Mexico Set. Len Deighton

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