I said nothing. There was nothing to say. She obviously believed what she said, but she wasn’t getting angry. She was more embarrassed than angry. I suppose she had no recollection of her father. He was no more than a name to her, and that’s how she spoke of him.
When it seemed that Ingrid didn’t want to tell me more, Werner said, ‘Dodo used the American Freedom of Information Act and had someone go through the US army archives. He didn’t find much except that an American colonel and a German civilian – both named Winter –died of gunshot wounds. It was night and snowing. The court of inquiry recorded it as an accident. No one was punished.’
‘Are you sure my father was there? Berchtesgaden was in the American Zone. Why would my father be with the Americans?’
‘Captain Brian Samson,’ said Ingrid. ‘He gave evidence to the inquiry. A sworn statement from him – and many other documents were listed – but Dodo couldn’t get transcripts.’
Werner said, ‘That damned Dodo is a dangerous little swine. If he’s determined to make trouble…’
He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. Werner knew me well enough to appreciate how much any kind of blemish on my father’s career would hurt me. ‘I have no quarrel with Dodo,’ I said.
‘He resents you,’ said Ingrid. ‘After your visit to him he came to see Mama. Dodo really hates you.’
‘Why should he hate me?’
‘She’s Hungarian, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, she’s Hungarian,’ I said.
‘And Dodo’s a close friend of her family,’ said Ingrid with that decisive finality with which women pronounce upon such relationships. ‘To him you are a meddlesome foreign intruder…’ She didn’t finish. There was no need to. I nodded. Ingrid was right and I knew the rest of it. It was easy to see myself as a middle-aged lecher taking advantage of this innocent young girl. It would be more than enough to trigger an unstable personality like Dodo. If it was the other way round, if that dreadful Dodo was living with the young daughter of one of my old friends I would be angry too. Angry beyond measure.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘There is always electricity,’ said Ingrid.
‘Is there?’ I said.
‘To heat the water,’ said Ingrid. ‘We could even have small electric heaters in each bathroom. Then water from the boiler would just be used by the kitchen.’
I was angry at the injustice of it. I looked at the boiler and kicked it at the place where the water went into the pump. Nothing happened so I kicked it again, harder. It gave a whirring sound. Ingrid and Werner looked at me with new respect. For a moment or two we watched to see if it would keep going, and Werner touched it to be sure it was getting hot again. It got hotter. ‘What about a drink?’ said Werner.
‘I thought you’d never ask,’ I said.
‘And then Ingrid will cook the Hoppel-Poppel. She has everything ready. She cooks it in goose dripping.’
‘If you want to wash or anything, your top-floor bathroom will have plenty of hot water. It gets it straight from the tank.’
‘Thanks, Ingrid.’
‘Your room is just the same as it was. Werner wanted to have it repapered and refurnished as a surprise for you but I said it would be better to ask you first. I said you might like it just the way it is.’ She looked at me and her face said how sorry she was to have been the conveyor of unpleasant news to Werner’s friend.
‘I like it the way it is,’ I admitted.
‘It was nice of you to bring the curtain material. Werner said you wouldn’t mind.’
‘In goose dripping, eh?’ I said. ‘Ingrid, you’re some woman!’
Werner smiled. He was smiling a lot lately.
19
Having returned to London with the malicious drunken defamations of Dodo still ringing in my mind, I left a message for Cindy Prettyman or Matthews as, despite the Prettyman pension, she was determined to be known. She called back almost immediately. I expected her to be annoyed that I’d not contacted her earlier, but she had no recriminations. She was sweet and elated. Friday evening would be just fine for her. A hotel in Bayswater? Any way you want to play it, Cindy. Before I rang off, I heard the pips going. So she’d gone out of the office and called from a pay phone. Pay phone? And a hotel in Bayswater? Oh well, Cindy had always been a bit weird.
