Mexico Set

by Len Deighton

  He was ‘Erich’ now to both the Volkmanns. I didn’t like that; it was too personal. Better to keep a doctor-patient relationship in this sort of operation just in case it got very rough. ‘He should have thought of that when he was vacillating,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a big step, Bernie.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ I went over to the air-conditioner. I held my hand in front of the outlet but the air was still not much cooled.

  ‘It makes a lot of noise but doesn’t work very well,’ explained Werner. ‘The Mexicans call them “politicians”.’

  ‘And if I have to finally submit to London a report about a cock-up, they are immediately going to ask me why the hell I didn’t insist on seeing Stinnes for myself.’

  ‘Erich knows what’s at stake,’ said Werner. ‘He’s an experienced agent. It will be just as if we were doing it. We’d make sure we got it right, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘He’d better get it right,’ I said. ‘He won’t be able to go back to his embassy and say he’s had a change of mind.’

  ‘Why won’t he?’ said Werner. ‘We’ve known that to happen before, haven’t we? I thought that’s why London were so keen to load him on to the plane and get him away.’

  ‘London have thought of that one,’ I said. ‘As soon as they get the telex to say that we have Stinnes, they’ll leak a story to one of the news agencies. It will say that we have a high-grade KGB defector who has been supplying information for some years. And the chosen reporter will even have some details of the intelligence that good old Stinnes is said to have provided to them.’

  Now Werner pinched the cloth of his undershirt between finger and thumb and pulled it away from his body to let some air get to him. ‘Erich Stinnes has never passed anything back to London, has he?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’d think that’s just London Central dropping him into the dirt so he doesn’t dare think about going back again ever.’

  ‘Fantastic, Werner,’ I said with mock admiration. ‘You got it at first guess. But for God’s sake don’t let Stinnes get wind of it.’

  ‘Who came up with that nasty little idea? Bret Rensselaer?’

  ‘Well, we both know it couldn’t be Dicky,’ I said. ‘Dicky never had an idea.’

  ‘Where do you want to meet Erich?’ Werner asked.

  ‘I’ll have to see him,’ I said. ‘Face to face, and well before Friday. Today if possible. If he wants to confide in Zena, or anyone else for that matter, that’s up to him. That’s a decision I can’t take for him. The information about Friday’s rendezvous is for him alone, Werner.’

  ‘You’re going to keep Zena out of it, are you? Are you going to keep me out of it too?’

  ‘You’ve done your bit, and so has Zena. Let’s get it over with. I want to get out of this city. The rain and the heat…and the smell. It’s not my idea of a holiday.’

  ‘Zena’s uncle and aunt are due back from their vacation at the weekend, so we’ll also be leaving. But I won’t be sorry,’ said Werner. ‘I’ll never complain about Berlin weather again after this damned humidity. Three times I’ve had someone in to look at that air-conditioner and they keep telling me it’s working fine. They say it’s too hot outside for the machine to cope with it.’

  I looked at him and nodded.

  ‘Okay,’ said Werner. ‘I’ll get you together with Erich Stinnes. He’s going to phone about six. I’ll bring him anywhere you want him.’

  ‘I’ll need to talk to him. Somewhere safe. Angel’s body shop; that car repair place out near the Shrine of Guadalupe. Remember? It’s painted in very bright red and yellow.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Drive straight in, through the workshop and out the back. There’s a yard. I’ll be parked there. Oh, say seven o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘No Zena,’ I said.

  Werner drank some lemonade. ‘I’ve never seen her like this before,’ he said sadly. ‘She really likes Erich. She’s worrying about him.’

  ‘Keep her out of it, Werner.’

  ‘Bernie. You don’t think Zena could be infatuated with Erich Stinnes, do you?’

  ‘You know her better than I do,’ I said, to avoid the question. Or rather to avoid the answer, which was simply that I knew only one thing that Zena was infatuated with. And Erich Stinnes was about to take delivery of a quarter of a million of them.

  ‘But do I?’ said Werner, as if he doubted it. ‘You never see the person you love, except through tinted spectacles. Sometimes I expect too much of her. I love her. I’d give her the crown jewels.’

