‘Oh Jesus.’
‘Who was it?’ Finn persists. ‘If you’re interested in keeping your skin safe for any length of time tell me now before I walk out and it’s too late.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ the boy repeats and waves his head from side to side like a distressed zoo animal.
‘Who?’
‘All right, all right. I was called by a man called Philippe Pou-lain.’
‘The MP?’
‘Yes, here in Luxembourg.’
The boy looks utterly defeated.
‘Give me the phone number,’ Finn says urgently.
The boy wearily threads his bony hands through a pile of papers and finally finds and holds up a sheet of A4 with nothing but a number written on it. Finn walks across the room, memorises it and looks down at the boy.
‘Just do as I told you and they’ll know they can rely on you,’ he says.
As Finn turns and walks quickly out of the room the boy doesn’t move. Finn shuts the door and, without pausing, descends the two floors two steps at a time and exits on to the street. He doesn’t look up, or in either direction, but walks fast to the left, his face to the pavement but his eyes looking carefully to the right. There is nobody sitting in the parked cars on either side of the street. After a hundred yards, he stops sharply, puts his hand inside his coat as if he’d forgotten something, and turns back. But there is nobody there.
‘Luxembourg is run by a small, tight group of people,’ Finn writes. ‘It is a small, tight state. Its MPs are businessmen, financiers, their interests lying principally with the interests of the ruling elite rather than with their constituents’ complaints about road-widening or the provision of extra waste bins for dog faeces. And the interests of the ruling elite–as well as of ordinary citizens, it must be said–is the furtherance and increase of Luxembourg’s share of the world’s wealth. That is what national legislators should be interested in.
‘But in order to do this patriotic task, because so much of what Luxembourg does for a living is secret, all branches of the state must be tightly controlled. The press, for example, is often told by the chief of police to bury a story that might otherwise damage the image of Luxembourg as a guardian of wealth. Many of the stories the police chief has buried in recent years concern a prominent member of the royal family who has been cut out of the line of succession to Luxembourg’s duchy. There have been stories the police chief has buried that show bombings in Luxembourg and arson at the national airport in the mid-eighties, for example, in which he was allegedly implicated. There are many strange allegations that are buried here.
‘But the culture of suppressing press stories doesn’t stop with the Duke’s family. Luxembourg and its parliament are so small that everyone is bound closely to everyone else. They are in it together. There is much more to conceal than just the prince’s antics. If Westbank, one of the world’s two clearing banks, can behave illegally, nearly everyone knows about it—everyone in Luxembourg’s elite, that is.
‘And so now, what do we see? We have a set of companies-Exodi. Exodi with a long “i”. They are Schmidtke’s companies, bequeathed to Otto Roth at the demise of Soviet Russia, wound up in 1989 and re-formed in 1991. Their true origins back in the mid-seventies, however, have been disguised by senior figures in the financial administrations of both Liechtenstein and Switzerland. And here in Luxembourg, thanks to this afternoon’s work, we have the edifying sight of a Luxembourg MP telephoning this boy, a former employee of Exodi with its illegal accounts, to warn him to say nothing.
‘And how beautiful is this? The father of this Luxembourg MP was a senior European commissioner. The father’s term ended in a welter of fraud allegations, missing public money, and attempts to silence the guardians of the EU budget who tried to blow the whistle on him. Exodi must indeed be important to have such protection.’
Finn describes this as a classic case of the overkill of secrecy I too know so well: when secrecy, for its own sake, reveals precisely what it is trying to conceal.
‘This boy knew nothing about Exodi, apart from the relatively trivial detail that it failed to pay its own employees’ insurance contributions.’
And so the attempt to keep the boy silent about something he knows nothing about has pulled back the carpet for Finn, to reveal that Exodi is not just a set of front companies which handle KGB money, first through Schmidtke and then through his successor Roth; not just a set of companies that has illegal secret accounts at Westbank, but a very deep and dirty set of companies which has the highest KGB connections to figures in the West who are central to the defence of Western Europe’s interests. Does this lone Luxembourg MP know what he is protecting? And is he indeed acting alone, not a rogue figure at all who is divorced from Luxembourg’s interests? Everything about the way that this city state operates suggests ‘Yes, he knows’ and ‘No, he is not acting alone.’ But that is not enough, not yet.
I am about to go to bed in the pink house. It is late, I’m tired and I haven’t found what I desperately want. Can there even be a clue, from all these years back in time, to where Finn is now? I must not be disheartened. I may be Finn’s only chance.
It’s strange being here, with so many of Finn’s things, in a place we never shared, but which has Finn everywhere. I look around the bedroom with its huge and comfortable bed- always Finn’s first preoccupation in a house. There are some novels he has read and I study closely where he thumbed them. There is a second-hand French wristwatch I gave him, an Emerich Meerson- and that he rarely wore because he said it was too beautiful to wear except on special occasions. There are his things in the bathroom- a razor, used, an empty tube of toothpaste which he seems still to have been squeezing long after any toothpaste could be extracted, an airline spongebag. I see his hairs in the razor.
I’m too tired, but can I afford even a few hours’ sleep? How much time do I have? Who else will find this house and how long will it take them?
16
FINN WAS BACK in London on the first Eurostar train from Paris the following morning. He was taken, almost forcibly, at Waterloo station by two look-outs from the Service who picked him up without breaking step and marched him to a car, the two of them standing a little too close to him all the way until they were sitting in the back, one on either side, and the man on the right had given the driver an instruction. Finn was caught off balance by the reception, but unsurprised.
They returned not to the house in Norwood but to another Service safe house in Hackney. They drive in silence, Finn making no attempt, for once, to poke fun or to undermine his own situation.
It is a once-elegant house with chipped white cornicing and broken steps that lead up to it, and with weeds sprouting from the basement steps. The neighbours are plumbers and poets, actors, waitresses and the unemployed.
Finn is escorted up the broken steps a little too fast for comfort and, once the door is secured behind him, down some stairs inside the house which have peeling white banisters, until he finds himself half pushed, half guided into a room with a steel door and without windows.
Standing behind a desk and talking into a mobile phone is Adrian, the head of the Moscow desk and always Finn’s handler. He has been Finn’s mentor since the beginning and maybe, too, his substitute father.
With Adrian is a new young Russia recruit just out of Oxford who reminds Finn of himself, back in 1989, being taken to witness the interview with Schmidtke at Belmarsh prison. There is also a woman whom Finn hasn’t met but who, it transpires, speaks good German. The room is bare but for three chairs, the desk and a metal box containing routing equipment and perhaps a scrambling device fixed to the wall at the back
Finn is offered a chair and the handlers are sent back upstairs, one to find a fourth chair. He is then told to wait outside the door ‘in case we need you’, as Adrian puts it ominously.
They sit down. Finn is in front of the desk, and his three colleagues sit opposite, almost like a respectful interview committee, except that Adrian is picking his teeth with a toothpick. The woman speaks first. She asks Finn in German where he’s been, who he’s seen, why he’s gone to Germany.
Finn speaks of a visit to Frankfurt, on his way to the Hartz Forest, where’s he’s been enjoying the hiking.
‘Why are we speaking in German?’ he asks Adrian, but Adrian hasn’t finished with his teeth, as though they
