Cover designer’s note

Some years ago I attended a design congress in Oaxaca, Mexico, where for a few pesos I purchased some wonderful papier mâché masks, my favourite being the umbrella salesmen, a moustachioed gentleman with a gold tooth. This image seemed to fit perfectly as a matching half to Len Deighton’s protagonist Bernard Samson’s face in Mexico Set. This two-faced quality seemed, to me, to speak volumes for the nature of the business that Bernard is in, and also to the conflicted nature of his character.

Some time later I was invited to speak at a design conference in Queretaro, Mexico. To my delight the event took place during the festival of ‘Día de los Muertos’, ‘The Day of the Dead’, during which time many wonderful related artefacts are sold. One of these items comes from the folk art of ‘papel picado’, the brightly coloured tissue paper-cuts. I thought that the image of a skeleton reading a book would be a most appropriate illustration for this book’s back cover.

At the heart of every one of the nine books in this triple trilogy is Bernard Samson, so I wanted to come up with a neat way of visually linking them all. When the reader has collected all nine books and displays them together in sequential order, the books’ spines will spell out Samson’s name in the form of a blackmail note made up of airline baggage tags. The tags were drawn from my personal collection, and are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.

Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

LEN DEIGHTON

Mexico Set

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd 1984

Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1984

Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2010

Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2010

Cover design and photography © Arnold Schwartzman 2010

Thanks are due to the following for permission to quote lines from ‘Bye-Bye Blackbird’:

The Remick Music Corporation, New York and Detroit, and EMI Music Publishing Limited,

London. Copyright © 1926, 1948

Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780008124991

Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007387199

Version: 2017-09-07

Contents

Cover

Cover Designer’s Note

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Len Deighton

About the Publisher

Introduction

During the First World War the neutral Netherlands had been the arena in which the rival spy services brawled. In the Second World War it was Portugal that served that purpose. In the Cold War the arena eventually became Mexico. It was in safe houses in Mexico City where the officers of the GRU and those of the KGB clashed, reasoned or sometimes socialized with their Allied opposite numbers. For Moscow, Washington and London these contacts were vital, but for the personnel stationed there the job was a consignment to the promotional rubbish heap. No interesting memoirs were written by the men who spent the Cold War years in Mexico. No indiscreet revelations were spilled into the well-paid serializations that sold the newspapers of that time. Mexico City only came into the headlines as a stopover for Lee Harvey Oswald when the assassination of President John Kennedy was being investigated.

The very first time I visited Mexico I was staying at the YMCA in Los Angeles. I was a penniless art student; well, perhaps that overstates it: let’s say I was living from hand to mouth and being saved from starvation by the care and consideration given me by the mother of an American artist I knew in London. Left to my own devices on my last day I ate supper from a hot-dog stand. Los Angeles was not the gourmet’s paradise that it later became, and street food was America’s answer to the fugu fish. I spent the night groaning in the toilets and when daylight finally arrived I was feeling very ill. In my pocket I had a Greyhound Bus ticket that would take me a few hundred miles into a country I knew nothing about and, with that physical stamina and grim determination that is the currency of the young and foolish, I dragged myself down to the bus depot, threw myself across the back seat and closed my eyes. You may wish to note that the back seat of a Greyhound Bus is not the best place to be if you are alternately praying for help and wishing to die. The sort of buses that are built for Mexico are fitted with robust and unyielding suspensions. The rearmost part of the chassis takes an undue proportion of the punishment that comes with loose surface roads and pot-holes. I recall every jolt of that journey but towards the end of it I was sitting upright and looking out of the window trying to see through the grime and the dust. As always, the Greyhound Bus got me there. During the nineteen fifties I did so many thousands of miles on Grey Buses that they used me in their advertising.

I survived the journey. I climbed down from the bus into the sweaty noon of Mexico’s west coast, spotted a bench and a Coca Cola stand and I started writing some notes for my diary. I’m told that nowadays this region of Mexico is packed with luxury hotels, motor-yachts and marinas but back in the nineteen fifties it was just a succession of small villages punctuating empty stretches of bleak, cactus strewn landscape. But the traveller counting the pennies gets a far more authentic impression of a country than any luxury tour can provide. The Mexicans were kind and generous to me and, if the steady diet of beans and tortillas I ate became monotonous, I knew that was only because I wasn’t as hungry as those around me. I felt at home. From that time I have always enjoyed being with Mexicans, and nowadays I am delighted to have become a part of a kind and joyful Mexican family.

I have always contrived to visit places at their least attractive time. Ski resorts in high summer, Asia when the monsoons come, Algeria in the annual rainstorms and the French Riviera when the restaurants are shuttered and the casinos being renovated. It may sound perverse but I can only get under the skin of foreign destinations when the lipstick and powder has been set aside and the spots and pimples are there for all to see. So, when I researched Mexico Set I saw it in the stormy season when the steely thunderclouds reach down lower and lower upon the thirsty earth until torrential rain arrives to lash the streets with fury.

Mexico Set opens with Bernard Samson and Dicky Cruyer in Mexico City. For Bernard the problems are piling higher and higher. While Berlin Game saw Bernard battered by professional dilemmas we now see the complex uncertainties of his private life. In this book I am able to do a few of the things that made the whole nine-book project so worthwhile for me. Instead of going back to start all over again with a new story I could take my characters deeper and deeper into the lives that, while being so weird and wonderful, are burdened with the domestic everyday events that we all endure.

Every writer wants to maximize everything: intriguing characters, labyrinthine plot, humorous asides, unfolding landscape, crisp dialogue. But now I didn’t have to cram all that tightly together; having the space granted by the planned future books gave me a freedom to do something better than I had ever done before. Of course every story worth reading has all of the above. Berlin Game with its dénouement set the scene. After that Mexico Set used arguments, anger and confidences to reveal new sides of the characters and their shifting attitudes to each other. Many important characters arrive in subsequent volumes but by the end of this book all the stars are on the stage. Yet in this book – and I know this is going to sound corny – Mexico is the star. It is a wonderful country, its cruel landscape tormented by its amazing weather patterns. With the ever-present danger of ending up writing a travel guide dominated by weather reports, I have kept Mexico as a persistent backdrop to the story of Bernard Samson.

Are the stories based on real people? Scott Fitzgerald argued with Ernest Hemingway about the nature of fiction. Writing to a friend who was deeply offended by the way she was depicted in his book, Fitzgerald said: ‘In my theory, utterly opposite to Ernest’s, about fiction i.e. that it takes half a dozen people to make a synthesis strong enough to create a fiction character – in that theory, or rather in despite of it, I used you again and again in Tender [is the Night].’ And so it is that most writers take manners and gestures and other bits and pieces from the people they meet, they steal slices from the landscape, relive the pain and joy of their experience. In this way the writer pushes beyond reality in pursuit of some sort of truth.

Len Deighton, 2010

1

‘Some of these people want to get killed,’ said Dicky Cruyer, as he jabbed the brake pedal to avoid hitting a newsboy. The kid grinned as he slid between the slowly moving cars, flourishing his newspapers with the controlled abandon of a fan dancer. ‘Six Face Firing Squad’; the headlines were huge and shiny black. ‘Hurricane Threatens Veracruz.’ A smudgy photo of street fighting in San Salvador covered the whole front of a tabloid.

It was late afternoon. The streets shone with that curiously bright shadowless light that precedes a storm. All six lanes of traffic crawling along the Insurgentes halted, and more newsboys danced into the road, together with a woman selling flowers and a kid with lottery tickets trailing from a roll like toilet paper.

Picking his way between the cars came a handsome man in old jeans and checked shirt. He was accompanied by a small child. The man had a Coca Cola bottle in his fist. He swigged at it and then tilted his head back again, looking up into the heavens. He stood erect and immobile, like a bronze statue, before igniting his breath so that a great ball of fire burst from his mouth.

‘Bloody hell!’ said Dicky. ‘That’s dangerous.’

‘It’s a living,’ I said. I’d seen the fire-eaters before. There was always one of them performing somewhere in the big traffic jams. I switched on the car radio but electricity in the air blotted out the music with the sounds of static. It was very hot. I opened the window but the sudden stink of diesel fumes made me close it again. I held my hand against the air-conditioning outlet but the air was warm.

Again the fire-eater blew a huge orange balloon of flame into the air.

‘For us,’ explained Dicky. ‘Dangerous for people in the cars. Flames like that, with all these petrol fumes … can you imagine?’ There was a slow roll of thunder. ‘If only it would rain,’ said Dicky. I looked at the sky, the low black clouds trimmed with gold. The huge sun was coloured bright red by the city’s ever-present blanket of smog, and squeezed tight between the glass buildings that dripped with its light.

‘Who got this car for us?’ I said. A motorcycle, its pillion piled high with cases of beer, weaved precariously between the cars, narrowly missing the flower seller.

‘One of the embassy people,’ said Dicky. He released the brake and the big blue Chevrolet rolled forward a few feet and then all the traffic stopped again. In any town north of the border this factory-fresh car would not have drawn a second glance. But Mexico City is the place old cars go to die. Most of those around us were dented and rusty, or they were crudely repainted in bright primary colours. ‘A friend of mine lent it to us.’

‘I might have guessed,’ I said.

‘It was short notice. They didn’t know we were coming until the day before yesterday. Henry Tiptree – the one who met us at the airport – let us have it. It was a special favour because I knew him at Oxford.’

‘I wish you hadn’t known him at Oxford; then we could have rented one from Hertz – with air-conditioning that worked.’

‘So what can we do …’ said Dicky irritably ‘… take it back and tell him it’s not good enough for us?’

We watched the fire-eater blow another balloon of flame while the small boy hurried from driver to driver, collecting a peso here and there for his father’s performance.

Dicky took some Mexican coins from the slash pocket of his denim jacket and gave them to the child. It was Dicky’s faded work suit, his cowboy boots and curly hair that had attracted the attention of the tough-looking woman immigration officer at Mexico City airport. It was only the first-class labels on his expensive baggage, and the fast talking of Dicky’s Counsellor friend from the embassy, that saved him from the indignity of a body search.

Dicky Cruyer was a curious mixture of scholarship and ruthless ambition, but he was insensitive, and this was often his undoing. His insensitivity to people, place and atmosphere could make him seem a clown instead of the cool sophisticate that was his own image of himself. But that didn’t make him any less terrifying as friend or foe.

The flower seller bent down, tapped on the window glass and waved at Dicky. He shouted ‘Vamos!’ It was almost impossible to see her face behind the unwieldy armful of flowers. Here were blossoms of all colours, shapes and sizes. Flowers for weddings and flowers for dinner hostesses, flowers for mistresses and flowers for suspicious wives.

The traffic began moving again. Dicky shouted ‘Vamos!’ much louder.

The woman saw me reaching into my pocket for money and separated a dozen long-stemmed pink roses from the less expensive marigolds and asters. ‘Maybe some flowers would be something to give to Werner’s wife,’ I said.

Dicky ignored my suggestion. ‘Get out of the way,’ he shouted at the old woman, and the car leaped forward. The old woman jumped clear.

‘Take it easy, Dicky, you nearly knocked her over.’

‘Vamos! I told her; vamos. They shouldn’t be in the road. Are they all crazy? She heard me all right.’

‘Vamos means “Okay, let’s go”,’ I said. ‘She thought you wanted to buy some.’

‘In Mexico it also means scram,’ said Dicky driving up close to a white VW bus in front of us. It was full of people and boxes of tomatoes, and its dented bodywork was caked with mud in the way that cars become when they venture on to country roads at this rainy time of year. Its exhaust-pipe was newly bound up with wire, and the rear panel had been removed to help cool the engine. The sound of its fan made a very loud whine so that Dicky had to speak loudly to make himself heard. ‘Vamos; scram. They say it in cowboy films.’

‘Maybe she doesn’t go to cowboy films,’ I said.

‘Just keep looking at the street map.’

‘It’s not a street map; it’s just a map. It only shows the main streets.’

‘We’ll find it all right. It’s off Insurgentes.’

‘Do you know how big Mexico City is? Insurgentes is about thirty-five miles long,’ I said.

‘You look on your side and I’ll look this side. Volkmann said it’s in the centre of town.’ He sniffed. ‘Mexico, they call it. No one here says “Mexico City”. They call the town Mexico.’

I didn’t answer; I put away the little coloured town plan and stared out at the crowded streets. I was quite happy to be driven round the town for an hour or two if that’s what Dicky wanted.

Dicky said, ‘Somewhere in the centre of town would mean the Paseo de la Reforma near the column with the golden angel. At least that’s what it would mean to any tourist coming here for the first time. And Werner Volkmann and his wife Zena are here for the first time. Right?’

‘Werner said it was going to be a second honeymoon.’

‘With Zena I would have thought one honeymoon would be enough,’ said Dicky.

‘More than enough,’ I said.

Dicky said, ‘I’ll kill your bloody Werner if he’s brought us out from London on a wild-goose chase.’

‘It’s a break from the office,’ I said. Werner had become my Werner I noticed and would remain so if things went wrong.

‘For you it is,’ said Dicky. ‘You’ve got nothing to lose. Your desk will be waiting for you when you get back. But there’s a dozen people in that building scrambling round for my job. This will give Bret just the chance he needs to take over my work. You realize that, don’t you?’

‘How could Bret want to take your job, Dicky? Bret is senior to you.’

The traffic was moving at about five miles an hour. A small dirty-faced child in the back of the VW bus was staring at Dicky with great interest. The insolent stare seemed to disconcert him. Dicky turned to look at me. ‘Bret is looking for a job that would suit him; and my job would suit him. Bret will have nothing to do now that his committee is being wound up. There’s already an argument about who will have his office space. And about who will have that tall blonde typist who wears the white sweaters.’

‘Gloria?’ I said.

‘Oh? Don’t say you’ve been there?’

‘Us workers stick together, Dicky,’ I said.

‘Very funny,’ said Dicky. ‘If Bret takes over my job, he’ll chase your arse. Working for me will seem like a holiday. I hope you realize that, old pal.’

I didn’t know that the brilliant career of Bret was taking a downturn to the point where Dicky was running scared. But Dicky had taken a PhD in office politics so I was prepared to believe him. ‘This is the Pink Zone,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you park in one of these hotels and get a cab?’

Dicky seemed relieved at the idea of letting a cab driver find Werner Volkmann’s apartment but, being Dicky, he had to argue against it for a couple of minutes. As he pulled into the slow lane the dirty child in the VW smiled and then made a terrible face at us. Dicky glanced at me and said, ‘Are you pulling faces at that child? For God’s sake, act your age, Bernard.’ Dicky was in a bad mood, and talking about his job had made him more touchy.

He turned off Insurgentes on to a side-street and cruised eastwards until we found a car-park under one of the big hotels. As we went down the ramp into the darkness he switched the headlights on. This was a different world. This was where the Mercedes, Cadillacs and Porsches lived in comfort, shiny with health, smelling of new leather and guarded by two armed security men. One of them pushed a ticket under a wiper and lifted the barrier so that we could drive through.

‘So your school chum Werner spots a KGB heavy here in town. Why did Controller (Europe) insist that I come out here at this stinking time of year?’ Dicky was cruising very slowly round the dark garage, looking for a place to park.

‘Werner didn’t spot Erich Stinnes,’ I said. ‘Werner’s wife spotted him. And there’s a departmental alert for him. There’s a space.’

‘Too small; this is a big car. Alert? You don’t have to tell me that, old boy. I signed the alert, Remember me? Controller of German Stations? But I’ve never seen Erich Stinnes. I wouldn’t know Erich Stinnes from the man in the moon. You’re the one who can identify him. Why do I have to come?’