  ‘She’d like the crown jewels, Werner.’

  He smiled without putting much effort into it. ‘I love her too much, I know that. You’re a friend; you can see it better than I can.’

  ‘It’s no good asking me about Zena,’ I said. ‘It’s no good expecting me to understand anything about any woman. Whatever Zena feels about Erich Stinnes, there’s not much chance that either of us will ever discover what it is. I thought she hated Russians.’

  ‘She talks about him a lot. She kept one of those passport photos he sent to you. She keeps it in the pages of her own passport. I noticed her remove it when we went through immigration at the airport.’

  ‘That’s not very significant,’ I said.

  ‘If she ran off with Stinnes I’d die,’ said Werner.

  ‘She’s not going to run off with Stinnes,’ I said. ‘And, even in the unlikely event that she did, you wouldn’t die, Werner. You’d feel miserable but you wouldn’t die.’ I felt like grabbing him and shaking him out of his despondent mood but I knew it wouldn’t work. I’d tried such measures before.

  ‘When we left Berlin this time, she took all her jewellery across to her sister.’

  Shit, I thought, don’t say there’s another Zena. But I smiled and said, ‘Has she got much jewellery?’

  ‘Quite a bit; some diamond rings, a three-strand necklace of pearls and a platinum bracelet set with large diamonds. And there’s a heavy gold necklace that cost me nearly ten thousand marks. Then there are things from her mother; pendants, a watch set with diamonds and pearls. She likes jewellery. You must have seen her wearing it.’

  ‘I may have done,’ I said. ‘I didn’t notice.’

  ‘She took it to her sister.’

  ‘She was frightened of burglars,’ I said.

  ‘She never leaves it in the apartment when we’re away.’

  ‘Well, there you are. She wanted to make sure it was safe. There’d be no point in bringing it to Mexico. You’d be asking for trouble with the Customs. And taking it out again would be even more difficult.’

  ‘But usually she asks me to put it in my safe-deposit box. This time she took it round to her sister.’

  ‘You could always ask her about it,’ I said, and tried to think of a way to change the subject.

  ‘I did ask her,’ said Werner. ‘She said she thought her sister might like to wear it while we’re away.’

  ‘There you are, then. That’s the explanation.’

  ‘Her sister never goes anywhere she could wear stuff like that.’

  ‘So why do you think she took it to her sister?’

  ‘If Zena was going to run off with Erich Stinnes, it would be a good thing to do. She likes that jewellery better than anything in the world.’

  ‘It will be better that Zena doesn’t know exactly what’s happening on Friday,’ I said.

  ‘You mean I refuse to tell her?’ I could see Werner anticipating the fight he was going to have about it.

  ‘Better that neither of you know,’ I said.

  ‘She won’t be satisfied with a refusal,’ said Werner. ‘She’s followed this one through right from the beginning. She’ll want to be in on the final act.’

  ‘We’ll think of something to tell her,’ I said. ‘By the way, how do you know that Henry Tiptree has arrived here?’

  ‘He phoned me. He gave me a lot of flattery about what a wonderful reputatio
n I had. Then he arranged a meeting. He said he wanted to pick my brains. But he phoned up later and put the meeting off. He’ll phone again, he said.’

  ‘Why did he cancel?’

  ‘Is it important?’

  ‘I’m just curious.’

  ‘I can’t tell you why. Zena took the call. He didn’t give any reason as far as I know. Zena said he just phoned up and cancelled the meeting.’ I nodded. Werner said, ‘Don’t mention the gun to Zena. She hates guns.’

  So Zena had been talking to Tiptree. Or he’d been talking to her. Either way I didn’t like it. And I didn’t like the way they’d kept Werner out of it. They were a bad combination: the tough, dedicated little Zena, and Tiptree, the ambitious diplomat trying his hand at a cloak-and-dagger job. They were amateurs. Amateurs keep their eyes on the target instead of looking over their shoulders.

