Funeral in Berlin (10 page)

The king may well be moved to a well-protected
spot away from danger.

Hendaye-plage, France, Monday, October 14th

The road along the plage was marbled with drifting sand. The sun was bright but lifeless as it lowered itself wearily behind the mauve hills. For miles the lonely beach wandered with just one dog for company until the cold wind became too much even for playful dogs. The casinos and hotels were shuttered and stained with the dribbling rust of early winter rain.

From one glass-encased restaurant on the Boulevard de la Mer came the doleful clack of a typewriter. I passed the padlocked kiosk where the torn sign said ‘laces’ and went through the glass door. A young girl in a pink smock looked up from the accounts.

She brought me coffee and I stared out at the grey confluence of sky and sea, growing pink in
the light of the setting sun. For another six months the sea would go on practising for summer, coming in each day to smooth out the sand like some fussy old chambermaid making the bed.

‘Do you have any guests?’ I asked wearily.

‘Yes.’ The girl’s smile was gentle and faintly mocking. ‘A Monsieur King and his wife.’

Checkmate remains the ultimate aim of every player.

Monday, October 14th

In the long dining-room a dozen tables were carefully arranged, even though only three guests were expected to dine. Across the bar were Cinzano ashtrays and shiny equipment for making ‘le cocktail’: strainers, shakers, fruit-knife and swizzlesticks. Behind the bar were rows of bottles, undisturbed since last summer. The tile floor reflected the cold evening air and from the ceiling I heard the chambermaid thumping pillows as my bed was made up for me.

The girl in the pink smock had put away the typewriter and changed into a black dress. ‘What would you like to drink?’ she asked. I poured two Suzes into my face in rapid succession while we agreed how few people came there in the winter. From the kitchen I heard the crinkle of boiling fat and the swish of things being dropped into it.
Yesterday they arrived, who knew how long they were staying; she joined me in a third Suze, the fourth one I took up to my room. When I came down for dinner the other guests had arrived back.

Vulkan had a cashmere overcoat over his lightweight Savile Row suit—his tie was Dior and his shirt creamy silk.

‘Hello, Mr King,’ I said. ‘Introduce your friend.’

‘This is Samantha,’ said Johnnie Vulkan.

Samantha said, ‘Hello’.

King’s Gambit is an opening in which his own
side’s pawns are sacrificed.

Monday, October 14th

Dinner was eaten quietly: codfish in the Basque style. Then Johnnie said, ‘Do you have to follow me?’

I said, ‘I came on business—there’s been some difficulty.’

‘Difficulty?’ said Vulkan. His jaws ceased to chew the codfish.

‘Have you swallowed a bone?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Vulkan. ‘What difficulty?’

‘Nothing much,’ I said. ‘But Gehlen keeps asking for the documents…’

‘Why haven’t you let them have them?’

‘London’s spelled the name wrongly,’ I said. ‘They spelled it BROOM when it should be…’

‘I know what it should be,’ Vulkan said very loudly, then quietly added, ‘the stupid, stupid, stupid bastards.’

‘It matters then,’ I said.

‘It certainly does.’

‘I had it correct when I sent it,’ I said.

‘I know, I know,’ said Vulkan in a preoccupied way. ‘I might have guessed it would all go wrong.’

The waitress came from the kitchen; she saw Vulkan’s plate with only half the fish eaten.

‘Didn’t you like it?’ she said. ‘Shall I bring you something else?’

‘No,’ said Vulkan.

‘There is
entrecôte
or
ris de veau.
’

‘
Ris de veau,
’ said Samantha.

‘
Ris de veau,
’ I said.

‘
Ris de veau,
’ said Vulkan, but his mind was far away.

We sat in the bar for the coffee and brandy. Samantha had an English newspaper and she gave me a sheet of it. Finally Vulkan leaned across from his chair.

‘Can you wire London and ask them to do another set?’

‘Certainly Johnnie, anything you say. You know that.’

Vulkan slapped me on the knee.

‘That’s what we’ll do then.’ He smiled a big smile. ‘Trust London to mess it all up after we do all this work.’

