Already vast assets had been banked in Belgrade. He had also invested heavily in gold, silver and diamonds and property bought under assumed identities supplied by the KGB. All he had to do was disappear off the face of the earth on the last day of Bilderberg. And at a leisurely pace. He would drive his Citroen CX 2400 to Marseilles, where he would pick up a similar car with a different registration and continue on his way as Monsieur Marcel Rabier, architect. Then he would cut across the French Riviera and the north of Italy to the Yugoslav border, which he would cross like any other French tourist intent on criticising the wines of another country.
There would be regrets, of course. Paris. How he would miss Paris! As it was now, with the displays of cut flowers in the Place de la Madeleine market; as it was in the autumn, with gold and brown leaves floating on the Seine. But since the day the Resistance had blown up the ammunition dump – and two generals with it – Brossard had always been fatalistic: it had been written and there was nothing he could do to reverse irrevocable processes.
He wondered if his more esoteric tastes would be catered for in Yugoslavia. To be denied masochism was surely the ultimate in masochism! But in his experience his Soviet masters were usually indulgent towards those who had served them well.
Just the same he would take full advantage of his last days in Paris. He let himself out of the house and, with an uncharacteristic gesture, hailed a taxi.
In the apartment at Montmartre, the girl with the red hair said: ‘You know perfectly well that I don’t work on Saturdays.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Brossard said meekly.
‘Well clear out, I have a real man coming to see me soon.’
‘Just this once. I will pay you well.’
‘How much?’
‘Another 1,000 francs on top of the usual fee?’
The girl stood in front of him, hands on her hips. ‘Two thousand.’
‘Very well.’ He placed the notes on the table.
And when she placed one stiletto heel on his bare chest she said: ‘You must have been a really bad boy, Pierre.’
‘Very bad,’ said Brossard as she reached for the whip. ‘Very bad indeed.’ What punishment, he wondered, would she have inflicted if she had known just how bad.
* * *
The following day Brossard lunched with Hildegard Metz in an open-air café overlooking the Seine. The waiters wore black trousers and white aprons, the tablecloths were chequered in red and white and the sunlight was dappled by the young leaves of the plane trees overhead. Paris wasn’t making his departure easy; perhaps, when the reverberations from the economic earthquake ahead subsided, he might be able to return for a little while ….
He sipped a glass of Medoc, reputed to stave off the allergies that beset him in spring and stimulate the appetite, and spoke to the efficient, enigmatic woman facing him.
‘So, everything is prepared for Bilderberg?’
‘Of course, Monsieur Brossard.’ A breath of reproach. ‘We have rooms close to each other?’
‘As you requested. I have also taken the precaution of ensuring that we are as far away as possible from Mr George Prentice. As you know I suspect that he was trying illegally to get information about your business activities.’
‘A very wise precaution, Fraulein Metz.’
A waiter served them omelettes and salad and a beer for Hildegard Metz. Brossard checked out all the details with her one by one – Telex, telephone, transport; she had forgotten nothing; she never did.
Where would we be without the Swiss? Brossard wondered as he speared some chicory with his fork. They survived wars; they survived epidemics; they survived depressions. And they always emerged triumphantly.
They said the Swiss were dull. Cautious, perhaps, feeding on the weaknesses and fears of their more flamboyant neighbours. But who could say they were dull if they had never penetrated that professional reserve? Perhaps they danced naked on moonlit lawns to celebrate the influx of another billion black marks or guilders invested in a numbered account with virtually no interest and extortionate charges?
Had Hildegard Metz ever danced naked on a moonlit lawn? Or anywhere else for that matter? It saddened Brossard to realise that he would probably never know.
She finished her omelette, placed her knife and fork neatly together and looked at him inquiringly through her spectacles. Plain glass, he had discovered. Why plain glass? I shall never know. Perhaps merely to accentuate that impersonal facade.
‘You seem troubled, Monsieur Brossard,’ she said. ‘As if you were going away and didn’t know how to say good-bye.’
Brossard smiled. ‘Very perceptive. But it is not I who am saying good-bye. It is Midas: I have decided to stop writing the column. The next one will be the last. It will have to be good and that’s what I was thinking about. Forgive me if I was preoccupied.’
‘But why abandon Midas? It’s the most respected financial column in the world.’
‘The conflict between inside knowledge and journalistic enterprise is too great. The temptations too enticing.’
‘I don’t believe you would ever even contemplate anything dishonest, Monsieur Brossard.’
Jamais de la vie! ‘It’s very touching of you to say that.’
‘What will you write about in your last column?’
‘Something sensational, have no fear.’
‘I’m pleased. But it will be a sad day.’ She stood up. ‘And now I must get back to the office, there is always a lot to do before Bilderberg.’
A good figure, Brossard mused. But concealed. Unused ….
‘Tell me one thing, Hildegard.’ He was surprising himself. She stopped in mid-stride. Unable to stop himself, he plunged on: ‘Why do you wear spectacles? I mean, they are plain glass, aren’t they?’
She looked confused. ‘I didn’t know you knew …. Why? To make myself look ordinary I suppose. I don’t mean that I am not ordinary …. To look like the perfect secretary, m’sieur.’