‘You’re here to decide what we do. I’m not senior enough or reliable enough to make decisions. What about there, next to the white Mercedes?’

‘Ummmmm,’ said Dicky. He had trouble parking the car in the space marked out by the white lines. One of the security guards – a big poker-faced man in starched khakis and carefully polished high boots – came to watch us. He stood arms akimbo, staring, while Dicky went backwards and forwards trying to squeeze between the white convertible and a concrete stanchion that bore brightly coloured patches of enamel from other cars. ‘Did you really make out with that blonde in Bret’s office?’ said Dicky as he abandoned his task and reversed into another space marked ‘reserved’.

‘Gloria? I thought everyone knew about me and Gloria,’ I said. In fact I knew her no better than Dicky did but I couldn’t resist the chance to needle him. ‘My wife’s left me. I’m a free man again.’

‘Your wife defected,’ said Dicky spitefully. ‘Your wife is working for the bloody Russkies.’

‘That’s over and done with,’ I said. I didn’t want to talk about my wife or my children or any other problems. And if I did want to talk about them Dicky would be the last person I’d choose to confide in.

‘You and Fiona were very close,’ said Dicky accusingly.

‘It’s not a crime to be in love with your wife,’ I said.

‘Taboo subject, eh?’ It pleased Dicky to touch a nerve and get a reaction. I should have known better than to respond to his taunts. I was guilty by association. I’d become a probationer once more and I’d remain one until I proved my loyalty all over again. Nothing had been said to me officially, but Dicky’s little flash of temper was not the first indication of what the department really felt.

‘I didn’t come on this trip to discuss Fiona,’ I said.

‘Don’t keep bickering,’ said Dicky. ‘Let’s go and talk to your friend Werner and get it finished. I can’t wait to be out of this filthy hell-hole. January or February; that’s the time when people who know what’s what go to Mexico. Not in the middle of the rainy season.’

Dicky opened the door of the car and I slid across the seat to get out his side. ‘Prohibido aparcar,’ said the security guard, and with arms folded he planted himself in our path.

‘What’s that?’ said Dicky, and the man said it again. Dicky smiled and explained, in his schoolboy Spanish, that we were residents of the hotel, we would only be leaving the car there for half an hour, and we were engaged on very important business.

‘Prohibido aparcar,’ said the guard stolidly

‘Give him some money, Dicky,’ I said. ‘That’s all he wants.’

The security guard looked from Dicky to me and stroked his large black moustache with the ball of his thumb. He was a big man, as tall as Dicky and twice as wide.

‘I’m not going to give him anything,’ said Dicky. ‘I’m not going to pay twice.’

‘Let me do it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got small money here.’

‘Stay out of this,’ said Dicky. ‘You’ve got to know how to handle these people.’ He stared at the guard. ‘Nada! Nada! Nada! Entiende?’

The guard looked down at our Chevrolet and then plucked the wiper between finger and thumb and let it fall back against the glass with a thump. ‘He’ll wreck the car,’ I said. ‘This is not the time to get into a hassle you can’t win.’

‘I’m not frightened of him,’ said Dicky.

‘I know you’re not, but I am.’ I got in front of him before he took a swing at the guard. There was a hard, almost vicious, streak under Dicky’s superficial charm, and he was a keen member of the Foreign Office judo club. Dicky wasn’t frightened of anything; that’s why I didn’t like working with him. I folded some paper money into the guard’s ready hand and pushed Dicky towards the sign that said ‘Elevator to hotel lobby’. The guard watched us go, his face still without emotion. Dicky wasn’t pleased either. He thought I’d tried to protect him against the guard and he felt belittled by my interference.

The hotel lobby was that same ubiquitous combination of tinted mirror, plastic marble and spongy carpet underlay that international travellers are reputed to admire. We sat down under a huge display of plastic flowers and looked at the fountain.

‘Machismo,’ said Dicky sadly. We were waiting for the top-hatted hotel doorman to find a taxi driver who would take us to Werner’s apartment. ‘Machismo,’ he said again reflectively. ‘Every last one of them is obsessed by it. It’s why you can’t get anything done here. I’m going to report that bastard downstairs to the manager.’

‘Wait until after we’ve collected the car,’ I advised.

‘At least the embassy sent a Counsellor to meet us. That means that London has told them to give us full diplomatic back-up.’

‘Or it means Mexico City embassy staff – including your pal Tiptree – have a lot of time on their hands.’

Dicky looked up from counting his traveller’s cheques. ‘What do I have to do, Bernard, to make you remember it’s Mexico? Not Mexico City; Mexico.’

2

This was a new Werner Volkmann. This was not the introverted Jewish orphan I’d been at school with, nor the lugubrious teenager I’d grown up with in Berlin, nor the affluent, overweight banker who was welcome on both sides of the Wall. This new Werner was a tough, muscular figure in short-sleeved cotton shirt and well-fitting Madras trousers. His big droopy moustache had been trimmed and so had his bushy black hair. Being on holiday with his twenty-two-year-old wife had rejuvenated him.

He was standing on the sixth-floor balcony of a small block of luxury apartments in downtown Mexico City. From here was a view across this immense city, with the mountains a dark backdrop. The dying sun was turning the world pink, now that the stormclouds had passed over. Long ragged strips of orange and gold cloud were torn across the sky, like a poster advertising a smog-reddened sun ripped by a passing vandal.

The balcony was large enough to hold a lot of expensive white garden furniture as well as big pots of tropical flowers. Green leafy plants climbed overhead to provide shade, while a collection of cacti were arrayed on shelves like books. Werner poured a pink concoction from a glass jug. It was like a watery fruit salad, the sort of thing they pressed on you at parties where no one got drunk. It didn’t look tempting, but I was hot and I took one gratefully.

Dicky Cruyer was flushed; his cowboy shirt bore dark patches of sweat. He had his blue-denim jacket slung over his shoulder. He tossed it on to a chair and reached out to take a drink from Werner.

Werner’s wife Zena held out her glass for a refill. She was full-length on a reclining chair. She was wearing a sheer, rainbow-striped dress through which her suntanned limbs shone darkly. As she moved to sip her drink, German fashion magazines, balanced on her belly, slid to the ground and flapped open. Zena cursed softly. It was the strange, flat-accented speech of eastern lands that were no longer German. It was probably the only thing she’d inherited from her impoverished parents, and I had the feeling she would sometimes have been happier without it.

‘What’s in this drink?’ I said.

Werner recovered the magazines from the floor and gave them to his wife. In business he could be tough, in friendships outspoken, but to Zena he was always indulgent.

Werner raised money from Western banks to pay exporters to East Germany, and then eventually collected the money from the East German government, taking a tiny percentage on every deal. ‘Avalizing’ it was called. But it wasn’t a banker’s business; it was a free-for-all in which many got their fingers burned. Werner had to be tough to survive.

‘In the drink? Fruit juices,’ said Werner. ‘It’s too early for alcohol in this sort of climate.’

‘Not for me it isn’t,’ I said. Werner smiled but he didn’t go anywhere to get me a proper drink. He was my oldest and closest friend; the sort of close friend who gives you the excoriating criticism that new enemies hesitate about. Zena didn’t look up; she was still pretending to read her magazines.

Dicky had stepped into the jungle of flowers to get a clearer view of the city. I looked over his shoulder to see the traffic still moving sluggishly. In the street below there were flashing red lights and sirens as two police cars mounted the pavement to get around the traffic. In a city of fifteen million people there is said to be a crime committed every two minutes. The noise of the streets never ceased. As the flow of homegoing office workers ended, the influx of people to the Zona Rosa’s restaurants and cinemas began. ‘What a madhouse,’ said Dicky.

A malevolent-looking black cat awoke and jumped softly down from its position on the footstool. It went over to Dicky and sank a claw into his leg and looked up at him to see how he’d take it. ‘Hell!’ shouted Dicky. ‘Get away, you brute.’ Dicky aimed a blow at the cat but missed. The cat moved very fast as if it had done the same thing before to other gringos.

Wincing with pain and rubbing his leg, Dicky moved well away from the cat and went to the other end of the balcony to look inside the large lounge with its locally made tiles, old masks and Mexican textiles. It looked like an arts and crafts shop, but obviously a lot of money had been spent getting it that way. ‘Nice place you’ve got here,’ said Dicky. There was more than a hint of sarcasm in his remark. It was not Dicky’s style. Anything that departed much from Harrod’s furniture department was too foreign for him.

‘It belongs to Zena’s uncle and aunt,’ explained Werner. ‘We’re taking care of it while they’re in Europe.’ That explained the notebook I’d seen near the telephone. Zena had neatly entered ‘wine glass’, ‘tumbler’, ‘wine glass’, ‘small china bowl with blue flowers’. It was a list of breakages, an example of Zena’s sense of order and rectitude.

‘You chose a bad time of year,’ complained Dicky. ‘Or rather Zena’s uncle chose a good one.’ He drained the glass, tipping it up until the ice cubes, cucumber and pieces of lemon slid down the glass and rested against his lips.

‘Zena doesn’t mind it,’ said Werner, as if his own opinions were of no importance.

Zena, still concentrating on her magazine, said, ‘I love the sun.’ She said it twice and continued to read without losing her place.

‘If only it would rain,’ said Werner. ‘It’s this build-up to the storms that makes it so unbearable.’

‘So you saw this chap Stinnes?’ said Dicky very casually, as if that wasn’t the reason that the two of us had dragged ourselves four thousand miles to talk to them.

‘At the Kronprinz,’ said Werner.

‘What’s the Kronprinz?’ said Dicky. He put down his glass and used a paper napkin to dry his lips.

‘A club.’

‘What sort of club?’ Dicky stuck his thumbs into the back of his leather belt and looked down at the toes of his cowboy boots reflectively. The cat had followed Dicky and looked as if it was about to reach up above his boot to put a claw into his thin calf again. Dicky aimed a vicious little kick at it but the cat was too quick for him. ‘Get away,’ said Dicky, more loudly this time.

‘I’m sorry about the cat,’ said Werner. ‘But I think Zena’s aunt only let us use the place because we’d be company for Cherubino. It’s your jeans. Cats like to claw at denim.’

‘It bloody hurts,’ said Dicky, rubbing his leg. ‘You should get its claws clipped or something. In this part of the world cats carry all kinds of diseases.’

‘What’s it matter what sort of club?’ said Zena suddenly. She closed the magazine and pushed her hair back. She looked different with her hair loose; no longer the tough little career girl, more the lady of leisure. Her hair was long and jet black and held with a silver Mexican comb which she brandished before tossing her hair back and fixing it again.

‘A club for German businessmen. It’s been going since 1902,’ said Werner. ‘Zena likes the buffet and dance they have on Friday nights. There’s a big German colony here in the city. There always has been.’

‘Werner said there would be a cash payment for finding Stinnes,’ said Zena.

‘There usually is,’ said Dicky slyly, although he knew there would be no chance of a cash payment for such a routine report. It must have been Werner’s way of encouraging Zena to cooperate with us. I looked at Werner and he looked back at me without changing his expression.

‘How do you know it really is Stinnes?’ said Dicky.

‘It’s Stinnes all right,’ said Werner stoically. ‘His name is on his membership card and his credit at the bar is in that name.’

‘And his cheque book,’ said Zena. ‘His name is printed on his cheques.’

‘What bank?’ I asked.

‘Bank of America,’ said Zena. ‘A branch in San Diego, California.’

‘Names mean nothing,’ said Dicky. ‘How do you know this fellow is a KGB man? And, even if he is, what makes you so sure that this is the johnny who interrogated Bernard in East Berlin?’ A brief movement of the hand in my direction. ‘It might be someone using the same cover name. We’ve known KGB people do that. Right, Bernard?’

‘It has been known,’ I said, although I was damned if I could recall any examples of such sloppy tactics by the plodding but thorough bureaucrats of the KGB.

‘How much?’ said Zena. And, when Dicky looked at her and raised his eyebrows, she said, ‘How much are you going to give us for reporting Stinnes? Werner said you want him badly. Werner said he was very important.’

‘Steady on,’ said Dicky. ‘We don’t have him yet. We haven’t even positively identified him.’

‘Erich Stinnes,’ said Zena as if repeating a prepared lesson. ‘Fortyish, thinning hair, cheap specs, smokes like a chimney. Berlin accent.’

‘Beard?’

‘No beard,’ said Zena. Hastily she added, ‘He must have shaved it off.’ She did not readily abandon her claims.

‘So you’ve spoken with him,’ I said.

‘He’s there every Friday,’ said Werner. ‘He’s a regular. He works at the Soviet Embassy, he told Zena that. He says he’s just a driver.’

‘They’re always drivers,’ I said. ‘That’s how they account for their nice big cars and going wherever they want to go.’ I poured myself some more of Werner’s fruit punch. There was not much of it left, and the bottom of the jug was a tangle of greenery and soggy bits of lemon. ‘Did he talk about books or American films, Zena?’

She swung her legs out of the reclining chair with a display of tanned thigh. I saw the look in Dicky Cruyer’s face as she smoothed her dress. She had that sexy appeal that goes with youth and health and boundless energy. And now she knew she had the right Stinnes her pearly grey eyes sparkled. ‘That’s right. He loves old Hollywood musicals and English detective stories …’

‘Then that’s him,’ I said, without much enthusiasm. Secretly I’d hoped it would all come to nothing and I’d be able to go straight back to London and my home and my children. ‘Yes, that’s “Lenin”; that’s the one who took me down to Checkpoint Charlie when they released me.’

‘What will happen now?’ said Zena. She was short; she only came up to Dicky’s shoulder. Some say short people are aggressive to compensate for their small stature, but look at Zena Volkmann and you might start thinking that aggressive people are made short lest they take over the whole world. Either way Zena was short and the aggression inside her was always bubbling along the edges of the pan like milk before it boils over. ‘What will you do about him?’

‘Don’t ask,’ Werner told her.

But Dicky answered her, ‘We want to talk to him, Mrs Volkmann. No rough stuff, if that’s what you are afraid of.’

I swallowed my fruit punch and got a mouthful of tiny pieces of ice and some lemon pips.

Zena smiled. She wasn’t frightened of any rough stuff; she was frightened of not getting the money for arranging it. She stood up and twisted her shoulders, slowly stretching her arms above her head one after the other in a lazy display of overt sexuality. ‘Do you want my help?’ she said.

Dicky didn’t answer directly. He looked from Zena to Werner and back again and said, ‘Stinnes is a KGB major. That’s too low a rank for the computer to offer much on him. Most of what we know about him came from Bernard, who was interrogated by him.’ A glance at me to stress the unreliability of uncorroborated intelligence from any source. ‘But he’s senior staff in Berlin. So what is he doing in Mexico? Must be a Russian national. What’s his game? What’s he doing in this German club of yours?’

Zena laughed. ‘You think he should have joined Perovsky’s?’ She laughed again.

Werner said, ‘Zena knows this town very well, Dicky. She has aunts and uncles, cousins and a nephew here. She lived here for six months when she first left school.’

‘Where, what, how or why is Perovsky’s?’ said Dicky. He was German Stations Controller. He didn’t like being laughed at, and I could see he was taking a little time getting used to Werner calling him Dicky.

‘Zena is joking,’ explained Werner. ‘Perovsky’s is a big, rather run-down club for Russians near the National Palace. The ground floor is a restaurant open to anyone. It was started after the revolution. The members used to be dukes and counts and people who’d escaped from the Bolsheviks. Now it’s a pretty mixed crowd but the anti-communist line is still de rigueur. The people from the Soviet Embassy give it a wide berth. If a man such as Stinnes went in there and spoke out of turn he might never get out.’

