The Company of Strangers (38 page)

Gromov nodded. He would work on her. She would come round to him in the end.

‘The only clue we have on the identity of the traitor was something your mother overheard back in ‘66 from Jim Wallis. It was a codename she’d never heard of before and she could find no existing financial record for it. The name was: Snow Leopard.’

‘Well, they’re rare, aren’t they, Mr Gromov?’

‘Very rarely seen indeed,’ he replied. ‘I come from Krasnogorsk in Siberia, not far from the Mongolian border. At
that point the Sayan mountains form the frontier, which is the natural habitat of the snow leopard. My father took me hunting when I was sixteen and while Wall Street was having its magnificent crash I shot the one and only snow leopard I have ever seen. My wife wears it today as a jacket when we go to the ballet.’

Andrea sat on a bench, high up in Brockwell Park, overlooking the Dulwich Road. The wind had got up and one side of her face was frozen, the eye tearful and her nose red. She hoped this discomfort would prompt some reasoned thought as to why she had just committed herself to spying for the Soviet Union. She had given Gromov good reasons. She wanted João Ribeiro to be rehabilitated. She had hinted that she was motivated in part by the death of her son and husband. Gromov had thrown up the pedigree business. It would appear that this was her family tradition. He’d also brought Louis Greig into the game. Her lover. Had she been considering that? Was it important not to disappoint Louis? His standing with Gromov would be enhanced. Would hers with Louis? Was that what she wanted? Were any of these the real reasons?

Then it struck her. The thought that had nearly penetrated at the end of the train journey. Control. Everyone, in this business and out, was looking for control. Louis had taken her as his lover because the secret of it gave him control over Martha. Andrea went along with it, with his demands, because she wanted to control Louis. As Louis sensed his control over Andrea waning, he drove her back into a vulnerable state. She allowed it, she wanted it, because she perversely interpreted this as regaining control over Louis by giving him what he wanted. She wanted to go back into the Company because, the spy’s fantasy, it would give her ultimate control. Perhaps that was it after all.

This had become her nature. Gromov had talked about pedigree, and he was right. She was her mother’s daughter. Her mother’s revenge for Longmartin’s injustice had been twenty-five years of treachery against her country. She wondered if she’d confessed that to Father Harpur.

Unable to stand the cold any longer she left the park. Gromov had told her that she was to meet Louis Greig at Durrant’s Hotel in George Street in the West End which, it occurred to her, was not far from the Edgware Road. She checked her handbag to make sure she was still carrying the key to safe-deposit box 718 at the Arab Bank. She took a bus to Clapham Common and the tube into the West End. She came up into Oxford Street from the Marble Arch tube station and walked up the Edgware Road, wondering what instinct in her had prevented her from looking in the box before now.

Within half an hour she was sitting alone in a cubicle with the oblong stainless steel box, hands sweating, unaccountably nervous. Inside the box were sheafs of tenpound notes. She didn’t have to count them because there was a note in her mother’s hand showing a total of £30,500.

Outside in the autumn wind she hailed a cab and, leaning against the passenger door, thought for a few moments and made her decision. She asked the driver to take her to King’s Cross Station. She took the afternoon train back to Cambridge and spent the evening packing her things. She went to the pub, ordered a double gin and tonic and called Jim Wallis.

15th January 1971, East Berlin.

The Snow Leopard stood three feet back from his living-room window and looked down from his fourth-floor apartment on to the empty packed snow and ice between the five concrete blocks which constituted his part of the not-so-new development on the Karl Marx Allee. He was smoking a Marlboro cigarette in a cupped hand and watching, and waiting, and thinking that life had become all about numbers – three feet, four floors, five blocks, all surrounded by nothingness, white, white zero snow. No cars. No people. No movement.

