Absolute Friends (42 page)

"Are you going to see her again?" he asks, struggling for small talk.

"It is questionable, Teddy. She is at a dangerous age and showed distinct signs of attachment."

No change there then, Mundy notes a little sourly, momentarily recalling Judith. He tries again.

"Sasha, on your great safari--during those missing years when you were writing to me--"

"They are not missing, Teddy. They were my _Lehrjahre,__ my years of instruction. For this."

"During those years, did you find yourself"--he was going to say _riding with,__ but that was Rourke's expression--"did you rub shoulders with the far-out people--the ones who advocated armed resistance, indiscriminately--terror, if you like?"

"Frequently."

"Were you influenced--persuaded by them?"

"What do you mean?"

"We used to talk about it. You and I. Judith did. Karen did. It was all the rage at the Republican Club. How far is it permissible to go? With the drama of the act, and so forth. What's a fair price, in what circumstances? When can the shooting legitimately begin? You used to say Ulrike and her kind were giving anarchism a bad name. I wondered whether anything had changed your mind."

"You wish for my views on this subject--_here, today__--while we drink this excellent burgundy? I think you are being a little Teutonic, Teddy."

"I don't think so."

"If I were a Palestinian living in the West Bank or Gaza, I would shoot every occupying Israeli soldier in sight. However, I am a poor shot and have no gun, so my chances of success would be small. A planned act of violence against unarmed civilians is in no case permissible. The fact that you and your American masters drop illegal cluster bombs and other repulsive weaponry on an unprotected Iraqi population consisting sixty percent of children does not alter my position. Is this what you are asking me?"

"Yes."

_"Why?"__

It appears that the interrogation has turned itself round. It is Sasha not Mundy who is keeping his anger at bay, and Sasha who is sitting bolt upright on the grass, glowering at him, demanding an answer.

"It just occurred to me that we might have different agendas, that's all."

"In what sense different? What are you talking about, Teddy?"

"Whether you and Dimitri are looking to do more than just _challenge__ the prevailing cant--or challenge it by different means."

"Such as what?"

"Raising a storm of some kind. Sending out a signal to the real forces of anti-Americanism." Rourke's words are winging back to him and this time he is reduced to using them. "Extending the hand of friendship to the perpetrators of the most sensational act of anticapitalism since the invention of gunpowder."

For a while Sasha appears to doubt his hearing. He inclines his head in question, and puts on his Party frown. With his small hands spread before him in a gesture to command silence, he consults the objects around him for enlightenment: the nearly empty bottle of burgundy, the hard-boiled eggs, cheese, pumpernickel bread. Only then does he lift his dark brown eyes, and Mundy to his alarm sees that they are brimming with tears.

"Who the fuck have you been talking to, Teddy?"

"Am I right, Sasha?"

"You are so wrong it makes me sick. Go and be an Englishman. Fight your own fucking wars."

Sasha has dragged himself to his feet and is buttoning up his shirt. His breath is coming in retches. He must have an ulcer or some bloody thing. It's the Dreesen Hotel all over again, Mundy thinks, as Sasha peers round him for his jacket. It's the same bloody river going by, and the same impossible gap between us. In a minute he's going to ride into the sunset and leave me looking like the unfeeling oaf I always was.

"It's my bloody bank, Sasha," he pleads. "For Christ's sake, sit down and drink some wine and stop behaving like a drama queen. We've got a problem. I need your help."

Which is how he planned to play it if he didn't extract the sobbing confession he was counting on.

Sasha is sitting again but he has drawn up his knees and locked his hands round them and the knuckles are white with tension. His jaw is set the way it used to be when he talked about the Herr Pastor, and he refuses to take his eyes off Mundy's face whatever Mundy does. The food and wine have ceased to interest him. All that matters to him are Mundy's words and Mundy's face while he speaks them. And this scrutiny would be about as much as Mundy could take, if it weren't for the hard school he'd been through, and his years of glib lying to the Professor and his acolytes.

"My bank just can't get over where the money came from," Mundy complains, wiping his wrist across his brow in agitation. "They have all these regulations about unexpected sums of money these days. Anything over five thousand euros sets their alarm bells ringing."