I shrugged. ‘When you’ve worked directly for London as long as I have, you see their good points and their bad ones. You end up just being
glad you aren’t on piecework; and start striking heavily into the expenses.’ I downed the last of my brandy.

‘You are right,’ said Vulkan. He shouted for the waitress and ordered three treble brandies, just to show how well he understood the point I had made.

‘What about the cash for Stok?’ Vulkan said. ‘He’ll want cash you know.’

‘No kidding,’ I said. ‘I was going to try using my Diners’ Club card on him.’

Vulkan laughed lightly and rubbed his hands.

‘You see,’ said Vulkan. ‘This trip to Hendaye is to do with the Semitsa deal.’

‘I don’t want to…’

Vulkan waved his hand. ‘I don’t have to keep it secret. It’s just that in the past I have found it best to compartmentalize my contracts. It’s something I learned in the War.’

‘The War,’ I said. ‘What did you do in the war, Johnnie?’ I asked.

‘What everyone did, I suppose,’ said Johnnie. ‘I did as I was told.’

I said, ‘Some people were told to do some pretty fantastic things.’

‘I did plenty of things I’m not proud of,’ said Johnnie. ‘I was a guard in a concentration camp at one time.’

‘Really,’ said Samantha. ‘You never told me that.’

‘There’s no point in denying it,’ Johnnie said. ‘A man has to live with the things he does. I suppose
everyone has skeletons in the cupboard. I never did anything terrible. I never tortured anyone or killed anyone and I never saw any atrocities take place, but I was part of the system. Unless there had been men like me going on duty in the control towers and sitting up there in the freezing cold wind drinking bad coffee and stamping about trying to keep warm—unless there had been little men like me, there couldn’t have been all the rest of it. I’m ashamed of the part I played but so, if he is honest, is the factory worker and the policeman and the railway guard, they were all bits of the system too. We should all have overthrown the system, shouldn’t we?’

Johnnie looked at me provocatively. I said nothing but Samantha said, ‘Yes, you should. You shouldn’t have had to wait until those generals messed around. The whole nation should have recoiled with shock at the things that were done to Jewish shopkeepers in the ‘thirties.’

‘Yeah,’ said Johnnie in a low growl. ‘That’s what I keep on hearing, how we should have overthrown Hitler. That’s because all the stupid people who say so don’t know what they are talking about. What do you mean “overthrow”—you mean that one morning I come on guard duty and shoot the sergeant?’

Samantha was getting the brunt of Johnnie’s wrath. ‘Perhaps it would have been a start,’ she said quietly.

‘Yeah,’ said Johnnie. ‘Great start. The sergeant
had a wife and six kids. He was an old-time Social Democrat. He hated all Nazis and was crippled with frostbite that he had caught in Smolensk in 1942.’

‘Someone else then,’ said Samantha.

‘Sure,’ said Johnnie sarcastically. ‘At random, eh?’ and he laughed a laugh that told you that even if he went on talking all night you would never understand what it was like to be inside a concentration camp, especially as a guard.

‘I was glad I was in the camp,’ said Johnnie viciously. ‘Glad, do you hear? Because if I hadn’t been with the concentration camp unit I would have been in the fighting line on the Eastern Front. It was a good job in the camp. A plum job. Everyone wanted that job. Do you think that the whole of Germany was queuing up to fight Bolshevism? That’s what you Americans would like to believe, eh? Well they weren’t—except for the crackpots in the SS. Everyone with an ounce of intelligence was trying to get a job a long way from the fighting line even if he couldn’t eat his lunch for the stink of the cremation ovens.’

Samantha pressed the palms of her hands over her ears and Johnnie laughed another of his laughs. It was more eloquent than anything he could say.

A skewer is an attack along a straight line.
As the first piece avoids capture it exposes
the second, real target to the full force of
the attack.

Monday, October 14th—Tuesday, October 15th

We all went to bed at half past eleven: or I suppose it would be more correct to say that
none
of us went to bed at half past eleven, although we all said good night and went through the motions. I put on my sheepskin-lined raincoat and stood out on the plage with the wind screaming around me like demented seagulls.

