Krysalis: Krysalis

by John Tranhaile

  No, Barzel thought to himself, it isn’t. And this will require very careful handling. “Berlin said something else. Anna’s husband is starting to make a nuisance of himself.”

  “What? Even after you threatened him that day in Cornwall?”

  “He doesn’t scare easily. Now he’s on his way to America. Can you guess why?”

  Gerhard’s face twitched. “No,” he snapped. “And you worry too much. He’ll never trace me here.”

  Barzel thought it over. Kleist was plainly scared out of his wits by the reference to America. HVA files showed that he’d had a brief affair with a United States citizen called Melkiovicz, in 1987, and that Melkiovicz was a close friend of Anna Lescombe’s. Which meant … what?

  “No,” he said thoughtfully. “He won’t trace us. It can be taken care of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We have an excellent organization across the Atlantic. Whatever Lescombe’s after, our people will ensure he doesn’t find it. And if by some chance he does …”

  Gerhard swallowed. “Yes?”

  “He won’t be allowed to use it.” Barzel studied him from under lowered eyelids. “You’re losing control of the Lescombe woman. This isn’t a secure place. I’m worried.”

  “No one ever comes here.”

  “So you say.”

  Barzel went across to the bedroom window, first collecting a pair of binoculars from the top of the chest of drawers. Suddenly he paused in midsweep and cursed under his breath. “So no one ever comes, eh?” he grated. “Look at that!”

  Gerhard came to stare over his shoulder and Barzel handed him the glasses. A small sailboat had anchored on the far side of the bay. People were lounging on the sundeck, the sound of happy voices drifted faintly across the water.

  “They come and go,” Gerhard said with a shrug, lowering the binoculars. “In the holiday season. They’re early, it’s still only April; there won’t be any more between now and Monday night.”

  “What if Anna were to see them?” Barzel suddenly remembered how she’d left the house. “She might try to escape! For God’s sake, go and see where she’s got to.”

  Gerhard looked at his watch, chewing his lip. Barzel understood. It was late in the afternoon, Iannis should be making his call soon, and how embanassing it might be if he, Barzel, were to answer the phone….

  “Go!” he commanded urgently.

  After Gerhard had left the room, Barzel padded across to the door to make sure it was shut before again sitting down on the bed. He’d visited Moscow once and hadn’t liked it. The time had come to run up Kleist’s phone bill a little, talk to friends in Berlin, make sure that this damned Soviet sub didn’t turn left when it ought to turn right.

  Barzel also needed the reassurance of a chat with Colonel Huper concerning his collection of books. He trusted Huper to keep his word, but there were other colonels in the HVA, illiterate men …

  Before Barzel could pick up the phone, however, his mind again diverted to David Lescombe. Anna’s husband was playing a game too deep to fathom. An amateur, said the HVA official line, someone blundering about in a daze. But he seemed to be a remarkably gifted amateur.

  Time Lescombe was stopped …

  Barzel arranged himself on the bed in such a way that he could continue to keep an eye on the boat. Berlin would have to wait. He picked up the phone and asked for a New York number.

  In the church, Anna, like Barzel, was busily devising a plan of campaign. She needed to uncover Gerhard’s weaknesses. Unfortunately, the only one she could remember was sex.

  Her feelings of bittersweetness comprised memories of their lovemaking and resentment at being unable to shake those memories off. When his hands touched her, that day on the beach, it was as if someone had turned on a long-dormant switch, flooding her with power. He still lusted after Anna, the old Anna; and she couldn’t pretend to be indifferent.

  During the golden time, they had consumed each other’s bodies like starving shipwrecked mariners, gorging themselves to fulfillment and beyond. Their appetite grew by what it fed on, the more they made love, the deeper their desire intensified. He could open a moist channel down to the neck of her womb with a single look, making her forget to breathe.

  Sitting here in the empty church, she told herself that the affair was all over long ago. Anna the lawyer yearned to believe this rational voice testifying inside her head … and was skeptical.

