Mexico Set

‘I couldn’t get hazelnuts but I tried this other sort; with honey. They’re not bad, are they? Why won’t they let them defect? They send them back to Russia? That’s disgusting,’ said Zena.

‘Encouraging defectors upsets the Russians for one thing,’ said Werner. ‘If Stinnes said he wanted to stay in Mexico, the Soviet ambassador would go running along to the Foreign Secretary and start pressurizing the Mexican authorities to hand him back.’

‘In which case doesn’t Stinnes just say go to hell?’ said Zena.

‘The ambassador then says that Stinnes has stolen the cash box or that he’s wanted to face criminal charges in Moscow. The Mexicans then find themselves accused of harbouring a criminal. And don’t forget that someone has to pay the defector a salary or find him a job.’ Werner reached for another biscuit.

‘This is Mexico,’ said Zena. ‘What do they care about the Russians?’

Werner was fully occupied with the biscuits. I said, ‘The Russians have a lot of clout in this part of the world, Mrs Volkmann. They can stir up trouble by getting neighbouring countries to apply pressure. Cuba will always oblige, since its economy depends totally on Soviet money. They can apply economic sanctions. They can influence United Nations committees and all the rigamarole of Unesco and so on. And all of these countries have to contend with a domestic Communist Party organization ready to do whatever the Russians want done. Governments don’t offend the Soviet Union without very good reason. Providing asylum for a defector is seldom reason enough.’

‘There are still plenty of defectors, though,’ persisted Zena.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Many defectors are sponsored by the USA, the way that famous musicians or performers are, because of the bad publicity their escapes make for the communist system. And they can earn their own living easily enough. The remainder have to bring something worthwhile with them as the price of entry.’

‘Secrets?’

‘That depends on what you call secrets. Usually a country provides asylum to someone bringing information about the way the Soviets have been spying on the host country. For that sort of information a government is usually prepared to withstand Russian pressures.’

‘And for that reason,’ said Werner, ‘most of the decent Russians can’t defect and the KGB bastards can. Put all the defectors together and you’d have a ballet company and orchestra, some sports stars and a vast army of secret policemen.’

Zena looked at me with her big grey eyes and said archly, ‘But if you two are right about Erich Stinnes, he’s a KGB man. So he could provide some secrets about spying on Mexico. So he would be allowed to stay here without your help.’

‘Would you like to live in Mexico for the remainder of your life, Mrs Volkmann?’ I said.

She paused for a moment as if thinking the idea over. ‘Perhaps not,’ she admitted.

‘No, a man such as Stinnes would want a British passport.’

‘Or a US passport?’ said Zena.

‘American citizenship provides no right to travel abroad. A British passport identifies a British subject, and they have the right to leave the country any time they wish. Stinnes will give us quite a list of requirements if he decides to defect. He’d need a lot of paperwork so that he has a completely new identity. I mean an identity that is recorded in such a way that it will withstand investigation.’

‘What sort of things?’ said Zena.

I said, ‘Things that require the cooperation of many different government departments. For instance, he’ll need a driving licence. And we don’t want that to materialize out of nowhere, not for a forty-year-old with no other driving experience on file and no record of passing a driving test. He’d need to have some innocuous-looking file in his local tax office. He’ll want a credit card; what does he put on the application? Then there are documents for travelling. He’ll probably want some freedom of movement and that’s always a headache. Incidentally he must give us some identity photos for his passport and so on. One good full-face picture will be enough. A picture of his wife too. I’ll get the copies done at the embassy.’

Werner nodded. He realized that this was his briefing. I was talking around the sort of offer he would be able to make to Stinnes. ‘You’re assuming that he would live in England?’ said Werner.

‘Certainly for the first year,’ I said. ‘It will be a long debriefing. Would that be a problem?’

‘He’s always spoken of Germany as the only place he’d ever want to be. Isn’t that true, Zena?’

‘That’s what he’s always said,’ Zena agreed. ‘But it’s the sort of thing everyone says at the Kronprinz Club. Everyone is drinking German beer and exchanging news of the old country. It is natural to talk of Germany with great affection. We all do. But when you are offering someone a chance to retire in comfort, England wouldn’t be too bad, I think.’ She smiled.