‘Really never get out?’ I said.

Werner turned to look at me. ‘It’s a rough town, Bernie. It’s not all margaritas and mariachis like the travel posters.’

‘But the Kronprinz Club is not so particular about its membership?’ persisted Dicky.

‘No one goes there to talk politics. It’s the only place in town where you can get real German draught beer and good German food,’ explained Werner. ‘It’s very popular. It’s a social club; you get a very mixed crowd there. A lot of them are transients: airline pilots, salesmen, ships’ engineers, businessmen, priests even.’

‘And KGB men?’

‘You Englishmen avoid each other when you are abroad,’ said Werner. ‘We Germans like to be together. East Germans, West Germans, exiles, expatriates, men avoiding tax, men avoiding their wives, men avoiding their creditors, men avoiding the police. Nazis, monarchists, communists, even Jews like me. We like to be together because we are Germans.’

‘Such Germans as Stinnes?’ said Dicky sarcastically.

‘He must have lived in Berlin. His German is as good as Bernie’s,’ said Werner, looking at me. ‘Even more convincing in a way, because he has the sort of strong Berlin accent you seldom hear except in some workers’ bar in the city. It was only when I began to listen to him really carefully that I could detect something that was not quite right in the background of his voice. I’ll bet everyone in the club thinks he’s German.’

‘He’s not here to get a tan,’ said Dicky. ‘A man like that is sent here only for something special. What’s your guess, Bernard?’

‘Stinnes was in Cuba,’ I said. ‘He told me that when we talked together. Security police. I went back to the continuity files and began to guess he was there to give the Cubans some advice when they purged some of the bigwigs in 1970. It was a big shake-up. Stinnes must have been some kind of Latin America expert even then.’

‘Never mind old history,’ said Dicky. ‘What’s he doing now?’

‘Running agents, I suppose. Guatemala is a KGB priority, and it’s not so far from here. Anyone can walk through; the border is just jungle.’

‘I don’t think that’s it,’ said Werner.

I said, ‘The East Germans backed the Sandinista National Liberation Front long before it looked like winning and forming a government.’

‘The East Germans back anybody who might be a thorn in the flesh of the Americans,’ said Werner.

‘But what do you really think he’s doing?’ Dicky asked me.

I was stalling because I didn’t know how much Dicky would want me to say in front of Zena and Werner. I kept stalling. I said, ‘Stinnes speaks good English. Unless the cheque book is a deliberate way of throwing us off the scent, he might be running agents into California. Handling data stolen from electronics and software research firms perhaps.’ I was improvising. I didn’t have the slightest idea of what Stinnes might be doing.

‘Why would London give a damn about that sort of caper?’ said Werner, who knew me well enough to guess that I was bluffing. ‘Don’t tell me London Central put out an urgent call for Stinnes because he’s stealing computer secrets from the Americans.’

‘It’s the only reason I can think of,’ I said.

‘Don’t treat me like a child, Bernard,’ said Werner. ‘If you don’t want to tell me, just say so.’

As if in response to Werner’s acrimony, Zena went across to the fireplace and pressed a hidden bellpush. From somewhere in the labyrinth of the apartment there came the sound of footsteps, and an Indian woman appeared. She had that chin-up stance that makes so many Mexicans look as if they are ready to balance a water jug on their heads, and her eyes were half closed. ‘I knew you’d want to sample some Mexican food,’ said Zena. Personally it was the last thing I’d ever want to sample, but without waiting to hear our response she told the woman we would sit down immediately. Zena used her poor Spanish with a fluent confidence that made it sound better. Zena did everything like that.

‘She can understand German perfectly and a certain amount of English too,’ said Zena after the woman had gone. It was a warning to guard our tongues. ‘Maria has worked for my aunt for over ten years.’

‘But you don’t talk to her in German,’ said Dicky.

Zena smiled at him. ‘By the time you’ve said tortillas, tacos, guacamole and quesadillas, and so on, you might as well add por favor and get it over with.’

It was an elegant table, shining with solid-silver cutlery, hand-embroidered linen and fine cut-glass. The meal had obviously been planned and prepared as part of Zena’s pitch for a cash payment. It was a good meal, and not too damned ethnic, thank God. I have a very limited capacity for the primitive permutations of tortillas, bean-mush and chillies that numb the palate and sear the insides from Dallas to Cape Horn. But we started with grilled lobster and cold white wine, and not a refried bean in sight.

The curtains were drawn back so that air could come in through the open windows, but the air was not cool. The cyclone out in the Gulf had not moved nearer the coast, so the threatened storms had not come but neither had much drop in temperature. By now the sun had gone down behind the mountains that surround the city on every side, and the sky was mauve. Pin-pointed like stars in a planetarium were the lights of the city, which stretched all the way to the foothills of the distant mountains until like a galaxy they became a milky blur. The dining room was dark; the only light came from tall candles that burned brightly in the still air.

‘Sometimes London Central can get in ahead of our American friends,’ said Dicky, suddenly spearing another grilled lobster tail. Had he really spent so long thinking up a reply for Werner? ‘It would give us negotiating power in Washington if we had some good material about KGB penetration of anywhere in Uncle Sam’s backyard.’

Werner reached across the table to pour more wine for his wife. ‘This is Chilean wine,’ said Werner. He poured some for Dicky and for me and then refilled his own glass. It was Werner’s way of telling Dicky he didn’t believe a word of it, but I’m not sure Dicky understood that.

‘It’s not bad,’ said Dicky, sipping, closing his eyes and tilting his head back to concentrate all his attention on the taste. Dicky fancied his wine expertise. He’d already made a great show of sniffing the cork. ‘I suppose, with the peso collapsing, it will be more and more difficult to get any sort of imported wine. And Mexican wine is a bit of an acquired taste.’

‘Stinnes only arrived here two or three weeks ago,’ said Werner doggedly. ‘If London Central is interested in Stinnes, it won’t be on account of anything he might be planning to do in Silicon Valley or in the Guatemala rain forest; it will be on account of all the things he did in Berlin during the last two years.’

‘Do you think so? said Dicky, looking at Werner with friendly and respectful interest, like a man who wanted to learn something. But Werner could see through him.

‘I’m not an idiot,’ said Werner, using the unemotional tone but exaggerated clarity with which a man might specify decaffeinated coffee to an inattentive waiter. ‘I was dodging KGB men when I was ten years old. Bernie and I were working for the department when the Wall was built in 1961 and you were still at school.’

‘Point taken, old boy,’ said Dicky with a smile. He could afford to smile; he was two years younger than either of us, with years’ less time in the department, but he’d got the coveted job of German Stations Controller against tough competition. And – despite rumours about an imminent reshuffle in London Central – he was still holding on to it. ‘But the fact is that the people in London don’t tell me every last thing they have in mind. I’m just the chap chipping away at the coal-face, right? They don’t consult me about building new nuclear power stations.’ He poured some warm butter over his last piece of lobster with a care that suggested he had no other concern in his mind.

‘Tell me about Stinnes,’ I said to Werner. ‘Does he come along to the Kronprinz Club trailing a string of KGB zombies? Or does he come on his own? Does he sit in the corner with his big glass of Berliner Weisse mit Schuss, or does he sniff round to see what he can ferret out? How does he behave, Werner?’

‘He’s a loner,’ said Werner. ‘He probably would never have spoken to us in the first place except that he mistook Zena for one of the Biedermann girls.’

‘Who are the Biedermann girls?’ said Dicky. After the remains of the lobster course had been removed, the Indian servant brought an elaborate array of Mexican dishes: refried beans, whole chillies and the tortilla in its various disguises: enchiladas, tacos, tostadas and quesadillas. Dicky paused for long enough to have each one identified and described but he took only a tiny portion on his plate.

‘Here in Mexico the chilli has sexual significance,’ said Zena, directing the remark to Dicky. ‘The man who eats hot chillies is thought to be virile and strong.’

‘Oh, I love chillies,’ said Dicky, his tone of voice picking up the hint of mockery that was to be detected in Zena’s remark. ‘Always have had a weakness for chillies,’ he said, as he reached for a plate on which many different ones were arranged. I glanced at Werner who was watching Dicky with interest. Dicky looked up to see Werner’s face. ‘It’s the tiny, dark-coloured ones that blow your head off,’ Dicky explained. He took a large, pale-green cayenne and smiled at our doubting faces before biting a section from it.

There was a silence after Dicky’s mouth closed upon the chilli. Everyone except Dicky knew he’d mistaken the cayenne for one of the very mild aji chillies from the eastern provinces. And soon Dicky knew it too. His face went red, his mouth half opened, and tears shone in his eyes. He fought against the pain but he had to take it from his mouth. Then he fed himself lots and lots of plain rice.

‘The Biedermanns are a wealthy Berlin family,’ said Zena, carrying on as if she’d not noticed Dicky’s desperate discomfort. ‘They are well known in Germany. They have interests in German travel companies. The newspapers said the company had borrowed millions of dollars to build a holiday village in the Yucatan peninsula. It’s never been finished. Erich Stinnes thought I looked just like the younger sister Poppy who’s always in the newspaper gossip columns.’

There was a silence as we all waited for Dicky to recover. Finally he leaned back in his chair and managed a rueful smile. There was perspiration on his forehead and he was breathing with his mouth open. ‘Do you know these Biedermann people, Bernard?’ said Dicky. He sounded hoarse.

‘Have an avocado,’ said Werner. ‘They are very soothing.’ Dicky took an avocado pear from the bowl and began to eat some.

I said, ‘When my father was attached to the military government in Berlin he gave old Biedermann a licence to start up his bus service again. It was one of the first after the war; it started the family fortune, I suppose. Yes, I know them. Poppy Biedermann was having dinner at Frank Harrington’s the last time I was in Berlin.’

Dicky was eating the avocado quickly with his teaspoon, using it to heal the burning in his mouth. ‘That was bloody hot,’ he confessed finally.

‘There’s no way you can be sure which are hot and which are mild,’ said Zena in a gentle tone that surprised me. ‘They cross-pollinate; even on the same plant you can get fiery ones and mild ones.’ She smiled.

‘Could these Biedermann people be interesting to Stinnes?’ said Dicky. ‘For instance, might they own a factory that’s making computer software in California? Or something like that? What do you know about that, Bernard?’

‘Even if that was the case, no point in making contact with the boss,’ I said. I could see that Dicky had focused on the idea of Silicon Valley and it was not going to be easy to shake him off it. ‘The approach would be made to someone in the microchip laboratory. Or someone doing the programs for the software.’

‘We need to know the current situation from the California end,’ said Dicky with a sigh. I knew that sigh. Dicky was just getting me prepared for a sweaty week in Mexico City while he went to swan around in southern California.

‘Talk to the Biedermanns,’ I said. ‘It’s easier.’

‘Stinnes asked about the Biedermanns,’ said Werner. ‘He asked if I knew them. I used to know Paul very well, but I told Stinnes I knew the family only from the newspapers.’

‘Werner, you didn’t tell me you know the Biedermanns,’ Zena interjected excitedly. ‘They are always in the gossip columns. Poppy Biedermann is beautiful. She just got divorced from a millionaire.’

Dicky looked at me and said, ‘Better you talk to Biedermann. No sense in me showing my face. Keep it informal. Find out where he is; go and see him. Would you do that, Bernard?’ It was an order in the American style: disguised to sound like a polite inquiry.

‘I can try.’

Dicky said, ‘I don’t want to channel this through London, or get Frank Harrington to introduce us, or the whole world will know we’re interested.’ He poured himself some iced water and sipped a little. He was recovering some of his composure, when suddenly he screamed, ‘You bastard!’, his eyes fixed on poor Werner and his head thrust forward low over the table. Werner looked perplexed until Dicky, still leaning forward with his head almost on his plate, yelled, ‘That bloody cat.’

‘Cherubino, you’re very naughty,’ said Zena mildly as she bent down to disengage the cat’s claws from Dicky’s leg. But by that time Dicky had delivered a kick that sent Cherubino across the room with a howl of pain.

Zena stood up, flushed and furious. ‘You’ve hurt her,’ she said angrily.

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ said Dicky. ‘Just gave way to a reflex action, I’m afraid.’

Zena said nothing. She nodded and left the room in search of the cat.

‘Paul Biedermann is approachable,’ said Werner, to cover the awkward silence. ‘He arranged a bank guarantee for me last year. It cost too much but he came through when I needed him. He has an office in town and a house on the coast at Tcumazan.’ Werner looked at the door but there was no sign of Zena.

‘There you are, then,’ said Dicky. ‘Get on to him, Bernard.’

I knew Paul Biedermann too; I’d exchanged hellos with him recently in Berlin and hardly recognized him. He’d smashed himself up driving a brand-new Ferrari back to Mexico from a drunken party in Guatemala City. At 120 miles an hour the car had gone deep into the roadside jungle. It took the rescuers a long time to find him, and a long time to cut him free. The girl with him had been killed, but the inquiry had glossed over it. Whatever the truth of it, now one of his legs was shorter than the other and his face bore the scar tissue of over a hundred neat stitches. These infirmities didn’t help me overcome my dislike of Paul Biedermann.

‘Just a verbal report. Nothing in writing for the time being. Not you, not me, not Biedermann.’ Dicky was keeping all the exits covered. Nothing in writing until Dicky heard the results and arranged the blames and the credits with godlike impartiality.

Werner shot me a glance. ‘Sure thing, Dicky,’ I said. Dicky Cruyer was such a clown at times, but there was another, very clever Dicky who knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it. Even if it did sometimes mean giving way to one of those nasty little reflex actions.

3

The jungle stinks. Under the shiny greenery, and the brightly coloured tropical flowers that line the roadsides like the endless window displays of expensive florists, there is a squelchy mess of putrefaction that smells like a sewer. Sometimes the road was darkened by vegetation that met overhead, and strands of creeper fingered the car’s roof. I wound the window closed for a moment, even though the air-conditioning didn’t work.

Dicky wasn’t with me. Dicky had flown to Los Angeles, giving me a contact phone number that was an office in the Federal Building. It was not far from the shops and restaurants of Beverly Hills, where by now he would no doubt be sitting beside a bright blue pool, clasping an iced drink, and studying a long menu with that kind of unstinting dedication that Dicky always gave to his own welfare.

The big blue Chevvy he’d left for me was not the right sort of car for these miserable winding jungle tracks. Imported duty-free by Tiptree, Dicky’s embassy chum, it didn’t have the hard suspension and reinforced chassis of locally bought cars. It bounced me up and down like a yo-yo in the potholes, and there were ominous scraping sounds when it hit the bumps. And the road to Tcumazan was all pot-holes and bumps.

I’d started very early that morning, intending to cross the Sierra Madre mountain range and be in a restaurant lingering over a late lunch to miss the hottest part of the day. In fact I spent the hottest part of the day crouched on a dusty road, with an audience of three children and a chicken, while I changed the wheel of a flat tyre and cursed Dicky, Henry Tiptree and his car, London Central and Paul Biedermann, particularly Biedermann for having chosen to live in such a Godforsaken spot as Tcumazan, Michoacan, on Mexico’s Pacific coast. It was a place to go only for those equipped with private planes or luxury yachts. Getting there from Mexico City in Tiptree’s Chevvy was not recommended.

