Schmidtke and the KGB washed the money and a friendly bank in an obscure Swiss canton invested this laundered money into all kinds of business ventures.’
Finn smiles at a memory. ‘I remember once when I was on a skiing holiday I was sitting on a ski-lift in a canton in Switzerland. I suddenly realised that this ski-lift was, in fact, a KGB investment,’ he says. ‘The technology was Swiss,’ he adds, as if concerned that we might be worrying about his physical safety.
But then he’s serious again.
‘So. When we arrested Schmidtke in Berlin in eighty-nine, several billions of dollars had been laundered by KoKo and invested in all kinds of ways. When we brought him in, Schmidtke was returning from Geneva having deposited over a billion dollars. We were a few hours too late to stop him divesting himself of the cash and bonds. We knew the money was held in an escrow account belonging to one of Schmidtke’s Western agents, a Belgian arms dealer living in Switzerland. We wanted him too, but missed him that time and every time since then.’
‘What does this have to do with Putin?’ Nana asks. ‘Our new President, God bless us.’
‘Putin was one of Schmidtke’s colleagues. He also worked for Schmidtke’s KGB controllers in the eighties,’ Finn says. ‘That’s the connection. Back in the days when he was based in East Germany, Putin and Schmidtke met regularly.’
‘And Schmidtke was clearing out the accounts before German re-unification,’ I say, ‘which is why he was depositing these billions in Switzerland.’
‘Yes. There were a lot of traces to be covered in a very short time,’ Finn replies. ‘Everything happened so quickly after the Wall came down. It wasn’t just Schmidtke and the Stasi and their KGB allies who had a clearout. Every KGB general and some regular army generals in East Germany were stripping the place. Huge Russian air transporters were flying out cargoes of Mercedes stolen in the West and bound for Moscow. The rapaciousness was unbelievable. Do you know that when Mercedes opened a dealership in Moscow at the beginning of the nineties, they couldn’t sell any cars, there were so many already there? Instead, they opened a service centre; they made good money, thanks to Russian driving.’
‘And Schmidtke?’ Nana says.
‘We questioned him for a few weeks in London. We knew he knew everything, all the skeletons, right up to the very top of the political leadership in Bonn. But the West Germans naturally wanted him, too, and they had a greater claim. We let them have him. Perhaps that was a mistake,’ Finn adds.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Why was it a mistake? They questioned him for two years. At the end they found he still knew more about them than they knew about him. He held all the secrets. Their secrets, secrets they didn’t even know about their own political leaders. Don’t forget, for nearly thirty years Schmidtke was at the heart of East Germany’s infiltration of West German politics, banking and business. He knew it all. I’m amazed he wasn’t killed in prison, actually. There were plenty of people who would have appreciated him more if he were in the grave. But he had very powerful allies. And still has. After two years of interrogation, the Germans let him go, under their surveillance, into a quiet, paid retirement in a village called Tegernsee in southern Germany.’
Finn rolls over on the sofa and puts his hands on my knees and seems to study them as they stroke my skin.
‘Tegernsee,’ he says, lost in the movement of his hand. ‘It’s a charming little place on a lake, you’d love it, Rabbit. And it’s very convenient for the Swiss border. The town has a number of interesting residents, in fact, as well as Schmidtke.’
Finn’s hand moves around the inside of my knee.
I take it and move it away. ‘Go on.’
Finn pauses and sighs and drinks from the brandy glass until it’s empty. Nana hobbles to the sideboard and brings the bottle over to refill it. Finn thanks her by blowing a kiss. He’s half sitting up. It’s as if he’s pretending to be drunk. And then he lies back again, sliding his hand across my stomach, and continues.
‘The German intelligence service, the BND, put a watch on Schmidtke’s apartment in Tegernsee from a field across the river at the back. It was a good spot with a clear view. In winter, that is, when they set it up. In the spring, however, a wall of leaves sprang up from the trees that grew up on the riverbank, and all their beautiful Zeiss lenses were met with this thick green wall that cut off Schmidtke’s apartment completely. Famed German intelligence.
‘But the British, they…you’d already got something out of him, hadn’t you?’ I say. ‘You knew the secrets the Germans wanted to find?’
‘He told us only a little of what he told the Germans,’ Finn corrects me. ‘It was plenty, believe me, and they knew we knew. We waited for them to act on it, but they didn’t. It was too costly for them, of course. Schmidtke was starting to unravel thirty years of KGB successes in West Germany right up to the highest level, so they put the lid on everything he told them and eventually they didn’t want to hear any more.’
‘Did the British tell the Germans everything Schmidtke told them?’ I ask.
‘We share all our intelligence,’ Finn replies straight-faced.
I laugh. ‘But not in this case.’
‘No. Not in this case,’ Finn says and smiles. ‘Or not as far as I know.’
He finally unrolls himself from the sofa and throws the two remaining logs from the basket on to the fire. He begins to put on a coat and hat, and the white felt boots Nana had brought back for him from a tourist trip she’d made to Nizhny Novgorod. Then he picks up the log basket. He looks at me and I get up from the rug to get dressed for the cold too.
We walk into the forest far away from where we keep the logs at the back of the dacha. It’s pitch dark, the first hour of the New Year, the new century, the new millennium. The snow is falling weakly inside the wood, like the last of the seed dribbling from the bottom of a packet, but when we emerge into the clearings beside the pond, it is robust, the big flakes driving down unimpeded with an apparent urgency to bury everything deeply and for ever.
Finn chats nervously. He tells me about a Vietnamese refugee he and some friends had sponsored when they were at university. The boy had arrived at a military airbase in Scotland in mid-winter and three days after he’d arrived he’d woken up to see the landscape white with snow. He’d called Finn in a panic, believing there’d been a nuclear attack.
‘Perception is sometimes a traitor,’ Finn says to me after he’s finished this story. ‘And sometimes it’s the truth. How do you distinguish when it’s one or the other?’
‘Instinct maybe,’ I reply. ‘That’s all we have, isn’t it?’
‘But we’re afraid to use it most of the time. For most of us, truth is merely facts. That’s where we feel safest.’
We walk further into the forest and stand by a pond which is seamlessly coated with snow so that it has become one with the surrounding land.
‘What do your instincts tell you now?’ he asks me.
‘About what?’
‘About where we’re going, you and I. Us.’
‘I don’t think about it. I don’t think about you much when we’re not together,’ I say, and it’s true. ‘I have my survival to think about.’
He holds my hand through our thick gloves.
‘And what if you did think about us, Rabbit, about where we both want to go?’
‘I can’t think about it,’ I say.
‘Or won’t,’ he says.
I am silent.
‘Let me tell you, then. My instincts say we should get out of all this. Retire, if you like. Remove the obstacles, our work, these forces around us, everything that conspires and will continue to conspire against our future. Let go of everything that restricts us from being true together. My instinct says we should reduce us to just you, me and the spirit that joins us.’
I consider what he’s saying. I fear the treason he’s suggesting. His to me, or mine to my country? I don’t know. And if Finn is true, what might it do to me, this treason? And I have other fears too. But these fears are of the wrong things; they are fears of a change in my life so massive I can barely imagine it. My fear is of leaving everything familiar to me, everything in my life up to this point, in exchange for Finn and uncertainty. It is a base