‘It just has to be,’ I was thinking at 1.15
A.M.
The yeasty smell of the ocean had moved closer on the evening tide.

At 2
A.M.
I was thinking the same thing but it was 2.30
A.M.
before anything happened. Along the front came two bright headlamps. The fact that they were not yellow helped me guess that
they were from across the border. It was a white Citroën DS 19. The tyres shot the final inch with a crunch as it halted on the sandy road. The chauffeur jumped out smartly and opened the rear door as Vulkan came down the steps. The light above the rear seat showed the other passenger to be a white-haired man of about fifty, but without binoculars it wasn’t possible to discern more. Vulkan got in hurriedly and I saw him look back up at my bedroom window. The chauffeur closed the door quietly, got in, and they drove away.

I went back to the hotel wondering who in Spain was chic enough to afford a Citroën with San Sebastian number plates and a chauffeur who would wear sunglasses at 2.30
A.M.

I closed the hotel door silently. I stepped into a small room at the foot of the stairs that held the toilet, a bucket, two mops, four packs of Omo, three raincoats, two umbrellas and a pay phone. I had two phone calls to make; the first call was to suggest the Gare St Jean as a meeting place; the second call was to spread the description of the San Sebastian number plates among people who would really care. There is no point in just wondering about the things that puzzle us.

I finished the phone calls without switching on the electric light.

From overhead I heard stiletto heels move quickly across the room. I left the phone off the hook to avoid making any sound and moved across the porch silently in my rubber shoes.

I walked out along the moonlit sea front. The phosphorescent breakers crumbled into shimmering lace-work and the moon was an overturned can of white paint that had spilled its contents across the sea. As I looked back towards the hotel, the front door shot a long trapezium of yellow light across the sandy path. A girl’s figure made a brief shadow-graph in the light, then hurried along the sea front.

Samantha was fully dressed. Ear-rings to eye-shadow proclaimed that she had not been to bed.

‘Johnnie’s gone,’ she said.

‘Gone where?’ I asked.

She buttoned her neck deeper into the big coat. ‘Just gone,’ she said. ‘He said he was going downstairs. Then I heard a car drive away.’

We both stood looking at each other for a long time.

‘I’m cold,’ she said, ‘and I’m frightened.’

I began to walk back towards the hotel.

‘Johnnie’s car is still there,’ said Samantha. She hurried to catch me up and walked alongside me. ‘What he said last night—was that all true?’

‘All true,’ I said.

‘But what, wise guy? I can hear the sneer.’

‘No sneer,’ I said. ‘People seldom report facts wrong. What they distort is their relationship to the facts. It’s possible to describe the Charge of the Light Brigade whether you were on the leading charger or at the other end of the valley brewing up tea.’

‘You’re so sharp,’ said Sam.

‘Now who’s sneering?’

‘Look. Vulkan’s a bright boy, whether you like him or not. He’s written an analysis of Bartok’s string quartets which will shatter the music world when it’s published.’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘If you want to buy a subscription to Vulkan’s fantasy-of-the-month club, go ahead, but I’ve been inoculated against moonshine.’ I was walking quickly and Samantha had to make a hop, skip and jump every few steps to keep alongside. She grabbed my arm.

‘Is that the same moon that we were voted lunar candidates of?’ she asked softly. ‘Didn’t we get elected after all?’

‘We did,’ I said, ‘but I’m demanding a recount.’ I pulled my arm free and opened the glass door. The dining-tables with their shiny plates and conical napkins were bright yellow in the dim light. Sam overtook me on the stairs and, fumbling in her handbag, produced the key by the time we reached her room. She swung the door open. On the bed was a grey leather travelling case and there was another at the side of the wardrobe. One was empty. I reached for the other. There was a small packet of Kleenex and a shoe-horn inside. There were clothes inside the wardrobe and I quickly examined them, prodding and twisting the shoulder padding and listening for the crackle of paper in the seams.