The two apartment blocks immediately opposite were completely unlit, not a square of light to be seen, not even the hint of someone stretching in a half-dark room, preparing for another all-night surveillance of nobody. The sky above was a muffled grey. The noise level was close to what city people knew as silence. The Snow Leopard’s wife snored quietly in the bedroom, her door open, always open. He cocked his head as one of his two daughters squeaked in her sleep, but then his face went back to the window, his hand back up to his mouth, and there was the unmistakable taste of export America.

He went into the kitchen, dowsed the butt and threw it in the bin. He shrugged into his heaviest coat. It was minus twelve degrees outside, with more Russian snow due during the day. He put his hand to the radiator. Still working – glad they weren’t on the tenth floor where the heating
probably wasn’t and State plumbers as rare as Omaha steak around here. He reviewed the situation one last time. Quiet. Two a.m. His time of night. His type of weather. He crammed a brimmed hat on to his head, picked up his uniform, which was protected by brown paper, and left the apartment, taking the stairs down to the garage.

He put his uniform in the boot and got into his black Citroën. He drove slowly over the ice-packed roads until he reached the cleared Karl Marx Allee, which had been the Stalin Allee, until Uncle Joe had been Khrushchevified, and then Brezhneved. He turned left, heading into the centre of town and the Wall. There was no traffic but he checked the rear view constantly. No tail. At Alexanderplatz he turned left on to Grunerstrasse, crossed the River Spree and parked up in Reinhold-Huhnstrasse. He took a brisk walk into an unmarked building, flicked a pass at two guards, who nodded without looking, and dropped down two flights of stairs into the basement. He went through a series of swept and swabbed tunnels until he reached a a door which he unlocked. This door, which he relocked, gave on to a small hallway and in four short steps he was walking southwards down Friedrichstrasse on the West side of the Wall.

He walked quickly and crossed the street at the Kochstrasse U-bahn. A hundred metres later he paid ten Deutschmarks to a swarthy, moustachioed man in a glass cubicle under a neon sign which read Frau Schenk Sex Kino. He entered through a large heavy leather flap and stood at the back, unable to see and unable to work out what was happening on the dark screen. Only the soundtrack told him that several people were approaching ultimate satisfaction with customary and prolonged ecstasy while the camera locked itself unerringly on their biological detail. Porn, he thought, the desecration of sex.

He reached the side wall of the cinema and walked
slowly down to the front and another door, which let him into a passage lit by a single red bulb. A ginger-haired man, the same width as the passage, stood at the far end with his hands in front of his groin. Close to, the Snow Leopard could see that the man had the eyelashes of a pig. He handed over another ten marks and opened his coat. The man patted him down, squeezed his pockets.

‘Number three is free,’ he said.

The Snow Leopard went into number three cubicle and closed the door. There was a binful of used tissues and some wishful graffiti on the walls. Beyond the tinted glass panel there was a girl kneeling on the floor with her face turned sideways, cheek to the ground, eyes closed, tongue roving her lips and her behind as high up in the air as it would go. She was fingering herself. He turned his back on the scene, checked his watch and tapped on the plywood wall. No answer. He tapped out his code again and this time received the correct reply. He took a roll of paper, a coded message, from the cuff of his coat and pushed it halfway through a hole drilled in the wall. It was removed from the other side. He waited. Nothing came back. A few minutes later the next-door cubicle was vacated.

He waited more minutes, his back to the glass panel, until there was a polite knock on the door. They always knocked, just in case. He followed another man down a passage, which curved to the right past other cubicles. The man opened a door to the left and waved the Snow Leopard through. The lighting returned to neon normal in this part of the building.

‘Second on the left,’ said the man, to the back of his head.

He went into the office. A man with a substantial belly stood up on the other side of a desk. They shook hands and the man offered coffee, which he accepted. The Snow Leopard laid a small white sachet on the sports page, which
the man had been reading. The man set the coffee down, picked up the sachet, closed his newspaper and laid out a piece of dark blue velvet. He emptied the sachet on to it. He inspected the diamonds visually first, divided them up and then weighed them on a set of scales he had on top of the safe in the corner of the room.

