by Len Deighton
For a long time we drove on in silence. The sun turned orange and then yellow as if setting fire to the whole wooded landscape. This illusion was heightened by the way my companion’s chain-smoking had by now filled the car interior with a choking haze of acrid blue smoke.
‘I’m a cop,’ he said suddenly and without preamble. ‘A police inspector.’
‘Is that so?’
‘There’s a long-distance bus station near where I’m headed. I’ll drop you there.’ He said it as though he was reluctantly forgoing the alternative course of taking me to the police station and beating the life out of me. ‘From that point on you’re on your own. But let me tell you this: if one of my boys picks you up for loitering, soliciting or pestering drivers for a free ride, they’ll bring you in, and I’ll make you damn sorry you ever passed this way.’
‘Okay,’ I grunted.
‘Speak up! Was that some kind of thank you, or was it just a drunken belch? I’ll be going half a mile out of my way to take you to that damned bus station. Jolted you did it; me being a detective?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You seem too soft-hearted to be a police inspector.’
5
There was a time when Zurich was my back yard. Collecting bags of gold sovereigns from the army cashier’s office in Hanover, and carting them to a private bank in Zurich under diplomatic cover, was one of the first official jobs my father allowed me to do. Werner and I would stroll into this magnificent bank on Bahnhofstrasse and slam the gold on to the cashier’s counter to pay it into the deposit account of Madame Xavier. If they wondered why two scruffy youngsters would be contributing so handsomely and regularly to Madame Xavier’s resources, the bank staff were too Swiss to reveal their feelings. It was not my place to point out that Zurich had gold in abundance: bankers can never have enough of it. I loved Zurich in those days. It was an island of peace and plenty in a Europe impoverished and exhausted by six years of war. A place alive with bright neon signs, where cream cakes contained cream, girls laughed without payment, and the dangers men faced were mostly in the stock-market.
I was twenty-one years old, and a wide-eyed habitué of the famous Café Odéon, where Lenin and Trotsky had sat planning to dethrone the Tsar, where Mussolini had sat hatching his ‘march on Rome’, where James Joyce sat writing Ulysses, and where now I could sit watching strip-tease, a form of entertainment forbidden in most cantons of Switzerland at the time. It was wonderful while it lasted, but inevitably the men in London found a more convenient, more practical and presumably equally clandestine method of paying field agents, and our expenses-paid jaunts to Zurich ceased.
Since those far-off days, Zurich and I had irretrievably changed. For both of us, dignity, refinement, reticence and leisurely grace had been abandoned in favour of an undignified scramble for a plastic livelihood. The Matterhorn has been climbed ten thousand times, and Zurich has become an overnight stop for cheap package-tour groups on the way to somewhere else. When I arrived this time it was early afternoon and Zurich’s Hauptbahnhof was as bustling as an oriental market. I pushed my way through groups of backpackers in well-worn anoraks and past elated school parties and bronzed glacier skiers clad in brightly coloured futuristic gear. Outside I got a ticket from the machine and swung aboard a No. II streetcar just as its doors were about to close. We rumbled along Bahnhofstrasse past banks, stylish shops and department stores and more banks. There was Carl Weber’s famous toy shop where my son Billy fell off the mechanical rocking-horse. It always happens to Billy; why is that? And is it something he inherited from me?
Rippling silken lingerie and severe Chanel suits, Hermes handbags and thin-soled crocodile shoes – the big names went clattering past. At the end of the street the tram turns to where the luxury hotels squat along the River Limmat, which opens out suddenly to become the cold grey Zurich-see, and we crossed the Quai bridge to Bellevue and another Zurich where the attire is less voguish, the shoes are sturdy, and you eat your paper-wrapped würstli standing in the street, and suffer the cruel and constant wind that blows across the icy water.
The streetcar pushed on up the hill from Bellevueplatz, climbing gently to the suburb at Balgrist where little antique shops sell dusty modern chinaware at museum prices. The sun was low as I alighted from the streetcar and crossed the road, careful to avoid the high-powered Mercedes cars driven by moneyed medicos who swarm in and out of the expensive Klinike nearby. Everything from ‘radiated mud-baths’ to second-hand hearts is available here, and the world’s wealthiest invalids bring their hope from afar, like pilgrims to a shrine.