On the dressing-table there were bottles of Cologne, nail varnish, mascara, face-powder,
shampoo, suede-cleaning brushes, packets of cotton wool, sun-glasses and cigarettes. I held the open case under them and swept them into it with my elbow. From the dressing-table drawers I shovelled up handfuls of Samantha’s underwear, transparent packets of nylons, flat-heeled shoes with gold straps and a cardboard box containing two diamond rings, a silver bangle, a jewelled wristwatch and some assorted cheap beads. I stretched out my hand towards her without looking up.

‘Handbag,’ I said. ‘Purse.’

She still had it in her hand and now she opened it and studied the contents carefully. She removed two cigarettes, lit them and passed one lighted Camel and the shiny patent leather handbag to me.

I riffed quickly through it. I removed a green American passport in the name of Samantha Steel and twenty-two very new crisp 100 NF notes. I put the notes and the passport into my pocket.

‘I thought we had something special,’ said Samantha. She looked shorter than five foot ten now. She was All-American innocent, lost and betrayed in big bad Europe.

‘We still have it,’ I said. ‘But this is business—let’s not mix it with pleasure.’

‘I’ve had all the business I need for a century,’ said Samantha. ‘When do I see the pleasure?’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said. I grinned and got a faint movement at the corner of her mouth.

‘I’d like you to know…’

‘Save it, Sam,’ I said. ‘I’m giving you a twentyfour carat deal when all I have to do, as far as my office is concerned, is lift the phone.’

She nodded and unzipped the side of her dress. She removed the dress unhurriedly like a Girl Guide at a medical. Her eyes were waterlogged. ‘It’s the smoke,’ she said. ‘I should never smoke when I’m tired. It wrecks my eye make-up.’ She smiled and planted three inches of unsmoked Camel into the Cinzano ashtray. She walked across the room in her black underwear, oblivious of my eyes. She carefully selected a red-striped wool dress from the wardrobe. ‘It does things for me, red,’ she said.

‘That’s right,’ I said.

She held the dress high above her head. ‘I may as well look my best.’ The dress dropped over her head like a candle-snuffer. Then suddenly she fought against the enveloping fabric in a sudden panic of constricted elbows until her hair shook itself nervously into the light again.

‘Stay here,’ I said. ‘I’m going to my room and I’ll fix both the bills.’

‘You’re a goddam cool ghoul,’ she said in neither admiration nor bitterness. She stared at her reflection while mauling her face around.

I had no baggage in my room. I waited downstairs to see if Samantha was taking the thing sensibly.

I stepped out on to the porch and looked down the road. There was no sign of any movement except for the patter of sand that the sea wind
was driving into the doorway. I finished my cigarette on the porch while the freezing night air was purging the last heaviness of the wine from my head. I stared towards the headland that stretched along the western horizon; only a few yards beyond it was Spain. The crippled, stunted trees along the plage pointed there.

The cases went on to the back of the Mercedes 220 SE. I put the heater on and we both sat quietly listening to the noise of the fan. I started up and the car bumped down over the kerb. The plage was dark and, apart from the howl of the wind, silent. It wasn’t until we turned on to the main road that I switched on the lights. The speedometer changed colour as I put the accelerator down and chased after the long horns of yellow light.

‘Looks like you got the booby prize,’ said Samantha.

‘Looks like it,’ I agreed.

‘You really wanted Johnnie, didn’t you?’

‘If you say so,’ I said.

‘You are determined to be discreet, aren’t you?’

‘Perhaps,’ I said. Then Sam snorted with bad temper and fished out her Camels.

‘Cigar lighter is the first one after the radio,’ I said, ‘but don’t be mad if your eye make-up runs.’ We drove in silence for a long time. Then Samantha said, ‘You’re cuter than Vulkan.’ She leaned across and gave me a perfunctory kiss on the ear lobe. ‘Personally,’ she went on, ‘I think you are a doll. Vulkan on the other hand…’ She was speaking
slowly and quietly as though working out her attitude as she told me, ‘Vulkan is a thorough-going, dyed-in-the-wool, black-hearted, London-shrunk, copper-bottomed bastard.’ She didn’t raise her voice even slightly. ‘But Vulkan is a genius. Vulkan has a mind like a diamond while you have a mind like glass.’

‘Commerical diamond versus hand-cut crystal glass,’ I said. ‘So I am typecast as the loser?’

