Yesterday's Spy (8 page)

Through the bead curtain I could see a patch of sunlight on the scaly brickwork of the alley. But inside, the room was as dark as night. An ornate table-lamp at one end of the bar made a golden spot on each of the bottles lined up behind the counter, and gave just enough light for the Princess to see the cash register.

‘Come and sit here, Charlie darling,' she said, but her eyes were fixed on Colonel Schlegel. Obediently, I took the bar stool she indicated. Schlegel sat down, too. I put my arm round the Princess and gave her rouged and powdered cheek a circumspect kiss.

‘Rapist!' said the Princess.

A girl appeared from out of nowhere and put her hands on the counter to show us how willing she was to serve expensive drinks.

‘Underberg,' said Schlegel, ‘and soda.'

‘And Charlie will have Scotch,' said the Princess. ‘So will I.'

The girl served the drinks and, without discussing the subject, put it all on my bill. Schlegel had the coupler at his feet and I noticed the way he kept his shoe pressed against it to be sure it was not removed.

‘Does your friend know that you were here in the war, Charlie?'

‘Yes, he knows,' I said.

‘What war was that, Charlie?' said Schlegel.

The Princess pretended not to hear Schlegel. She craned her neck to look in the fly-specked mirror behind the bar, so that she could make adjustments to her rouge and eye make-up.

‘We had good times, didn't we, Charlie? We had good times as well as bad ones.' She turned to face us again. ‘I can remember nights when we sat along this bar counter, with the German sentries walking along the sea-front there. Guns in my cellar and the wireless set in a wine barrel. My God! When I think of the risks we took.'

‘You knew this guy Champion then?' Schlegel asked her.

‘And I liked him. I still do like him, although I haven't seen him for years. A gentleman of the old sort.' She looked at Schlegel as he swilled down his Underberg and then crunched the ice-cubes in his teeth. ‘If you know what I mean,' she added.

‘Yeah, well, there's a lot of definitions,' said Schlegel affably, ‘and most of them are obscene. So you liked him, eh?'

‘Well, at least he didn't betray us,' said the Princess.

‘Did anyone?' I said.

‘That filthy little Claude betrayed us,' said the Princess.

‘Claude
l'avocat
?
I saw him only yesterday.'

‘Here? The little swine is here?' shouted the Princess angrily. ‘He'll get killed if he comes here to Villefranche.' She clasped her beads and twisted them against her neck, staring at me as if angry that I didn't understand. ‘If only I'd kept the newspaper clipping.'

‘About Claude?'

‘He got a medal – an iron cross or something – he was working for the German police all the time. His real name is Claude Winkler, or some name like that. His mother was French, they say. He betrayed Marius and old Madame Baroni and poor Steve Champion, too.'

I drank my whisky. ‘All that time and he was working for the Abwehr.'

‘The Abwehr – how could I forget that word,' said the Princess.

‘And they let us go on functioning,' I said. ‘That was cunning.'

‘Yes, if they'd arrested us all, others would have replaced us. It was clever of them to let us continue.'

‘So Claude was a German,' I said. ‘When I think of all those months …'

‘And the RAF escape-route,' said the Princess. ‘They let that continue, too.'

I nodded. ‘As long as the flyers came through here, London would be convinced that all was well.'

‘I would kill him,' said the Princess. ‘If he came in this bar now, I'd kill him.'

‘Claude Winkler,' said Schlegel, as the Princess got up from the bar stool in order to pour more drinks for us. ‘Do you know what he does now?'

‘Yes,' said the Princess. ‘He still works for the Boche Secret Police.' She poured drinks for us. ‘The nerve of the man! To come back here again.'

I put my hand over my glass. She poured whisky for herself, and this time Schlegel too had whisky.

‘I'll kill him if he comes in here,' she said again. ‘People think I'm a silly old woman, but I'll do it, I promise you.'

‘Claude
l'avocat
,' I said. There were more tourists now, peering into the bars, reading the menus and looking at the crude daubs that the ‘artists' sold on the waterfront. None of them came into this bar: it was a dump, just as Schlegel said. Fly-specked old bottles of watered-down cognac, and re-labelled champagne. Bar girls with fat legs and unseeing eyes. And upstairs, broken beds, dirty counterpanes and a ‘badger man' who came in and shouted ‘That's my wife!' before even your pants were down.