She walked away self-consciously, one hand touching her spectacles, and Brossard wondered if perhaps she was a little in love with him. For his part he would miss her.
In the afternoon he called on Mayard, who was smoking a cigar far too big for him. He had just been to the barber and the smell of pommade mingled with the cigar smoke drifting across his desk.
Brossard told him he was writing his last column. Mayard looked surprised. ‘But why, Pierre?’
‘Time to get out. I’ve been using your brains for too long. How would you like to become Midas?’
Mayard stroked his small moustache, ‘You know I can’t write. I’m a make-up man, an ideas man—’
‘You know more about finance than anyone in France.’ ‘That doesn’t make me a writer.’
‘I’d like you to try,’ Brossard said.
Mayard shrugged. ‘Okay, you’re the boss.’
‘Literary flourishes aren’t necessary. Just tell the facts – the ones they don’t know. Which reminds me. My last column, I want you to put it all over the front page.’
‘You mean it’s a news story?’
‘Oh yes,’ Brossard said, ‘it’s a news story all right. I can’t tell you any more at the moment. But I want every word used, nothing cut on the stone.’
‘Naturally,’ Mayard said, knocking a thick roll of ash into the ashtray. ‘Have we ever cut the thoughts of our proprietor?’
Brossard fanned the smoke with one hand and coughed. ‘I think the story will surprise you. At the moment I have only an inkling of what it’s all about. But don’t forget that the source will be impeccable.’
‘Bilderberg?’
Brossard didn’t reply.
After he had left the editor’s office, Brossard walked along some of the famous avenues of Paris. Down the Rue de la Paix to the Opera House. Along the Champs-Elysées to the Place de l’Etoile, where he gazed for a few moments at the French flag rippling in the breeze.
Then he walked home, stooping a little, briefly overcome by the parting th
at lay ahead. Between himself and Paris.
From the living-room of his house there came the sound of chanting. Surprised, Brossard looked through the half-open door. Six women including his wife were kneeling on the carpet praying.
Brossard’s spirits lifted. There was much he would be happy to leave behind.
XVII
The message that Helga Keller dispatched after she had left Brossard said subject proceeding as expected. She coded, dated and timed it.
The subject was Brossard, The Kremlin had never wholly trusted a man capable of sending twenty-two compatriots to their graves to save his fingernails and, since 1976 when she had become his secretary, Helga Keller had monitored his movements.
She telephoned the bearded assistant in the bookshop and met him outside the Hotel de Ville. She passed on the message inside a creased copy of Elle magazine which she discarded in a litter bin.
Afterwards she crossed the Louis-Philippe bridge onto the Ile Saint-Louis.
It was spring and it was Paris, and it was like nowhere else in the world. It wasn’t just the buds opening on the trees leaning over the Seine; nor the pleasure boats forging arrows in the water; nor the spire of Notre-Dame touching the misty blue sky. It was more, much more. It was reawakened innocence, it was … ah well, it was Paris.
On the cobbled embankment of the river below her, old men camped beside their fishing rods and lovers strolled entwined and intent. As Helga had once strolled. Because today was what it was, Helga let her thoughts drift with the river. And the towers and spire of Notre-Dame became the domes of the Kremlin.
One week after Karl Danzer’s murder, Helga Keller had made contact with the Soviet Embassy in Berne. Two months later she had flown to Moscow, telling her father that she had got a job in London.
It had then taken the KGB a month to decide whether she was a suitable candidate to become a professional spy as opposed to the obedient mistress of one. In the labyrinths of the KGB’s directorates her case was argued. Her youth, gullibility and emotional immaturity versus her potential.
It was her hatred that finally won the day. It was like an icicle that never thawed, its icy blade pointing towards the West, towards the two men, one black and one white, who had killed Karl Danzer.
At first, while they debated her case, she stayed in the Ukraine, the great mausoleum of a hotel on Kutuzovsky Prospect. From there, always in company, she was allowed to make the tourist rounds of Moscow, and it was just as Karl had described it to her: the gold cupolas of the Kremlin riding over the snow-white city, skates singing on the ice-covered paths in the parks, the Bolshoi, Metro stations like chapels …. Within the vice of winter she could feel the united energy of the people.
Finally she was given a tiny apartment off Gorky Street and taken under the wing of Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate, responsible for training agents living abroad under false identities. Because, as it was explained to her, Helga Keller had been blown in Zurich: it would be another girl, a stranger, who would eventually return to Europe. Meanwhile they took her letters for her father and posted them in London.
The indoctrination took months. In vain did she point out that Karl had taught her about Marxism and Leninism; that was not enough; you had to live a cause, not learn it. Her life was then put in the hands of a French-speaking agent named Litvak.
Litvak had been a boy soldier in the last stages of World War II and, like most veterans of a nation that had lost 20 million, he hated the Germans with an intensity that would never weaken. When he had drunk a little too much vodka, the hatred became confused with The Cause. This Helga Keller understood.
He was tall and lean with cropped hair – not unlike an archetypal pre-war Prussian officer – and grey eyes that sometimes looked sad as though he were searching for something that had been taken from him when he was a boy. He was very correct and, Helga suspected, a little in love with her.