I said, ‘Dicky thinks Stinnes will jump at any decent offer.’

‘Does he?’ said Werner doubtfully.

‘London thinks Stinnes has been passed over for promotion. They think he’s been stuck away in East Berlin to rot.’

‘So why is he here in Mexico?’ said Werner.

‘Dicky thinks it’s just a nice little jaunt for him.’

‘It’s a convenient thing to say when you can’t think of any convincing answer,’ said Werner. ‘What do you think, Bernie?’

‘I’m convinced he’s here in connection with Paul Biedermann,’ I said cautiously. ‘But why the hell would he be?’

Werner nodded. He didn’t take me seriously. He knew I disliked Biedermann and thought this was clouding my judgement. ‘What makes you think that, Bernie?’ he said.

‘Stinnes and his pal didn’t know I was listening to them out at the Biedermann house. They said they were running Biedermann and I believe it.’

‘Paul Biedermann has been koshering cash for the KGB,’ Werner told Zena. ‘And sending it off for them too.’

‘What a bastard,’ said Zena. The family property in East Prussia, which Zena had failed to inherit because it was now a part of the USSR, made her unsympathetic to people who helped the KGB. But she didn’t put much venom into her condemnation of Biedermann; her mind was on Stinnes. ‘What’s so special about Stinnes?’ she asked me.

‘London wants him,’ I said. ‘And London Central moves in strange and unaccountable ways.’

‘It’s all Dicky Cruyer’s idea,’ she said, as if she’d had a sudden insight. ‘I’ll bet it’s not London at all. Dicky Cruyer went off to Los Angeles and had a meeting with Frank Harrington. Then he returned with the electrifying news that London wants Erich Stinnes, and he’s to be coaxed into defection.’

‘He couldn’t do that,’ said Werner, who hated to have his faith in London Central undermined. ‘It’s a London order, isn’t it, Bernie? It must be.’

‘Don’t be silly, Werner,’ his wife argued. ‘It was probably made official afterwards. You know that anyone could talk Frank Harrington into anything.’

Werner grunted. Zena’s brief love affair with the elderly Frank Harrington was something that was never referred to, but I could see it was not forgotten.

Zena turned to me. ‘I’m right. You know I am.’

‘A successful enrolment would do wonders for Dicky’s chances of holding on to the German Desk,’ I said. I got up and walked over to the window. I had almost forgotten that we were in Mexico City, but the mountains just visible behind a veil of mist, the dark ceiling of clouds, the flashes of lightning and the tropical storm that was thrashing the city were not like anything to be seen in Europe.

‘When do we get the money for finding him?’ Zena said. My back was to her and I pretended to think that she was asking Werner.

It was Werner who replied. ‘It will work out, darling. These things take time.’

Zena came across to the window and said to me, ‘We’ll not do any more to help until we’ve been paid some money.’

‘I don’t know anything about the money,’ I said.

‘No, no one knows anything about the money. That’s how you people work, isn’t it?’

Werner was still sitting heavily in his chair, munching his biscuits. ‘It’s not Bernie’s fault, darling. Bernie would give us the crown jewels if it was only up to him.’ The crown jewels had always been Werner’s idea of ultimate wealth. I remembered how, when we were at school, various prized possessions of his had all been things he wouldn’t exchange for the crown jewels.

‘I’m not asking for the crown jewels,’ said Zena demurely. I turned to look her in the face. My God but she was tough, and yet the toughness did not mar her beauty. I suddenly saw the fatal attraction she had for poor Werner. It was like having pet piranhas in the bath, or a silky rock python in the linen cupboard. You could never tame them but it was fun to see what effect they had on your friends. ‘I’m asking to be paid for finding Erich Stinnes.’ She picked up a notepad by the phone and entered the cup and saucer on to her list of breakages.

I looked at Werner but he was trying on some new inscrutable faces, so I said, ‘I don’t know who told you that there was a cash payment for reporting the whereabouts of Erich Stinnes but it certainly wasn’t me. The truth is, Mrs Volkmann, that the department never pays any sort of bounty. At least I’ve never heard of such a payment being made.’ She stared at me with enough calm, dispassionate interest to make me worry whether my coffee was poisoned. ‘But I probably could sign a couple of vouchers that would reimburse you for air fares, first class, return trip.’