‘So Claude betrayed us,' I said.

‘Are you all right?' said the Princess.

‘I'm all right,' I said. ‘Why?'

‘You look like you are going to be sick,' she said. If you work in a bar for thirty years, you develop a sharp eye for people who feel sick.

‘We didn't just
want
to murder him; we planned the killing.'

Serge Frankel did not look up. He put the big magnifying glass over the envelope and examined the stamps carefully. Then he moved it to look at the franking marks. ‘Yes, we planned it,' he said. He rubbed his eyes and passed the envelope to me. ‘Take a look at that cancellation. What does it say?'

I leaned across the desk, careful not to disturb the trays and the tweezers and the small fluorescent lamp that he used to detect paper repairs and forgeries. I looked closely at the envelope. The stamping machine had not been applied evenly. One side of the circular mark was very faint. ‘“Varick St Sta …” Could it be Varick Street Station?'

‘Can you make out the date?'

‘May something nineteen thirty.'

‘Yes, well that's what it should be.' He picked it up, using only the tips of his fingers. It was a foolscap-size cream envelope, with three large US stamps on it and a big diamond-shaped rubber stamp that said ‘First Europe Pan-America Round Flight.
Graf Zeppelin
'.

‘Is it very valuable?' I asked.

He slid it into a clear plastic sleeve and clipped it into a large album with others. ‘Only for those who want such things,' he said. ‘Yes, we planned to kill Claude
l'avocat
. That was in 1947. He gave evidence at one of the Hamburg trials. Pina saw it in a Paris newspaper.'

‘But you did nothing.'

‘Oh, it wasn't quite like that. Our bitterness was based upon our natural aversion for the betrayer – as yours is now. But Claude did not betray anyone. He was a German. He passed himself off as a Frenchman in order to help his own country …'

‘Sophistry!'

‘Can you remember Claude's accent when he was working with us?'

‘He said he was from the north.'

‘And none of us had travelled very much, or we might have detected quite a bit of Boche there, eh?'

‘None of us had travelled enough – except for Marius. So he made sure that Marius died.'

‘I think so,' said Serge calmly. ‘But Claude's life was in danger all the time he was with us, did you ever think of that?'

‘They were our people, Serge. And they died in squalid camps and torture chambers. Am I supposed to admire your calm and rational attitude? Well, I don't. And perhaps it would be better if you stopped being so godlike …'

‘We Jews, you mean?'

‘I don't know what I meant.'

‘This is not in character, Charles. You are the one who stayed so calm. Without you we would have been out on the streets fighting, instead of silently building almost the only network that lasted till the end.' He cocked his head. ‘Are you now saying that was wrong?'

I didn't reply. I picked up some of his valuable envelopes and went through the motions of studying them.

‘You're fighting the wrong enemy,' said Serge. ‘That's all over, that war! I'm more interested in what our friend Champion is doing with his import and export business with the Arabs.'

‘Guns, you mean?'

‘Who said anything about guns?' Behind him was the skyline of old Nice. The afternoon was dying a slow death, spilling its gory sunlight all over the shiny rooftops.

‘You've resurrected the old network, haven't you?' I said.

He pointed to a large lamp that occupied most of the sofa upon which I was sitting. ‘Move that infra-red lamp, if it's in your way. This weather is bad for my arthritis.'

‘The Guernica network …' I said. He watched me as I pieced together my suspicions and the hints and half-truths that only now began to make sense to me. ‘You're playing at spies … for money? … for old times' sake? … Because you all hate Champion? Tell me, why?'

He didn't deny it, but that didn't prove I was right, for he was not the sort of man who would leap in to correct your grammar – especially when there might be a deportation order awarded for the right answer.

‘Curiosity – even nosiness – is not yet against the law, even in France,' he said.

‘I saw Champion today,' I admitted.

‘Yes,' said Serge, ‘at the
Herren Klub
.'

It was a shrewd jibe, not because it described the club or its members, but because it provided an image of the
Fressenwelle
– Mercedes limousines, silent chauffeurs, astrakhan collars, the whiff of Havana and a muffled belch – I'd never before realized how well Champion fitted into such a scene.

