The Helsinki Pact (16 page)

"I got distracted by other things
too, I guess, as it’s the first time I’ve been around here." he
said. "Do you know, just beyond the end of this street there’s this
old building with a small courtyard closed off by an elaborate iron
gate – I just had to spend some time admiring that. Have you seen
it?”

Although Bettina said nothing
Thomas noted with satisfaction that her knuckles whitened
visibly.

“And then, I also figured you
were probably busy telling people convenient lies and getting
others stuck in jail.” he added. “You’re good at that. You know the
thing about you I hate the most?”

She looked at him coolly. She
said nothing, waiting. There was a slight curve at the edges of her
mouth which infuriated Thomas, driving him further than he'd
initially intended.

"You don't? Let me tell you
anyway. Hypocrisy. Your goddamned hypocrisy. All that bullshit you
kept feeding Stephan and Camille about your life so you could win
them over. All those hard luck tales, while looking oh so sincere.
No wonder your dad pissed off out of it when he had a chance. You
even fooled me again for a short while, and I already knew what you
were like. That’s what I find really disturbing. It was exactly
like that first evening with me." He smiled sweetly at her. "You’re
the greatest lying, hypocritical, untrustworthy, devious bitch I
think I’ve ever met.”

She flushed but looked straight
at him, holding his gaze until Thomas found himself glancing away
despite his bravado. “Better now? Nobody forced you to take me to
dinner that evening. You invited me. You persuaded me. You wanted
me, remember. I noticed the cigarettes when they fell out of your
jacket and wondered why, as you’d said you didn’t smoke. So I
checked them when you went to pay the bill. Nosiness, maybe, but
that’s how it is. Then I realised you were into black-market
currency and I didn’t have any choice. I liked you, enjoyed our
evening, but personal feelings couldn’t come into it. This is my
country and once I knew you were a criminal my duty was
clear.”

“Your duty! Your duty!” Thomas
shouted. “Your duty, as you choose to call it, means ruining other
people’s lives. Do you realize that? I’m being asked to spy on my
friends and to spy on and betray people I hardly know. And your
duty, as you dignify this shitty behaviour, led to someone’s death
because you had your thugs follow me. It could as easily have led
to mine.”

“You were not the main object of
our interest and I had no idea it was that particular bastard you
were meeting later, the one you knew as Mark. His real name was
Hans-Jörg Romer and he was much more than a black market currency
dealer." She looked steadily at him again. "Much, much more. He
used the Deutsche Marks you changed with him to import drugs and
arms. Last week alone three people died from using badly-cut
heroin, heroin he’d brought in and adulterated to increase his
profits. And a month ago one of my friends died, shot by a gun your
friend Mark had sold. Great business partner, Thomas.”

Thomas said nothing. He thought
back to how Mark had surprised him with details of his tour
activities but also how, in the euphoria of meeting Bettina and
taking her to dinner, he hadn’t checked that he wasn’t being
followed to his meeting with Mark. He dropped his head into his
hands and sat there, remembering Mark’s proposal to smuggle drugs
and his reassurance “it’s been done before”. At least he’d refused
that offer – where would he be now if he’d got into that earlier
with Mark? He remained silent and stared at the floor.

“We really, really wanted him
alive. We’d been after him for months. We knew pretty much what he
was up to but he was too clever at avoiding us. He changed his
associates frequently, changed his appearance too, and he was very
difficult to track. It was pure chance that you guided us to him.
If it hadn't been for the cigarettes you wouldn't have been
followed. And if it had been a commonplace transaction with almost
anyone else, nothing much would have happened. You'd have been
picked up probably, scared a bit, maybe pushed around to see if
there was anything interesting you were hiding, but that would have
been it." She got up and walked to the window and looked
out.

