by John Gardner
“Angels,” said Art, soberly, “have no sex. That’s the word according to St. Augustine. Or was it Ignatius Loyola?”
“Talking of angels …” Herb began.
Art nodded. “I have some with me. You’re as safe as we can make it here. I have five guys. Two watching by day, three by night. We’ve covered most of the angles, but I don’t think anyone else is around.”
“Who’d you expect to be around?”
“FBI, the Mob and the Agency. The Mob and the Agency—or at least some inner conclave of it—want Louis Passau under the earth. By definition they probably want you with him, Herbie.”
“Any idea why?”
“Not the Mob, no. But I’ve got a large slice of information on why other people want him silenced.”
“And do we take the old boy to England? Is that an option?”
“It depends on what you’ve got for me.”
Herbie’s big head bobbed, signifying that he understood. “As far as our trade is concerned, we have very little. He’s a born dissembler and he knows his way around. He says we get the whole story and nothing but the whole story. His argument is that we won’t understand it until he tells exactly what happened in his life.”
“And you believe that?”
“As far as I believe anything. I’m not really certain that I’m talking to the same Maestro Passau all the time. So far, we’ve reached the 1930s and the old bastard has faked himself into being an overnight conducting success. I think it is starting to become interesting to people in our line of business.” He paused, looking at Art. “Back in London, when you sent me out here, I was told there were true reasons for drying out this rock of ages once and for all. In spite of the events in Eastern Europe. In spite of his age. In spite of everyone being friends and burying the hatchet.
“Okay, now I ask you is it really still so vital to clean out this old guy? I mean really vital?”
Art nodded. “Even more so, now.”
“Ah! So we’re coming to my long-lost love. To Ursula.”
Art felt, more than saw, Pucky Curtiss stiffen. “So,” he thought. “Good for Herbie. He’s melted the ice queen.” Then he said, “I spent an entire night going over the immediate concerns of Ursula Zunder.”
“What next?”
“Go back a snake, Herb. I have to say that after you left on this assignment some of us became concerned. You hadn’t been gone for more than twelve hours when there were serious doubts. It was even suggested that we should recall you.”
“Nobody told me,” Pucky sounded a mite huffy.
“Need-to-know, Puck. By the time you came in we were all intent on placating Desperate Dan at Grosvenor Square. The balloon had gone up. Well and truly gone up. Shooting. The magic disappearance of the Maestro and Herb.”
“Why?” Herbie asked. He sat still, his face blank.
“Nothing specific. Sources over here tipped us that some people were anxious to render Maestro Passau terminally unconscious. It was even suggested that he would never get to Quantico. Also we had this feeling that the Agency might finally cut you out of the deal.”
“They couldn’t have been nicer in New York, Art.”
“I know, but most of those guys ended up dead in the Queens Midtown Tunnel, right?”
In his head, Herbie heard the sound of crunching metal, and the gunshots, hugely magnified in the tunnel. Again he caught the last scream of the third man he had killed, and saw the blood.
“So, I presume all the stuff you gave me at Warminster is still pertinent? Is right …”
“Pertinent, yes, Herb, and yes, it still stands. However, someone else has come into the equation.”
“The someone else being Fraulein Zunder, ja?”
Art nodded and slid his eyes towards Pucky, then back again to Herb. “How much does the Puck know?”
“Almost everything. I told her my past and my present. Only left out the bits about cutting up people with axes and keeping them in the fridge.”
“You’ve become quite chummy.” Art left the remark hanging between them.
“Not much to do in Virginia during the long evenings, once the Maestro’s gone bye-byes.”
“Mmmm.”
Nobody spoke for a full minute.
“You want to tell us, or you keep us in suspense for the rest of our lives?”
“I’ll tell you. Right from page one. Okay? First off, Ursula’s been a busy girl over the years, Herb. Someone must’ve taught her very well indeed.” He went on to give them a full rundown on his long night’s journey into day with Ursula in the guest suite at Warminster.