This was the place I wanted. Men such as Werner Volkmann do not depend upon post office boxes or forwarding addresses. They trust instead to a network of acquaintances to whom they confide the sacred knowledge of their whereabouts. Café Ziegler. It was a dark little place, smelling of dark-roasted coffee, tobacco smoke and warm cheese. There were about a dozen small tables, with red cloths, and on the window-sill some potted flowers struggled to contest a thin beam of watery sunlight. The only bright light was over a table at the far end of the room where four elderly men sat under a blackboard, upon which the luncheon menu had been scrawled. They were playing cards and drinking beer and smoking so that the cone of yellow light was crawling with serpents of tobacco fumes. I have never mastered the game of Tarok, but it involves a great deal of shouting and laughing and is always punctuated by the crack of cards snapped edge-on against the table-top. The men were speaking Schweizerdeutsch, not the simple variety that is spoken in the restaurants and banks down-town but a rapid tongue-twisting variety that was beyond my comprehension. At my intrusion they looked up, and the shouting and laughter died abruptly.
‘We’re closed,’ said the oldest of the four. ‘Open again at six-thirty.’ I recognized him. Benjamin was Zurich born and bred, as his thick accent proclaimed. We’d met once or twice: that was over a decade ago when this man – whom we used to call Benny – had played middle man in a transaction that got one hundred specially made rifles for a syndicate of wealthy Canadian hunters. Only later was it revealed that the ‘rifles’ were really machine pistols and that explosives, detonators and radio fuses were a part of the deal. There was a tip-off of some kind, a raid on a lakeside house that came to nothing, and a critical report of official ineptitude in the local newspaper. The Canadians – who later turned out to be a shell company in the Bahamas owned by Colombian drug dealers – vanished, as did the ‘rifles’ and the money, except that Benjamin quietly retired and became the proprietor of this little café.
‘I’m looking for a friend of mine,’ I said. ‘Werner. I’ve come from Berlin and I need to talk to him.’
‘I don’t know anyone named Werner,’ said Benjamin in a bored voice. He didn’t look up, and played a card as if the Tarok game was all that mattered to him.
‘My name is Bernd,’ I said. In such circumstances family names are never offered or demanded. I stepped closer to the pool of light so that he could see me and look at my face. He closed his fan of cards and stared at me but gave no sign of recognition. Identification was an essential element of the procedure. An inquiry on the phone would have got nowhere. Such men exposed their friends only to other known and identified friends. ‘Bernard from Berlin?’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ I agreed.
The other three men were looking at the cards as if they could not hear us. ‘Very well, Bernd-aus-Berlin. I’ll ask some people I know. Come back tomorrow about this same time.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Where are you staying?’
‘I’ve booked a room at the Savoy.’
‘The Savoy!’ He raised an eyebrow without looking up at me. ‘That’s classy, Bernd-aus-Berlin!’ When I said nothing he added: ‘I doubt if I will be able to help you. But I’ll ask around the district.’
Back in the street it was almost dark. The grey stone Klinike were pierced with blue rectangles of light, like a hundred TV screens where doctors and nurses and patients acted ou
t their bloody dramas. The No. 11 streetcar arrived. Its brightly lit interior revealed a boxful of passengers packed absurdly tightly together like inebriated guests at a cocktail party. Together with a dozen other people I shouldered my way inside. The doors closed and we rattled off down the hill. I looked forward to luxuriating in a hot bath at the hotel and nursing my bruises, but found myself wondering how many times I’d have to go up the hill to Café Ziegler before Werner finally came out of the woodwork.
I got off at Paradeplatz, a streetcar junction just a few steps from the Savoy. As I was crossing the road only yards from the hotel someone called: ‘Bernard!’
