Bernard Samson: Faith - Bernard Samson: Faith Part 6
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Bernard Samson: Faith Part 6

'I'm looking for a friend of mine,' I said. 'Werner. I've come from Berlin and I need to talk to him.'

'I don't know anyone named Werner,' said Benjamin in a bored voice. He didn't look up, and played a card as if the Tarok game was all that mattered to him.

'My name is Bernd,' I said. In such circumstances family names are never offered or demanded. I stepped closer to the pool of light so that he could see me and look at my face. He closed his fan of cards and stared at me but gave no sign of recognition. Identification was an essential element of the procedure. An inquiry on the phone would have got nowhere. Such men exposed their friends only to other known and identified friends. 'Bernard from Berlin?' he said.

'That's right,' I agreed.

The other three men were looking at the cards as if they could not hear us. 'Very well, Bernd-aus-Berlin. I'll ask some people I know. Come back tomorrow about this same time.'

'Thanks,' I said.

'Where are you staying?'

'I've booked a room at the Savoy.'

'The Savoy!' He raised an eyebrow without looking up at me. 'That's classy, Bernd-aus-Berlin!' When I said nothing he added: 'I doubt if I will be able to help you. But I'll ask around the district.'

Back in the street it was almost dark. The grey stone Klinike were pierced with blue rectangles of light, like a hundred TV screens where doctors and nurses and patients acted out their bloody dramas. The No. 11 streetcar arrived. Its brightly lit interior revealed a boxful of passengers packed absurdly tightly together like inebriated guests at a cocktail party. Together with a dozen other people I shouldered my way inside. The doors closed and we rattled off down the hill. I looked forward to luxuriating in a hot bath at the hotel and nursing my bruises, but found myself wondering how many times I'd have to go up the hill to Cafe Ziegler before Werner finally came out of the woodwork.

I got off at Paradeplatz, a streetcar junction just a few steps from the Savoy. As I was crossing the road only yards from the hotel someone called: 'Bernard!'

A woman's voice. I looked around. 'Zena!' Of all the people I might have met while looking for Werner Volkmann, his first wife, the irrepressible Zena, was the furthest from my thoughts. I hadn't seen her since the two of them had separated. She hadn't changed much: pale-complexioned with intense eyes, emphasized by discreet use of mascara, a little shadow in just the right places and carefully made-up lips. The little pointed nose was still the same too: sometimes I found myself looking at her and wondering what sort of nose-job she could have and how it would change her. She was wearing a full-length golden-coloured fox-fur coat, but even in sacking a and with or without a nose-job a Zena would have been a stunning-looking woman.

'What a coincidence! But what have you done to your face?' She was looking at my cuts and bruises with the sort of dispassionate inquiry one encounters when buying Band-Aids in a pharmacy.

'I fell into a xylophone,' I told her.

'I think I heard the chimes,' said Zena, and gave a soft nose-wrinkling snigger that under other circumstances might have been captivating. We'd never liked each other. It was too late now to have second thoughts, but we had long since agreed a mutually convenient armistice; bows, handshakes and eyes meeting with the polite restraint that the Koreans perfected at Panmunjom. 'Come and have coffee.' Suddenly a foxy limb reached out, and her elegant leather-gloved hand plucked at me. Everything that was predatory about Zena was exemplified in that gesture. 'Have you just come from Berlin?'

'No,' I said.

'And how is Frank Harrington these days?' Zena flatly ignored my denial and asked after the sprightly womanizer who not so long ago had painfully fallen victim to her charms.

'You're looking well,' I said.

'You'd better come and talk, Bernard.'

I looked at her. She didn't have to say more than that. I knew from the tone of her voice and the look in her eyes that Benjamin had already spoken with her. She had lost no time in acting on whatever he'd told her. I'd mentioned the Savoy and, while I'd been waiting for the streetcar and lumbering along the rails, she had driven down here to head me off.

'Whatever you say, Zena.'

'There is a wonderful cafe across the road,' she said. 'And I know your weakness for patisserie, Bernard.'

Seated in the cafe, across coffee cups and a selection of cream-laden mille-feuilles and eclairs, I could get a better look at her. She had slipped her magnificent fur coat off her shoulders and let it fall back over the chair in such a way that the label was displayed. Under it she was wearing a striped shirt-style blouse with a gold and jade brooch and matching necklace. In any other town it might have been considered a bit over the top, but not in down-town Zurich. She hadn't changed much in the couple of years since I'd seen her in Mexico City. The Zenas of this world know their priorities, and Zena's number one priority was herself. She was twenty-six years old, and when she did her wide-eyed little girl act she could pass for a few years younger even. A strict regime of facials, work-outs, hair treatments and all the other sorcery seemed to have paid off. I admired her restraint. If only I could mutilate my cream cakes without eating them, the way Zena did it, I would be in better shape too.