‘It’s a one-horse race,’ said Samantha with finality.

The greatest tribute you can pay to a secret agent is to take him for a moron. All he has to do is to make sure he doesn’t act too exactly like one. That was my concern now.

It’s about two hundred kilometres along the N10 to Bordeaux, but it’s a good road and in the early hours only the odd market truck, decked with a multitude of lights, and the slower long-distance stuff from San Sebastian across the frontier shared the road with us. Samantha slept for at least half the journey, which took about three and a half hours; there was no need to burn up any roadspeed records nor to get the man I was going to see out of bed. After Bayonne there is just good, sealed, wide road all the way through the great sullen Landes to Bordeaux. As far as the horizon the seedlings parade, the saplings posture, regiments of stumps march and countermarch. Oceans of standing timber await the executioner’s axe and the occasional scoured black desert of destruction
marks the passage of a terrible fire. Behind Sam’s head the graticule of trees glowed with a fiery foliage, like a badly printed colour photo with the red block out of register.

Twig after twig shone red with the hoar frost of dawn until the sun’s corona mixed gold with lead and by some inverse alchemy made clear blue morning. I doused the headlights in the outer periphery of Bordeaux’s suburbs. We began to see lonely cyclists moving with the stiff precise arrogance that early risers acquire. The end walls of houses held gigantic faded advertisements for aperitifs, and a cat’s-cradle of wires caged the cobbled streets. I drove to the Gare St Jean and parked in front of it. The town had its head under a blanket of cloud.

I parked beyond the bus shelter. The cyclopean eye of the Gothic railway station showed 7
A.M.
and outside the Hotel Faisan the cane chairs leaned drunkenly against the Formica tables. Workmen were darting into the Bar Brasserie and downing a glass of something warming on their way to work. The roar and clang of a slow-moving dust-cart could be heard from close by and an old woman in black was slopping pails of water across the pavement and scrubbing at it with a broom.

‘Wake up,’ I said, and almost before she was awake Sam was opening a small compact and watching herself dab colours and lotions on her skin.

Two black-clad police motor-cyclists who had been talking outside the Hotel Faisan pulled on their white gauntlets, eased their black leather belts, tugged down the hem of their jackets and in choreographic unison leaned lovingly across their machines, stabbed at the kick-starters and with a graceful
jeté
and
plié
moved forward. Gathering speed they leaned into the curve of the road and sped away past the vibrating wooden doors and shutters, leaving a trail of exhaust smoke in the cold air. Samantha shivered.

‘Can we have coffee?’ she said. I nodded.

The tiny bar was crowded. A dozen men in
bleu de travail
were drinking, talking and breathing garlic fumes and Gauloise smoke into the limited air space. Two of the men made room for us and someone near the door made a joke about him making a pass at the foreign girl. I asked for two coffees with milk in English. You can never despise the conversation of men who work in shipping, if eavesdropping is your stock-in-trade.

‘It’s not too late,’ I said to Samantha. ‘Even now.’

‘To work for you?’ she said. I nodded. She said,

‘On this date that he was slain Many a kind thought dies in Paine.’

I said, ‘Stone cold dead in the graveyard.’

‘I like the work I do already.’ She was fencing around, not sure how much I knew. It was a
woman’s game and she began to enjoy it. ‘I couldn’t possibly give that up now,’ she said.

‘No one will suggest you do,’ I said archly.

Samantha gave a snort of rage that made conversation there cease for thirty seconds. ‘You are a cynical swine,’ she said.

I smiled and drank my coffee quietly. The sky was even darker. She smoked the usual half-inch of Camel before dropping it on to the floor and giving it the stiletto-heel treatment. ‘You can scram now,’ I said. I gave her her passport.

‘Give me my money, buddy boy.’

‘That’s not part of the deal,’ I said. ‘You’ve got your baggage. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, peach blossom. Take off.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Samantha said. ‘You bring me all this way before saying it.’

‘DST
¹
offices are not open in the middle of the night, but…’ I looked at my watch. ‘…my boyo will be in his office in seventeen minutes time.’