‘I don’t want any charity,’ she said. ‘I want what is due to me.’ It wasn’t ‘us’, I noticed.

‘What sort of fee would you think appropriate?’ I asked.

‘It must be worth sixteen thousand American dollars,’ she said. So she’d decided what she wanted. At first I wondered how she’d come to such an exact figure, but I then realized that it had not been quantified by the job she’d done; it was the specific amount of money she wanted for something or other. That was the way Zena’s mind worked; every step she took was on the way to somewhere else.

‘That’s a lot of money, Mrs Volkmann,’ I said. I looked at Werner. He was pouring himself more coffee and concentrating on the task as if oblivious of everything around him. It suited him to to have Zena giving me hell. I suppose she was voicing the resentment that had been building up in Werner in all the years he’d suffered from the insensitive double-dealing of the birdbrains at London Central. But I didn’t enjoy having Zena bawl me out. I was angry with him and he knew it. ‘I will see that your request is passed on to London.’

‘And tell them this,’ she said. She was still speaking softly and smiling so that a casual observer might have thought we were chatting amicably. ‘You tell them unless I get my money I’ll make sure that Erich Stinnes never trusts a word you say.’

‘How would you achieve that, Mrs Volkmann?’ I asked.

‘No, Zena …’ said Werner, but he’d left it too late.

‘I’d tell him exactly what you’re up to,’ she said. ‘I’d tell him that you’ll cheat him just as you’ve cheated me.’

I laughed scornfully. She seemed surprised. ‘Have you been sitting in on this conversation, and still not understood what Werner and I are talking about, Mrs Volkmann? Your husband earns his money from avalizing. He borrows money from Western banks to pay in advance for goods shipped to East Germany. The way he does it requires him to spend a lot of time in the German Democratic Republic. It’s natural that the British government might use someone such as Werner to talk to Stinnes about defecting. The KGB wouldn’t like that, of course, but they’d swallow it, the same way we swallow it when they use trade delegates to contact trouble-makers and float some ideas we don’t like.’

I glanced at Werner. He was standing behind Zena now, his hands clasped together and a frown on his face. He’d been about to interrupt but now he was looking at me, waiting to hear what I was going to say. I said, ‘Everyone likes a sportsman who can walk out into the middle of a soccer field, exchange a joke with the linesmen and flip a coin for the two team captains. But “enrolling” doesn’t just mean offering a man money to come to the other side; it can mean beating him over the head and shipping him off in a crate. I don’t say that’s going to happen, but Werner and I both know it’s a possibility. And if it does happen I want to make sure that the people in the other team keep thinking that Werner is an innocent bystander who paid the full price of admission. Because if they suspect that Werner is the kind who climbs the fence and throws beer cans at the goalkeeper they might get rough, Mrs Volkmann. And when the KGB get rough, they get very rough. So I advise you most sincerely not to start talking to Erich Stinnes in a way that makes it sound as if Werner is closely connected with the department, or there’s a real risk that they’ll do something nasty to you both.’

Werner knew I was going to spell it out for her. I suppose he didn’t want her to understand the implications in case she worried.

I looked at her. She nodded. ‘If Werner wants to talk to Stinnes, I won’t screw it up for you,’ she promised. ‘But don’t ask me to help.’

‘I won’t ask you to help,’ I said.

Werner went over to her and put his arm round her shoulder to comfort her. But she didn’t look very worried about him. She still looked very angry about not getting the money.

6

‘If Zena ever left me, I don’t know what I’d do,’ said Werner. ‘I think I’d die, I really would.’ He fanned away a fly using his straw hat.

This was Werner in his lugubrious mood. I nodded, but I felt like reminding him that Zena had left him several times in the past, and he was still alive. He’d even survived the very recent time when she’d set up house with Frank Harrington – a married man more than old enough to be her father – and had looked all set to make it permanent. Only Zena was never going to make anything permanent, except perhaps eventually make Werner permanently unhappy.

‘But Zena is very ambitious,’ said Werner. ‘I think you realize that, don’t you, Bernie?’

‘She’s very young, Werner.’

‘Too young for me, you mean?’

I worded my answer carefully. ‘Too young to know what the real world is like, Werner.’

‘Yes, poor Zena.’