I had to talk to her. Dodo’s various bombshells, whether true or entirely nonsense, made it all the more urgent. And delicate little assignments like nosing into the tight little empire of Schneider, von Schild und Weber was best done via the big anonymous facilities of the Foreign Office, rather than the parochial ones of my Department, where all concerned would know, or guess, that the request had come from me. I’d come out of it with a lot of explaining to do if any of Dodo’s exotic allegations proved true.
‘I hate the idea of you confiding in that woman,’ said Gloria when I got home that night. ‘She’s so…’ Gloria paused to think of the word, ‘…cold-blooded.’
‘Is she?’
‘When are you seeing her?’
‘Friday evening, from the office.’
‘Can I come?’ said Gloria.
‘Of course.’
‘I’d be intruding.’
‘No, do come along. She won’t be expecting dinner. A drink, she said.’ I watched Gloria carefully. In all our years together, my wife – Fiona – had never revealed a trace of jealousy or suspicion, but Gloria scrutinized every female acquaintance as a possible paramour. She especially examined the motives of unattached females, and those from my past. In all these respects Cindy loomed large.
‘If you’re sure,’ said Gloria.
‘You might have to close your ears,’ I warned. I meant of course that there would be things said that I might later officially deny, that Cindy might later deny and that, if Gloria was going to be there, she’d have to be prepared to deny too. Deny on oath.
I think Gloria understood. ‘I’ll make a trip to the Ladies, that will give her a chance to say anything confidential.’
In the event Gloria decided not to come after all. I suppose she just wanted to see whether I’d say no, and how I would do it. I knew these little ‘tests’ she gave me were all part of her insecurity. Sometimes I wondered whether her plan to go to university was a test, designed to push me into a proposal of marriage.
Meanwhile, that Friday evening, I went to meet Cindy alone. It was just as well. Cindy was not in the best of moods. She was rather distracted, and it would not have improved her humour to see Gloria tagging along behind me. Cindy regarded her as a very junior civil servant who had come trespassing on the old friendship we’d once had.
‘Your blonde interlude’ is how Cindy referred to Gloria. It summed up what she thought of the relationship: its participants, its incongruity, its frivolity and its impermanence.
I let it go. She smiled in a fashion that both gave emphasis to what she’d said, and noted my passive acceptance of the judgment she’d passed. Cindy was an attractive woman, sexy in the way that health and energy so often are. But I’d never envied Jim. Cindy was too devious and manipulative and I was not good at handling her.
She was in a room on the second floor, sitting on the bed smoking a cigarette. Beside her there was a tray with a teapot and milk and cup – just one cup – and a big Martini ashtray with lots of lipstick-marked cigarette butts. Cindy’s attempt to give up smoking seemed to have been abandoned. She asked me if I wanted a drink. I should have said no but I said I’d have a Scotch and I gave her the box with the photos of the tomb inscriptions and the deciphering attempts, or rather I tried to give it to her. She waved it away with a world-weary flick of splayed fingers. ‘I don’t want it.’
‘Gloria said…’
‘I’ve changed my mind. Keep it.’
‘There’s nothing there that will shed any light on Jim or his work,’ I told her. ‘I’ll stake my life on that.’
She shrugged and touched her hair.
We wasted a lot of time getting the hotel staff t
o supply drinks, and while we waited we passed the time talking about nothing in particular. It was not my idea of an enjoyable evening out. Cindy had chosen the venue; The Grand & International, a seedy old hotel standing on the northern edge of Kensington Gardens, and hiding behind the Chinese restaurants of Queensway.
She’d coped with getting the room, paying in advance and arranging to occupy it without luggage and entertain a male visitor for an hour or so. I looked at her in her smart green and black plaid jacket and matching skirt. A boxy imitation fur coat was thrown across the bed. She wasn’t tall and graceful in the way that Gloria was but she had a shapely figure and the way she was lounging across the pillows did everything to emphasize it. I wondered what they made of her downstairs at the desk. Or had reception clerks in this part of the town stopped wondering about their clients?