Together, as the snow melted and water gurgled in the streets, they walked in Gorky Park and the Lenin Hills. And, when spring arrived to prepare hastily the way for the brief summer, they picnicked on the river beaches where, in their thousands, Muscovites bared themselves to the stranger, the sun.
Although Helga didn’t realise it, men who fed souls into computers had decided that in her case, indoctrination should be orchestrated with beauty. That was the way, according to his reports, that Karl Danzer had begun the process and that was the way it should continue. For the time being.
They needn’t have bothered. Helga would have embraced Communism working on a factory assembly line.
Only once did Litvak stray from his brief – when they were sitting on a spur of grassland beside a fat curve in the river after lunching on black bread, caviar, cheese, fruit and Georgian wine.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, lying down with his hands behind his head and staring at the blue sky, ‘you shouldn’t hate so much. It will consume you, as it did me.’
She looked at him in surprise. ‘But you are consumed with ideals. They have replaced the hatred. Except when you have drunk too much vodka,’ smiling at him.
‘My life was founded on hatred. The Germans killed my parents and my brother …. It was sown in me when I was too young. My hatred and my ideals over-lapped. But I never let anyone know. Only you. And I shouldn’t ….’
She touched his arm, bare beneath the rolled-up sleeves of his white shirt. ‘All that matters is the work we’re doing. Equality, that’s all we should worry about. Then, perhaps, there won’t be any room for hatred.’
He took her hand and kissed it. ‘There is something that I should tell you.’
She withdrew her hand. She wasn’t sure whether she should be angry. Surely he understood that her life was now a dedication.
He saw the expression on her face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘One day perhaps ….’
And that was all.
When they thought she was ready for it, they taught her the arts of surveillance – how to implement it and how to avoid it – and the subtleties of choosing between useful and useless information. They taught her self-defence, microphotography, cryptology, radio-transmission … and Russian because it was only right and proper.
They also created Hildegard Metz.
Born 1952 in Vienna in a small street off the Praterstrasse near the railway station. A student of languages and business management, competent in shorthand and audio-typing. (She found the secretarial training more tedious than anything else.)
An only child. Parents killed in an automobile accident when she was eighteen. Determined, when she was qualified, to leave Austria.
The KGB also physically moulded Hildegard Metz. Plastic surgeons filled out her face a little and the Russian diet thickened her waist, but not too much. She wore spectacles and pinned up her long hair. Before the transformation she had planned to visit her father, but she learned that he had died of a heart attack.
Within a year she was Hildegard Metz. Except alone sometimes in the tiny apartment.
If she hadn’t blindly handed her life over to The Cause, as a nun bequeaths her life to the Church, she might have questioned some of the manifestations of the dream of equality. The cramped quarters with whole families sharing one bathroom; the ubiquitous upravdom—the KGB supervisor present in every apartment block; the turgid propaganda in Pravda and Izvestia; the harassment of dissidents and Jews; the disappearance of critics of the regime into the Serbsky mental institution.
But her tutors explained it all. One day there would be fine homes for everyone and one day, when the American and British spies stopped preying on innocent citizens, there would be no call for the upravdom. The Jews …. Were they not first and foremost Russians? The dissidents …. ‘Are they not traitors sabotaging our beautiful ideals?’
She remembered Karl Danzer and saw the blood spurting on the windows of the cable-car and, yes, she believed.
They didn’t send her directly to Paris. Instead she joined the ranks of secretaries eager to obtain lucr
ative jobs with various branches of the EEC in Brussels. She worked for an Englishman and regularly reported to the Kremlin the mounting evidence of Britain’s disenchantment with the European Community. She discovered that she revelled in intrigue: it replaced other desires which had been quenched.
In the early spring of 1975 she was recalled to Moscow. She was met at Sheremetievo Airport by Litvak who looked ill. His face was gaunt and his eyes hollowed. He kissed her on both cheeks and led her to his small grey Moskavitch car.
Driving into Moscow, past the monument marking the point where the German advance had been halted, he told her that she was to be uniquely honoured: she was to meet the head of the entire KGB operation, Nicolai Vlasov.
‘They must have something very important lined up for you,’ he told her. ‘Not many people get to meet Vlasov.’ Snow was sliding off the rooftops, the silver birches were dripping. It was the same Moscow that she had once explored with Litvak by her side.
He dropped her outside the Ukraine Hotel, gripped her arm and said: ‘Be careful,’ and was gone.
The hotel hadn’t changed. The vast lobby was filled with tottering piles of luggage and dispirited visitors lining up for keys, passports, currency …. She was escorted to a suite of rooms on the floor where the surveillance equipment was located.
Nicolai Vlasov was waiting for her with a bottle of Russian champagne, two pale-green glasses and a plate of canapes.
So this was the dreaded commander of an army which penetrated every walk of Soviet life and infiltrated every capital in the world. He looked positively benign, she thought. An elder statesman rather than the head of the secret police. Except for the eyes, set wide in the fragile-looking skull, that took you apart with one glance. They were green, she noted.
I, Said the Spy Page 25