Red to Black

28

'THE DRESDEN FILE gives us five names,’ Finn says. He pushes the small camera he used to photograph the file at the bank across the table towards me, leans back in his chair, and looks out of the window of the inn towards the mountains. ‘Five names, five account numbers that correspond to the names, and monthly payments of twenty-five thousand euros into each account.’

I look at the names, clicking through the first five pictures he took.

‘German?’ I say.

‘Looks that way. Maybe Swiss-German.’

‘Twenty-five thousand euros a month paid to five people is hardly an explanation of Exodi,’ I reply.

‘On the face of it, no.’

‘And yet it must be.’

‘Mikhail says so,’ Finn grunts. ‘Mikhail said the file is the explanation. So it must be.’

I take a laptop from my bag and begin to Google the names.

When Finn left the bank, he and I took a taxi out of Geneva and then the slow red train from Montreux that heads up over the passes to the Bernese Oberland. There were a few hikers on board on their way to the small, rich resorts of Chateaux d’Oeux, Gstaad and beyond, and some tourists who simply wanted the thrill of seeing the high pass from the train.

The train hauled itself up to its highest halt, where it stopped to pick up and drop off the mail, and we looked over the great expanse of cragged mountains that stretched eastwards.

We got off the train in Gstaad after a winding descent into the high valley. A taxi took us a dozen miles beyond the town to the Baren Inn at the foot of the road’s long ascent to the glacier of Les Diablerets. We ate supper in a wooden dining room with a slow log fire that crackled and spat its pine sap, and then went up to bed in another wooden room which had red-and-white chintz curtains with shepherdess prints and a faux wooden spinning wheel in the corner. We didn’t talk much. Making love with Finn that night was a ritual of purification for both of us.

It is late on a fine summer’s morning and we have eaten breakfast in the room. Finn then gently cuts the lining of an old, oiled coat that was so thick it stood up on the floor by itself.

From inside the lining he extracts the camera and mobile phone and places them on the pine table. The first five photos are the five names with their account numbers. A further four pictures of the Dresden file are a list of transactions, all of which consist of money paid into the accounts of the five names. Twenty-five thousand euros a month. The rest of the ‘pages’ are a long list of the names of companies.

‘Each name receives his or her monthly payments from a bank affiliated with Clement Naider’s Banque Leman,’ Finn says. ‘This bank is a small regional bank that deals with local agricultural loans, mortgages and meagre personal savings. Way below the radar, in other words. It’s on the far side of the mountains from here, in the canton of Valais, and is called the Banque Montana.’

Valais, Switzerland’s poorest canton, is free with handing out residency permits compared to the rest of Switzerland, particularly with permits for Russians since the Wall came down. And there was a KGB-owned ski hotel there, from long before the end of the Cold War. We used it to entertain officers from the American Sixth Fleet based in Naples.

‘Clement Naider has a seat on the board of the Banque Montana,’ Finn says.

‘A bit below his status, isn’t it?’ I say.

‘Exactly.’

‘So Naider sits on the board of an insignificant bank in the backwoods…’

‘…and his presence on the board is for just one purpose, to oversee these payments,’ Finn says, completing my own thought.

‘From an Exodi account?’

‘I think the Troll will find that it’s Exodi in Geneva which is making these payments,’ Finn says. ‘But it hardly explains the vast sums that Exodi controls.’

I have found the five names on my laptop. Four men, one woman. Each has a list of company directorships to their name, all German companies, some companies that Finn or I or both of us know-big, international names- others that neither of us have heard of.

Finn looks over my shoulder.

‘Dieter will understand this better,’ he says.

Finn sits on the bed and begins to compose a message for Dieter. He leaves the coding books open so that I can see his workings.

I’ll give you plenty of opportunity to betray me. His words on the night in Geneva came back to me, and he is being true to them. How can he be so sure, I wonder, that I won’t betray him? Or is it a leap of faith, a necessary passage on his intended journey for us to be one?

When he’d completed the message to Dieter, Finn wanted to get away from the room, the file, the names. We both did. He suggested we try some summer skiing up at the glacier and we eventually find some boots and skis for rent and take a taxi up to the cable car. It is a clear blue day and the cable car takes us to the top and we ski a few hundred yards and admire the view, the wind blowing out the intensity of the past few days and restoring some kind of sanity, clarity perhaps. We find a rock to shelter from the wind and Finn puts his arms around me.

‘I love you, Rabbit,’ he says.

‘Thank you.’

‘So you win the bet,’ he says. ‘I told you first.’

I look down at the snow beneath my skis.

‘I knew I’d win,’ I say.

‘Sometimes I wonder what you feel.’ He looks at me. ‘Whether your feelings flit across your surface like a breeze on the sea, or whether they take a hold somewhere below the surface.’

I take his hand in mine.

‘You have a glass wall around you, Rabbit,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I can get behind it. Sometimes you lower it a little, but you never lower it altogether. I want you to understand you can trust me. Telling you I love you is the freest thing I’ve ever done.’

‘I’ve decided to leave,’ I say finally.

‘Leave?’

‘I’ve decided to come over.’

Finn is silent and we listen to the wind whistling around the rock.

‘Are you leaving Russia, or coming to me?’ he says eventually.

‘It’s the same.’

‘Not quite. You’re leaving because of the pictures of Naider.’

‘Yes. But it’s everything at once. My past. The Forest. And you too, of course, Finn.’

‘What about Nana?’

‘She’ll understand. It’s what she’d want.’

‘I’m very happy,’ he says, and we hug each other.

‘Me, too.’

‘You don’t have to tell me you love me, by the way,’ he says, and grins.

‘Well, I do,’ I reply. ‘I love you, Finn.’

He gets up and draws with his ski pole in the snow the words ‘I love you, Anna’.

I hold his arm and look down into the snow, unseeing.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ he says.

And we ski the several kilometres of the long glacier run and return by taxi when the light has faded into black, and the mountains glow a dull grey-blue in the moonlight.

We spend three days at the Baren Inn. On the fourth day, two things happen that shatter the brief illusion. Finn had gone downstairs to fetch the newspapers as he always did when he got out of bed. While he was gone I checked my e-mails and saw that I was being summoned to Moscow. On the ‘next plane’. It was not a friendly message and it was the first time in four years I’d been summoned at all.

Finn came back with the newspapers. He threw them one by one on to the bed and I saw they all contained