"Once we saw who you were meeting
we had no choice. We had to act. Our agents shot to stop the car
and arrest you both, or at least him, but it seems one of the
bullets hit him in the head – that’s why the car crashed, why you
were knocked out and your face mashed up a bit. We rushed him to
hospital, St Hedwig’s, but it was too late. But don’t blame
yourself for any of that part – if he hadn’t made a run for it he’d
be alive now. " Her voice had softened but now took on again its
hard edge. "Your mistake was dealing with him in the first place,
helping to fund his drug peddling and his arms trading, basically
bringing him the hard currency which made him a fortune by
destroying other people’s lives. I wish he were still alive so that
we could interrogate him fully, close off some loose ends, but at
least now there’s going to be a few who’ll have more years of life
than his antics would have allowed them otherwise.”

Thomas sat silent again,
digesting this information. He supposed it was true but perhaps it
was exaggerated, further evidence of Bettina’s
duplicity.

“Then why am I here? You’ve got
what you wanted.”

“Yes, we were going to let you
go, once it seemed clear that your connection with Romer wasn't
that of an equal. Westerners get caught all the time smuggling
currency, even if it’s usually for less than the impressive amounts
you were dealing in. As I said, we would have scared you, maybe
stuck you in prison for a bit to get the point across and warned
you not to try it again.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Because of Romer Dieter joined
the case. That was your bad luck. Dieter saw your documents,
thought your unusual surname was familiar, decided it was worth
investigating you further. That's what he's good at, having
hunches, joining things together. He checked up and realised that
you were Albert Wundart’s elder son. It was obvious then that your
family would have good connections in the Western financial and
political worlds and that you could be really useful to us. That
was too good a chance to pass over. I did try to dissuade him,
asked him just to let you go like anyone else." She was quiet for a
moment. "Maybe I felt kind of responsible, I guess.”

Thomas laughed
angrily.

“Fuck off! Don’t give me that
shit about trying to help me. Maybe you can fool Camille, maybe
even Stephan, but not me. I know you now. You’re a cynical liar. I
expect you enjoy hurting others and seeing them suffer.”

“Think what you want, Thomas. We
don’t have to be friends. You don’t have to believe what I tell
you. But you don’t know me at all, so you’re really in no position
to judge. And just for the record, I really didn’t plan to harm
you, and nothing I told Camille or Stephan on Friday was a lie.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said what I did but I kind of took time off
from being an agent. I actually liked your friends. I had a good
evening then. And everything I said to them was true.”

She picked up a briefcase and put
it on the desk in the centre of the room, then opened it and took
out some documents.

“Now, if you’ve finished your
insults and accusations, let’s get on with the
briefing.”

She crossed her arms, leant
forward and waited for Thomas to move his chair to the other side
of the desk.

“Screw you!” Thomas retorted.
“Goddamn it, Bettina, you’re ruining my life and you act as if this
is of no concern at all to you. As if it just happened of itself.
As if you had nothing to do with it. You talk about ‘duty’ as if
that excuses all this, as if that gives you a right to make me a
spy for this shitty country against my own.”

Bettina unfolded her arms, passed
her open right hand over her eyes and then down across her mouth,
stared up for a moment at the ceiling and then back, hard, at
Thomas. Her face turned livid in a flash of anger, her nostrils
flared and her mouth tightened as she breathed in hard, and Thomas
dropped his gaze, unable to meet the force of her fury.

“You were the one doing something
illegal. You were the one acting criminally. You seem to have
forgotten that black-market currency trading is a serious crime.
You were facing a good period in jail for that alone. And if we’d
shown a connection with Romer’s wider activities, tied you in with
his drug dealing for example, you’d have been ten years older at
least, fifteen or twenty maybe, before you saw the West again. What
would that have done to your life, your career, your
reputation?”

She paused to take a drink of
water from the tumbler on the desk but Thomas was unable to say
anything. “You knew very well what you were up to. You were the one
funding those heroin deaths. Think about that. You killed my friend
by funding the gun that shot him. Think about that. You believe you
have a God-given right, because you’re from the West, to take
advantage of these poor idiots from the East, right? And you blame
me for doing my duty. Your interest was in nothing but your own
selfish needs, what you could get out of it, what you could get
away with, just how much you could make stealing from others. You
weren't a student funding his studies through harmless
misdemeanours - you were nothing but a squalid little thief and
your activities helped to kill people, to destroy them and their
families. Think about that.” She paused for breath.