  Somehow she had to find a weakness in him that did not overlap with hers.

  When the door crashed open she spun around to find Gerhard framed against the hot brightness outside.

  “I’m sorry if I startled you.”

  She nodded token remission. But when he tried to touch her, she stood up, pushing his hands away, and went to close the door. As she reached it, something made her raise her eyes above the level of the path. A man she had never seen before stood a dozen or so paces up the hill, one hand resting on the bole of a eucalyptus tree, the other in his pocket. Now she understood why they had let her leave the house: a guard was already in position, waiting. She slammed the door shut and leaned against it.

  “Another Barzel?” she inquired.

  “Anna.” Ignoring the two or three rickety chairs scattered around, he sat on the floor, inviting her with a gesture to do the same. “We have to talk.”

  “I’m listening.” But she did not sit down

  “It’s time you heard the truth. About me.”

  “I think so,” she agreed.

  “You’ve had the bad luck to fall in with someone who isn’t what he appears to be.” He paused. “Anna, this is very difficult to say.”

  “Go on.”

  “I work for an organization called Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung. HVA. It is the East German secret service.”

  “They ordered you to steal David’s file. Using me.”

  “Anna, listen—”

  “Just tell me one thing,” she said, ignoring him, and the resolution in her voice surprised her. “Why did you do it, Gerhard?”

  “Why?”

  “Is that such a difficult question? Sixteen years we’ve known each other, we’ve been lovers, and now suddenly you’re a spy.”

  He hesitated. “I have a sister. Her name is Ilsa.”

  Whatever Anna had been expecting, it wasn’t this. First a spy, now a spy with a hitherto unsuspected sister. “You never mentioned that. Not once.”

  “There are lots of things I never mentioned.”

  People were shut off. Anna thought she knew Gerhard, just as she thought she knew David and Juliet; she had lived her life in a certain way on the strength of such assumed knowledge. But she did not know them.

  “For instance,” Gerhard went on, “I told you I was born in Germany, and you believed I meant West Germany, but it wasn’t so. My father was a high-up in the Communist party. He got me out, to the West.”

  “Why should he want to do that?”

  “I was his … favorite. I could do no wrong in his eyes. Ilsa, you see … our mother died in labor, when she was born. Father couldn’t forgive Ilsa. He spoiled me.” Gerhard laughed, without humor. “I longed to study in the West, have a good time as well. And although I didn’t know it then, that suited some important people who wanted a tame therapist in London, or maybe Paris or New York.”

  “These HVA people?”

  “Yes. But when they stitch together such deals, there’s always an insurance. Someone has to stay behind, to act as a magnet. A guarantee that you will come home, and a security for good behavior while you are away.”

  “And Ilsa was your magnet?”

  He nodded again. “She’s younger than I am. We were always as close as blood to the vein. When father died, it left just the two of us. She’s a pediatrician. A good doctor. Dedicated.”

  He spoke the last word with a mixture of resentment and admiration.

  “Before you and I met, HVA came to me one day. One of my patients was a secretary in the cabinet office. She was te
rrified of her employers’ finding out she was in therapy. HVA told me to go to work on her, play on her fears.” He laughed, a hateful sound. “Make her fall in love with you, why don’t you?—that’s what they said.”

  “And you said yes.”

  “I said no.”

  “But—”

  “I was … encouraged to think again. If I wanted Ilsa and her family to go on working. Eating. Walking about the streets. Don’t you see the irony, Anna? If I bought this deal, I’d be prostituting everything I’d trained for. Whereas if I refused, the only effect would be to destroy my sister’s career, and she’s no prostitute.”

  “What happened?” Anna asked coldly.

  “This wretched girl, this secretary, told me a few odds and ends that I passed on. Enough to satisfy HVA.”

  “And when I married David, they came to you again.”

  “In a way …”

  She looked at him expectantly. His face told her that whatever came next she would find difficult.

  “Anna, I have to tell you this. They … they knew about David before you did. HVA asked me to find a way of introducing the two of you. And I did.”