It was early evening when I reached the ocean at a village variously called ‘Little San Pedro’ or ‘Santiago’, according to who directed you. It was not on the map under either name; even the road leading there was no more than a broken red line. Santiago consisted only of a rubbish heap, some two dozen huts constructed of mud and old corrugated iron, a prefabricated building surmounted by a large cross and a cantina with a green tin roof. The cantina was held together by enamelled advertisements for beer and soft drinks. They had been nailed, sometimes upside-down or sideways, wherever cracks had appeared in the walls. More adverts were urgently needed.

The village of Santiago is not a tourist resort. There were no discarded film packets, paper tissues or vitamin containers to be seen littering the streets or even on the dump. From the village there was not even a view of the ocean; the water-front was out of sight beyond a flight of wide stone steps that led nowhere. There were no people in sight; just animals – cats, dogs, a few goats and some fluttering hens.

Alongside the cantina a faded red Ford sedan was parked. Only after I pulled in alongside did I see that the Ford was propped up on bricks and its inside gutted. There were more hens inside it. As I locked up the Chevvy, people appeared. They were coming from the rubbish heap: a honeycomb of tiny cells made from boxes, flattened cans and oil-drums. It was a rubbish heap, but not exclusively so. No women or children emerged from the heap; just short, dark-skinned men with those calm, inscrutable faces that are to be seen in Aztec sculpture: an art form obsessed with brutality and death.

The smell of the jungle was still there, but now there was also the stink of human ordure. Dogs – their coats patchy with the symptoms of mange – smelled each other and prowled around the garbage. One outside wall of the cantina was entirely covered with a crudely painted mural. The colours had faded but the outline of a red tractor carving a path through tall grass, with smiling peasants waving their hands, suggested that it was part of the propaganda for some long-forgotten government agricultural plan.

It was still very hot, and my damp shirt clung to me. The sun was sinking, long shadows patterned the dusty street, and the electric bulbs which marked the cantina doorway made yellow blobs in the blue air. I stepped over a large mongrel dog that was asleep in the doorway and pushed aside the small swing-doors. There was a fat, moustachioed man behind the bar. He sat on a high stool, his head tipped forward on to his chest as if he was sleeping. His feet were propped high on the counter, the soles of his boots pushed against the drawer of the cash register. When I entered the bar he looked up, wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief and nodded without smiling.

There was an unexpected clutter inside; a random assortment of Mexican aspirations. There were sepia-coloured family photos, the frames cracked and wormeaten. Two very old Pan-American Airways posters depicted the Swiss Alps and downtown Chicago. Even the girlie pictures revealed the ambivalent nature of machismo: Mexican film stars in decorous swimsuits and raunchy gringas torn from American porno magazines. In one corner there was a magnificent old juke-box but it was for decoration only; there was no machinery inside it. In the other corner there was an old oil-drum used as a urinal. The sound of Mexican music came quietly from a radio balanced over the shelf of tequila bottles that, despite their varying labels, looked as if they’d been refilled many times from the same jug.

I ordered a beer and told the cantinero to have one himself. He got two bottles from the refrigerator and poured them both together, holding two bottles in one hand and two glasses in the other. I drank some beer. It was dark, strong and very cold. ‘Salud y pesetas,’ said the bartender.

I drank to ‘health and money’ and asked him if he knew anyone who could mend my punctured tyre. He didn’t answer immediately. He looked me up and down and then craned his neck to see my Chevvy, although I had no doubt he’d watched me arrive. There was a man who could do such work, he said, after giving the matter some careful thought. It might be arranged, but the materials for doing such jobs were expensive and difficult to obtain. Many of the people who claimed such expertise were clumsy, inexpert men who would fix patches that, in the hot sun and on the bad roads, would leak air and leave a traveller stranded. The brakes, the steering and the tyres: these were the vital parts of a motor car. He himself did not own a car but one of his cousins had a car and so he knew about such things. And on these roads a stranded traveller could meet bad people, even bandidos. For a puncture I needed someone who could make such a vital repair properly.

I drank my beer and nodded sympathetically. In Mexico this was the way things were done; there was nothing to be gained by interrupting his explanation. It was for this that he got his percentage. He shouted loudly at the faces looking in through the doorway and they went away. No doubt they went to tell the man who fixed flats that his lucky day had finally come.

We each had another beer. The cantinero’s name was Domingo. Awakened by the sound of the cash register, the dog looked up and growled. ‘Be quiet, Pedro,’ said the bartender and edged a small plate of chillies across the counter towards me. I declined. I left some money on the counter in front of me when I asked him how far it was to the Biedermann house. He looked at me quizzically before answering. It was a long, long way by road, and the road was very bad. Rain had washed it out in places. It always did at this time of year. On a motorcycle or even in a jeep it was possible. But in my Chevvy, which Domingo called my double bed – cama matrimonial – there would be no chance of driving there. Better to take the track and go on foot, the way the villagers went. It would take no more than five minutes, maybe ten. Fifteen minutes at the most. If I was going up to the Biedermann house everything was okay.

Mr Biedermann owed me some money, I explained. Might I encounter trouble collecting it?

Domingo looked at me as if I’d just arrived from Mars. Didn’t I know that Señor Biedermann was muy rico, muy, muy rico?

‘How rich?’ I asked.

‘For no one does what he gives seem little, or what he has seem much,’ said the bartender, quoting a Spanish proverb. ‘How much does he owe you?’

I ignored his question. ‘Is he up at the house now?’ I fiddled with the money on the counter.

‘He’s not an easy man to get along with,’ said Domingo. ‘Yes, he’s up at the house. He’s there all alone. He can’t get anyone to work for him any more, and his wife is seldom with him nowadays. He even does his own laundry. No one round here will work for him.’

‘Why?’

Domingo put the tip of his thumb in his mouth and upended his fist to show me that Biedermann was a heavy drinker. ‘He can get through two or three bottles of it when he’s in one of his rages. Tequila, mezcal, aguardiente or imported whisky, it’s all the same to him once he starts guzzling. Then he gets rough with anyone who won’t drink with him. He hit one of the workmen mending the floor; the youngster had to go to the dispensary. Now the men refuse to finish the work.’

‘Does he get rough with people who collect money?’ I asked.

Domingo didn’t smile. ‘When he is not drinking he is a good man. Maybe he has troubles; who knows?’

We went back to talking about the car. Domingo would arrange for the repair of my tyre and look after the car. If the beer-delivery truck arrived it would perhaps be possible to deliver the car to the Biedermann house. No, I said, it was better if the car remained where it was; I’d seen a few beer-delivery drivers on the road.

‘Is the track to the Biedermann house a good one?’ I asked. I pushed some money to him.

‘Whatever path you take, there is a league of bad road,’ said Domingo solemnly. I hoped it was just another proverb.

I got my shoulder-bag from the car. It contained a clean shirt and underclothes, swimming trunks and towel, shaving kit, a big plastic bag, some string, a flashlight, some antibiotics, Lomatil and a half-bottle of rum for putting on wounds. No gun. Mexico is not a good place for gringos carrying guns.

I took the path that Domingo had shown me. It was a narrow track made by workers going between the crops and the village. It climbed steeply past the flight of stone steps that Domingo said was all that remained of an Aztec temple. It was sunny up here while the valleys were swallowed in shadow. I looked back to see the villagers standing round the Chevvy, Domingo parading before it in a proprietorial manner. Pedro cocked his leg to pee on the front wheel. Domingo looked up, as if sensing that I was watching, but he didn’t wave. He wasn’t a friendly man; just talkative.

I rolled down my shirt-sleeves against the mosquitoes. The track led along the crest of a scrub-covered hill. It skirted huge rocks and clumps of yucca, with sharp leaves that thrust into the skyline like swords. It was hard going on the stony path and I stopped frequently to catch my breath. Through the scrub-oak and pines I could see the purple mountains over which I’d driven. There were many mountains to the north. They were big, volcanic-looking, their distance – and thus their exact size – unresolved, but in the clear evening air everything looked sharp and hard, and nearer than it really was. Now and again, as I walked, I caught sight of the motor road that skirted the spur and came in a long detour up the coast. It looked like a damned bad road; I suppose only the Biedermanns ever used it.

It took me nearly an hour to get to the Biedermann house. I was almost there before I came over the ridge and caught sight of it. It was a small house of modern design, built of decorative woods and matt black steel, its foundations set into the rocks upon which the Pacific Ocean dashed huge breakers. One side of the house was close to a patch of jungle that went right to the water’s edge. There was a little pocket of sandy beach there, and from it ran a short wooden pier. There was no boat in sight, no cars anywhere, and the house was dark.

A chainlink fence that surrounded the grounds of the house had been damaged by a landslide, and the wire was cut and bent up to provide a gap big enough to get through. The makeshift track continued after the damaged fence and ended in a steep scramble up to a patch of grass. There were flowers here; white and pink camellias and floribunda and the inevitable purple bougainvillaea. Everything had been landscaped to hide the place where a new macadam road ended at the double garage and shaded carport. But there were no cars to be seen, and wooden crates blocked the white garage doors.

So Paul Biedermann had taken flight despite the appointment I’d made with him. I was not surprised. There had always been a streak of cowardice in him.

I had no difficulty getting inside the house. The front door was locked but a ladder left on the grass reached to one of the balconies. The sliding window, secured only by a plastic clip, was easy enough to force.

There was still enough daylight coming through the window for me to see that the master bedroom had been tidied and cleaned with that rigorous care that is the sign of leave-taking. The huge double bed was stripped of linen and covered with clear plastic covers. Two small carpets were rolled up and sealed into bags that would protect them from termites. Torn up and in the waste-paper basket I found half a dozen Mexico City airport luggage tags dating from some previous journey, and three new and unused airline shoulder-bags not required for the next. The sort of airline bags that come free with airline tickets were not something that the Biedermanns let their servants carry. I stood listening, but the house was completely silent. There was only the sound of the big Pacific Ocean waves battering against the rocks below the house and roaring their displeasure.

I opened one of the wardrobes. It smelled of moth repellent. There were clothes there: a man’s cream-coloured linen suits, brightly coloured pants and sweaters, handmade shoes – treed and in shoe-bags embroidered ‘P.B.’ – and drawers filled with shirts and underclothes.

In the other wardrobe, a woman’s dresses, expensive lingerie folded into tissue paper and a multitude of shoes of every type and colour. On the dressing table there was a photo of Mr and Mrs Biedermann in swimsuits standing on a diving board and smiling self-consciously. It had been taken before the car accident.

The three guest bedrooms on the top floor – each with separate balcony overlooking the ocean and private bathroom – had all been stripped bare. Inside the house, a gallery that gave access to the bedrooms was open on one side to overlook the big lounge downstairs. All the furniture was covered in dustsheets, and to one side of the lounge there was a bucket of dirty water, a trowel, some adhesive and dirty rags marking a place where a large section of flooring was being retiled.

Only when I got to Biedermann’s study, built to provide a view of the whole coastline, was there any sign of recent occupancy. It was an office; or, more exactly, it was a room furnished with that special sort of luxury furniture that can be tax-deducted as office equipment. There was a big puffy armchair, a drinks cabinet, and a magnificent wood-inlay desk. In the corner was that sort of daybed that Hollywood calls a ‘casting couch’. On it there were blankets roughly folded and a soiled pillow. A big waste-bin contained computer print-out and some copies of the Wall Street Journal. More confidential print-out was now a tangle of paper worms in the clear plastic bag of the shredder. But the notepads were blank, and the expensive desk diary – the flowers of South America, one for every week of the year in full colour, printed in Rio de Janeiro – had never been used. There were no books apart from business reference books and phone and telex directories. Paul Biedermann had never been much of a reader at school but he’d always been good at counting.

I tried the electric light but it did not work. A house built out here on the edge of nowhere would be dependent upon a generator operating only when the house was occupied. By the time I had searched the house and found no one, the daylight was going fast. The sea had turned the darkest of purples and the western skyline had almost vanished.

I went back up to the top floor and chose the last guest room along the gallery as a place to spend the night. I found a blanket in the wardrobe and, choosing one of the plastic-covered beds, I covered myself against the cold mist that rolled in off the sea. It soon became too dark to read and, as my interest in the Wall Street Journal waned, I drifted off to sleep, lulled by the sound of the waves.

It was 2.35 when I was awakened by the car. I saw its lights flashing over the ceiling long before I heard its engine. At first I thought it was just a disturbed dream, but then the bright patch of light flashed across the ceiling again and I heard the diesel engine. It never struck me that it might be Paul Biedermann or any of the family coming home. I knew instinctively that there was danger.

I slid open the glass door and went outside on to the balcony. The weather had become stormy. Thin ragged clouds raced across the moon, and the wind had risen so that its roar was confused with the sound of the breakers on the rocks below. I watched the car. The headlights were high and close together, a configuration that suggested some Jeep-like vehicle, as did the way it negotiated the bad road. It was still going at speed as it swung round the back to the garage area. The driver had been here before.

There were two voices; one of the men had a key to the front door. I went through the guest bedroom and crouched on the interior gallery so that I could hear them speaking in the lounge below.

‘He’s run away,’ said one voice.

‘Perhaps,’ said the other, as if he didn’t care. They were speaking in German. There was no mistaking the Berlin accent of Erich Stinnes, but the other man’s German had a strong Russian accent.

‘His car is not here,’ said the first man. ‘What if the Englishmen arrived before us and took him off with them?’

‘We would have passed them on the road,’ said Stinnes. He was perfectly calm. I heard the sound of him putting his weight on to the big sofa. ‘That’s better.’ A sigh. ‘Take a drink if you want it. It’s in the cabinet in his study.’

‘That stinking jungle road. I could do with a bath.’

‘You call that jungle?’ said Stinnes mildly. ‘Wait till you go over to the east coast. Wait until you go across to the training camp where the freedom fighters are trained, and cut your way through some real tropical rain forest with a machete, and spend half the night digging chiggers out of your backside. You’ll find out what a jungle is like.’

‘What we came through will do for me,’ said the first man.

I raised my head over the edge of the gallery until I could see them. They were standing in the moonlight by the tall window. They were wearing dark suits and white shirts and trying to look like Mexican businessmen. Stinnes was about forty years old: my age. He had shaved off the little Leninstyle beard he’d had when I last saw him but there was no mistaking his accent or the hard eyes glittering behind the circular gold-rimmed spectacles.

The other man was much older, fifty at least. But he was not frail. He had shoulders like a wrestler, cropped head and the restless energy of the athlete. He looked at his watch and then out of the window and then walked over to the place where the tiles were being repaired. He kicked the trowel so that it went skidding across the floor and hit the wall with a loud noise.

‘I told you to have a drink,’ said Stinnes. He did not defer to the other man.

‘I said you should frighten Biedermann. Well, you’ve frightened him all right. It looks as if you’ve frightened him so much that he’s cleared out of here. That’s not what they wanted you to do.’

‘I didn’t frighten him at all,’ said Stinnes calmly. ‘I didn’t take your advice. He’s already too frightened. He needs reassurance. But he’ll surface sooner or later.’

‘Sooner or later,’ repeated the elder man. ‘You mean he’ll surface after you’ve gone back to Europe and be someone else’s problem. If it was left to me, I’d make Biedermann a number-one priority. I’d alert every last KGB team in Central America. I’d teach him that an order is an order.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Stinnes. ‘It’s all so easy for you people who sit at desks all your life. But Biedermann is just one small part of a complicated plan … and neither of us knows exactly what the plan is.’

It was a patronizing reproach, and the elder man’s soft voice did not conceal the anger in him. ‘I say he’s the weak link in the chain, my friend.’