‘Three hundred thousand,’ he said.

‘Dollars?’ asked the Snow Leopard, and the man laughed.

‘Are you OK for cigarettes, Kurt?’ he said, showing how seriously he took the attempt at negotiation.

‘I’ve got plenty.’

‘Did you bring any of those Cuban cigars with you this time?’

‘What are we celebrating?’

‘Nothing, Kurt, nothing.’

‘That’s why I didn’t bring any.’

‘Next time.’

‘Only if it’s dollars, not Deutschmarks.’

‘You’re getting to be a capitalist.’

‘Who? Me?’

The man laughed again, asked him to turn his back. The Snow Leopard sipped his good, strong, real coffee down to the grounds and turned to find six blocks of money on the desk. He put them into the lining of his coat.

‘Which way out?’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go back through there like I did the last time.’

‘Left, right, keep going until you get to a door and that’ll put you into the Kochstrasse U-bahn.’

‘Why couldn’t I come in that way?’

‘That way we don’t get the twenty Deutschmarks entrance fee from you.’

‘Capitalists,’ said the Snow Leopard, shaking his head.

The man boomed another laugh.

The Snow Leopard got back into his Citroën on the East side of the Wall. He headed north through the old Jewish quarter of Prenzlauer Berg on the Schönhauser Allee. He took a right after the Jewish cemetery and, as the street narrowed, went up on to the pavement and parked under the arch of the
ersterhof
of a huge and decrepit
Mietskasern
in Wörtherstrasse. He waited with the engine running and then rolled into the first courtyard of the old nineteenth-century rental barracks, the terrible fortress-like forerunners to the kind of place he was now living in himself. He parked up and crossed the courtyard to the
hinterhof
, the back building, which never saw any sunlight. It was silent. The place was deserted, the living spaces totally uninhabitable, the damp, at this time of year, frozen on the walls. Chunks of plaster and concrete lay scattered across the stairs and landings. He knocked on the metal door of an apartment on the third floor. Feet approached from the other side. He took a full-face ski hat out of his pocket and pulled it over his head.

‘
Meine Ruh’ ist hin
,’ said a voice.

‘
Mein Herz ist schwer,
’ he replied.

The door opened. He stepped into the heat.

‘Do we have to have such depressing lines from Goethe?’

‘I’ll be changing to Brecht next week.’

‘Another cheerful soul.’

‘What can I do for you, Herr Kappa?’

The Snow Leopard took off his coat, laid it on the chair and removed an American passport in the name of Colonel Peter Taylor from the lining. Amongst its pages was a loose passport-size photograph.

‘You know the deal. Take the old one off, put the new one on.’

The man, late thirties with bland, unnoticeable, dark features opened the passport, leafed through it with the familiarity of a border guard, which was what he had been
fifteen years before. The nine years he’d spent in prison as a member of a five-man ring who’d been caught smuggling people to the West had not dulled his attention to detail, but rather sharpened it to a professional level.

‘This is genuine,’ said the man, looking up out of the corner of his head.

‘It is.’

‘I’ll need forty-eight hours.’

‘I want an entry stamp, too. I’ll give you the date later.’

‘Five hundred…’

‘Same as the last time then.’

‘Five hundred down and five hundred when I finish.’

‘Since when did your rates double?’

‘Like I told you, Herr Kappa, passports are the window into people’s lives. I looked into this one and it seemed…cluttered to me.’

‘Cluttered or sparse, it shouldn’t affect your work.’

‘That’s the deal, Herr Kappa.’

The Snow Leopard took his uniform out of the boot and changed in the car. He went back to the Schönhauser Allee and headed north under the pillars of the S-bahn. He kept going and passed under the Pankow S-bahn, where he turned right and, as he pushed on, began to come out of the urban sprawl through Buchholz. Just before Schöner-linde he had to show his papers at a police post and was saluted and allowed through without even a glance into the back seat. He drove through the small village and headed north again through Schönwalde and into the pine forest beyond. A fine snow began to fall just as he turned off the road to Wandlitz and by the time he reached the guardhouse to the Wandlitz Forest Settlement, the idyllic lakeside village reserved for the ruling élite, he was swearing out loud. The snow was going to slow everything down. The guard cracked his heels together and saluted.