A woman’s voice. I looked around. ‘Zena!’ Of all the people I might have met while looking for Werner Volkmann, his first wife, the irrepressible Zena, was the furthest from my thoughts. I hadn’t seen her since the two of them had separated. She hadn’t changed much: pale-complexioned with intense eyes, emphasized by discreet use of mascara, a little shadow in just the right places and carefully made-up lips. The little pointed nose was still the same too: sometimes I found myself looking at her and wondering what sort of nose-job she could have and how it would change her. She was wearing a full-length golden-coloured fox-fur coat, but even in sacking – and with or without a nose-job – Zena would have been a stunning-looking woman.
‘What a coincidence! But what have you done to your face?’ She was looking at my cuts and bruises with the sort of dispassionate inquiry one encounters when buying Band-Aids in a pharmacy.
‘I fell into a xylophone,’ I told her.
‘I think I heard the chimes,’ said Zena, and gave a soft nose-wrinkling snigger that under other circumstances might have been captivating. We’d never liked each other. It was too late now to have second thoughts, but we had long since agreed a mutually convenient armistice; bows, handshakes and eyes meeting with the polite restraint that the Koreans perfected at Panmunjom. ‘Come and have coffee.’ Suddenly a foxy limb reached out, and her elegant leather-gloved hand plucked at me. Everything that was predatory about Zena was exemplified in that gesture. ‘Have you just come from Berlin?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘And how is Frank Harrington these days?’ Zena flatly ignored my denial and asked after the sprightly womanizer who not so long ago had painfully fallen victim to her charms.
‘You’re looking well,’ I said.
‘You’d better come and talk, Bernard.’
I looked at her. She didn’t have to say more than that. I knew from the tone of her voice and the look in her eyes that Benjamin had already spoken with her. She had lost no time in acting on whatever he’d told her. I’d mentioned the Savoy and, while I’d been waiting for the streetcar and lumbering along the rails, she had driven down here to head me off.
‘Whatever you say, Zena.’
‘There is a wonderful café across the road,’ she said. ‘And I know your weakness for patisserie, Bernard.’
Seated in the café, across coffee cups and a selection of cream-laden mille-feuilles and éclairs, I could get a better look at her. She had slipped her magnificent fur coat off her shoulders and let it fall back over the chair in such a way that the label was displayed. Under it she was wearing a striped shirt-style blouse with a gold and jade brooch and matching necklace. In any other town it might have been considered a bit over the top, but not in down-town Zurich. She hadn’t changed much in the couple of years since I’d seen her in Mexico City. The Zenas of this world know their priorities, and Zena’s number one priority was herself. She was twenty-six years old, and when she did her wide-eyed little girl act she could pass for a few years younger even. A strict regime of facials, work-outs, hair treatments and all the other sorcery seemed to have paid off. I admired her restraint. If only I could mutilate my cream cakes without eating them, the way Zena did it, I would be in better shape too.
‘We’re back together,’ she said triumphantly. She knew how I felt about the shabby way she’d treated Werner, and that was a part of her triumph. ‘The poor darling simply can’t manage without me.’ She looked at me and her eyes narrowed, as if she was about to smile, but the smile never came. ‘At least that’s what he tells me.’
‘Where is he?’ I asked.
‘You realize that I was on the payroll?’ A quick look over her shoulder. ‘That London Central had me on the payroll?’
London Central had Zena on the payroll! Like hell I knew. I felt like leaping over the brass rail into the shop window and thrashing about in the meringues. But I did everything I could to conceal my surprise. ‘Yes, I heard something about that.’
‘I was monitoring Werner. They never fully trusted him, I’m sure you know that London never trusted him?’
She was right about that at least. That was what bugged me about the situation. London Central had never fully trusted Werner. All right: but how could anyone there have put their trust in Zena? She’d consistently demonstrated her powers of self-preservation and her devil-take-the-hindmost philosophy. Who could have considered her as a suitable Departmental employee? ‘Is he here in Zurich?’ I said. ‘I must talk to him. It’s official.’