‘Yes, poor Zena,’ I said. Werner looked at me to see if I was being sarcastic. I smiled.

‘This is a beautiful hotel,’ said Werner. We were sitting on the balcony having breakfast. It was still early in the morning, and the air was cool. The town was behind us, and we were looking across gently rolling green hills that disappeared into gauzy curtains of morning mist. It could have been England; except for the sound of the insects, the heavy scent of the tropical flowers, and the vultures that endlessly circled high in the clear blue sky.

‘Dicky found it,’ I said.

Zena had let Werner off his lead for the day, and he’d come to Cuernavaca – a short drive from Mexico City – to tell me about his encounter with Stinnes at the Kronprinz Club. Dicky had decided to ‘make our headquarters’ in this sprawling resort town where so many Americans came to spend their old age and their cheap pesos. ‘Where’s Dicky now?’ said Werner.

‘He’s at a meeting,’ I said.

Werner nodded. ‘You’re smart to stay here in Cuernavaca. This side of the mountains it’s always cooler and you don’t have to breathe that smog all day and all night.’

‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘I do have Dicky next door.’

‘Dicky’s all right,’ said Werner. ‘But you make him nervous.’

‘I make him nervous?’ I said incredulously.

‘It must be difficult for him,’ said Werner. ‘You know the German Desk better than he’ll ever know it.’

‘But he got it,’ I said.

‘So did you expect him to turn a job like that down?’ said Werner. ‘You should give him a break, Bernie.’

‘Dicky does all right,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t need any help. Not from you, not from me. Dicky is having a lovely time.’

Dicky had lined up meetings with a retired American CIA executive named Miller and an Englishman who claimed to have great influence with the Mexican security service. In fact, of course, Dicky was just trying out some of the best local restaurants at the taxpayer’s expense, while extending his wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Dicky had once shown me his card-index files of contacts throughout the world. It was quite unofficial, of course; Dicky kept them in his desk at home. He noted the names of their wives and their children and what restaurants they preferred and what sort of house they lived in. On the other side of each card Dicky wrote a short résumé of what he estimated to be their wealth, power and influence. He joked about his file cards; ‘he’ll be a lovely card for me,’ he’d say, when someone influential crossed his path. Sometimes I wondered if there was a card there with my name on it and, if so, what he’d written on it.

Dicky was a keen traveller, and his choice of bars, restaurants and hotels was the result of intensive research through guidebooks and travel magazines. The Hacienda Margarita, an old ranchhouse on the outskirts of town, was proof of the benefits that could come from such dedicated research. It was a charming old hotel, its cool stone colonnades surrounding a courtyard with palmettos and pepper trees and tall palms. The high-ceilinged bedrooms were lined with wonderful old tiles, and there were big windows and cool balconies, for this place was built long before air-conditioning was ever contemplated, built at the time of the conquistadores if you could bring yourself to believe the plaque over the cashier’s desk.

Meanwhile I was enjoying the sort of breakfast that Dicky insisted was the only healthy way to start the day. There was a jug of freshly pressed orange juice, a vacuum flask of hot coffee, canned milk – Dicky didn’t trust Mexican milk – freshly baked rolls and a pot of local honey. The tray was decorated with an orchid and held a copy of The News, the local English-language newspaper. Werner drank orange juice and coffee but declined the rolls and honey. ‘I promised Zena that I’d lose weight.’

‘Then I’ll have yours,’ I said.

‘You’re overweight too,’ said Werner.

‘But I didn’t make any promises to Zena,’ I said, digging into the honey.

‘He was there last night,’ said Werner.

‘Did he go for it, Werner? Did Stinnes go for it?’

‘How can you tell with a man like Stinnes?’ said Werner. ‘I told him that I’d met a man here in Mexico whom I’d known in Berlin. I said he had provided East German refugees with all the necessary papers to go and live in England. Stinnes said did I mean genuine papers or false papers. I said genuine papers, passports and identity papers, and permission to reside in London or one of the big towns.’

‘The British don’t have any sort of identity papers,’ I said. ‘And they don’t have to get anyone’s permission to go and live in any town they like.’

‘Well, I don’t know things like that,’ said Werner huffily. ‘I’ve never lived in England, have I? If the English don’t need papers, what the hell are we offering him?’