He is approaching the fiction, but with fact at his elbow.

"They've backtracked on the money orders and don't like what they've found. They're thinking of going to the authorities."

"Which authorities?"

"The usual, I suppose. How should I know?" He bends the truth a little further. In a minute it's going to snap. "They had an extra man there. He said he was from head office. He went on asking me who was behind the payments. As if they were criminal somehow. I said what Dimitri's people had told me to say, but that wasn't good enough for him. He kept complaining that I hadn't anything to show them--no contract, no correspondence. I couldn't even tell him the name of my benefactor. Just half a million dollars from some pretty odd places, recycled through big-name banks."

"Teddy, this is total fascistic provocation. You have been at the bastards' mercy for so long they can't bear you to slip out of their grasp. I think you are being a little naive, actually."

"Then he asked me whether I'd ever had anything to do with anarchists at any point in my life. Or their supporters. He was talking about Euro-anarchists. People like the Red Army Fraktion and the Red Brigades." He allows time for this disinformation to have its effect, but it has none at all. Sasha is watching him with the same shocked straight stare that he adopted from the moment Mundy started down this road.

"And you?" Sasha inquires. "What did you say?"

"I asked him what the hell that had got to do with anything."

"And he?"

"Asked me why I was expelled from Berlin."

"And you?"

Mundy would like to tell Sasha to shut up prompting him and just listen. I'm trying to sow alarm in you, damn you--draw you out, force an admission from you, and all you do is glower at me as if I'm the villain in this, and you're the lily-white one.

"I said that in my youth I had been a rebel, just like anybody else, but I didn't think that fact had much to do with my present standing at the bank, or my fitness to receive cash from a reputable trust." He flounders on. "They haven't left me alone since. They gave me a whole bunch of forms to fill in, and yesterday I got a call from somebody describing herself as the bank's special inquiries officer, asking me if I could name references who could vouch for me over the last ten years. Sasha, listen to me, please--"

He is doing a Sasha in reverse: eyes wide, hands open, appealing to him the way Sasha did when he was begging him to go with him to the mountaintop.

"Is there really nothing more you can tell me about Dimitri? I mean, just his real name would be a help, for Christ's sake, a few scraps about his past--only the reputable bits, naturally--some idea of who he is and how he made his money--where he's coming from politically?" And for good measure: "I'm in the hot seat, Sasha. This one isn't going away."

Mundy is standing and Sasha, in his beggar's crouch, is still staring up at him. But instead of fear and guilt or tears, his eyes are filled with pity for a friend.

"Teddy. I think you are right. You should get out of this before it's too late."

"Why?"

"I asked you before we went up to see Dimitri. I ask you again now. Do you truly believe your own rhetoric? Are you really prepared to return to the intellectual barricades? Or are you like the little pipers when they march to war? The first sound of gunshot, they want to go home?"

"Just as long as the barricades are intellectual and nothing else. What do I tell the bank?"

"Nothing. Tear up their forms, don't answer their calls. Leave them with their fantasies. You receive money from an Arab charity, and when you were a beardless child you were a pseudo-militant in Berlin. For their poor sick minds, that's already enough. You are clearly a Euro-terrorist with pro-Islamist sympathies. Did they mention that you were a comrade of the notorious rabble-rouser Sasha?"

"No."

"I am disappointed. I thought I would have star billing in their ridiculous scenario. Come, Teddy." He is scrabbling busily about, gathering up food, putting it in the plastic boxes. "We have had enough of ill humor. We go back to your beautiful school, we drink a lot, we sleep in the attic like old times. And in the morning before I go to Hamburg you tell me whether you want me to find someone else to do the job, no problem. Or maybe by then we have our courage back, okay?"

And with the _okay,__ Sasha slings his arm round Mundy's shoulders to cheer him up.

They are cycling side by side the way they learned to cycle together: Mundy soft-pedaling, Sasha precariously at his own speed. Evening dew is falling. The river runs beside them, the red castle observes them darkly in the failing light.