‘Perhaps he is supposed to be just that,’ said Stinnes complacently. ‘One day maybe the Englishwoman will put you in charge of one of her crazy schemes, and then you’ll be able to ignore orders and show everyone what a clever man you are in the field. But until that time you’ll do things the way you’re ordered to do them, no matter how stupid it all seems.’ He got to his feet. ‘I’ll have a drink, even if you don’t want one. Biedermann has good brandy.’

Stinnes passed below me out of sight and I heard him go into the study and pour drinks. When he returned he was carrying two glasses. ‘It will calm you, Pavel. Have patience; it will work out all right. You can’t rush these things. You’ll have to get used to that. It’s not like chasing Moscow dissidents.’ He gave the elder man a glass and they both drank. ‘French brandy. Schnapps and beer are not worth drinking unless they come from a refrigerator.’ He drank. ‘Ah, that’s better. I’ll be glad to be back in Berlin, if only for a brief spell.’

‘I was in Berlin in 1953,’ said the elder man. ‘Did you know that?’

‘So was I,’ said Stinnes.

‘In ’53? Doing what?’

Stinnes chuckled. ‘I was only ten years old. My father was a soldier. My mother was in the army too. We were all kept in the barracks during the disturbances.’

‘Then you know nothing. I was in the thick of it. The bricklayers and builders working on those Stalinallee sites started all the trouble. It began as a protest against a ten per cent increase in work norms. They marched on the House of Ministries in Leipzigerstrasse and demanded to see the Party leader, Ulbricht.’ He laughed. It was a low, manly laugh. ‘But it was the poor old Mining Minister who was sent out to face them. I was twenty. I was with the Soviet Control Commission. My chief dressed me up like a German building worker and sent me out to mix with the mob. I was never so frightened in all my life.’

‘With your accent you had every cause to be frightened,’ said Stinnes.

His colleague was not amused. ‘I kept my mouth shut; but I kept my ears open. That night the strikers marched across to the RIAS radio station in West Berlin and wanted their demands to be transmitted over the Western radio. Treacherous German swine.’

‘What were their demands?’ asked Stinnes.

‘The usual: free and secret elections, cuts in the work norms, no punishment for the trouble-makers.’ The older man drank some more. He was calmer now that he’d had a drink. ‘I advised my people to bring our boys out to clear the streets the way we’d cleared them in 1945. I told them to announce an immediate curfew and give the army shoot-on-sight orders.

‘But they didn’t,’ said Stinnes.

‘I was only twenty years old. The men who’d fought in the war had no time for kids like me. The Control Commission was not taken seriously. So they sat up all night hoping that everything would be all right in the morning.’

‘The disturbances spread next day.’

‘By 11 a.m. on 17th June they were tearing the red flag down from the Brandenburg Gate and ransacking the Party offices.’

‘But the army sat on it, didn’t they?’

‘Eventually they had to. There were strikes all over the country: Dresden, Leipzig, Jena and Gera, even in Rostock and the Baltic island of Rügen. It took a long time before things settled down. They should have acted immediately. Since then I’ve had no sympathy for people who tell me to have patience because everything will come out all right.’

‘And that’s what you’d like me to do now?’ asked Stinnes mockingly. ‘Bring our boys out to clear the streets the way we cleared them in 1945? Announce an immediate curfew and give the army shoot-on-sight orders?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘You have no idea what this business is all about, Pavel. You’ve spent your career running typewriters; I’ve spent mine running people.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You rush in like a rapist when we are in the middle of a seduction. Do you really think you can march agents up and down like Prussian infantry? Don’t you understand that men such as Biedermann have to be romanced?’

‘We should never use agents who are not politically dedicated to us,’ said Pavel.

Stinnes went to the window and I could see him clearly in the moonlight as he looked at the sea. Outside, the wind was roaring through the trees and making thumping noises against the windows. Stinnes held his drink up high and swirled it round to see the expensive brandy cling to the glass. ‘You’ve still got that passion that I once had,’ said Stinnes. ‘How do you hang on to all your illusions, Pavel?’

‘You’re a cynic,’ said the elder man. ‘I might as well ask how you continue doing your job without believing in it.’

‘Believing?’ said Stinnes, drinking some of the brandy and turning back to face his companion. ‘Believing what? Believing in my job or believing in the socialist revolution?’

‘You talk as if the two beliefs are incompatible.’

‘Are they compatible? Can a “workers and peasants state” need so many secret policemen like us?’

‘There is a threat from without,’ said the elder man, using the standard Party cliché.

‘Do you know what Brecht wrote after the 17th June uprising? Brecht I’m talking about, not some Western reactionary. Brecht wrote a poem called “The Solution”. Did you ever read it?’

‘I’ve no time for poetry.’

‘Brecht asked, would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people, and vote itself another?’

‘Do you know what people say of you in Moscow?’ the older man asked. ‘They say, is this man a Russian or is he a German?’

‘And what do you say when people ask that question of you, Pavel?’

‘I had never met you,’ said the elder man, ‘I knew you only by reputation.’

‘And now? Now that you’ve met me?’

‘You like speaking German so much that sometimes I think you’ve forgotten how to speak Russian.’

‘I haven’t forgotten my mother tongue, Pavel. But it is good for you to practise German. Even more you need Spanish, but your appalling Spanish hurts my ears.’

‘You use your German name so much, I wonder if you are ashamed of your father’s name.’

‘I’m not ashamed, Pavel. Stinnes was my operational name and I have retained it. Many others have done the same.’

‘You take a German wife and I wonder if Russian girls were not good enough for you.’

‘I was on active service when I married, Pavel. There were no objections then as I remember.’

‘And now I hear you talk of the June ’53 uprising as if you sympathized with the German terrorists. What about our Russian boys whose blood was spilled restoring law and order?’

‘My loyalty is not in question, Pavel. My record is better than yours, and you know that.’

‘But you don’t believe any more.’

‘Perhaps I never did believe in the way that you believe,’ said Stinnes. ‘Perhaps that’s the answer.’

‘There’s no half-way,’ said the elder man. ‘Either you accept the Party Congress and its interpretation of Marxist-Leninism or you are a heretic.’

‘A heretic?’ said Stinnes, feigning interest. ‘Extra ecclesiam nulla salus; no salvation is possible outside the Church. Is that it, Pavel? Well, perhaps I am a heretic. And it’s your misfortune that the Party prefers that, and so does the service. A heretic like me does not lose his faith.’

‘You don’t care about the struggle,’ said the elder man. ‘You can’t even be bothered to search the house.’

‘There’s no car, and no boat at the dock. Do you think a man such as Biedermann would come on foot through the jungle that frightens you so much?’

‘You knew he wouldn’t be here.’

‘He’s a thousand miles away by now,’ said Stinnes. ‘He’s rich. A man like that can go anywhere at a moment’s notice. Perhaps you haven’t been in the West long enough to understand how difficult that makes our job.’

‘Then why did we drag ourselves out here through that disgusting jungle?’

‘You know why we came. We came because Biedermann told us the Englishman phoned and said he was coming here. We came because the stupid woman in Berlin sent a priority telex last night telling us to come here.’

‘And you wanted to prove Berlin was wrong. You wanted to prove you know better than she knows.’

‘Biedermann is a liar. We have found that over and over again.’

‘Then let’s get on the road back,’ said the older man. ‘You’ve proved your point; now let’s get back to Mexico City, back to electric light and hot water.’

‘The house must be searched. You are right, Pavel. Take a look round. I will wait here.’

‘I have no gun.’

‘If anyone kills you, Pavel, I will get them.’

The elder man hesitated as if about to argue, but he went about his task, nervously poking about with his flashlight, while Stinnes watched him with ill-concealed contempt. He came upstairs too but he was an amateur. I stepped outside to avoid him. I need not have bothered even to do that, for he did little more than shine a light through the doorway to see if the bed was occupied. After no more than ten minutes he was back in the lounge telling Stinnes that the house was empty. ‘Now can we go back?’

‘You’ve gone soft, Pavel. Is that why Moscow sent you to be my assistant?’

‘You know why Moscow sent me here,’ the elder man grumbled.

Stinnes laughed briefly and I heard him put his glass down on the table. ‘Yes, I read your personal file. For “political realignment”. Whatever did you do in Moscow that the department thinks you are not politically reliable?’

‘Nothing. You know very well that that bastard got rid of me because I discovered he was taking bribes. One day his turn will come. A criminal like that cannot survive for ever.’

‘But meanwhile, Pavel, you suit me fine. You are politically unreliable and so the one man I can be sure will not report my unconventional views.’

‘You are my superior officer, Major Stinnes,’ said the older man stuffily.

‘That’s right. Well, let’s head back. You’ll drive for the first couple of hours. I will drive when we reach the mountains. If you see anything in the road drive over it. Too many people get killed on these roads swerving to avoid eyes they see shining in the headlights.’

4

I didn’t sleep again after they departed. I dozed fitfully but imagined I could hear their diesel car returning, with the alternate roars and screams that a really bad surface racks from a small engine. But it was just the wind, and then, as dawn came and the storm passed over, I was kept awake by the screeching and chattering of the animals. They came right down to the water through the thick undergrowth that bordered one side of the house. There was a stream there; it passed close by a window of Paul Biedermann’s study. I suppose he liked to watch the animals. It was an aspect of Biedermann’s character that I’d not yet encountered.

Dawn shone its hard grey light and made the sea look like granite. I went down to the kitchen and found some canned food: beans and tomatoes. I could find no way of warming the mixture so I ate a plateful cold. I was hungry.

From the kitchen window there was a view back towards the village. That way the sky was light pink. I counted seven vultures, circling very high and looking for breakfast. Nearer to the house there were birds in the trees making a lot of noise, and monkeys scrambling about in the lower branches with occasional forays into the garden.

I would have given a lot for a cup of coffee, but instant powder stirred into cold tinned milk did not appeal. I made do with a shot of Biedermann’s brandy. It was everything Stinnes said about it. So good, in fact, that I took another.

Fortified by the strong drink, and one of Biedermann’s fancy striped sweaters chosen from his wardrobe, I went outside. The sky was overcast to give a cold shadowless light and, although the black clouds had gone, there was still a cold wind from the ocean. The tyre marks of the jeep were to be seen on the roadway. I followed the new macadam road to the entrance gate. It was open, its chain freshly cut. Despite the borrowed sweater I was cold, and colder still as I circled the house completely, crossed the patio that was sheltered from the wind, and climbed up the hill at the back to the highest point of rock. I couldn’t see the road or the village but there was a haze of woodsmoke rising from where I guessed the village must be. I couldn’t see any sign of Biedermann or his car. That was the first time I’d noticed the swimming pool. It was about two hundred metres from the house and hidden by a line of junipers planted by some landscape gardener for that purpose.

The pool was big, and very blue. And full length on the bottom, at the deep end, was a human figure. At first I thought it was a drowning case. Wrapped in cheap grey blankets, the figure made a shapeless bundle that almost disappeared in the dark depths of blue shade. It was only when I got past the wooden building that housed four changing rooms and filtering and heating equipment that I was sure that the pool was dry and drained.

‘Hey!’ I shouted at the inert figure. ‘Tu que haces?’

Very slowly the blankets became unravelled to reveal a man dressed in badly wrinkled white trousers and a T-shirt advertising Underberg. One of his bare sunburned arms bore a lacework of neat white scar tissue, and so did one side of his face. He blinked and squinted into the light, trying to see me against the glaring sky.

‘Paul Biedermann,’ I shouted. ‘What the hell are you doing in the pool?’

‘You came,’ he said. His voice was hoarse and he coughed to clear his throat. ‘The others have gone? How did you get here?’

‘It’s Bernd,’ I said. ‘We spoke on the phone; Bernd Samson. I walked. Yes, the other two drove away hours ago.’ He must have been watching the road. My approach along the track had gone unobserved from wherever he’d been hiding.

Wrapped into his blanket I could see a hunting rifle. Biedermann pushed it away as he bent his head forward almost to his knees and stretched his arms. Then he rubbed his legs and arms, trying to restore his circulation. It must have been very uncomfortable on the hard, cold surface of the concrete pool all night. He looked up and then smiled as he recognized me. It was a severe smile, twisted by the puckered scars that marked one side of his face.

‘Bernd. Are you alone?’ he said, trying to make it sound as if it meant no more to him than how many cups of coffee to order. His face and arms were blue; it was the light reflected from the painted sides of the pool.

‘They’ve gone,’ I said. ‘Come and switch the electricity on, and make me a cup of coffee.’

He slung the rifle on his shoulder and climbed up the ladder of the empty pool. He left the blanket where it was. I wondered if he intended to spend another uncomfortable night here.

He moved about like an automaton. Once inside the house he showed me all the things I should have found for myself. There was bottled gas for cooking, a generator for lighting, and a battery-powered Sony short-wave radio. He boiled water and measured out coffee in silence. It was as if he wanted to take as long as he could to defer the start of the conversation. Even when we were both seated in his study, hands clasped round cups of strong black coffee, he still didn’t offer any explanation about his curious behaviour. I said nothing. I waited for him to speak. It was usually better that way and I wanted to see how he would start, and even more importantly what he would avoid.

‘I’ve got everything,’ said Paul Biedermann. ‘Plenty of money, my health, and a wife who stood by me after the accident. Even after that girl was killed in my car.’ It was hard to believe that this was the nervous schoolboy I’d known in Berlin. It was not just the strong American accent he’d acquired at his expensive East Coast school but something in his poise and his manner too. Paul Biedermann had become unreservedly American in a way that only Germans are able to do.

‘That was a nasty business,’ I said.

‘I was unconscious three days. I was in hospital almost six months altogether, counting the convalescence. Six months; and I hate hospitals.’ He drank some coffee. It was a heavy Mexican coffee that Biedermann had turned into a devil’s brew that made my teeth tingle. ‘But then I got entangled with those bastards and I haven’t slept properly ever since. Do you know that, Bernd? It’s the literal truth that I haven’t slept really well since the start of it.’

‘Is that so,’ I said. I didn’t want to sit there with my tongue hanging out. I wanted to sound casual; bored, almost. But I wanted to know, especially after I’d heard Stinnes and his pal talking about Biedermann as if he was a KGB agent.

‘The Russians,’ said Biedermann, ‘spies and all that. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’ He was looking over my shoulder as if he wanted to see the animals and birds in the trees outside.

‘I know what you’re talking about, Paul,’ I said.

‘Because you’re in all that, aren’t you?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ I said

‘I was talking to my sister Poppy. She met you at a dinner party at the house of one of the big Berlin spy chiefs. You’re one of them, Bernd. You probably always have been. Was that why your father sent you to school in Berlin, instead of sending you back to England the way the other British families sent their kids back there to go to school?’

‘Who were they, Paul? Who were those men who came in the night?’

‘I didn’t see you arrive. I was out with the gun, shooting lizards. I hate lizards, don’t you? Those Russkies are like lizards, aren’t they? Especially the one with glasses. I knew they would come, and I was right.’

‘How well do you know them?’

‘They pass me around like a parcel. I’ve dealt with so many different Russians that I’ve almost lost count. These two were sent from Berlin. The one with the strong Berlin accent calls himself Stinnes but he’s not really a German, he’s a Russian. The other one calls himself Pavel Moskvin. It sounds like a phoney name, doesn’t it? I still haven’t figured out if they work from Moscow or are part of the East German intelligence service. What do you think, Bernd?’

‘Moskvin means “man from Moscow”. It could be a genuine name. Do they have diplomatic cover?’

‘They said they do.’