'We're back together,' she said triumphantly. She knew how I felt about the shabby way she'd treated Werner, and that was a part of her triumph. 'The poor darling simply can't manage without me.' She looked at me and her eyes narrowed, as if she was about to smile, but the smile never came. 'At least that's what he tells me.'

'Where is he?' I asked.

'You realize that I was on the payroll?' A quick look over her shoulder. 'That London Central had me on the payroll?'

London Central had Zena on the payroll! Like hell I knew. I felt like leaping over the brass rail into the shop window and thrashing about in the meringues. But I did everything I could to conceal my surprise. 'Yes, I heard something about that.'

'I was monitoring Werner. They never fully trusted him, I'm sure you know that London never trusted him?'

She was right about that at least. That was what bugged me about the situation. London Central had never fully trusted Werner. All right: but how could anyone there have put their trust in Zena? She'd consistently demonstrated her powers of self-preservation and her devil-take-the-hindmost philosophy. Who could have considered her as a suitable Departmental employee? 'Is he here in Zurich?' I said. 'I must talk to him. It's official.'

'Official?' She laughed and drank some coffee. She drank double-strength coffee: as black as treacle and almost as heavy. 'You will have your little English jokes, Bernard. Werner has been fired. Kicked out in the most vindictive way those bastards could arrange it. Don't pretend you don't know that?'

'I must see him, Zena. It's very important for both of us.'

'Both of us? You and me, you mean? Or you and Werner?'

It was the sort of cat-and-mouse game that Zena most enjoyed. She knew how to keep Werner under wraps. If she was determined to keep him away from me, Werner would stay away rather than upset her. Zena's tempers were talked of in hushed tones by anyone who'd lived through one. 'All of us,' I said evenly. 'An agent has been killed. I want to talk to Werner before I go to London and talk to them about it. It could save a lot of trouble if we all agree about what we are going to say.' I kept it a bit vague, not being sure whether Zena's employment by London Central was still continuing.

'VERDI, is that it?' she said calmly. 'Well, that's all over and done with.' My God, the woman knew everything. Who else knew? No wonder we'd arrived in Magdeburg to find a corpse.

'Better I talk to Werner,' I said.

She took her time about replying. She finished her coffee, consulted her diamond-studded Carrier watch and looked at herself in a tiny mirror she took from her crocodile handbag. 'I'll go and get him,' she said, snapping the mirror closed and putting it away. 'You wait here.'

'Thanks, Zena,' I said.

'And wipe that blob of cream off your chin,' she said. She was always the nanny.

'Was it Frank Harrington who put you on the payroll?' I asked her.

'He's a sweet man,' she said.

'And did you file false reports and get Werner kicked out of Berlin?'

'Of course not,' she said, but after a moment she smiled.

'So that you could be with him here?'

She turned away from me. 'If you say anything like that to Werner, I shall tell him never to speak to you again.'

I waited in case she denied the accusations, but she didn't.

'And Werner will do as I say,' she added, as if I didn't already know it.

'How long will he be, Zena?'

'He's waiting in my car. And I don't want him to eat any cakes. I shall be angry, tell him.'

'I'll tell him, Zena. Sugar in his coffee okay?'

'You've got to have the last word, haven't you, Bernard? You can never learn when to hold your tongue.'

Just because Werner Volkmann allowed Zena to manipulate him so completely did not mean that Werner was in any way a weakling or a wimp. The people who made that mistake about him learned the truth at their cost. Except for his relationship with Zena, Werner was entirely his own man. He was stubborn and methodical. Trying to persuade him to do anything against his will was a futile exercise, even if Zena could twist him around her little finger. But when he arrived in a dark blue business suit, spotted tie and soft black cashmere overcoat with a black fur collar I felt quite sure that Zena had chosen everything he was wearing. Perhaps the silver-topped walking cane was not her idea: that elaboration smacked of Werner.

'You might have dropped me a line, Werner,' I said after he'd hung up his magnificent coat and seated himself. Fresh coffee had arrived, and I was biting into my second cream eclair.

He took a small Filofax sheet from his leather wallet and wrote a phone number on it with a silver pencil before passing it to me. 'I needed time to think,' he said defensively. 'Don't you ever feel you need time to think?'

