Red to Black

to your investigations, Finn. It’s a Swiss branch of Jensbank and it has a long, historic trade with the KGB. I will give you the name. But anyway, we know that, from now onwards, Roth was put in charge of that money. The Swiss accounts were to be controlled by Roth after Schmidtke deposited the cash. You see, Schmidtke knew that the writing was on the wall for him and he just managed to make these deposits before the British arrested him. The end was fast, the Wall tumbled earlier than they’d expected. But by the time it fell the decks were cleared. The past was erased. We were ready to close in on Schmidtke when the British arrested him.’

‘And we missed our chance to get Roth,’ Finn says, ‘at the moment when he received this money and before he had time to obscure its origins.’

‘Just so. But to Exodi,’ Dieter continues. ‘The Exodi companies demonstrate two things. First that many or maybe all of the companies Schmidtke and Roth controlled were wound up in 1989 and then re-formed in 1991 under exactly the same names. They were not formed for the first time in 1991, as the documents we looked at, courtesy of the Swiss and Liechtenstein authorities, showed. It was a nice deceit. You look into the origins of a company that you have concerns about and you see it was formed after the period concerning your investigations. It does not occur to you that it may have a history before that. You have nice, clean, official documents in your hands, from impeccable officials, that tell you the date of incorporation. Why look further?

‘But the second thing Exodi demonstrated to me is truly alarming. This second thing is that two of the most senior financial officials in Liechtenstein and Switzerland were able to say, without openly lying, that Exodi was formed in 1991. It was formed in 1991. But not for the first time. Did they know they were lying, these two impeccable officials, Hutzger and his opposite number in Geneva? If they did, it was perfectly deniable.’ Dieter pauses awkwardly, as if he has allowed himself to run on too long to an unwilling listener. But Finn is far from unwilling.

‘Why did they re-form these companies in the same name, after they were wound up?’ Finn says. ‘Why not just make new companies?’

‘For exactly that reason. When I found on my second search that the Exodi companies had been originally founded in 1975, I also found information from that time about the activities of Exodi that related to money- laundering, corruption, fraud. All these activities had KGB traces. But if you looked at the history of these companies, as it was given to us in the documents from Geneva and Liechtenstein, their history only began in 1991. So we must be wrong, that was the implication. Any information about Exodi and the KGB must be wrong. And that’s what they wanted us to believe.’

‘They wanted you to believe the fake Exodi,’ Finn says. ‘But you were right, Dieter. Exodi existed before. And the highest officials in Liechtenstein and Switzerland were covering it up.’

‘Deniably. And without actually lying, yes. And my government in Bonn decided to believe it, knowingly or unknowingly. And again, deniably, without actually lying.’

‘And Bonn closed the investigations.’

‘Swiftly.’

‘And you, Dieter? Did you take what you found to your masters?’

‘It was too late by then and I guessed I would not be thanked for it. I saw which way things were going. The government was using us, its security service, to give it a cloak of respectable investigation into the past, but it didn’t really want us to investigate anything to its end. The glimpses of the truth we’d already found were too frightening.’

Dieter begins to untie the watertight clips, takes off the plastic coat, and pulls the box out from inside it. He pushes it across to Finn.

‘Take these. They’re microfiches; perhaps a hundred and twenty companies of Roth’s and Schmidtke’s. They show their real history before 1989. They are your link from the past to the present, Finn. Look at the Exodi companies.’

Finn doesn’t touch the box.

‘Take it. I don’t want them now,’ Dieter says. ‘Once, I thought I would use them, not any more. When you no longer trust your own government…’ He pauses. ‘Now I spend my time drinking the odd bottle of fine Moselle in the evening. And I’m writing short stories for my brother’s granddaughters, just children’s stories. You, Finn, it’s your turn to keep this box safe.’

Finn takes the box, puts it back in its thick plastic sheath and attaches the clips back on to it.

‘I don’t want to be connected in any way with what you’re doing,’ Dieter says firmly. ‘I’m retired and I live for my great-nieces.’

‘I may need your help, Dieter,’ Finn says. ‘More help,’ he adds.

Dieter sighs and stands up and walks to the window.

‘How will we communicate?’ he says at last without turning back.

Finn draws an old thin hardback book from his coat pocket. He places it carefully on the table. Dieter turns and walks back and sits down again.

‘Lessons in English,’ Finn says. ‘Published in 1941, very few copies left.’

Dieter opens the book and reads: ‘Long Live International Youth Day. Long Live the Communist Party. Long Live Comrade Stalin.’

‘They’re the stories of Sasha and Misha,’ Finn says. ‘Fairy stories, too, in their way. Two kids from the Caucasus. Children’s stories with a difference. They were written to turn children into good little communist citizens. We’ll use this book for code work. No phone calls, no e-mails. This address is my contact.’ He gives Dieter a box number address. ‘What about you?’

‘I’ll send you a contact place,’ Dieter says. ‘I haven’t done this for a while.’

Dieter closes the doors of the fire and clears the glasses and cups into a stone sink. They leave the house and walk around to the stone barns and talk as they go about how the coding is to work.

In the car, Finn gives Dieter a sheet of paper denoting the code’s mechanism. The page numbers that Dieter is to refer to in the stories of Sasha and Misha are indicated by the names of fungi found in another book, The Oxford Book of Fungi. The fungus ‘Witches’ Butter’ is page sixty-eight of Sasha and Misha, for example. The letters of the words on each page in Sasha and Misha change according to the description in The Oxford Book of Fungi of each fungus that is date relevant. And the whole thing shifts after each communication from either of them. It is a crude, old-fashioned type of code, but they’ve both worked with such codes many times.

14

THE HEAT OF BODIES in the gasthaus at Tegernsee was by now causing steam to rise from the dance floor. The band broke their set and everyone returned to long tables. They were red in the face, these round, jolly people who looked slightly crazed in the eyes from the dance. Trays of beers were ordered and they sat, splayed legs and rolled-up sleeves, their conversation filling the echoing stone ceiling with amorphous noise.

I tucked Finn’s notebook into my coat and finished the remains of the coffee that had gone cold. I wanted to be outside in the street, my bones warmed now against the snow, which still fell and melted on the window panes.

I walked carefully back along the lake to Finn’s pink house, taking a roundabout route and watching from a distance for a cold half-hour before I approached. I walked around the outside, checking the windows and the front and back doors, before I entered. It was as I’d left it.

I lit a fire in the ground-floor sitting room and poured myself a whisky. I was cold again but I realised it was now also the cold of loneliness.

Dieter’s microfiches would be downstairs in the cellar somewhere and sometime I would have to find them. They seemed to carry the weight of some valuable artefact from a lost time, a missing link. But I needed something more immediate, something that would lead me to Finn.

I went down into the cellar and picked out Finn’s second Book of Record. Deciding now that warmth had beaten caution I took it with me up the stairs to the chair by the fire.