  It mattered to him more than to her, she realized. “The sailing weekend?”

  “Yes.”

  “It worked.” She sighed. She knew he felt bad about it, presumably because that had spelled the end of his hopes of one day divorcing Clara and marrying Anna, but she couldn’t share his regrets. By bringing her and David together, Gerhard had done her the biggest favor in his life.

  “So HVA wanted to get at David, through me,” she said. “Is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  A long pause followed. “And you agreed,” she said at last. “Even though we’d been lovers, friends …”

  Gerhard was eager to justify himself. “You see, Ilsa and I, we … we had a sort of conspiracy. Against my father. Even before I opened my first textbook I knew how wrong he was to blame Ilsa for our mother’s death. It made us even closer, somehow. Once she was married, had children, she became even more vulnerable. Anna, can’t you find it in yourself to understand how I felt?”

  “What do you want?” She was genuinely curious. “Sympathy? Forgiveness?” She could have told him, you get used to the guilt, after a while. After a lifetime. But somehow that would have sounded cheap, and would have brought her down to his level. So instead, “I understand,” was all she said.

  His expression told her that he found this hard to accept, but Anna found it equally difficult to elaborate. She imagined the HVA holding Juliet, or David. “Behave or else,” that’s what they would say, and she would behave, oh yes….

  Gerhard started to apologize, but she cut him off. “Is there anything else?”

  For a long time he continued to gaze down at the floor as if the secrets of his motivation lay concealed beneath the flagstones. Anna sensed he was casting about for an explanation of why he had, after all, decided to sacrifice Ilsa, why in the end she had proved as expendable as anyone else. Anna knew the answer: when it came down to a straight choice between Gerhard and Ilsa, it had seemed the right thing to do at the time. Now …

  “They are sending a submarine to take us off the island,” he said at last. “That’s what I came here to tell you. A Russian submarine.”

  She fixed him with one of her level stares, the kind she knew he most abhorred because she could use it to veil herself from him. “Of course.”

  “Why do you say ‘of course’?”

  “They’ll want to interrogate me, won’t they? See what else I know about David’s work. You’d better hypnotize me again, remove whatever it was you put in my head to stop me from leaving.”

  “You knew about that?”

  “Oh, I’ve worked out a lot of things. When does this happen?”

  He did not answer immediately. Anna felt like a condemned prisoner who hears that her appeal for clemency has been rejected, that it remains only to pencil a date in the diary. “When?”

  “Monday.”

  “But that’s the day after tomorrow!”

  “Anna, what you said was right, I did implant a suggestion that you shouldn’t try to leave here. So now we really must try to prepare you for the journey, sort you out.”

  “Get lost.”

  “Unless you make an effort—”

  “You’ll what? Go on, tell me, you bastard! Twist me and bend me and make suggestions in the hope I’ll believe I thought of them first … come on, you can do it! After all, you made me into a traitor!”

  She raised her hands to her eyes, wanting more than anything to sleep, perhaps faint; it didn’t matter what form oblivion took as long as it came. But then she remembered: if she did not save herself, nobody else could.

  She had one solid, useful piece of information: she knew how he had broken her. She understood his methods. If only she could find a way of turning them against him, discover the weakness that must be there….

  “Gerhard,” she said, wiping her eyes.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m all right now.” She lowered herself down beside him, in such a way that he could not easily see her face.

  “I’m glad.”

  “But there’s something else I’d like to ask you.”

  “What is it?”

  “When they’ve finished with me in Berlin, or wherever it is, assuming I cooperate …”

  He became unexpectedly animated. “Yes, I wanted to talk to you about that. When it’s over—”

  “Can I go home then? To David?”

  Gerhard’s gaze dropped. He said nothing.

  “That’s the one success you did have. He’s all I ever prayed for, dreamed of, and I love him.” She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “I love him,” she repeated, “and he must be feeling desolate beyond belief.”

  “He’s a sensible man.” Gerhard’s voice was indifferent. “He’ll come to terms with it.”

