Red to Black (18 page)

O
N A FINE CLEAR SUMMER MORNING,
when the outlines of the mountains seem to have been painted on glass, Finn walks up a pleasant leafy road in Cologny, a suburb of Geneva reserved for the world’s wealthy, and its diplomats and the lords of the international agencies and organisations that have taken root in the city. Here they huddle halfway to heaven on a rolling hill above the lake. Above them, neat domestic vineyards embroider the fields all the way to the sky, while below them the city of Geneva stands at the head of the flat blue lawn of its lake.

Finn has parked a small white van at the top of the street, killing the reverberating volume of Elastica as he cuts the engine. In the stunned silence, he walks across the road, turns into a cul de sac that curves in an arc rejoining the road further down from where he’s parked. He wears old blue overalls and carries a metal workman’s box.

He’s already seen the car he is looking for as he drove by. It is a silver grey Lexus with diplomatic plates, parked on the kerb outside
white wrought-iron gates. As he walks back up the hill, without breaking step he takes a roll of black electrical tape from the box, bites into the plastic-tasting end, and pulls off a two-inch strip. When the car is level with him he places the strip in a vertical position at the side of the curved back window and walks on, continuing up to where he parked the van twenty minutes earlier.

He throws the toolbox into the back, switches on the engine and with it the blasting music, and drives back down the hill and into the city. He returns the van to the hire company less than two hours after he’s rented it for cash from a bored representative, and boards a tram by the shopping plaza on the west bank. The tram winds its way up and around a hill, offering glimpses of the lake through side streets, and on to another suburb, south of the city this time, called Chêne Bougeries.

Finn steps off the tram, along with some Scandinavian backpackers, just a few hundred yards from the French border. He walks across the road unchallenged by the border guards, and into the Bar des Douanes, where he sits at a table in the back and orders a black coffee.

It is just after ten o’clock in the morning and the striking blue summer day is visible like a cinema screen from the dark gloom at the back of the bar.

Five minutes later a short, tubby, bearded man wearing jeans and a faded grey T-shirt, and carrying a battered leather knapsack slung over his left shoulder, enters the bar. When they see each other Finn rises from the plastic seat and they embrace in the surprised way the English have, no matter how many times they’ve embraced foreigners. The man grunts an indecipherable and half-suspicious greeting. He sits, orders a coffee and brandy, unrolls a newspaper and slaps it with the back of his hand.

‘Read that,’ he says and, as Finn reads, the man takes a pouch from the leather knapsack and rolls a cigarette from some dry Drum tobacco he grumpily scrapes up from the corners of the pouch.

‘They’re trying to get rid of Stelzer,’ the man says, gesticulating at the newspaper. ‘He’s doing his job too well.’

Finn has met Jean-Claude many times in the past five years. He’s a man at home in one environment and completely at odds with all others. His plane of existence is a dark bar or, best of all, the wreck of his windowless office where he sits on a swivel chair with a torn and dirty nylon seat and hunches over a plywood door that is his desk and is piled with paperwork, ashtrays, half-empty beer bottles, scraps of paper scribbled with telephone numbers, half-drunk cups of coffee and thousands of coloured paperclips he seems to collect like semi-precious stones. His beard is dappled with the white blossom of cigarette ash from the cigarettes he wedges, until long after they’re burnt out, between two brown and very crooked front teeth. His bulbous nose is somehow fitted on to his face, red and greasy, and it doesn’t appear to obey the normal physics of noses.

In any environment other than his office or a bar, Jean-Claude is diminished. Finn walked with him once into the mountains outside Geneva and up there he looked like an ugly troll, with his nose and straggled beard, who’d had his fairy tale ripped out from under him. He seemed to be struggling to come to terms with a landscape that once, in another world perhaps, was his, but had now been tamed by roads and bridges and gas stations and hotels and all the other human forces more progressive than his own.

But in the dark cave of a bar, or of his study, he lost the uncertainty, the unease he felt in the wider, brighter modern world. Finn is the only person who calls Jean-Claude ‘Troll’ to his face.

‘And they’ve just killed my documentary,’ Jean-Claude puffs while Finn finishes reading the article. ‘Help me sell it in England, Finn,’ he says. ‘They’re serious in England,’ he continues, with a nostalgia
for British investigative journalism that is at least thirty years out of date. ‘Anyway, why are you here? What do you want?’