'No I don't, Werner,' I said. 'If I start off thinking about everything a everything I say and do, and the stupid orders that I sometimes have to obey a high-pressure steam would start coming out of both ears, and I wouldn't know how to stop it.'

'Is that what happened last time?'

'Last time I started thinking? Yes, that's right.'

'I'm sorry Bernie. You're right, I should have written but I was staying away from everyone, not just you.' He was still the same old sleepy-eyed Werner; jet-black bushy hair, straggling eyebrows and strong Berlin accent. The son of a dentist, Werner was born at a time when the Nazis were energetically sending Jews to the death camps. Werner was his 'name for the outside'. I was born the same year as Werner, we went to school together and grew up together. Werner was as near to being a brother as I would ever get, and he measured everything I did or said with that godlike and superior impartiality with which brothers judge each other.

'I went in to get VERDI,' I explained.

'I heard.'

'They wasted him before he could talk.'

'How is Dicky taking that?'

'Dicky Cruyer?'

'VERDI is his baby, isn't he?'

'Not especially.'

'Not especially? How long have you been away, Bernie? Don't you know that VERDI is a big man these days?'

'VERDI was a big man, you mean.'

'Do I? Okay a was a big man, then.' He brought out a handkerchief and wiped his nose. I thought for a moment he was going to serve me up with all the rigmarole about Banner Party No. 5 scaling the heights of the Reichstag, but he mercifully passed over that episode and gave me what sounded more like the real cause of Dicky's distress. 'VERDI went to work in Moscow some time back. When he returned to Berlin he was put in charge of communications security a protection of KGB communications. Not just Stasi ones. You're listening?'

'I'm listening, Werner.'

'A job like that brings a man into contact with codes, cryptographic machines and all the other gimmicks and gizmos.'

'Well, he was never much good at the sharp end,' I said, remembering VERDI and a couple of noteworthy bungles of which I'd taken advantage when he was in the field.

'Yes, well don't let it go to your head, Bernie. VERDI's job as communications supremo made him a hundred times more important than you or I ever could be.'

'And enrolling him was Dicky's baby?' I mused aloud as I thought about the tangled knot of frustration Dicky's face had been during that meeting in Frank's study.

'No, I think the offer came from VERDI originally, but you know how these things are. It's difficult to know how they begin. London was all set. The rumours are that they'd already sold-on some participation to Washington.'

'Everything's got to be run on businesslike lines nowadays, Werner,' I said sarcastically. 'Even London Central.'

Werner gave a small close-lipped smile. He liked lighting the fuse and watching me explode. 'What did you do to your face?'

'I fought off a KGB hit man on the way down here. The son of a bitch nearly killed me.'

'What was he using, this hit man: his handbag or his high-heel shoes?'

'Very funny, Werner. He gave me a lift and waited until I was dozing.'

Werner indicated an almond slice with his fork. 'Do you want that one?' he asked.

'No, you have it,' I said.

Had Werner showed a little more concern I might not have been tempted to tell him in detail about the assault I'd suffered, but with him sitting there eating the almond slice and smiling like a brass Buddha I described exactly what had happened.

'You think he was a KGB hit man?' asked Werner at the end of my story, showing neither sympathy nor alarm.

'Or Stasi.'

'You're crazy, Bernard. They're not recruiting from the football hooligans; not yet anyway. That truck driver was nothing like a professional hit man; you know that if you are honest with yourself.'

'Why?'

'Who did we ever know who would flap and flounder around like that? Tell me one example of the other side sending some muscle-bound lunatic to take out an experienced field agent. A pro with a gun could have got rid of you in one minute.'

'And left holes in his cab?'

'So he tells you to get out ... or maybe uses a prussic-acid vapour-gun, and the coroner would swear you died of a coronary. You know these people, Bernie. They are not like this weirdo you're telling me about.'

'So who was he?'

'How do I know who he was? My guess is that you crossed the path of a madman. There are plenty of them about these days: pathological killers who just want to maim and murder at random and for no real reason.'

'You think that's the answer?'

'Yes, I do. The Autobahnen are dangerous for hitchhikers. Don't you ever read the newspapers?'

'I need Valium before I can face the newspapers these days. Is Zena coming back here?'

'She had to go to the beauty shop or somewhere.'

'Can you spare me some Swiss money?'

'The hairdresser I think it was,' he said, and looked over his shoulder furtively before taking out his wallet and putting a dozen or more 100-franc bills on the table.

'Thanks, Werner. Can you wait a week? I'll send you a cheque.'

'You think I'm a fool, don't you?'

'Your personal life is none of my business, Werner.' I picked up the money and put it in my wallet.

'Be honest.'