“YOUR NAME, for the record—true name, that is?” he began, as though filling in some official form.
“Ursula Anna Zunder. You know my name already, Mr. Railton.”
“Yes, but this is very official. I’m starting the debrief.” He paused and looked at her. “I don’t mean to be personal, Fraulein Zunder, but you should have your hair fixed. Dyed. You’re not old enough to have white hair.”
She gave an infectious little laugh. “It is dyed. I’ll let it grow out while I’m here—if you’re going to keep me here.”
“I think, for the time being, we should.”
“I hope,” she looked grave again. “I hope my hair does grow out. It has changed color many times in the past few years. Like my name has changed, and my nationality. I have been kept very busy since …”
“Since you bagged Herbie and had him shut up for longer than any of us liked.”
She gave a nod, not meeting his eyes.
“Who were you working for, Ursula? I know, but I have to hear it all again.”
“Since my late teens I’ve worked exclusively for KGB.” She sounded like someone filling out her C.V., as though it was the most natural thing in the world to spend her life working for the former Russian Intelligence Service.
“And that is why you’ve run to us now?”
“Because the new Germany is being a little tough with people like me. Because there have been some drastic, dramatic changes, and because I have information which I believe will still be very valuable to you.”
“Why shouldn’t we just throw you back and let them put you on trial? Maybe they wouldn’t even do that. I gather they’re being selective. Not everyone is going to stand trial.”
“Oh, I think they’d want me. My name appears on some very sensitive documents. Some have probably been destroyed, but KGB are now talking about opening the files. Some of these are almost certainly already doctored. They’d be given to you, or worse, to the Americans. I’ve a feeling I would not even get to trial. There’d be an accident. You see, I’m a liability to everyone—to KGB and CIA. To put it melodramatically, I know too much.”
“You’re not a liability to us as well?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know. I do know I can solve some problems for you.”
“Such as?”
“Kingfisher. You know about Kingfisher?”
“Some.”
“I realize, from when I saw you the other day, you’re already aware of a great deal I have to tell you, but I doubt if you have it all. You know who he was—is? Kingfisher?”
“Yes. In a way we have him. At least your former lover has him.”
“Here?”
“Not quite yet, no. But …”
“Louis Passau is with Herbie?”
“Something like that. Just tell me what your connection is, your affiliation with Louis Passau.”
She asked for more coffee, and if he minded her smoking. When she was settled, Ursula Zunder began.
Though she was Russian born, she had lived most of her life in East Germany, her father having been a senior KGB officer, confidant of many legendary figures of the old Soviet hierarchy. “There are not many active KGB who are women. The old Service was backward about that. Women were used mainly for what you call honey traps. I did that, of course. But I was trained for other things.”
In 1985 she had been given what she called
a new “legend,” which meant a complete identity, with a past, present and foreseeable future. “In fact I had two main legends. You must pay close attention to this as it is very, very important, so you will understand.”
On one hand she had been Franziska Bauer, with an apartment in what was then West Berlin, and papers which, if examined and checked on, led a false trail to Stuttgart, Munich, Wiesbaden and back again. “It was so complicated,” she told Art, “that only the most tenacious would get past Munich.”
There were other, minor, identities, for fallbacks, but her second main legend was as Anna Brüke, whose address was the same apartment as Bauer’s in West Berlin. This was her travel name. “If anyone checked on me they would find that I was a senior editor working for Stern magazine. I was, as it were, a double. Anna Brüke was a real person.”
This was a risky way to do things, but it helped mightily with the immigration authorities when she went in and out of the United States, which was often.
“They had some kind of a line on the real Fraulein Brüke. It was very good. Only once I recall a panic, when I had to leave the United States very quickly. What Herbie would have said, I had to get out in my knickers.” She blushed appropriately but a sexual fusion filled the air, not directed at Art. She still had the hots for Herb, he thought. That’s what she was telling him.