‘Then they are Russians. The KGB give almost all their people diplomatic cover. The East Germans don’t. They work mostly in West Germany and infiltrate their agents among the refugees going there.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s part of the overall contingency plan. East German agents in West Germany are hard to find. They don’t need the cover. And in other parts of the world East German networks survive after Russians with diplomatic cover are discovered and kicked out.’

‘They never answer any questions. I thought they’d leave me alone, now that I spend most of the year in Mexico.’ Not most of the time but most of the year. Most of the financial year; it was a fiscal measurement of time.

‘How did you get entangled with the Russians, Paul?’ I asked, carefully using his own words.

‘What am I supposed to do? I’ve got half my family still living over there in Rostock. Am I supposed to tell them to go to hell so that they take it out on my aunts and uncles?’

‘Yes, that’s what you’re supposed to do,’ I said.

‘Well, I didn’t,’ said Biedermann. ‘I played along with them. I told them I’d do nothing serious but I played along when they asked for run-of-the-mill jobs.’

‘What did they get you to do?’

‘Laundering money. They never asked me to give them money – they seem to have plenty of that to throw around. They wanted Deutschmarks changed into dollars, Swedish kronor changed into Mexican pesos and vice versa, Latin American currencies changed into Dutch guilders.’

‘They could have all that done at a money exchange in West Berlin.’

He smiled and stared at something beyond me and drank his coffee. ‘Ja,’ he said, forgetting for a moment that we were speaking English. He touched the side of his face as if discovering the terrible scars for the first time. ‘There was a difference; the money was sent to me in large cash transfers and I had to pass it on in small contributions and donations.’

‘Pass it on how?’

‘By mail.’

‘In small amounts?’

‘One hundred dollars, two hundred dollars. Never more than five hundred dollars – or the equivalent amount in whatever currency.’

‘Cash?’

‘Oh yes, cash. Strictly no cheques.’ He shifted uneasily in his seat, and I had the feeling that he now regretted this confession. ‘High-denomination notes in plain envelopes. No registered letters; that would mean a lot of names and addresses and post-office forms. Too risky, that sort of thing, they said.’

‘And where has all this money been going to?’

He put his coffee on the table and began searching the pockets of his pants as if looking for a cigarette. Then he stood up and looked round. Eventually he found a silver box on the table. He took one for himself. Then he offered the open box to me. It was, of course, that sort of evasive temporizing that armchair psychologists call ‘displacement activity’. Before he could repeat the whole performance in pursuit of matches, I threw him mine. He lit his cigarette and then waved the smoke away from his face nervously. ‘You know where it’s been going to, Bernd. Trade unions, peace movements, “ban the bomb” groups. Moscow can’t be seen making donations to them. The money has to come from “little people” all over the world. You weren’t born yesterday, Bernd. We all know the way it’s done.’

‘Yes, we all know the way it’s done, Paul.’ I swung round to see him. On the side-table there was the bottle of brandy that Stinnes and I had plundered. I wondered if that was what had attracted his gaze when he had stared over my shoulder. He wasn’t looking at it now; he was looking at me.

‘Don’t damn well sneer at me. I’ve got my relatives to worry about. And if I hadn’t koshered their bloody contributions someone else would do it for them. It’s not going to change the history of the world, is it?’ He was still moving round the room, looking at the furnishings as if seeing them for the first time.

‘I don’t know what it’s going to do, Paul. You’re the one that had the expensive education: schools in Switzerland, schools in America and two years’ postgraduate studies at Yale. You tell me if it’s going to change the history of the world.’

‘You weren’t so high and mighty in the old days,’ said Biedermann. ‘You weren’t so superior when you sold me that old Ferrari that kept breaking down.’

‘It was a good car. I had no trouble with it,’ I said. ‘I only sold it because I went to London. You should have looked after it better.’ What a memory he had. I’d quite forgotten selling him that car. Maybe that’s how the rich got richer – by remembering in resentful detail every transaction they made.

He kept his cigarette in his mouth and, still standing, fingered the keys of the computer as if about to use it. ‘It’s getting more and more difficult,’ he said. He turned to look at me, the smoke of the cigarette rising across his face like a fine veil and going into his eyes so that he was squinting. ‘Now that the Mexicans have nationalized the banks, and the peso has dropped through the floor, there are endless regulations about foreign exchange. It’s not so easy to handle these transactions without attracting attention.’

‘So tell your Russians that,’ I suggested.

‘I don’t want them to solve my problems. I want to get out of the whole business.’

‘Tell them that.’

‘And risk what happens to my relatives?’

‘You talk as though you are some sort of master spy,’ I said. ‘If you tell them you’ve had enough, that will be the end of it.’

‘They’d kill me,’ he said.

‘Rubbish,’ I said. ‘You’re not important enough for them to waste time or effort on.’

‘They’d make an example of me. They’d cut my throat and make sure everyone knew why.’

‘They’d not make an example of you,’ I said. ‘How could they? The last thing they want to do is draw attention to their secret financing network. No, as long as they thought you’d keep their secrets, they’d let you go, Paul. They’d huff and puff and shout and threaten in the hope you’d get frightened enough to keep going. But once they saw you were determined to end it they’d reconcile themselves to that.’

‘If only I could believe it.’ He blew a lot of smoke. ‘One of the new clerks in my Mexico City office – a German fellow – has been asking me questions about some of the money I sent out. It’s just a matter of time …’

‘You don’t let the staff in your office address the envelopes, do you?’

‘No, of course not. But I do the envelopes on the addressing machine. I can’t sit up all night writing out envelopes.’

‘You’re a fool, Paul.’

‘I know,’ he said sadly. ‘This German kid was updating the address lists and he noticed these charities and trade unions that were all coded in the same way. It was in a different code from all the other addresses. I said it was part of my Christmas charity list but I’m not sure he believed me.’

‘You’d better transfer him to one of your other offices,’ I said.

‘I’m going to send him to Caracas but it won’t really solve the problem. Some other clerk will notice. I can’t address the envelopes by hand and have handwritten evidence all over the place, can I?’

‘Why are you telling me all this, Paul?’

‘I’ve got to talk it over with someone.’

‘Don’t give me that,’ I said.

He stubbed out his cigarette and said, ‘I told the Russians that the British secret service was becoming suspicious. I invented stories about strangers making inquiries at various offices.’

‘Did they believe that?’

‘Phone calls. I always said the inquiries were phone calls. So I didn’t have to describe anyone’s physical appearance.’ He went over to the side-table and picked up the bottle of brandy. He put it into a cupboard and shut the door. It looked like the simple action of a tidy man who didn’t want to see bottles of booze standing around in his office.

‘That was clever,’ I said, although I thought such a device would sound very unconvincing to any experienced case officer.

‘I knew they’d have to give me a respite if I was under surveillance.’

‘And talking to me is a part of that scheme? Did you tell them about my phone call? Was it that that gave you the idea? Is that why they came here last night?’

He didn’t answer my question, and that convinced me that my guess was right. Biedermann had thought up all this nonsense about the British becoming suspicious only after I’d phoned him. He said, ‘You’re something in the espionage business, you’ve admitted that. I realize you’re not in any sort of senior position, but you must know people who are. And you’re the only contact I have.’

I grunted. I didn’t know whether that was Paul Biedermann’s sincere opinion or whether he was hoping to provoke me into claiming power and influence.

‘Does that mean you can help?’ he said.

I finished the coffee and got to my feet. ‘You copy that list of addresses for me – London might be interested in that – and I’ll make sure that Bonn is told that we are investigating you. You’ll become what NATO intelligence calls “sacred”. None of the other security teams will investigate you without informing us. That will get back to your masters quickly enough.’

‘Wait a moment, Bernd. I don’t want Bonn restricting my movements or opening my mail.’

‘You can’t have it both ways, Paul. “Sacred” is the lowest category we have. There’s not much chance that Bonn will find that interesting enough to do anything: they’ll leave you to us.’

Biedermann didn’t look too pleased at the idea of his reputation suffering, but he realized it was the best offer he was likely to get. ‘Don’t double-cross me,’ he said.

‘How would I do that?’

‘I’m not up for sale to the highest bidder. I want out. I don’t want to exchange a master in Moscow for a master in London.’

‘You make me laugh, Paul,’ I said. ‘You really think you’re a master spy, don’t you? Are you sure you want to get out, or do you really want to get in deeper?’

‘I need help, Bernd.’

‘Where did you hide your car?’

‘You can drive along the beach when the tide is out.’

I should have thought of that one. The tide comes in and washes away the tyre tracks. It had fooled Stinnes and his pal too. Sometimes amateurs can teach the pros a trick or two. ‘The tide is out now,’ I said. ‘Get it and give me a lift into the village, will you, before someone starts renting my Chevvy out as a bijou residence.’

‘Keep the sweater,’ he said. ‘It looks good on you.’

5

‘Muy complicado,’ said Dicky. We were elbowing our way through a huge cobbled plaza that twice a week became one of Mexico City’s busiest street markets, and he was listening to my account of the trip to Paul Biedermann’s house. It was what Dicky called combining business with pleasure. ‘Muy bloody complicado,’ he said reflectively. That was Dicky’s way of saying he didn’t understand.

‘Not very complicated,’ I said. I’d found Biedermann’s story depressingly simple – too simple, perhaps, to be the whole truth – but not complicated.

‘Biedermann hiding in the bloody pool all night clasping a gun?’ said Dicky with heavy irony. ‘No, not complicated at all, of course.’ He’d been chewing the nail of his little finger and now he inspected it. ‘You’re not telling me you believed all that stuff?’

The sun was very hot. Towering cumulus clouds were building up to the east and the humidity was becoming intolerable. We were walking down a line of vendors selling secondhand hardware that varied from ancient spark plugs to fake Nazi medals. Dicky stopped to look at some broken pottery figurines that a handwritten notice said were ancient Olmec. Dicky picked one up and looked at it. It looked too new to be genuine, but then so did many of the fragments in the National Museum.

Dicky passed it to me and walked on. I put it back on the ground with the other junk. I had too many broken fragments in my life already. I found Dicky looking at a basketful of silver-plated bracelets. ‘I must get some little presents to take back to London,’ he said.

‘Which parts of Biedermann’s story do you think were not true?’ I asked him.

‘Never mind the exam questions,’ snapped Dicky. He didn’t want to be in Mexico; he wanted to be in London making sure his job was secure. In some perverse way he blamed me for his situation, although, God knows, no one would have waved goodbye to him with more pleasure.

He started bargaining with the Indian squatting behind the folk-art jewellery. After a series of offers and counter-offers, Dicky agreed to buy six of them. He crouched down and solemnly began to sort through all of them to find the best six.

‘I’m asking you what you believe and what you don’t believe,’ I said. ‘Hell, Dicky. You’re in charge. I need to know.’

Still crouched down, he looked at me from under the eyelashes that made him the heart-throb of the typing pool. He knew I was goading him. ‘You think I’ve been swanning around in Los Angeles wasting my time and the department’s money, don’t you?’ Dicky was looking very Hollywood since his return from California. The faded jeans had gone, replaced by striped seersucker trousers and a short-sleeved green safari shirt with loops to hold rhino bullets.

‘Why would I think that?’

Satisfied with his choice of bracelets, he sorted out his Mexican money and paid for them. He smiled and put the bracelets in the pocket of his shirt. ‘I saw Frank Harrington in LA. You didn’t know I was going to see Frank, did you?’

Frank Harrington headed the Berlin Field Unit. He was an old experienced Whitehall warrior with influence where it really counted: at the very top. I didn’t like the idea of Dicky sliding off to meetings with him, especially meetings from which I was deliberately excluded. ‘No, I didn’t know.’

‘Frank was attending some CIA powwow and I buttonholed him to talk about Stinnes.’ We’d got to the end of the line and Dicky turned to go up the next row of stalls; brightly coloured fruit and vegetables on one side and broken furniture on the other. ‘This is not just another Mexican street market,’ said Dicky, who’d insisted that we come here. ‘This is a tiangui – an Indian market. Not many tourists get to see them.’

‘It might have been better to have come earlier. It’s always so damned hot by lunchtime.’

Dicky chuckled scornfully. ‘If I don’t jog and have a decent breakfast I can’t get going.’

‘Perhaps we should have found a hotel right here in town. Going backwards and forwards to Cuernavaca eats up a lot of time.’

‘A couple of miles jogging every morning would do you good, Bernard. You’re putting on a lot of weight. It’s all that stodge you eat.’

‘I like stodge,’ I said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Look at all these wonderful fresh vegetables and delicious fruit. Look at those great heaps of chillies. There must be fifty different kinds. I wish I’d brought the camera with me now.’

‘Does Frank know anything about Stinnes?’

‘Ye gods. Frank knows everyone in Berlin. You know that, Bernard. Frank says Stinnes is one of their brightest people. Frank has a fat file on him, and all his activities from one end of the world to the other.’

I nodded. Frank always claimed to have fat files on everything when he was away from his office. It was only when you were with him in Berlin that the ‘fat file’ turned out to be a small pink card with ‘Refer to Data Centre’ scribbled on it. ‘Good old Frank,’ I said.

This end of the market beyond the vegetables was occupied by food stalls. Almost everyone in the market seemed to be eating. They were eating and buying, eating and selling, eating and chatting, and even eating as they smoked and drank. Some of the more dedicated were sitting down to eat, and for these aficionados seats were provided. There were chairs and stools of every kind, age and size, with nothing in common but their infirmity.

Most of the stalls had steaming pots from which stewed mixtures of rice, chicken, pork and every variety of beans were being served. There were charcoal grills too, laden with pieces of scorching meat that filled the air with smoke and appetizing smells. And the ever-present tortillas were being eaten as fast as they could be kneaded, rolled out and cooked. An old lady came up to Dicky and handed him a tortilla. Dicky was disconcerted and tried to argue with her.

‘She wants you to feel the texture and admire the colour,’ I said.

Dicky gave her one of his big smiles, fingered it as if he was going to have it made up into a three-piece suit, and handed it back with a lot of ‘Gracias, adios’.

‘Stinnes speaks excellent Spanish,’ I said. ‘Did Frank tell you anything about that?’

‘You were right about Stinnes. He went to Cuba to sort out some of their security problems. He did so well that he became the KGB’s Caribbean trouble-shooter all through the early seventies. He’s been to just about all the places where the Cubans have sent soldiers; and that’s a lot of travelling.’

‘Does Frank know why Stinnes is here?’

‘I think you’ve answered that already,’ said Dicky. ‘He’s here running your friend Biedermann.’ He looked at me and, when I didn’t respond, said, ‘Don’t you think so, Bernard?’

‘Arranging a little money to prop up a trade union or finance an anti-nuke demo? Not exactly something for one of the KGB’s brightest people, is it?’

‘I’m not so sure,’ said Dicky. ‘Central America is a top KGB priority, you can’t deny that, Bernard.’

‘Let me put it another way,’ I said. ‘Covert financing of that sort is an administration job. It’s not something for Stinnes with his languages and years of field experience.’

‘Ho ho,’ said Dicky. ‘Hint, hint, eh? You mean, you chaps with field experience and fluent languages are wasted on the sort of job that administrators like me can manage?’

It was exactly what I thought, but since it wasn’t what I’d intended to say I denied it. ‘Why the German name?’ I said. ‘And why does a man like that work out of Berlin? He must be forty years old; a crucial age for an ambitious man. Why isn’t he in Moscow where the really big decisions are made?’