It was probably one of their best rooms, but it was a squalid place by any standards. A flyblown mirror surmounted a cracked blue china sink. The bed was big with a quilted head-board and grey sheets. Cindy said it was suitably anonymous but I think she was confusing anonymity with discomfort –many people did. But if ‘The G and I’, an amalgamation of two Victorian monoliths, was somewhere that Cindy was in no danger of seeing anyone she knew, the same could not be said for me.
I’d been in this place many times. I’d brought a lovely old Sauer automatic pistol to the bar there back in 1974. I’d sold it to a man named Max, who died saving my life during the last ‘illegal’ border crossing I ever made. It was a good little gun: its blueing had worn but it had been little used. At the time its double action was better than anything else manufactured, but I suspect that Max selected it because during the war it had been the favoured side-arm of high-ranking German officers. Max was as anti-Nazi as anyone I knew, but he had a healthy respect for their choice of weapons.
There was hardly a day went by when I didn’t think of Max. Like Dodo, he had been one of ‘Koby’s Prussians’, an American Prussian in this case, for Max was one of those curious men who drift from place to place and from job to job. And somehow the towns they go to are all troublespots, and the jobs they find are always violent and dangerous jobs, and usually illegal too. But Max was different to all the others, an ex-New York police detective who fretted and worried and looked after everyone he worked with, especially me, the youngest member of his team.
Max had the most amazing memory for poetry, and his quotes ranged from Goethe to Gilbert & Sullivan librettos. I could usually keep up with his Goethe: ‘Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?’ but his Gilbert was what I always remembered him for:
‘When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is taboo’d by anxiety,
I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in, without impropriety.’
and of course, sung with verve and derision, for Max was not an uncritical admirer of his British allies:
‘For he might have been a Roosian,
A French, or Turk, or Proosian, Or perhaps Ital-ian!
But in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations, He remains an Englishman!’
Some of Gilbert’s phrases were too cryptic for Max. As the only Englishman with whom Max was regularly in contact, I was expected to decipher all the ‘Britishisms’ and explain such Gilbertian inexplicables as ‘A Sewell & Cross young man, A Howell & James young man’. Poor Max, I never did find out for him.
And yet there was nothing so inexplicable as Max himself. He was his own worst enemy, if my father was to be believed, but my father detested Max. In fact he detested ‘Lange’ Koby and all of what he called ‘the American freebooters’ in Berlin. That’s why my father stayed clear of them.
‘Are you listening, Bernard?’ I was jolted from my memories by Cindy.
‘Yes, Cindy, of course I am.’ I suppose I hadn’t nodded and smiled frequently enough while listening to her small-talk.
‘I’m going to Strasbourg,’ she said suddenly, and she had all my attention. With the cigarette still in her hand, she made a movement that left a thin trail of smoke. Then she touched her hair; it was shiny and curly and looked as if she’d been to the hairdresser. Her hair aways looked like that.
‘On holiday?’
‘God-a-mercy! Don’t be stupid, Bernard. Who would go to Strasbourg on holiday?’ She waved the cigarette in the air, and a long section of ash fell on the bedcover.
‘A job?’
‘Don’t be so dense, Bernie. The bloody European Parliament is there, isn’t it?’ As if angry about the marked bedcover, she stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray, pushing it down in a punitive action that deformed its shape and left it bent and broken.
‘And that’s who you’ll be working for?’ I wondered why the hell she hadn’t mentioned it earlier, when we’d been talking about the weather and how difficult it was to get seats for the Royal Opera House unless you knew someone. But then I realized that she didn’t want to tell me until I’d had a drink.
‘The pay is terrific and I’ll have no trouble selling my place in London. The estate agent is putting an ad in next Sunday’s papers. He says I’ll have hordes of people after it. He said that if I spent a bit of money on the kitchen and bathroom he could get another fifteen grand but I just don’t have the time.’
‘I see.’
‘You’re not interested, I suppose?’
‘Interested in what?’
‘What’s wrong with you tonight, Bernie? Are you interested in buying my house? I’d sooner it went to a friend.’
‘I’ve just moved,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t go through packing and unpacking again.’
