Sitting by the crackling fire, he began to throw away his secret life and, as I now realise, he was throwing it away for my sake.
When Finn decided something, he decided it quickly. And events would then unravel very fast. He had the capacity to think fast and very far ahead on these occasions. As it turned out, the telling of this story put into play all that was to follow. From that afternoon at Barvikha what has happened to Finn and me was set in motion.
His aim was later to become clear to me, but it wasn’t clear at the time. He had a plan, for far into the future, to make sure we could share our lives together without the artificial, professional barriers preventing it. And it was for that reason alone that he began the process of burning his boats.
Six years later, picking up Finn’s first notebook and reading it by the light of the oil lamp in the vault at Tegernsee, it is an eerie experience. The first lines written in Finn’s hand are word for word what he said on that evening, the eve of the millennium.
‘For me,’ Finn begins, settling a cushion behind his lower back and tickling Genghiz under the chin, ‘the story began in January 1989. Although it really started back in 1961.
‘In 1989, I was stationed in West Berlin. One grey middle-European winter night an East German citizen by the name of Anatoly Schmidtke landed on a flight from Geneva at Berlin’s Tegel airport. The flight was less than half full and he was easy to spot. He was stopped and arrested immediately by the British. We controlled the zone around Tegel. Berlin was still divided into four zones. The Soviets had East Berlin, and West Berlin was divided between the British, the French and the Americans.
‘We swiftly moved Schmidtke to London where we put him in a high-security cell in Belmarsh prison. It’s where we keep awkward foreigners out of sight from the press.’
Finn bends down to stroke Genghiz who is curled up at his feet, ancient now like Nana, and who seems, unusually, to have given Finn his stamp of approval.
‘I was sent with a senior officer from the Service to interview Schmidtke,’ Finn continues. ‘I was an up-and- coming officer and my station head considered this to be a golden opportunity to introduce me to a real Russian- or East German- spy.’ Finn grins like a schoolboy at the word.
Then he looks at me and I see for the hundredth time how his eyes become completely different from each other when he’s focusing on something. One of them, the left one as I look at him, is soft and gentle. The other is hard, cruel even. He is like two different people in one pair of eyes. I’ve never seen a man’s eyes like this, eyes that could express two completely separate expressions at the same time, as if they were operated by two different sides of the brain.
‘So off we went to Belmarsh prison,’ Finn resumes. ‘You knew him?’ Finn says to me. ‘Schmidtke?’
‘Only by name.’
‘Yes, Schmidtke was a bit before your time.’ Finn smiles. ‘Anyway, back in eighty-nine, I was sent to Belmarsh to interview him about what he’d been doing in Geneva, not to mention what he’d been doing in the other twenty-eight years of his operational life.’
‘He wasn’t Russian?’ Nana asks.
‘He was—is—a Russian German, originally from the East. He became a Stasi officer. He was even Foreign Minister for a short time. But mainly he headed an organisation just over the Wall on your side called KoKo, for short. Kommerzielle Koordinierung. Of all his positions and centres of power, KoKo was the gold seam of his influence. It was KGB, of course, but it was run on a day-to-day basis by the East Germans.’
And now Finn barely pauses.
‘KoKo was set up in 1961, just after the Wall went up. It was a hybrid trade organisation the purpose of which was to get hold of foreign currency to fund KGB and Stasi operations abroad. Foreign currency wasn’t so easy to obtain for your people after the Wall went up. Your own Wall made traffic from East to West more difficult for the KGB, too. So Schmidtke’s mission was to find new ways to get hold of valuable foreign currency. The rouble was useless, unconvertible, of course.
‘It all started pretty crudely with Schmidtke’s thugs combing East Germany for works of art the Nazis hadn’t hidden–antiques and so on. They just confiscated stuff from their owners and sold it through various dealers from Switzerland and Belgium, London and other places. Schmidtke set up a secret financial pipeline from East Germany to Switzerland in order to launder the money and he learned from Soviet sympathisers and illegal financial operators in the West how to set up offshore accounts, wash money, avoid tax. What he learned about capitalism was how all the grimy underside of it worked, the illegal side, the side used by organised crime. So his main contacts in the West were by and large criminal. But there were bankers too, and lawyers, who operated above the line.’
Finn looks up to the ceiling at this point, as if to make sure that the microphones are picking up his every word.
Nana disappears into the kitchen and comes back with a tray of
‘Are you all right, Nana?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m all right. Just a dizzy spell, Anna. They come and go quickly.’
‘Sit down, Nana,’ Finn says and stands up to plump a cushion on the chair opposite him, but she remains standing. In the corner of the room the Russian flag still flutters on the televison in front of the Kremlin’s cameras, but I’ve turned the television down. Nana can hear only if there’s no background noise.
‘So, in the West, did nobody ask where these artworks came from?’ Nana says.
‘No. There was money to be made. On all sides. In 1961 Europe was in disorder after the Wall went up. There was a lot of movement across the line still and we were encouraging people to come over. Of course, that’s when the KGB put many of their people in place in the West. It was the end of free movement and everyone was trying to get their pieces in position.’
Finn looks at the clock on the wall over the mantelpiece. It is half an hour before the New Year. He gently touches the side of my face in a gesture that Nana says later is the one that wards off evil spirits. Nana has all kinds of superstitions like this from God knows where. To me, Finn’s hand on my cheek feels like protection of sorts too, so maybe Nana is right.
‘You want me to continue?’ Finn says, and a line of worry creases his eyes. He says it as if we are going through some door, some magic portal of no return, or over the brink of a precipice. And in a sense we are.
‘Yes, why not? Go on.’
He brushes the hairs on my temple as he takes his hand away and then continues, as before, carefully laying the words down as if they are a ball of string along which we can find our way back.
‘Well, soon, of course, Schmidtke’s theft of art ran out of steam. There wasn’t anything left. Who knows how much money KoKo made? Millions? Certainly. But new ways had to be found to fund the KGB’s increasing presence in Western Europe and elsewhere. They were funding the Communist parties in France and Italy, for a start. But that’s another story. So Schmidtke turned to what was practically the only thing the Soviets had to offer of their own. Arms.’
Finn now spreads out on his back as if the smallest effort of movement might result in the end of the world. To me, trained observer that I am, it is a position of deliberate vulnerability, of ‘I’m taking a big risk.’ It is the psychiatrist’s couch and the ‘patient’ is peeling off one layer of the onion of his hidden self to test the effect it has.
The fact that we all know about the microphones adds a surreal touch, I suppose. We’re all playing, to some extent, to the third ear in the room–Putin’s Ears, as Finn refers to the microphones later. But while Finn, it seems to me, wants my masters to hear what he is saying, he nevertheless and unnecessarily looks straight at me as if to convey a deeper meaning that cannot be known by anyone outside the room. I know he’s conveying a message to me beyond his words, but that the message in some way includes his words too.
In retrospect, I now realise that it was an appeal, an appeal to me to understand his real motives, the unexpressed, the unsaid.
‘KoKo became one of the biggest illegal arms sales operations in the world,’ he continues. ‘At its height it was selling shipments of weapons all over Africa, the Middle East, South America, China, rebel groups in the Far East…Schmidtke even sold a cargo of small arms out of Rostock to the Americans for their covert war in Nicaragua. Good, solid Soviet-made weapons and East German optics could soon be bought throughout the world. And Schmidtke funnelled the profits down his secret financial pipeline into Switzerland. Two banks in Geneva friendly to