“But I didn't mean any harm. I
didn't. Those deaths would have happened anyway. They weren't my
fault.” said Thomas. He’d tried to sound assertive but faced with
Bettina’s now blazing blue eyes had merely felt defensive and even
ashamed, his tone plaintive.

“By your black market antics,
selling DMs at an Ost Mark rate high above the official one, you
were stealing money from the country. That was money coming from
our people's pockets to line yours, Thomas. You’re a thief, Thomas,
nothing but a shitty little thief. You were stealing from people
who already had very little, who were a lot poorer than you, even
as a student. Was that moral? You were funding criminals,
facilitating those heroin deaths, the murder of my friend. Not your
fault, you say, can't blame me!" she laughed harshly. "Didn't mean
any harm!" She shook her head about in parody. "Given the
consequences, is that something to feel proud of? Go on, tell me
what a big man it makes you feel now. They're dead, Thomas, dead.”
She turned her head suddenly away from him, looked down and away
and put her hand over her face.

There was silence and Thomas
could think of no adequate response. Bettina was breathing heavily.
Despite himself, he was impressed with her fury and the strength
behind it and now starting to feel ashamed. She turned sharply
round again.

“You haven’t changed a tiny bit.
Now you’re out of prison, you’re the same arrogant, egocentric,
selfish Westerner you were when I first met you. And to think I
even tried convincing Dieter to let you go. Where you are now,
you’ve no one but yourself to blame. Step out of line again and,
trust me, you’ll see how bad it can really get.”

Bettina turned abruptly and
stared out of the window again, leaving Thomas dumbfounded, his
emotions in turmoil. He noticed that her eyes were glistening and
in a moment she she scrunched them hard and wiped them with a
handkerchief. Now truly ashamed, he sat on the chair and for a long
time neither of them spoke. She stared out of the
window.

“Look. Ummm, maybe, I guess, umm,
maybe I overreacted a bit. It’s just, it’s just that I ... , I ...
”

“I know. It’s not a great
position to be in. That I understand. But you’ve made the right
choice. Dieter would have let you rot in jail.”

Thomas could think of nothing
more to say.

"I know you still feel sore about
what’s happened." she continued. "I don’t like it much either but
it’s where we are. We can’t change that. We’re going to be together
a great deal - we can either fight each other all the time or work
out a way of engaging professionally. Even if we can't again become
friends maybe we can at least work together civilly.” She started
to stretch out her hand then dropped it and for a period looked at
him.

Eventually he nodded slightly,
saying nothing, then sighed. “Maybe. OK. Maybe.”

“What do you want to discuss?” he
asked.

“Let’s go over the information
we’d like you to get from Stephan. And from anyone else there who
might be helpful.” She handed him a sheet of paper with a list of
questions. “You need to memorise these - not by rote but to be
clear about what you have to find out. Leave these papers behind
when you go. And I have to remind you again not to give the
slightest hint of what you’re doing. Dieter has told you what will
happen if anyone discovers what you're up to. And it will happen,
believe me, Dieter is someone who keeps his word. You have to
understand that.”

They talked for nearly an hour,
some of it role playing with Bettina as Stephan, which Thomas had
disliked and handled mostly in a surly manner. Towards the end
Dieter came in. “It’s in both our interests that you succeed.” he
said. “The better you help us the quicker you’ll be left to get on
with your own life." He smiled and handed Thomas a stylish and
expensive looking black leather briefcase with, Thomas was touched
to see, the initials ‘T W’ discreetly blocked in gold on the front.
"And as you’re going to the hub of West German commerce I thought
it might be good for you to look the part of a rising young
banker.” Inside was a return ticket on the morning flight to
Frankfurt from Berlin’s Tegel airport in exactly a week's time,
together with the essential letter of exit
authorisation.