  25

  You look out for the tacheria which always has smoke from the open fire and a line of people waiting for the fresh tacos. Across the road there are the buses that bring pilgrims to the Shrine of Guadalupe. Buses of all shapes and sizes and colours. Huge air-conditioned monsters that bring people from the big international hotels downtown and bone-rattling old wrecks which convey pilgrims from across the mountains. But the customers buying tacos are not all from the shrine; locals come here too.

  Next door to the smoky tacheria is the place where I was to meet Stinnes. It is a large, shed-like building with a ramshackle frontage. Across the bright-red overhang, ‘Angel – body shop’ is crudely lettered in bloody script. Inside there are trucks and motor cars in various stages of repair and renovation. And always there is the intense flashing light, and the intermittent hiss of the welding torch. There is always work for skilled car-repair men in Mexico City.

  I got there early, drove through the workshop, and parked in the backyard. Angel Morales, a small, sad-eyed man with dark skin and a carefully trimmed moustache, came out to see who it was. ‘I’m meeting someone, Angel,’ I said. ‘It’s business.’ I passed him an envelope containing money.

  Angel nodded mournfully. Angel was a friend of a friend of mine but we’d put things on a proper business footing from the time we first met. It was better than using any of the safe houses that the SIS people at the embassy would provide for me. He took the envelope and tucked it into a pocket of his oily overalls without looking inside it. ‘I want no trouble,’ said Angel. That must have been the only English that Angel knew, for he’d said the same words to me on the two previous meetings.

  ‘There’ll be no trouble, Angel,’ I said, giving him the sort of wide smile that I’d seen on carefree men with easy minds.

  He nodded and went back to shout abuse at an Indian youth who was bolting a new section of metal on to the back of a badly broken truck.

  They arrived exactly on time. Stinnes was driving his own car. He stopped the car in the yard and got out but didn’t switch off the engine. Then Werner got into the driver’s seat and – waiting only long enough for Stinnes to get clear – he gave a brief wave of the hand before reversing back. Carelessly he knocked the rear fender against the wall. Embarrassed, he swung the car round and accelerated loudly to drive away. It was arranged that Werner would return with the car in half an hour. I wondered if Werner was angry at being excluded from the meeting. But then I dismissed that idea from my mind. Werner was enough of a pro not to let that bother him.

  Stinnes was dressed in a green tropical suit which repeated washings had faded to a very light colour. The collar of his white shirt was buttoned, but he wore no tie. It gave the impression of an absent-minded man who’d dressed hurriedly, but I knew that Stinnes was not absent-minded, and the way in which he’d dragged out the arrangements for his enrolment was the mark of a man who never hurried.

  Stinnes was solemn as he got into the car. ‘There is nothing wrong, I hope,’ he said, when the greetings were over.

  ‘What sort of a game are you playing, Erich?’ I said. ‘I wish I knew.’

  ‘What games are there?’

  ‘There are many different ones,’ I said. ‘There is the Moscow game in which you lead us by the nose, and then say no thanks.’

  ‘I know only the Bernard Samson game,’ he said. ‘I do as you propose. I get my money and a few months of interrogation and I retire in comfort.’

  ‘What about the Erich Stinnes game? You grab the money and you take off on your own and disappear.’

  ‘You’ll find a way to prevent that, I’m sure. That’s your job, isn’t it?’

  ‘What have you arranged with London behind my back, Erich?’ I said.

  ‘That’s what really annoys you; the way your own department have behaved. You have no complaint against me. I have kept my word all along the line.’

  ‘We haven’t gone very far yet,’ I pointed out.

  ‘The London game, that’s what you haven’t mentioned,’ said Stinnes.

  I said nothing. He was trying to rile me in order to see what he could discover. It was to be expected; it was what I would do to him under the same circumstances.

  ‘The London game…’ said Stinnes. ‘You take the blame for all their mistakes. Is that perhaps the London game, Mr Samson?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I was tired of this silly conversation.

  But Stinnes persisted. He said, ‘If you disappear, it would leave your people in London with a convenient scapegoat for all their failures, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘No. They’d have a lot of explaining to do,’ I said, with more bravado than I could spare.

