children.’
‘I remember the case,’ I said.
‘Normannenstrasse was determined to destroy him. The Stasi lost their Berlin codes and ciphers and wavelengths.’
‘Yes, but that was a different generation of Stasi in those days. Those gorillas were the last remnants of the Stalinists.’
‘The same sort of vindictive crew are holding the reins again now. Anyone less than fanatical finds himself shunted off to a frontier job, to be replaced by a dedicated Marxist. Every day in my office I see the results of what they’re doing. These people are fuelled by hatred. They see Gorbachev’s concessions as a threat to their sacred creed, and they have dug their heels in.’
‘Well, they didn’t get Simakaitis,’ I said. ‘I heard that someone went over to Florida last summer to get his opinion on some new radio material.’
‘They didn’t get Sim because the Yanks took him into one of those elaborate witness protection programmes they designed for Mafia informants: a completely new life.’
‘So what did they do?’
‘The KGB let Sim live. Sim’s elderly parents were killed in a shooting in a filling station hold-up in Brussels. The killers didn’t stop to steal any money. His wife died six months later. She went overboard from the Flushing ferryboat, and the Scheldt estuary is very cold in January. No one saw her go over. That happened one year, to the very day, after he defected. Washed up a week later. No water in the lungs. Unconscious before she went in, the coroner said. Then Sim’s sister took a big overdose one summer night when she was on holiday in Spain, and in the best of spirits. His brother died in France. That happened the same day Sim went to Washington: fell from the Paris–Lyon express. His four children were all swimming together…’
‘Okay, that’s enough,’ I said.
‘Sim is in a nursing home in Orlando. I was the person who went to see him. They did for him all right. He sits and looks at the wall all day. It’s just as well he doesn’t want to go anywhere or do anything, because he can’t even go to the toilet on his own.’
‘Fiona are you thinking about?’
‘Of course I’m thinking about Fiona. Sim did nothing compared to what she did. No matter about the exact circumstances of her departure, her subsequent treachery is unforgivable in their eyes. They trusted her; she betrayed them. They did everything for her, a decent place to live, a car and driver, they even gave her a department and authority. You know what those things mean in the East. She spat in their eye.’
‘You think Fiona might be targeted in that same way?’
‘How can you rule it out? Perhaps the wheels are already turning. Her only sister is dead. Her brother-in-law has been forced into taking a trip to Poland, for reasons we can only puzzle about. The boy was killed, perhaps because they mistook him for you. You are on your way there, and we both know how exposed you’ll be out there in the sticks.’
‘It would have happened by now,’ I said.
‘That’s what Sim thought. But they don’t hurry their retributions. They like their victims to think about what’s coming. You know what they are like; how can you be so blind?’
He got out his cigarettes and offered me one. It was a slim silver case with his initials engraved on it. I declined. ‘I’m trying to give up,’ I said.
He lit up using his slim Dunhill lighter and puffed smoke, savouring its taste. Then he wiped the condensation from the windscreen with the edge of his hand. ‘Forget it,’ he said suddenly. ‘I spoke out of turn.’
‘No,’ I said, and I took up the little flashlight again and studied the photos for a final check. ‘Thanks,’ I said as I handed the pictures back to him.
‘Is there anything wrong? Is it n
ot him?’ said Rupert.
‘Difficult to say with that big fur hat he’s wearing. But it looks like George.’
‘They haven’t told us anything,’ said Rupert. It wasn’t a complaint. Rupert had never been the whining kind, but he wanted me to know that he thought the Warsaw SIS office was being deliberately kept out of the George Kosinski business.
‘Thanks again for the ride home,’ I said. ‘Thanks for everything.’
Rupert was hunched over the steering wheel, cigarette drooping from his fingers, looking closely at the pictures with the aid of his flashlight. ‘You saw something else, didn’t you?’ he said without looking up. Rupert was quick and I was tired, otherwise he’d never have detected the surprise I’d registered when looking at the pictures. ‘Is one of those people in the photo Thurkettle?’
‘I’ve never heard of Thurkettle.’
‘No? Bret thought you had. Before you arrived tonight he was telling Cruyer that, in your debriefing in California, you described how Thurkettle shot and killed Tessa Kosinski. You were there; and you said you saw it.’
‘I seem to remember Dicky saying tonight that I thought Tessa was still alive.’
‘Dicky always likes to look before he leaps,’ said Rupert. ‘He doesn’t express his own thoughts, he puts them into the mouths of other people to see what happens.’
‘Tessa Kosinski? Still alive?’
‘I can see why they are puzzled. Bret is worried that your uncorroborated evidence, about a confused exchange of shots on a dark night, is the only thing they have to say that Tessa Kosinski is dead. Nothing else. In fact everyone else denies it.’
‘What about Fiona? She was there too. What did she tell Bret at her debriefing?’
‘Don’t get angry with me, Bernard, I’m just putting you in the picture.’
‘Can you still find your way to Fulham?’ I said.
But Rupert wasn’t going to stop now. ‘Bret said Fiona won’t talk about that night. He says that Fiona is struck dumb when Tessa’s name is mentioned, that she has totally repressed any idea that her sister might be dead. By never admitting she is dead she’ll keep her sister alive.’