dozen chairs in various states of repair, an old sofa on which a huge wolfhound was lying, and some artfully placed oil lamps.
‘You have the money?’ the man asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Bring it.’
Finn left the room and walked to the car. I saw him open the boot and bring out a black plastic briefcase which shone unnaturally in the dying rays of the sunset. As Finn walked back, the man disappeared through a door and by the time Finn was in the gloomy long room, the man was coming back through the door again carrying some beers in the crook of his arm. He snapped the tops off with a Swiss army knife and put them on the table. The beers were very cool, and came, perhaps, from a deep cellar.
Finn put the briefcase on the table and picked up one of the bottles. The man sat down, without asking us to join him. He opened the case and I could see from the angle at which I was standing, that it was full of bundles of cash. The man counted each row of bundles out in front of us and put them back in the case before counting the next row. When he’d finished, he snapped the lid of the case shut and picked up a beer and sat with his elbows on the table, sipping from the neck of the bottle.
‘Sit down,’ he said at last, and gave a low whistle. The wolfhound which had apparently been sleeping came immediately over to the table and sat on the floor beside him. Finn and I pulled up the chairs most likely to survive our weight and sat opposite him.
‘So. Who’s this Pablo?’ the man asked, and I translated for Finn. ‘How does he know of me?’
‘I don’t know how he knows you. He’s a cheat and a liar,’ Finn said. ‘That’s why the British employ him,’ he added.
‘The British?’
‘And others,’ Finn said. ‘Anyone who’ll pay him enough, in fact.’
‘How does he know about this place?’
‘I don’t know. He makes it his business to collect valuable information, that’s all I know.’
‘Maybe my father spoke to him once,’ the man said vaguely.
He pushed the briefcase to the centre of the table, as if he hadn’t yet decided whether to take the money or not, but Finn didn’t react. He just said, ‘I’ve told Pablo that if any accident happens to you, he’ll be dead in days.’
I looked at Finn in astonishment and saw that he was serious. It made me scared. But the man also saw he was serious and made the decision that Finn wanted.
‘I’ll show you something, then,’ he said.
He got up and walked through the door where he’d gone to get the beers. He was gone a long time, as if what he was bringing was buried very deep somewhere. Outside the sunset was now turning into a dull glow. I saw stars through the open door and a chill air was creeping into the house.
When he returned he was carrying an old leather knapsack of the kind one of his ancestors might have worn while sitting out on the mountain, guarding his flocks against wolves. He sat down and undid the one buckle that still worked and withdrew a waterproof plastic folder; from inside that he took out a buff A4 reinforced envelope for photographs.
He put five photographs on to the table, looked at them keenly, then pushed them across the table to Finn. He got up and fetched a bottle of some home-made mountain liqueur with what looked like a sprig of rosemary inside the bottle. It was dark now and he shut the door. He lit a fire already laid in a rough brick fireplace in the corner of the room.
Finn looked at the pictures. Three were faded and were older than the other two, which looked very recent; different paper, sharp and with a glossy look to them as if they’d recently been developed.
The farmer poured three shots of the liqueur and raised his glass.
‘To what are we drinking?’ he said.
Finn and I raised our glasses.
‘Let’s drink to your father,’ Finn said.
The farmer levelled his eyes at Finn.
‘It’s a good toast,’ he said finally, and we drank. Then the man began to speak.
‘In the spring of 1989,’ he began, ‘my father was working this farm. I wasn’t here back then. I was working in Switzerland. An intermediary, who my father later discovered was acting for one of the men in the pictures, came to him and requested that he rent this house for a weekend in that June. In return for the rent of the farmhouse here, he offered my father a hundred thousand dollars and also a week in the Canary Islands for him and his wife, which they were to take over the period of the weekend when the farmhouse was rented. My own mother died many years ago and this was his second wife,’ the man explained.
‘My father accepted the deal and the money was paid into an account set up for him in Vaduz. The two of them were given air tickets and a room was booked at the most expensive hotel on an island called Hierra. Very remote, even by the standards there. But my father didn’t go. Instead, he called me. I was working at the time on a dairy farm belonging to a distant relative over the border in Switzerland. I hadn’t been up here for many years at the time. I didn’t like his wife.
‘I met my father in Vaduz and he asked me to go with his wife on this holiday instead of him. We had the same first names and it would be easy for me to simply substitute myself for him. I didn’t want to. The idea of spending a week with his woman was repugnant to me. He offered to buy me a new car and I accepted. I was broke. So I went to Hierra and had a horrible time, drinking too much and trying to get away from her. We had to share a room to make it look right on the bill that the intermediary was paying. It wasn’t an enjoyable week.
‘And my father stayed behind in Liechtenstein. He told nobody but me and his wife. He kept it a secret. He hid out in an old shepherd’s hut a few miles over the mountain from here. He came up here in the early evenings of the weekend these men rented the place and stayed in the cover of the trees over there.’ He waved vaguely in the direction of the door. ‘There was a lot of security, he told me later, and that was as close as he could get. And he brought a camera with him. These are the pictures he took.’
The farmer separated the three older pictures and turned them round to face Finn.
‘The man on the far right you know. Most of the newspaper-reading public knows him.’
Finn and I bent over the first picture and looked at a tall, grey-haired figure. I recognised him immediately: a very senior, long-serving German politician from the political elite. Then I looked at the third figure from the right and recognised a KGB general, the SVR’s central Asian boss, who liaises with the Uzbeks and their drug cartels. In between these two was a man I didn’t know. Nor did I recognise the others. But Finn seemed to know everyone in the picture.
‘Quite an interesting weekend,’ Finn said.
‘These three pictures were taken in 1989,’ the farmer repeated. ‘And these I took earlier this year, when there was a second meeting here, between the same men.’
The two recent photographs were indeed the same group, shiny in the newness of the pictures.
‘They rented the farm up here for another weekend, fifteen years after they first took it. Maybe they’ve had other meetings, I’m sure they have, elsewhere. But this is what I have.’
He poured another shot of liqueur for each of us and raised his glass.
‘These are the kind of people who run our countries,’ he said. ‘To freedom from such men.’ Finn and I echoed the toast.
‘I don’t know why my father took the original pictures,’ the man mused quietly. ‘It was completely out of character. But I knew I had to do the same this year when they came back after all this time and, if only in memory of my father, I did.’
We left the farmer with the case of money and drove back down the track until we reached the road. Then Finn turned left, towards Germany, and we drove in silence for a while. I had the pictures on my lap, inside the stiff photograph envelope, inside the waterproof bag.
‘I wonder what he’ll do with all that money,’ Finn said, breaking the silence briefly. I guessed at how much of it there was from watching the farmer count the bundles and I was stunned by the cost.
‘He’ll probably hoard it up somewhere like all the mountain men,’ he continued. ‘The Troll, for example. I bet he turns out to be a multimillionaire when he dies.’
Once we were over the border and in Germany, Finn began to talk quietly about the men in the pictures.