‘You are having him followed?' I asked.

Serge picked up an envelope and removed it from its clear plastic cover. ‘I sent this to a customer last month. He complained that its condition was not good enough for his collection. Today I had it back from a second customer who says it looks too new to be genuine.' He looked up and smiled at me to make sure I shared the joke.

‘Yes,' I said. It was no good pushing him.

‘It's a pre-adhesive cover – 1847 – by ship from Port Mauritius to Bordeaux. It got that ship-letter cachet in southern Ireland. It was postmarked again in Dublin as a backstamp, and then got stamped at London and Boulogne before arriving in Bordeaux.' He held it close to the desk light. It was a yellowed piece of paper, folded and sealed so as to make a packet upon which the address had been written. On the back of the folded sheet there was a mess of rubber-stamped names and dates and a cracked segment of a red seal.

Serge looked at me.

‘He thinks it's fake?' I said finally.

‘He says the watermarks on the paper are wrong for this date … And the shape of the Dublin stamp … that too he doesn't like.'

‘What do
you
say?' I asked politely.

He took it by the two top corners and pulled, so that the sheet tore slowly right down the middle. There was an almost imperceptible hesitation at the bottom and then the two halves separated, and the ragged edge flashed in the lamplight.

‘He was quite correct,' said Serge. ‘It was a forgery.'

‘Did you have to destroy it?'

‘If I kept it here, and a client wanted such a thing … How can I be sure I wouldn't yield to temptation?'

I smiled. It was not easy to think of this Spartan yielding to temptation.

‘I was not even fifteen when I first joined the Communist Party. I was so proud. I slept with that card under my pillow, and in the daytime it was pinned inside my vest. I've given my whole life to the party. You know I have, Charles. You know I have.'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘The risks I ran, the times I was beaten with police truncheons, the bullets in my leg, the pneumonia I caught during the Spanish winter fighting … all this I don't regret. A youth must have something to offer his life to.' He picked up the torn pieces of paper as if for a moment regretting that he'd destroyed the forged cover. ‘When they told me about the Stalin–Hitler pact I went round explaining it to the men of lesser faith. The war you know about. Czechoslovakia – well, I'd never liked the Czechs, and when the Russian tanks invaded Hungary … well, they were asking for it, those Hungarians – I ask you, who ever met an honest Hungarian?'

I smiled at his little joke.

‘But I am a Jew,' said Frankel. ‘They are putting my people into concentration camps, starving them, withdrawing the right to work from anyone who asks to go to Israel. When these pigs who call themselves socialists went to the aid of the Arabs … then I knew that no matter what kind of Communist I was, I was first and foremost a Jew. A Jew! Do you understand now?'

‘And Champion … ?'

‘You come and visit me from time to time. You tell me that you are on vacation – I believe you. But I've always wondered about you, Charles. What sort of work does a man like you do in peacetime? You told me once that you were an economist, working for your government. Very well, but now you are asking me discreet questions about Champion, and all the others. So I ask myself if the work you do for your government is perhaps not entirely confined to economics.'

It was like taking a book down from one of these crowded shelves: you couldn't read the fine print until the dust settled. ‘What is Champion up to, then?' I said.

‘You mean, what am I up to?' said Frankel. ‘Everyone knows what Champion is up to: he's an Arab.'

‘And you?'

‘I'm a Jew,' said Frankel. ‘It's as simple as that.'

Geneva. Calvin's great citadel is perched precariously between the grey mountains of France and the grey waters of Lake Geneva. The city, too, is grey: grey stone buildings, grey-uniformed cops, even its money and its politics are grey. Especially its politics.

I looked out through the hotel's spotlessly clean windows, and watched the plume of water that is Geneva's last despairing attempt at gaiety. The tall jet fell back into the lake and hammered the surface into steel. The traffic moving slowly along the lakeside stopped, started and then stopped again. There was no hooting, no flashing headlights, no arguments, no complaining. The citizens of Geneva are as well adjusted as its clocks. It was 10
A
.
M
., but the city was silent except for the rustle of banknotes and the ticking of a couple of billion wristwatches.