  ‘Not if the money also disappeared with you.’

  ‘What are you telling me, Erich?’ I kept it light and tried to act as if I found his suggestions amusing. ‘That London would murder me and make the money vanish and pretend that I’d been a KGB agent for many years?’

  He smiled but gave no reply.

  ‘And how would you fit into that scenario? Me dead. Money gone. Erich Stinnes where?’

  ‘I’ll keep to my agreement. I’ve told you that. Do you have any reason to doubt?’ I followed Stinnes’s gaze. The ground sloped up at the back of the yard. On a grubby white wall a youth in faded jeans and a purple T-shirt was spraying a slogan on the tall stucco wall: La revolución no tiene fronteras – the revolution has no frontiers. It was to be seen all over Central America, wherever they could afford the paint.

  ‘We’re still on opposing sides, Erich. On Friday we’ll be meeting under different circumstances. But until then I’m treating you with great suspicion.’

  He turned his head to look at me. ‘Of course. Perhaps you’re waiting for some gesture of good faith from me. Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘It would raise my morale.’

  ‘This particular gesture of good faith might not,’ said Stinnes. He reached into his pocket and got a Russian passport. He gave it to me. There was nothing special about it – it had been issued two years before and was convincingly marked and dog-eared – except that the photo and physical description were mine. I went cold. ‘Keep it,’ said Stinnes. ‘As a souvenir. But don’t use it. The serial numbers are ones that will alert the frontier police. And there are invisible marks that when seen under fluorescent light will mean a phone call to Moscow.’ He smiled, inviting me to join in the fun.

  ‘There was a plan to kidnap me?’

  ‘A silly contingency plan that has long since been abandoned…on my instructions.’

  ‘And no one suspects you might be coming to us?’

  ‘A frustrated fool suspects, but he had cried wolf too often with too many others.’

  ‘Take care, Erich.’

  ‘Take care? How safe is this place? Angel’s body shop. Can we be sure we’re not observed.’

  I said, ‘Werner knows his job. And Angel’s yard is as safe as anywhere in this dangerous town.’

  ‘Do you observe what those men over there are doing with that chisel?’ he asked. ‘They are cutting the number from that truck engine. They are criminals. The police
probably have this workshop under observation. You must be mad to bring me to such a place.’

  ‘You’ve got a lot to learn about the West, Erich. This fellow Angel regularly works on transforming American trucks and cars that are stolen in Texas and California. The first time I came here I walked into the office and saw him with a box of US licence plates that had been ripped off cars before they were resprayed.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, you don’t think he can go on doing that year after year without attracting the attention of the police, do you?’

  ‘Why isn’t he in prison?’

  ‘He bribes the police, Erich. What do they call them here – “the biting ones” – come regularly to collect their fees. This is the safest place in the whole town. No cop would dare come in here and disturb our peaceful conversation. He’d have the whole force at his throat.’

  ‘I can see I have much to learn about the West,’ said Stinnes with heavy sarcasm. It was interesting that he chose to pretend that bribery and corruption was not plaguing the Eastern bloc. He took off his spectacles and blinked. ‘It was hard to say goodbye to my son,’ he said, as if thinking aloud. ‘He asked me if I’d ever thought of defecting to the West…He’d never said such a thing before. Never. It was very strange, almost like telepathy. I had to say no, didn’t I?’

  For the first time I felt sorry for him, but I made sure it didn’t show. ‘We’ll meet in Garibaldi Square,’ I said. ‘Take a cab there and pretend you want to listen to the musicians. But stay in the cab. Arrive at nine o’clock. The time might change if the plane is late. Phone the number I gave you between six and seven to confirm. Whoever answers will give a time but no place. That means Garibaldi Square. No baggage. Wear something that won’t look too conspicuous in England.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘And don’t tell Mrs Volkmann.’

  ‘Don’t tell her where I’m meeting you?’

  ‘Don’t tell her anything.’

  ‘She’s with your people, isn’t she? I thought I’d be travelling on the plane with her.’

  ‘Don’t tell her anything.’

  ‘Are you sure that you’re in charge of this operation?’