‘Si, maestro,’ said Dicky very slowly. He looked at me quizzically and ran a fingertip along his thin bloodless lips as if trying to prevent himself from smiling. Instead of concealing my own feelings, I’d subconsciously identified with Stinnes. For I was also forty years old and I wanted to be where the big decisions are made. Dicky nodded solemnly. He might be a little slow on languages and fieldwork but in the game of office politics he was seeded number one. ‘Frank Harrington had an answer for that one. Stinnes – real name Nikolai Sadoff – married a German girl who couldn’t master the Russian language. They lived in Moscow for some time but she was miserable there. Stinnes finally asked for a transfer. They live in East Berlin. Frank Harrington thinks a Mexico City assignment will probably be a quick in and out for Stinnes.’

‘Yes, he talked as if he was going soon – “when I’ve gone back to Europe”, he said.’

‘He said the Englishwoman had put him in charge of one of her crazy schemes, didn’t he?’

‘More or less,’ I said.

‘And we both know who the Englishwoman is, don’t we? Your wife is running this operation. It was your wife who sent the telex from Berlin that they grudgingly obeyed. Right?’

I said nothing.

Dicky stared at me, his mouth pursed, his eyes narrowed. ‘Is it right or not?’ He smiled. ‘Or do you think they might have some other Englishwoman running the KGB office in Berlin.’

‘Probably Fiona,’ I said.

‘Well, I’m glad we agree on that one,’ said Dicky sarcastically. It was only when I heard the contempt in his voice that I realized that he hated working on this job with me as much as I did with him. In the London office our relationship was tolerable; but on this type of job every little difference became abrasive. Dicky turned away from me and took a great interest in the various pots of stew. One of the stallholders opened the lids so that we could sniff. ‘Smell that,’ I said. ‘There’s enough chilli in there to put you into orbit.’

‘Obit, you mean,’ said Dicky, moving on quickly. ‘Put you into the Times obit column.’ His dinner with the Volkmanns had lessened his appetite for the chilli. ‘Our friend Paul Biedermann is going soggy on them. He starts making up stories about British spies telephoning him, and who knows what other sort of nonsense he’s been telling them. So they get nervous and Stinnes is sent over here to kick arses and get Biedermann back into line.’

‘Is that also what Frank says?’

‘No, that’s what I’m saying. It’s obvious. I don’t know why you are being so baroque about it. Maybe it’s not a very big deal. But these KGB people like a nice little jaunt to Mexico, fresh lobster salad and a swim in the Pacific to brighten up their working days. Stinnes is no different.’

‘It doesn’t feel right. Biedermann is rich and successful; he is woolly-minded and flabby with it. He doesn’t have the motivation, and he certainly doesn’t need the money.’

‘So what? Biedermann was frightened for his family. Shall we eat here? Some of this food looks really good. Look at that.’ He read the sign. ‘What are carnitas?’

‘Stewed pork. He’s serving it on chicharrones: pork crackling. You eat the meat, then eat the plate. Biedermann wouldn’t give that plate of pork for his family, and especially not for distant relatives in Rostock.’

‘We’ll walk to the end and see what else there is and then come back here and try some,’ Dicky suggested. Dicky could always surprise me. Just as I had decided he was the archetypal gringo tourist, he wanted to have lunch at a fonda. ‘So what’s your theory?’

‘I have no theory,’ I said. ‘Agents come in many shapes and sizes. Some are waiting for the socialist millennium, some hate their parents, some get angry after being ripped off by a loan company. Some simply want more money. But usually it begins with opportunity. A man finds himself handling something secret and valuable. He starts thinking about using that opportunity to get more money. Only then does he become a dedicated communist agent. So how does Biedermann fit into that? Where are his secrets? What’s his motivation?’

‘Guilt,’ said Dicky. ‘He feels guilty about his wealth.’

‘If you’d ever met Paul Biedermann you’d know what a good joke that is.’

‘Blackmail, then?’

‘About what?’

‘Sex.’

‘Paul Biedermann would pay to have people say he was a sex maniac. He thinks of himself as a rich playboy.’

‘You let your acute dislike of Paul Biedermann spill over into your judgements, Bernard. The fact of the matter is that Biedermann is an agent. You heard the two KGB people talking. He is an agent; it’s no good your trying to convince yourself he’s not.’

‘Oh, he’s an agent,’ I said. ‘But he’s not the sort of agent that a man such as Stinnes would be running. That’s what puzzles me.’

‘Your experience makes you over-estimate what qualities an agent needs. Try and see it from their point of view: rich US businessman – someone the local cops would be reluctant to upset – isolated house on a lonely stretch of beach in western Mexico, not too far by road from the capital. And not too far by sea from Vladivostok.’

‘Landing guns, you mean?’

‘A man with a reputation for drinking who gets so rough with his servants that he’s left all alone in the house. Wife and children often away. Convenient beach, pier big enough for a big motor boat.’

‘Come along, Dicky,’ I said. ‘This is just a holiday cottage by Biedermann’s standards. This is just a place he goes to read the Wall Street Journal and spend the weekend dreaming up a quick way to make a million or two.’

‘So for half the year the house is completely empty. Then Stinnes and his pals have the place all to themselves. We know guns go from Cuba to Mexico’s east coast and onwards by light plane. So why not bring them across the Pacific from the country where they are manufactured?’ We’d got to the end of the food stalls and Dicky became interested in a stall selling pictures. There were family group photos and coloured litho portraits of generals and presidents. All of the pictures were in fine old frames.

‘It doesn’t smell right,’ I said. But Dicky had put together a convincing scenario. If it was the house they were interested in, it didn’t matter what kind of aptitude Biedermann had for being a field agent. Yes, London Central would love a report along those lines. It had the drama they liked. It had the geopolitic that called for maps and coloured diagrams. And, as a bottom line, it could be true.

‘If it doesn’t smell right,’ said Dicky with heavy irony, ‘I’ll tell London to forget the whole thing.’ He stood up straight as he looked at the selection of pictures for sale, and I realized he was studying his reflection in the glass-fronted pictures. He was too thin for the large, bright-green safari shirt. It made him look like a lollipop. ‘Is it going to rain?’ he said, looking at the time. He’d bought a new wrist-watch too. It was a multi-dial black chronometer that kept perfect time at 50 fathoms.

‘It seldom rains in the morning, even during the rainy season.’

‘It will bucket down on the stroke of noon, then,’ said Dicky, looking up at the clouds that were now turning yellowish.

‘I’m still not sure what London wants with Stinnes,’ I said.

‘London want Stinnes enrolled,’ he said, as if he’d just remembered it. ‘Shall we walk back to where the pork is? What did you say it’s called – carnitas?’

‘Enrolled?’ It could mean a lot of things from persuaded to defect, to knocked on the head and rolled in a carpet. ‘That would be difficult.’

‘The bigger they are the harder they fall,’ said Dicky. ‘You said yourself that he’s forty years old and passed over for promotion. He’s been stuck in East Berlin for ages. Berlin is a plum job for Western intelligence but it’s the boondocks for their people. A smart KGB major left to rot in East Berlin is sure to be fretting.’

‘I suppose his wife likes it there,’ I said.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ said Dicky. ‘Would I take an intelligence job in Canada because my wife liked ice hockey?’

‘No, Dicky, you wouldn’t.’

‘And this fellow Stinnes will see what’s good for him. Frank Harrington thought the chances were good.’

‘You talked about all this with Frank?’

‘Sure. Frank has to be in on it because Stinnes is based in Big B. Stinnes is very much in his territory, Bernard.’ A nervous movement of fingers through curly hair. ‘The worst difficulty is that the Data Centre showed that Stinnes has an eighteen-year-old son. That might prove sticky.’

‘Christ, Dicky,’ I said, as I came to terms with this bombshell. ‘Did you know all this when we left London?’

‘Enrolling Stinnes, you mean?’

‘Yes, enrolling Stinnes I mean.’

‘It looked as if it might go that way.’ That was Dicky on the defensive. He’d known all along, that was obvious. I wondered what else he knew that he was not going to tell me about until it happened. ‘London Central put out a departmental alert for him, didn’t they?’ We had reached the carnitas stand by now. He selected a chair that didn’t wobble and sat down. ‘I’ll have mine wrapped in a tortilla; pork skin is very fattening.’

‘London Central puts out departmental alerts for clerks who make off with the petty cash.’

‘But they don’t send senior staff, like us, to identify them when they are spotted,’ said Dicky.

‘Enrolled,’ I said, considering all the implications. ‘A hotshot like Stinnes. You and me? It’s madness.’

‘Only if you start thinking it’s madness,’ said Dicky. ‘My own opinion …’ Pause. ‘For what’s it’s worth …’ A modest smile. ‘… is that we stand an excellent chance.’

‘And when did you last enrol a KGB major?’

Dicky bit his lip. We both knew the answer to that one. Dicky was a pen-pusher. Stinnes was the first KGB officer Dicky had ever come this close to, and he hadn’t seen Stinnes yet.

‘Isn’t London proposing to send someone over here to help? This is a complicated job, Dicky. We need someone who has experience.’

‘Nonsense. We can do it. I don’t want Bret Rensselaer breathing down my neck. If we can pull this one off, it will be a real coup.’ He smiled. ‘I didn’t expect you to start asking London for help, Bernard. I thought you were the one who always liked to do everything on his own.’

‘I’m not on my own,’ I said. ‘I’m with you.’ The stallholder was stirring his cauldron of pork and arranging suitable pieces on a large metal platter.

‘And you’d prefer to work with your friend Werner, eh?’

I could hear danger signals. ‘We were at school together,’ I said. ‘I’ve known him a long time.’

‘Werner Volkmann isn’t even employed by the department. He hasn’t been employed by us for years.’

‘Officially that’s right,’ I said. ‘But he’s worked for us from time to time.’

‘Because you give him jobs to do,’ said Dicky. ‘Don’t try to make it sound as if the department employs him.’

‘Werner knows Berlin,’ I said.

‘You know Berlin. Frank Harrington knows Berlin. Our friend Stinnes knows Berlin. There is no great shortage of people who know Berlin. That’s no reason for employing Werner.’

‘Werner is a Jew. He was born in Berlin when the Nazis were running things. Werner instinctively sees things in people that you and I have to learn about. You can’t compare his knowledge of Berlin and Berliners with anything I know.’

‘Calm down. Everyone knows Werner is your alter ego, and so mustn’t be criticized.’

‘What do you want? You can have “lean meat”, “pure meat”, “meat without fat” or “a bit of everything”.’

‘What’s the difference between …’

‘Don’t let’s get into semantics,’ I said. ‘Try surtido, that’s a bit of everything.’ Dicky nodded his agreement.

Dicky, who always showed a remarkable aptitude for feeding himself, now discovered that a carnitas stand is always conveniently close to those that sell the necessary accompaniments. He provided us with salsas and marinated cactus, and was now discovering that tortillas are sold by the kilo. ‘A kilo,’ he said as the tortilla lady disappeared with the payment and left him with a huge pile of them. ‘Do you think they’ll keep if I take them back for Daphne?’ He wrapped some of the pork into the top tortilla. ‘Delicious,’ he said as he ate the first one and took a second tortilla to begin making another. ‘What are all those pieces?’

‘That’s ear, and those pieces are intestine,’ I said.

‘You just wait until Daphne hears what I’ve been eating; she’ll throw up. Our neighbours came out to Mexico last year and stayed in the Sheraton. They wouldn’t even clean their teeth unless they had bottled water. I wish I had my camera so you could photograph me eating here in the market. Now what is it again – carnitas? I want to get it exactly right when I tell them.’

‘Carnitas,’ I said. ‘Surtido.’

Dicky wiped his mouth on his handkerchief and stood up and looked round the market square. Just from where we were sitting I could see people selling plastic toys, antique tables and gilt mirrors, cheap shirts, brass bedsteads, dog-eared American film magazines and a selection of cut-glass stoppers that always survive long after the decanters. ‘Yes,’ said Dicky. ‘It’s really quite a place, isn’t it? Fifteen million people perched at seven thousand feet altitude with high mountain tops all round them and thick smog permanently overhead. Where else could you find a capital city with no river, no coastline and such lousy roads? And yet this is one of the oldest cities the world has ever known. If that doesn’t prove that the human race is stone-raving mad, nothing will.’

‘I hope you don’t think I’m going to walk right up to Stinnes and offer him a chance to defect,’ I said.

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Dicky. ‘The Volkmanns already know him. Shall we let them make the first overtures?’

‘Werner doesn’t work for the department. You just told me that.’

‘Correction,’ said Dicky. ‘I said that Werner’s knowledge of Berlin is not sufficient reason for using him in Berlin. Let’s remember that Werner has had a “non-critical employment only” tag on his file.’

‘You can be a spiteful bastard, Dicky,’ I said. ‘You’re talking about that signals leak in 1978. You know very well that Werner was completely cleared of suspicion.’

‘It was your wife who did it,’ said Dicky. Suddenly he was angry. He was angry because he’d never suspected Fiona of leaking secrets, and now I realized that Dicky saw me as someone who had helped to deceive him rather than as Fiona’s principal victim.

The sky was darkening with clouds now and there was the movement of air that precedes a storm. I never got used to the speedy effects of the heat and humidity. The sweet smell of fresh fruits and vegetables had filled the air when we first arrived at the market. Now it was already giving way to the smells of putrefaction as the spoiled, squashed and broken produce went bad.

‘Yes, it was my wife who did it. Werner was innocent.’

‘And if you’d listened you’d have heard me say that Werner has had a “non-crit” tag on his file. I didn’t say it was still there.’

‘And now you’re going to ask Werner to enrol Stinnes for you?’

‘I think you’d better put it to him, Bernard.’

‘He’s on holiday,’ I said. ‘It’s a sort of second honeymoon.’

‘So you told me,’ said Dicky. ‘But my guess is that they are both getting a bit bored with each other. If you were on your honeymoon – first, second or third – you wouldn’t want to spend the evenings in some broken-down German club in a seedy part of town, would you?’

‘We haven’t seen the club yet,’ I reminded him. ‘Perhaps it’s tremendous.’

‘I love the way you said that, Bernard. I wish I could have recorded the way you said “tremendous”. Yes, it might be Mexico’s answer to Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, or the Paris Lido, but don’t bank on it. You see, if it was me on a second honeymoon with that delectable little Zena, I’d be in Acapulco, or maybe finding some sandy little beach where we could be undisturbed. I wouldn’t be taking her along to the Kronprinz club to see who’s winning the bridge tournament.’

‘The way it’s turned out,’ I said, ‘you’re not taking the delectable little Zena anywhere. I thought I heard you saying you didn’t like her. I remember you saying that one honeymoon with Zena would be enough for you.’ From the sulphurous yellow sky there came a steady drum-roll of thunder, an overture for a big storm.

Dicky laughed. ‘I admit I was a little hasty,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t been away from home for very long when I said that. The way I feel now, Zena is looking sexier and sexier every day.’

‘And you think talking to Stinnes about Western democracy and the free world will give the Volkmanns a new interest in life,’ I said.

‘Even allowing for your sarcasm, yes. Why don’t you put it to them and see what they say?’

‘Why don’t you put it to them and see what they say?’

‘Look at those children and the donkey and the old man with the sombrero. That would make the sort of photo that wins prizes at the Photo Club. I was so stupid not to bring a camera. But have you seen the sort of price you have to pay for a camera in this country? The Americans are really putting the squeeze on the peso. No, I think you should put it to them, Bernard. You get hold of Werner and talk with him, and then he could go along to the Kronprinz Club tonight and see if Stinnes is there.’ He stopped at a stall to watch a man making chiles rellenos, putting meat fillings into large peppers. Each one got a big spoonful of chopped chillies before being deep-fried and put in a garlicky tomato sauce. Just looking at it made me feel queasy.