When he senses Jean-Claude has finished with his tirade, Finn looks up from the newspaper, the
Zürcher Zeitung,
and grins broadly. ‘Hello, Troll,’ he says.

‘What the fuck is there to say “Hello” about?’ Jean-Claude grumbles. ‘You’ve read that, haven’t you?’

‘It’s two years,’ Finn laughs. Jean-Claude looks at him in astonishment, as though time is some devilish human construct which now even this, one of his few remaining and trusted friends, has fallen for.

Jean-Claude, Finn told me, would spend a year, two years- ten years, even–tracking one secret money trail through a hundred different destinations until he found where it all began, the hidden owner, the motherlode. He could follow a financial pipeline as a water diviner traces water. His fellow enthusiasts, who Finn imagined as a band of trolls, lived in other Swiss mountain towns, as well as in Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Channel Islands, the Cayman and Virgin Islands. Jean-Claude had spent nearly fifty years obsessed with secret money.

First it was Nazi gold and the stolen cash hoards that found their way out of Germany at the end of the war, then the Camorra-the Naples mafia–and their Sicilian cousins, and then the KGB and Stasi secret money pipelines from East Germany. He has been spending fifteen years by the time Finn meets him on this morning in the Bar des Douanes, looking at the financial networks of Russian front companies and banks which were said to have been wound up when the Wall came down, but which were constructed so intricately, bound so tightly, that no one could be sure- and Jean-Claude, for one, didn’t believe- that they had really been wound up at all; companies like Exodi.

Time was nothing to him. Time, he once told Finn solemnly, was invented by the devil to clog the smooth-running machine that
was God’s natural world. ‘And that,’ Finn had told me, ‘was when he was sober.’

‘Well?’ Finn says. ‘What’s new?’

‘Nothing’s new, you fucking idiot. That’s the point. What do you want?’

‘Maybe this is a good place to start,’ Finn says smiling and looks down at the front page of the
Zürcher Zeitung.

Jean-Claude orders a large brandy the second time around, as if the single one hadn’t really done the trick, and he orders two more coffees and then he remembers he’s forgotten he’s out of tobacco and walks over to the counter and buys another pouch. When he is comfortably surrounded by these props, he looks at Finn balefully.

‘Stelzer’s the best chief prosecutor this country’s ever had,’ he says. ‘So what do they do? Intrigue against him. They’ll have him out by the end of the year. He’s prosecuting the wrong sort of people. Rich crooks, in other words. He’s trying to clean up this sewer of a country. The burghers are aghast. Stelzer’s been stopping dirty money coming over from the East. Russia itself; Kazakhstan and the other central Asian republics; the Caucasus. Tens of billions of laundered cash is getting held up by Stelzer from joining all the other cash that the world’s murderers and half-mad potentates and mafiosi and intelligence creeps like you wish to deposit in our beautiful vaults. Two weeks ago Stelzer said to the parliamentary financial committee–in other words, interested bankers who run the country–that if we accept all these huge, unprecedented sums of black money, we’ll choke on it. They didn’t listen then and they aren’t now.

‘Last week was the final straw. Stelzer had four men arrested coming over the border from Liechtenstein with nearly four billion dollars’ worth of bonds. And you know what they’re saying down at the border post? That Putin himself is a nominee for some of it. I don’t believe it, I can’t believe it. Are they that brazen in the Krem
lin? Anyway, Stelzer had them all arrested, along with that Russian mafioso Mikhas, and locked them up and photographed everyone, as well as the documents.’

Jean-Claude puffs his cigarette, which has gone out a while before. ‘Walking over the fucking border!’ he says, amazed.

Jean-Claude takes a delicate sip from his brandy glass, a gesture that is somehow inappropriate next to his brutal verbal assault.

Jean-Claude only ever drinks less than half of what he buys or what he pours. He simply likes to know it is there.

‘And do you know what I know?’ Jean-Claude demands. ‘Of course you don’t. They’ll replace him with Hutzger. You know Hutzger. Harvard Business School, the Swiss Economic Committee, then the Principality’s financial adviser in Liechtenstein. He’s been in charge of hushing up their criminal activities in Vaduz–perfect training for Switzerland. You know Hutzger, Finn?’