“On that occasion, the real Anna Brüke made a sudden decision to fly to New York. They knew about it the day it happened and I was out within four hours. The Russian Service could be very good on agent handling.”
Art nodded. She was not telling him anything he did not already know. “And you were handling Kingfisher?”
“Of course. There were two of us. A German-born musician, name of Willy Oscar, who was his control in Europe. I did crash meetings when Willy was not around, but mainly I handled him on his home territory. In the U.S.A. Kingfisher was very special for us. He gave some incredible material. Told us almost what the President of the United States was thinking before even the President knew.” She added a nice amused smile, to show this was a joke.
“Then what?”
“I felt honored.” She lit another cigarette. “I was honored. The information he provided was specialist by nature: financial things, the mood of the American military, the latest stuff from the Pentagon, even White House memos. It was different, but very good material.”
“What were the nuts and bolts?”
“You mean meetings? Pick ups? This kind of thing?”
He nodded, and she described in detail how she ran Passau in America. The dead drops, and general tradecraft. Then the meetings—sitdowns in an apartment on Lexington Avenue. “Very smart. A beautiful place. It had a kitchen the size of my whole Berlin apartment. It was a dream place. I think the staff—the concierge and service people—considered that I was his mistress.”
“And were you?”
Her head went back as though she had been shot, and her eyes flared with anger for a second. She had nice eyes, Art thought. She opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it.
“Well, were you?” he asked again.
She looked away, then murmured “Yes, on a few occasions.”
“So they were right.”
“He had many mistresses, and I think he used the Lexington Avenue apartment to entertain them. You’re not a woman, Mr. Railton. The man had—has—a singular attraction to women. He radiates power, and that turns people on. I resisted him for a long while, but he expected any woman who would meet with him alone to lie down with him.”
“We’re talking about a very old man.”
“We’re talking about a very extraordinary man.”
“And he was a good lover?”
She seemed to have recovered some of her humor, giving him a shy smile as she said—“I’ve known better.”
“You met with him, on a regular basis, at the Lexington Avenue apartment?”
“It would be considered regular, yes. About once every three or four months I would fly in. I always stayed at the same hotel—one that the real Fraulein Brüke did not use—the Intercontinental. It was the normal place, though there were at least seven crash meetings when he had something critical to give us. That is seven extra times between eighty and ninety-one.”
“The years you handled him, yes?”
“I handled him right up to just before his ninetieth birthday, Mr. Railton. Right up to after the August coup. KGB did not shut down overnight you know.”
“So, you actually ran him in the U.S.A. from eighty?”
“Correct. But these extra meetings were lumped together, between eighty-seven and eighty-eight.”
“And the crash meetings were all at the New York apartment?”
“No. Three of them were. Four took place outside New York. One in Los Angeles, another in San Diego, the third in San Francisco and the fourth in Chicago. He was touring at the time—with his orchestra, or the opera company. We met in hotels.”
“You can recall the reasons for these meetings being urgent?”
“As I said, they all took place in eighty-seven and eighty-eight. They were bad years for me. I spent much time running around after him.”
“Why the urgency?” Art pressed.
“At the time they appeared to be very important. In retrospect, when we began to reexamine his work, at the end of 1989 and in early ninety, they turned out not to be so important at all. In fact he seemed to be trying to impress us; trying to enhance his importance. This is the real problem with Kingfisher, Mr. Railton. In the final analysis we thought he might be working both sides of the street. That is correct? That is the way you say it, the same as KGB?”
Art frowned, wondering if she was doing a Herbie on him. After all, Herbie had trained her. He gave a curt nod. “Working both sides of the street, yes.”
“We knew at the end. I can give you a lot of details. It would take days, weeks even. But we knew. Kingfisher was being run also by CIA and …”
“They’d doubled him?”