‘Yes. I forgot. You’re in the sticks. I couldn’t live in the suburbs again. It’s a slow death.’
‘Yes, well, I’m not in a hurry,’ I said. I felt as if I’d just been given a swift kick in the guts. I’d come here believing that Cindy was even more determined than I was to get to the bottom of the mystery, and now I found she wasn’t interested in anything but selling her bloody house. Tentatively, and keeping Dodo out of it, I said, ‘I think I might have had a breakthrough on the matter of the German bank account.’
She had started rummaging through the expensive crocodile handbag that never left her side. ‘Good,’ she said looking down into the handbag and showing little or no interest in anything I might have discovered.
I persisted. ‘I hear it’s a bank called Schneider, von Schild und Weber. I found it in the Berlin phone book. We’ll need more details.’
‘I’ll be in Strasbourg as from the end of next week.’ From the handbag she brought her pack of cigarettes and a gold lighter.
‘That’s damned sudden.’
Without hurrying she lit her cigarette, blew a lot of smoke high into the air and said, ‘Sir Giles put my name in.’
‘Creepy-Pox strikes again.’
She gave a fixed smile to show that she didn’t think it was amusing but wasn’t going to make an issue of it.
‘It’s a plum job. The vacancy came up out of the blue. That’s why I got it. The fellow there now has AIDS. Two others shortlisted for the job are both family men with children at school. They wouldn’t move at such short notice. No, I have to be there next week.’
I swallowed the angry words that first came to mind and said, ‘But the last time we talked, you said that no one was going to shut you up. You said you weren’t going to let it go.’
‘I’ve got my life to lead, Bernard.’
‘So now you want me to forget it?’
‘Don’t shout, Bernie. I thought you’d be pleased and wish me good luck. I’m not telling you what to do, Bernie. If you want to continue and solve your whodunnit I’m not going to stop you.’
Patiently and quietly I said, ‘Cindy, this isn’t a whodunnit. If it’s what I think it is – what we both think it is – it’s the biggest KGB penetration of our department ever.’
‘Is it?’ She didn’t give a damn. It was as if I was talking to a stranger. This wasn’
t the woman who’d vowed to uncover the truth about the murder of her ex-husband.
‘Even if I’m wrong,’ I said, ‘we’re still talking about embezzlement on a mammoth scale: millions!’
‘I thought the same at first,’ she said very calmly and very condescendingly. ‘But when you consider it more carefully, it’s difficult to sustain the notion that there’s some gigantic financial swindle, and that the D-G is in on it.’ She smiled one of her saccharine smiles to emphasize the absurdity of that suggestion.
‘The D-G has virtually disappeared.’ I was exaggerating only slightly; he was very seldom in the office these days.
‘Is the disappearance of the D-G all part of this plot?’ she said with that same stupid smile on her face.
‘I’m not joking, Cindy,’ I said. Only with considerable difficulty did I resist telling the stupid bitch that she was the one who’d started all this. And she was the one who set up this discreet meeting and used a pay phone to do so.
‘I’m not joking either, Bernie. So just answer my question: are you saying there is a conspiracy in which Bret Rensselaer, Frank Harrington, the Deputy and maybe Dicky Cruyer are all implicated?’
It was such an absurd misrepresentation of anything I’d ever thought that I didn’t know where to start refuting it. I said, ‘Let us suppose that just one really irreproachable individual…’
‘The D-G,’ she said, like a particularly haughty member of the audience choosing a card for an amateur conjuror.
‘Okay. For the sake of argument, let’s say the D-G is a party to some big swindle. Surely you see that the structure of the Department is such that no one would believe it. Frank, Dicky, Bret and all the others would simply stand firm and say everything’s fine.’
‘And you’re the little boy telling the Emperor he has no clothes?’
‘Just because everyone says there is nothing wrong, we shouldn’t refuse to examine it more closely. Strange things happen in the place where I go to work. I’m not talking about the Ministry of Education or the Department of Health and Social Services, Cindy. I’m talking about the place the rough stuff is arranged.’