‘Official?’ She laughed and drank some coffee. She drank double-strength coffee: as black as treacle and almost as heavy. ‘You will have your little English jokes, Bernard. Werner has been fired. Kicked out in the most vindictive way those bastards could arrange it. Don’t pretend you don’t know that?’
‘I must see him, Zena. It’s very important for both of us.’
‘Both of us? You and me, you mean? Or you and Werner?’
It was the sort of cat-and-mouse game that Zena most enjoyed. She knew how to keep Werner under wraps. If she was determined to keep him away from me, Werner would stay away rather than upset her. Zena’s tempers were talked of in hushed tones by anyone who’d lived through one. ‘All of us,’ I said evenly. ‘An agent has been killed. I want to talk to Werner before I go to London and talk to them about it. It could save a lot of trouble if we all agree about what we are going to say.’ I kept it a bit vague, not being sure whether Zena’s employment by London Central was still continuing.
‘VERDI, is that it?’ she said calmly. ‘Well, that’s all over and done with.’ My God, the woman knew everything. Who else knew? No wonder we’d arrived in Magdeburg to find a corpse.
‘Better I talk to Werner,’ I said.
She took her time about replying. She finished her coffee, consulted her diamond-studded Carrier watch and looked at herself in a tiny mirror she took from her crocodile handbag. ‘I’ll go and get him,’ she said, snapping the mirror closed and putting it away. ‘You wait here.’
‘Thanks, Zena,’ I said.
‘And wipe that blob of cream off your chin,’ she said. She was always the nanny.
‘Was it Frank Harrington who put you on the payroll?’ I asked her.
‘He’s a sweet man,’ she said.
‘And did you file false reports and get Werner kicked out of Berlin?’
‘Of course not,’ she said, but after a moment she smiled.
‘So that you could be with him here?’
She turned away from me. ‘If you say anything like that to Werner, I shall tell him never to speak to you again.’
I waited in case she denied the accusations, but she didn’t.
‘And Werner will do as I say,’ she added, as if I didn’t already know it.
‘How long will he be, Zena?’
‘He’s waiting in my car. And I don’t want him to eat any cakes. I shall be angry, tell him.’
‘I’ll tell him, Zena. Sugar in his coffee okay?’
‘You’ve got to have the last word, haven’t you, Bernard? You can never learn when to hold your tongue.’
Just because Werner Volkmann allowed Zena to manipulate him so completely did not mean that Werner was in any way a weakling or a wimp. The people who made that mistake about him learned the truth at their cost. Except for his relationship with Zena, Werner was entirely his own man.
He was stubborn and methodical. Trying to persuade him to do anything against his will was a futile exercise, even if Zena could twist him around her little finger. But when he arrived in a dark blue business suit, spotted tie and soft black cashmere overcoat with a black fur collar I felt quite sure that Zena had chosen everything he was wearing. Perhaps the silver-topped walking cane was not her idea: that elaboration smacked of Werner.
‘You might have dropped me a line, Werner,’ I said after he’d hung up his magnificent coat and seated himself. Fresh coffee had arrived, and I was biting into my second cream éclair.
He took a small Filofax sheet from his leather wallet and wrote a phone number on it with a silver pencil before passing it to me. ‘I needed time to think,’ he said defensively. ‘Don’t you ever feel you need time to think?’
‘No I don’t, Werner,’ I said. ‘If I start off thinking about everything – everything I say and do, and the stupid orders that I sometimes have to obey – high-pressure steam would start coming out of both ears, and I wouldn’t know how to stop it.’
‘Is that what happened last time?’
‘Last time I started thinking? Yes, that’s right.’
‘I’m sorry Bernie. You’re right, I should have written but I was staying away from everyone, not just you.’ He was still the same old sleepy-eyed Werner; jet-black bushy hair, straggling eyebrows and strong Berlin accent. The son of a dentist, Werner was born at a time when the Nazis were energetically sending Jews to the death camps. Werner was his ‘name for the outside’. I was born the same year as Werner, we went to school together and grew up together. Werner was as near to being a brother as I would ever get, and he measured everything I did or said with that godlike and superior impartiality with which brothers judge each other.