“I never figured out. I was never given the chance to figure it out—whether it was from the very beginning or only the last few years.” She gave a brief smile and stubbed out the cigarette. “No, he wasn’t an official double. We knew that. It was something more. He was being run by a small cadre of officers inside CIA. That is what is so strange. Moscow told us they already knew he was under the control of CIA officers. My colleagues, those who analyzed the information, Willy Oscar and myself … we were told to forget about the CIA involvement.”
“Just like that?”
“Exactly like that. Mr. Railton, we were left in no doubt at all that Louis Passau was some kind of a conduit between a group of high-level Agency officers and members of KGB.”
“For what reason?”
“That’s the most interesting part. Senior officers of KGB were talking to a group of senior officers of CIA right up to the August coup in Moscow this year. They talked through the direct channel that is Louis Passau: sent him messages while he sent stuff back to them, directly from the Agency. I know. I carried the messages. Perhaps you can understand why I am a little afraid, and why Louis Passau should also be frightened now. You want to hear all the details? It will take a very long time, for it has the ingredients of a wonderfully complex conspiracy and throws a lot of doubt on what is happening in my poor split and shattered country now.”
In the present, inside the large room of the Captiva Island apartment, Art Railton stopped talking and leaned back in his chair, while Kruger and Ms. Curtiss sat, mouths open, incredulous. What Art was telling them was the kind of intelligence link of which global nightmares are made, and they knew it.
(9)
“SO, YOU SEE WE have a tinderbox here.” Arthur Railton looked from Herbie to Pucky and back again.
“Towering bloody inferno.” Pucky’s eyes hinted at battle fatigue.
“Bomb, with the fuse already on injury time. She telling the truth, Ursula?” Herbie sounded as though few people
ever told the truth.
“I suspect there’s more in heaven and earth than dreamed of in your philosophy, Herb.”
“Shakespeare,” Herbie informed Pucky, unnecessarily. “Is hard,” he frowned, the great forehead almost growling with its deep furrows. “This is writing history: forbidden fruit; poisoned tree.”
“If it really is so, then we have a huge conspiracy on our hands; that’s the general opinion. And you’re right, Herb. It’s true secret history and it changes recent events in Eastern Europe.” Art shifted uncomfortably. Herbie’s interrogation skills told him that Art was unhappy about everything he had told them. It showed in his body language, one arm thrown defensively across his chest, his legs drawn up, face tense.
“They putting Ursula through the mill? Warminster?”
Art nodded. “The mill, mangle and spin dryer. Gus is doing the full business. I spoke with him before coming out here. He’s inclined to believe most of it. You catch any of this yet, Herb? From the old man, I mean.”
Kruger gave a grunt. “Art, this is like Arabian Nights. I almost signed him up for the book rights. I told you, he’s giving me his life, bit by bit. We got to the mid, late 1930s. You read the biographies, so you know that’s only the start. He’s just gone to New York with Androv and the Manhattan Symphony. Also collected twenty million bucks and passed Go. Did Not Go To Jail, so probably collected a further two hundred dollars.
“Tomorrow morning I’m going to Monopoly Passau.”
“Monopolize, Herb.”
“Sure.”
RAIN SLASHED AND stippled the long windows of the apartment. Outside, the sky was the color of pewter and the wind lashed at the palm trees, sending sand leaping around the beach.
“Beautiful view. Might as well have gone to Bognor Regis.” Passau had been allowed near the window. Herbie would pull him back if any boat came within rifle distance, otherwise it was safe. There was nowhere to hide out there.
“At least it’s warm, Lou. This kind of weather bloody perishing in Bognor.”
“Bugger Bognor.”
“What’s next, Lou? You going to tell me some more? You went off to New York with a cool twenty million—and profits from the booze heist—in your bank account. You were Androv’s associate director for one year, almost exactly one year. Reading between the lines, you also made a beeline for the Friends of the Manhattan Symphony, particularly Veronica Duncan. …”