‘Never mind all that, Werner. What did Stinnes say?’

‘He said that refugees were never happy. He’d known a lot of exiles and they’d always regretted leaving their homeland. He said they never properly mastered the language, and never integrated with the local people. Worst of all, he said, their children grew up in the new country and treated their parents like strangers. He was playing for time, of course.’

‘Has he got children?’

‘A grown-up son.’

‘He knew what you were getting at?’

‘Perhaps he wasn’t sure at first, but I persisted and Zena helped. I know she said she wouldn’t help, Bernie, but she did help.’

‘What did she do?’

‘She told him that a little money solves all kinds of problems. Zena said that friends of hers had gone to live in England and loved every minute of it. She told him that everyone likes living in England. These friends of hers had a big house in Hampshire with a huge garden. And they had a language teacher to help them with their English. She told him that these were all problems that could be solved if there was help and money available.’

‘He must have been getting the message by that time,’ I said.

‘Yes, he became cautious,’ said Werner. ‘I suppose he was frightened in case I was trying to make a fool of him.’

‘And?’

‘I had to make it a little more specific. I said that this friend of mine could always arrange a job in England for anyone with experience of security work. He’d just come down here for a couple of weeks’ holiday in Mexico after travelling through the US, recruiting security experts for a very big British corporation, a company that did work for the British government. The pay is very good, I told him, with a long contract optional both sides.’

‘I wish you really did have a friend like that, Werner,’ I said. ‘I’d want to meet him myself. How did Stinnes react?’

‘What’s he going to say, Bernie? I mean, what would you or I say, in his place, faced with the same proposition?’

‘He said maybe?’

‘He said yes … or as near as he dared go to yes. But he’s frightened it’s a trap. Anyone would be frightened of it being a trap. He said he wanted more details, and a chance to think about it. He’d have to meet the man doing the recruiting. I said I was just a go-between of course …’

‘And he believed you are just the go-between?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Werner. He picked up the orchid and examined it as if seeing one for the first time. ‘You can’t grow orchids in Mexico City, but here in Cuernavaca they flourish. No one knows why. Maybe it’s the smog.’

‘Don’t just suppose so, Werner.’ He made me angry when he avoided important questions by changing the subject of conversation. ‘I wasn’t kidding last night … what I said to Zena. I wasn’t kidding about them getting rough.’

‘He believed me,’ said Werner in a tone that indicated that he was just trying to calm me down.

‘Stinnes is no amateur,’ I said. ‘He’s the one they assigned to me when I was arrested over there. He had me taken to the Normannenstrasse building and sat with me half the night, discussing the more subtle aspects of Sherlock Holmes and laughing and smoking and making it clear that if he was in charge of things they’d be kicking shit out of me.’

‘We’ve both seen a lot of KGB specimens like Erich Stinnes,’ said Werner. ‘He’s affable enough over a stein of beer but in other circumstances he could be a nasty piece of work. And not to be trusted, Bernie. I kept my distance from him. I’m no hero, you know that.’

‘Was there anyone with him?’

‘An older man – fifty or so – built like a tank, cropped hair, can’t seem to speak any language without a strong Russian accent.’

‘Sounds like the one who went with him to the Biedermann house. Pavel, he called him. I told you what they said, didn’t I?’

‘I guessed it was him. Luckily Pavel isn’t really fluent in German, expecially when Stinnes and I got going. Stinnes got rid of him as soon as he realized the drift my conversation was taking. I thought that might have been a good sign.’

‘I can use all the good signs we can get, Werner.’ I drank some coffee. ‘It’s all right telling him about language lessons in Hampshire, but he knows the real score would be him sitting in some lousy little safe house blowing KGB networks. And drinking half a bottle of Scotch every night in an effort to forget what damage he’s doing to his own people, and that he’s going to have to start doing it all over again next morning. Hey, don’t look so worried, Werner.’

He looked at me, biting his lip. ‘He knows you’re here, Bernie, I’m sure he does.’ There was a note of anxiety now. ‘He asked if I knew an Englishman who was a friend of Paul Biedermann. I said Paul knew lots of Englishmen. He said yes, but this one knew all the Biedermann family and had done for years.’

‘That description fits lots of people,’ I said.