‘To see General Stiller,’ said the Snow Leopard.

‘Herr Major,’ said the guard, and raised the barrier.

He drove through the settlement to the corner reserved for the Ministry of State Security, the Stasi, and parked up outside the villa belonging to General Lothar Stiller. The wind was blowing hard, buffeting against the buildings, needling the fine crystals of snow into the still sensitive side of his face. He’d think afterwards whether he’d heard anything, or if it had just been the thump of the wind on the edge of the villa.

He did hear something as he walked up the path to the front door, the snow swirling, feinting left and right, on the steps up to the porch. It was the door knocking against the latch. He pushed it open with a thick gloved finger and stepped into the dark carpeted hall.

Light came from a crack under a door to the left. It opened on to the remains of a party – three shot glasses for schnapps and vodka and larger glasses laced with the scum of beer foam. There was nobody in the room, but a tie lay on the back of one of the chairs. He skirted the furniture and headed for the general’s bedroom.

He didn’t see him at first. There was only a bedside lamp on and a bad sulphurous smell in the room. He turned on the main light. General Stiller was naked and kneeling in the corner of the room, hunched over an armchair on the back of which his light blue uniform was neatly laid out. There was a large, dark red stain over the pocket of the jacket which was working its way up to the medal ribbons on the chest. The white shirt next to it was flecked with blood. The bad smell was from the streak of diarrhoea down the general’s hamstrings and spattered over his calves.

The Snow Leopard held a hand over his mouth and inspected the body. Stiller had been shot at point-blank range in the back of the neck. He knelt by his side. The
exit wound was huge, an appalling mash of skin and bone and an ugly black hole where the nose should have been. The eyes seemed to be staring agog, as if amazed at seeing what had been a good-looking face sprayed over the back of the chair.

The Snow Leopard reached under the chair and came up with a ball of lacy underwear. He stood and took in the room. Four strides and he was in the bathroom. He pulled back the plastic curtain to the bath. She was lying face-down, peroxide blonde hair, black at the roots and now horribly reddened. She wore a black suspender belt and black stockings.

Back in the bedroom he flung back the covers. Something heavy hit the floor. The gun. A Walther PPK, no suppressor. He held it in his gloved hand, went back to the living room, opened the door opposite the curtained window of the front room. The girl’s clothes were on the back of the chair. The bed had seen some action, all the covers hung off the end like a thick tongue and there was a large stain on the bottom sheet. He checked the rest of the house. Empty. The back door was open. The wind had eased up and the snow was now falling thickly. No tracks.

He picked up the phone and thought for a full minute of his options. He had to be careful. They always said that the phones in the Wandlitz Forest Settlement weren’t tapped but anybody would be mad to believe that, given the ubiquity of the Stasi, and he should know.

Half of the money he had on him was due to a Russian, the KGB General Oleg Yakubovsky, and he would really have liked to call him and ask his opinion at this moment but that risked pointing a finger. There was no possibility of just driving away as he was logged in at the guardhouse. He knew he only had one option but it was worth fidgeting around his head just in case he miraculously came up with
an alternative. But there was none. It had to be General Johannes Rieff, Head of Special Investigations.

Rieff’s voice was thick with sleep.

‘Who is it?’ he asked.

‘Major Kurt Schneider.’

‘Do I know you?’

‘From the Arbeitsgruppe Ausländer.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Five thirty, sir.’

‘I’m not used to being disturbed for another two hours.’

‘There’s been an incident at the Wandlitz Forest Settlement. General Stiller has been shot and there’s a dead girl in the bath who…is not his wife.’