Finn pauses and looks at the surface of the table, as if at some imaginary stain. Hutzger is the name he’s heard from Dieter a year before, the man who laid the false trail for the German intelligence services in their investigation into Exodi.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, what do you know about him?’ Jean-Claude asks sourly.

‘We believe he has contacts with the KGB,’ Finn says.

For the first time, Jean-Claude looks wrong-footed.

‘What did you say?’

Finn doesn’t reply.

Jean-Claude replaces the brandy glass on the table and stares at Finn.

‘Show me that’s true,’ he says at last.

‘Maybe I can, maybe I can’t. But with your help I can do a lot more than that. Putin’s personal funds are a sideshow. I need you, Troll. I need your help.’

There is no indication of assent or otherwise.

‘I have a friend in the mountains,’ Jean-Claude says. ‘He makes
one wristwatch a year. Just one. He spends ten, twelve hours a day perhaps, for a whole year and makes one watch. Then he sells it for two or three hundred thousand dollars. I love this man. He’s a perfectionist, there is madness in him. Switzerland is a perfectionist country, if you hadn’t noticed. It has perfected the art of looking after other people’s money. There are more people employed in Switzerland with the sole purpose of hiding money than there are coal miners in Ukraine. The Swiss are genetically programmed to hide things. The lines of banks along the lake and all the ones dotted around the cantons are just the physical manifestation of what is going on inside their heads.’

He looks directly at Finn. ‘Apart from my house, have you ever been invited into the house of a Swiss out in the mountains?’

‘No.’

‘You see. They hide everything, even when there’s nothing to hide except IKEA furniture. They can’t help it, it’s a disease.’

‘And where there are perfectly hidden things there are also people who are perfect at finding them,’ Finn says.

‘Exactly,’ the Troll says proudly. ‘You make one thing and you make its opposite at the same time. That is normal. Bullets and armour; missiles and radar; tax laws and tax evasion; life and death.’

‘That’s why I want your help.’

‘But will you hide things from me too? I know you and your profession.’

‘You’ll have everything I have.’

‘Then I’ll help you.’

He doesn’t question Finn’s word.

Jean-Claude rummages in his knapsack and takes out a videotape.

‘There,’ he says. ‘That’s my documentary which Swiss TV has refused to broadcast. Look at it soon. But you must go to Liechtenstein. Speak to Pablo in Vaduz. You know Pablo?’

‘I’ve met him with you.’

‘He has an interesting story about Hutzger.’

‘Is Pablo like us?’

‘Maybe, maybe not. I think he can’t help playing both sides. That’s his disease.’

‘Thank you, Jean-Claude.’

Once again the Troll looks at Finn in amazement. He has no concept of gratitude.

‘I need something very specific from you, Troll,’ Finn says. ‘There’s a set of companies. They’re called Exodi, and there’s one of them here in Geneva. I want to know whatever you can find for me about Exodi in Geneva.’

‘Exodi?’ the Troll murmurs. ‘No. I don’t know it. Call on me in a week and we’ll see where we are.’

‘I’ll do that,’ Finn says.

Finn sits on a stone bench by the neatly landscaped quay reserved for Lake Geneva’s pleasure boats. Here the lake narrows to the width of a bridge span and runs off through a lock and into the Rhone.

He watches the man in the light brown polo shirt and Burberry slacks who ushers two small children in front of him and on to the ferry. Sergei must have seen the strip of black tape on his car screen within an hour of Finn leaving it there.

The Russian has been waiting on the far side of the road from the quay, buying ice creams and balloons for the kids until the ferry is almost ready to depart. He joins the end of the now-depleted queue, so he will know there is nobody boarding behind him- or, if anybody does board, he will have a picture of a face clearly in his mind. And he will know to abort.

But nobody comes on behind him and the ferry churns the water with its bow propeller and, crablike, leaves the quay in a white wash, heading up the lake for several stops on the way to Vevey.

Finn notes the ferry’s destination again, folds the tourist map
he’s needlessly carrying, stands up and tucks it into a back pocket. He walks across the intersection of three roads that filter towards the bridges that join Geneva’s two parts at the lake’s apex and picks up the one taxi that stands at the rank.