"You know what is bad about those bankers--actually wicked, I would say?" Sasha demands breathlessly, swerving into Mundy and righting himself in the nick of time.

"Greed," Mundy suggests.

"Worse. Much worse."

"Power."

"Even worse than power. They are trying to put us into one bed. Liberals, socialists, Trotskyists, Communists, anarchists, antiglobalists, peace protesters: we are all _Sympis,__ all pinkos. We all hate Jews and America and we are the secret admirers of Osama. You know what they dream of, your bankers?"

"Sex."

"That one day a worthy policeman will walk into the offices of the antiglobalization movement in Berlin or Paris or London or Madrid or Milan and find a big box of anthrax with a label on it saying, _From all your good friends in Al Qaeda.__ The liberal left will be exposed as the closet fascist bastards they've always been, and the petit bourgeoisie of Europe will go crawling to its American Big Brother, begging it to come to its protection. And the Frankfurt stock exchange will go up five hundred points. I'm thirsty."

A pit stop while they finish the red burgundy and Sasha waits for his chest to calm down.

From the attic of the schoolhouse, if you stand in the man-sized dormer window, you can watch the early summer's dawn steal along the red castle walls and down the river and over the bridges until the whole of Heidelberg has been taken without a shot fired.

But if Mundy must as usual be up and doing, Sasha who could never rise early is sound asleep inside the heap of sofa cushions and blankets and dust-sheets that Mundy put together for him when they had drowned their differences in a second bottle of burgundy. The Party briefcase lies at Sasha's feet beside his jeans and sneakers, he has one thin arm crooked beneath a cushion and his head on top of it, and if Mundy didn't know him better he might wonder whether he was dead because of the discretion of his breathing. On the floor beside him sits Mundy's alarm clock set for ten as Sasha asked, and beside the clock Mundy's note saying, _Cheerio, gone to Munich, give Hamburg a kiss from me, see you in church.__ And as a P. S.: _Sorry to have been an arsehole.__

Carrying his shoes in his hands he pads down the big staircase and across the hall to the front door and sets off at a smart pace for the old town. It is by now half past eight. The tourist traps in the Hauptstrasse are still asleep and will remain so for another hour. But his business is not in the Hauptstrasse. In a glass and concrete side street not far distant from the railway station stands a Turkish travel agency that he has noticed on his wanderings. It seemed to be always open, and is open now. With cash that he has taken from a machine with the aid of his new bank card, he buys two excursion tickets from Munich to Ankara for Zara and Mustafa and, after a moment's deliberation, a third for himself.

With the tickets in his pocket, he walks again beside a busy road until he is the only pedestrian. He enters half countryside. A paved footpath across a wheat field brings him to a shopping complex where he finds what he is looking for: a line of public pay phones in semi-cubicles. In his pocket he has thirty euros in coin. He dials first to Britain, then to central London, then to God knows where, because never in his life has he dialed such an unlikely set of digits, or so many of them.

_And this is Edward's panic button for a rainy day,__ Nick Amory is saying quietly over a farewell luncheon at his club, handing him a bit of card with a number to memorize. _Whistle and I'll come to you, but you'd better make it bloody good.__

Holding a fountain pen at the ready, he waits for the dial tone. It is interrupted by a woman's electronic voice saying, _Leave your message now.__ With the fountain pen he begins tapping on the mouthpiece: This for who I am, this for who I want to talk to, because why announce yourself to half the listening world by using your own stupid voice?

The woman wants binary answers.

_Is your problem immediate?__

Tap.

_Can it wait twenty-four hours?__

Tap.

_Forty-eight hours?__

Tap.

_Seventy-two hours?__

Tap tap.

_Now select one of the following options. If the meeting you require may safely occur at your last recorded residence, press five.__

By the time she's finished with him, he's so exhausted that he has to sit on a bench and let himself dry out. A Roman Catholic priest eyes him, wondering whether to offer his services.

14

ON THE TRAIN back to Munich Mundy has offered up prayers of thanks to Zara's beloved youngest sister, whose wedding will take place in her home village one week from today. He has also noted that tomorrow is Zara's day off and, because it's a Thursday, Mustafa will be home at lunchtime.