  “But he can’t, you see. Don’t you realize what he must be feeling? He thinks that I’ve abandoned him, that I don’t love him.” She paused, seeking some way to reach Gerhard. “Another death without a corpse. You remember, we were talking yesterday, the worst thing in the world?”

  When he remained silent she raised her head and looked at him beseechingly. “If you promise me I can go back to David, I’ll do anything you want. I won’t try to escape.”

  He was almost convinced. “You promise?”

  “Yes.” Now she was on the brink. Suppose he put her under, then tried to make love to her, no, don’t think that…. “You can hypnotize me, if you like.” It was done! “If that will make you feel more … more secure. Only please don’t use the drugs again, they’re so dreadful. Just put me into a trance. Relax me.” Anna breathed in deeply, closing her eyes. “Do it now,” she said in a rush.

  “Here?”

  “Yes. It’s peaceful here.”

  “Anna, listen to me.” He took her hands between his own. A spasm of treacherous delight ran down her spine; with an effort she repressed a gasp. “There was a time when we had something, wasn’t there? Something … perfect.”

  She stared at him.

  “If you came to Berlin and … and they decided they couldn’t afford to let you go …”

  She snatched her hands away, but he caught them again and held them fast. “If that’s what happened … could you … bring yourself to forget the past, forget David—?”

  She jumped to her feet, where he could no longer use that insidious touch to play upon her innermost vulnerability. You fool, she cried to herself. How could you fail to realize …?

  “Anna, please say you’ll consider it.” He was imploring her now. “Please!”

  “No!” she cried, running to the door. “I love David.” The words acted on her like a magic charm, she felt an upsurge of energy as she seemed to grow in stature, and it was true! “I love David,” she shouted again, this time with triumph in her voice.

  “And what if something were to happen to him?�
�� he said harshly. “What then?”

  She wheeled around to stare at him. “What could happen to—”

  “Who do you think these people are, these HVA men we’ve been talking about so gaily? Kindergarten nurses? Eh?”

  Her exultation drained away, she became frightened. “Tell me,” she whimpered. “I know you’re hiding something. Tell me!”

  He was on his feet now, his face twisted into an expression of hatred. “He’s going to New York. They’ll—”

  “How can you know where he’s—”

  “Unless he backs off soon, they’ll stop him.” He strode forward, catching her unawares, and grabbed her arm. “Anna, don’t you understand? They’re going to kill your husband!”

  CHAPTER

  29

  It was night, the streets of New York were jammed with cars and pedestrians. David made his initial pass quickly, first examining the facade of Robyn’s apartment building from the opposite side of Park Avenue, then walking by close enough to get a good look at the doorman, wearing his peaked hat, with a pair of white gloves tucked into the left epaulette of his overcoat. David turned off the avenue and ducked into the first bar he found. He ordered a scotch, straight up, found the last empty table, and wrote a note. Then he went straight back onto Park, walking fast, and accosted the doorman, who had just escorted a mink-clad lady from her Mercedes to the door.

  “For Robyn Melkiovicz,” he said, handing the note to the man. “You might be good enough to inform her that it’s somewhat urgent.” David did not know he had such reserves of true-grit Brit accent to call upon. “And I hope you will have a drink on me later this evening. Good day.” Wrapped around the envelope was a twenty-dollar bill.

  David walked away without looking back, turned right at the next intersection, and broke into a jog. He loped all the way around the block, glad to be jostled by passersby, because they afforded him what he most needed: cover.

  The FBI would be closing in now. Perhaps they had already intercepted the note. David pushed through the door of the same bar he’d visited earlier and ordered another scotch.

  Fifteen minutes, he had written in his note. Such and such a bar in fifteen minutes’ time, don’t phone anyone, don’t tell a neighbor, you’re being watched, your phone is tapped, you may be in great danger. He had signed himself “Anna Lescombe’s husband, David” and he had included the photograph found in Anna’s desk, not knowing if that would work, but praying, praying …