‘Werner will have to know what London is prepared to offer Stinnes. I assume there will eventually be a big first payment, a salary and contractual provisions about the size of the house they’ll get and what sort of car and so on.’

‘Is that the way it’s done?’ said Dicky. ‘It sounds like a marriage contract.’

‘They like it defined that way because you can’t buy houses in East Europe and they don’t know the prices of cars and so on. They usually want to have a clear idea of what they are getting.’

‘London will pay,’ said Dicky. ‘They want Stinnes; they really want him. That’s just between us, of course; that’s not for Werner Volkmann to know.’ He touched the side of his nose in a conspiratorial gesture. ‘No reasonable demand will be refused.’

‘So what does Werner say to Stinnes?’ On the cobbled ground there were shiny black spots appearing one after the other in the grey dust. The rain had come.

‘Let’s keep it all very soft-sell, shall we?’ said Dicky. His wife Daphne worked in a small advertising agency. Dicky told me that it had very aggressive methods with really up-to-date selling techniques. Sometimes I got the feeling that Dicky would like to see the department being run on the same lines. Preferably by him.

‘You mean we don’t brief Werner?’

‘Let’s see how the cookie crumbles,’ said Dicky. It was an old advertising expression that meant put your head in the sand, your arse in the air and wait for the explosion.

My prediction that the rain came only in the afternoons was only just right. It was a few minutes after one o’clock when the rain started. Dicky took me in the car as far as the university, where he was to see one of his Oxford friends, and there – on the open plaza – let me out into steady rain. I cursed him, but there was no hostility in Dicky’s self-interest; he would have done the same thing to almost anyone.

It was not easy to get a cab but eventually an old white VW beetle stopped for me. The car’s interior was battered and dirty, but the driver’s position was equipped like the flight deck of a Boeing jet. The dashboard was veneered in walnut and there was an array of small spanners and screwdrivers and a pen-shaped flashlight as well as a large coloured medallion of the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe. In contrast to the derelict bodywork of the little car, the young driver was dressed in a freshly starched white shirt with a dark-grey tie and looked more like a stockbroker than a cab driver. But Mexico is like that.

The traffic moved slowly through the heavy rain but it didn’t make less noise. There were two-stroke motorcycles and cars with broken mufflers and giant trucks – some so carefully painted up that every bolt-head, rivet and wheel-nut was picked out in different colours. Here on the city’s outskirts, the wide boulevard was lined with a chaos of broken walls, goats grazing on waste ground, adobe huts, rubbish tips, crudely painted shop-fronts in primary colours and corrugated-iron fences defaced with political slogans and ribaldry. Despite the rain, drunks sprawled full-length on the pavement and the barbecue fires hissed and flared at the taco counters.

By the time we got near to Werner Volkmann’s apartment, the rainstorm was flooding the gutters and making great lakes through which the traffic splashed, and in which it sometimes stalled. There was a constant racket of car horns and engines being over-revved by nervous drivers. The cab moved slowly, and I watched drenched and dirty kids offering dry, clean lottery tickets that were protected inside clear plastic bags. And plenty of well-dressed shoppers had chauffeurs who could hold an umbrella in one hand and open the door of a limousine with the other. I couldn’t imagine Zena Volkmann anywhere but here in the Zona Rosa. Within the area contained by the Insurgentes, Sevilla and Chapultepec there are the big international hotels, smart restaurants, the shops with branches in Paris and New York. And in the crowded cafés that spill out on to the pavement are to be heard every new rumour, joke and scandal that this outrageous town provides in abundance.

Zena Volkmann could live anywhere, of course. But she preferred to live in comfort. She’d learned to respect wealth, and the wealthy, in a way that only a poverty-stricken childhood teaches. She was a survivor who’d climbed up the ladder without benefit of any education beyond reading and writing and painting her face, plus a natural ability to count. Perhaps I did her an injustice but sometimes I had the feeling that she would do anything if the price was high enough, for she still had that fundamental insecurity that one bout of poverty can inflict for a lifetime, and no amount of money remedy.

She made no secret of her feelings. Even amid the contrasts of Mexico she showed no great interest in the plight of the hungry. And like so many poor people she had only contempt for socialism in any of its various forms, for it is only the rich and guilty who can afford the subtle delights of egalitarian philosophies.

Zena Volkmann was only twenty-two years old but she’d lived with her grandparents for much of her childhood. From them she’d inherited a nostalgia for a Germany of long ago. It was a Protestant Germany of aristocrats and Handküsse, silvery Zeppelins and student duels. It was a kultiviertes Germany of music, industry, science and literature; an imperial Germany ruled from the great cosmopolitan city of Berlin by efficient, incorruptible Prussians. It was a Germany she’d never seen; a Germany that had never existed.

The elaborate afternoon Kaffee-Trinken that she’d prepared was a manifestation of her nostalgia. The delicate chinaware into which she poured the coffee, and the solid-silver forks with which we ate the fruit tart, and the tiny damask napkins with which we dabbed our lips were all parts of a ceremony that was typically German. It was a scene to be found in the prosperous suburbs of any one of a hundred West German towns.

Zena’s brown silk afternoon dress, with embroidered collar and hem below the knee, made her look like a dedicated hausfrau. Her long dark hair was in two plaits and rolled to make the old-fashioned ‘earphone’ hairstyle virtually unknown outside Germany. And Werner, sitting there like an amiable gorilla, had gone to the extent of putting on his tan-coloured tropical suit and a striped tie. I was only too aware that my old rain-wet open-necked shirt was not exactly de rigueur, as I balanced the coffee-cup on the knee of my mud-splashed nylon pants.

While Zena had been in the kitchen I’d told Werner about my trip to Biedermann’s house, about the Russians I’d seen there and Biedermann’s confession to me. Werner took his time to answer. He turned to look out of the window. On a side-table the broken fragments of a cup and saucer had been arranged in a large ashtray. Werner moved the ashtray to the trolley that held the TV. From this sixth-floor apartment there was a view across the city. The sky was low and dark now, and the rain was beating down in great shimmering sheets, the way it does only in such tropical storms. He still hadn’t answered by the time Zena returned from the kitchen.

‘Biedermann always was a loner,’ said Werner. ‘He has two brothers, but Paul makes all the business decisions. Did you know that?’

It was small talk, but now Zena was with us and I was undecided about how much to say in front of her. ‘Are both his brothers in the business?’

Werner said, ‘Old Biedermann gave equal shares to all five of them – two girls and three boys. But the others leave all the decisions to Paul.’

‘And why not?’ said Zena, cutting a slice of fruit tart for me. ‘He knows how to make money. The other four have nothing to do but spend it.’

‘You never liked him, did you, Bernie?’ said Werner. ‘You never liked Paul.’

‘I hardly knew him,’ I said. ‘He went off to some fancy school. I remember his father. His father used to let me steer the trucks round their yard while he operated the accelerator and brakes. I was only a tiny child. I really liked the old man.’

‘It was a filthy old yard,’ said Werner. He was telling Zena rather than me. Or perhaps he was retelling it to himself. ‘Full of junk and rubbish. What a wonderland it was for us children who played there. We had such fun.’ He took a piece of tart from Zena. His slice was small; she was trying to slim him down. ‘Paul was a scholar. The old man was proud of him but they didn’t have much in common when Paul came back with all those college degrees and qualifications. Old Mr Biedermann had had no proper education. He left school when he was fourteen.’

‘He was a real Berliner,’ I said. ‘He ran the transport business like a despot. He knew the names of all his workers. He swore at them when he was angry and got drunk with them when there was something to celebrate. They invited him to their marriages and their christenings and he never missed a funeral. When the union organized a weekend outing each year they always invited him along. No one would have wanted to go without the old man.’

‘You’re talking about the road transport business,’ said Werner. ‘But that was only a tiny part of their set-up.’

‘It was the business the old man started, and the only part of the Biedermann empire he ever really liked.’ A timer began to ping somewhere in the kitchen but Zena didn’t move. Eventually it stopped. I guessed the Indian woman was there but banished to the back room.

‘It was losing money,’ said Werner.

‘So, when Paul Biedermann came back from his American business management course, the first thing he did was to sell the transport company and pension his father off.’

‘You sound very bitter, Bernie. That couldn’t be why you hate Paul so much, could it?’

I drank some more coffee. I began to have the feeling that Zena didn’t intend to leave us alone to talk about the things we had to talk about. I kept the small talk going. ‘It killed old Biedermann,’ I said. ‘He had nothing to live for after the yard closed and the company was being run from New York. Do you remember how he used to sit in Leuschner’s café all day, talking about old times to anyone who would listen, even to us kids?’

‘It’s the way things are now,’ said Werner. ‘Companies are run by computers. Profit margins are sliced thin. And no manager dare raise his eyes from his accounts long enough to learn the names of his staff. It’s the price we pay for progress.’

Zena picked up the ashtray containing the broken cup and saucer. I could tell that Werner had broken it by the way she averted her eyes from him. She took the coffee-pot too and went to the kitchen. I said, ‘Dicky saw Frank Harrington in LA. Apparently London have decided to try enrolling Erich Stinnes.’ I had tried to make it unhurried but it came out in a rush.

‘Enrolling him?’ I was interested to see that Werner was as dismayed and surprised as I had been. ‘Is there any background?’

‘You mean, have there been discussions with Stinnes before. I was wondering the same thing myself but from what I got out of Dicky I think the idea is to go in cold.’

Werner leaned his considerable weight back in the armchair and blew through his pursed lips. ‘Who’s going to try that?’

‘Dicky wants you to try,’ I said. I drank some of my strong coffee and tried to sound very casual. I could see that Werner was torn between indignation and delight. Werner desperately wanted to become a regular departmental employee again. But he knew that being chosen for this job was no tribute to his skills; he was simply the man closest to Stinnes. ‘It’s a great opportunity,’ said Werner resentfully, ‘a great opportunity for failure. So Frank Harrington, and all those people who’ve been slandering me all these years, can have a new excuse and start slandering me all over again.’

‘They must know the chances are slim,’ I said. ‘But if Stinnes went for it, you’d be the talk of the town, Werner.’

Werner gave me a wry smile. ‘You mean both East and West sides of it?’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Zena, returning with the coffee. ‘Is this something to do with Erich Stinnes?’

Werner glanced at me. He knew I didn’t want to discuss it in front of Zena. ‘If I’m going to try, Zena will have to know, Bernie,’ he said apologetically. I nodded. The reality was that Werner told her everything I told him, so she might as well hear it from me.

Zena poured more coffee and offered us a selection of Spritzgebäck, little German biscuits that Werner liked. ‘It is about Stinnes, isn’t it?’ she said as she picked up her own coffee – she drank it strong and black – and sat down. Even in this severe dress she looked very beautiful; her big eyes, very white teeth and the high cheekbones in that lightly tanned face made her look like the work of some Aztec goldsmith.

‘London want to enrol him,’ said Werner.

‘Recruit him to work for London, do you mean?’ said Zena.

‘You recruit ordinary people to become spies,’ Werner explained patiently. ‘But an enemy security officer, especially one who might help you break his own networks, is “enrolled”.’

‘It’s the same sort of thing,’ said Zena brightly.

‘It’s very different,’ said Werner. ‘When you recruit someone, and start them spying, you paint romantic pictures for them. You show them the glamour and make them feel courageous and important. But the agent you enrol knows all the answers already. Enrolment is tricky. You are telling lies to highly skilled liars. They’re cynical and demanding. It’s easy to start it off but it usually goes sour some way along the line and everyone ends up mad at everyone else.’

‘You make it sound like getting a divorce,’ said Zena.

‘It’s a bit like that,’ I said. ‘But it can get more violent.’

‘More violent than a divorce?’ Zena fluttered her eyelashes. ‘You’re only going to offer Erich Stinnes a chance to defect to the West. Can’t he do that any time he wants? He’s in Mexico. Why go back to Russia if he doesn’t want to?’ There was something deliciously feminine about Zena and her view of the world.

‘It’s not as easy as that,’ said Werner. ‘Not many countries will allow East European nationals to defect. Seamen who jump ship, passengers or Aeroflot crew who leave their planes at refuelling stops, or Soviet delegates who walk into foreign police stations and ask for asylum find it’s not so easy. Even right-wing governments send them right back to Russia to face the music.’ He bit into a biscuit. ‘Good Spritzgebäck, darling,’ he said.

‘I couldn’t get hazelnuts but I tried this other sort; with honey. They’re not bad, are they? Why won’t they let them defect? They send them back to Russia? That’s disgusting,’ said Zena.

‘Encouraging defectors upsets the Russians for one thing,’ said Werner. ‘If Stinnes said he wanted to stay in Mexico, the Soviet ambassador would go running along to the Foreign Secretary and start pressurizing the Mexican authorities to hand him back.’

‘In which case doesn’t Stinnes just say go to hell?’ said Zena.

‘The ambassador then says that Stinnes has stolen the cash box or that he’s wanted to face criminal charges in Moscow. The Mexicans then find themselves accused of harbouring a criminal. And don’t forget that someone has to pay the defector a salary or find him a job.’ Werner reached for another biscuit.

‘This is Mexico,’ said Zena. ‘What do they care about the Russians?’

Werner was fully occupied with the biscuits. I said, ‘The Russians have a lot of clout in this part of the world, Mrs Volkmann. They can stir up trouble by getting neighbouring countries to apply pressure. Cuba will always oblige, since its economy depends totally on Soviet money. They can apply economic sanctions. They can influence United Nations committees and all the rigamarole of Unesco and so on. And all of these countries have to contend with a domestic Communist Party organization ready to do whatever the Russians want done. Governments don’t offend the Soviet Union without very good reason. Providing asylum for a defector is seldom reason enough.’

‘There are still plenty of defectors, though,’ persisted Zena.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Many defectors are sponsored by the USA, the way that famous musicians or performers are, because of the bad publicity their escapes make for the communist system. And they can earn their own living easily enough. The remainder have to bring something worthwhile with them as the price of entry.’

‘Secrets?’

‘That depends on what you call secrets. Usually a country provides asylum to someone bringing information about the way the Soviets have been spying on the host country. For that sort of information a government is usually prepared to withstand Russian pressures.’

‘And for that reason,’ said Werner, ‘most of the decent Russians can’t defect and the KGB bastards can. Put all the defectors together and you’d have a ballet company and orchestra, some sports stars and a vast army of secret policemen.’

Zena looked at me with her big grey eyes and said archly, ‘But if you two are right about Erich Stinnes, he’s a KGB man. So he could provide some secrets about spying on Mexico. So he would be allowed to stay here without your help.’

‘Would you like to live in Mexico for the remainder of your life, Mrs Volkmann?’ I said.

She paused for a moment as if thinking the idea over. ‘Perhaps not,’ she admitted.

‘No, a man such as Stinnes would want a British passport.’

‘Or a US passport?’ said Zena.

‘American citizenship provides no right to travel abroad. A British passport identifies a British subject, and they have the right to leave the country any time they wish. Stinnes will give us quite a list of requirements if he decides to defect. He’d need a lot of paperwork so that he has a completely new identity. I mean an identity that is recorded in such a way that it will withstand investigation.’

‘What sort of things?’ said Zena.

I said, ‘Things that require the cooperation of many different government departments. For instance, he’ll need a driving licence. And we don’t want that to materialize out of nowhere, not for a forty-year-old with no other driving experience on file and no record of passing a driving test. He’d need to have some innocuous-looking file in his local tax office. He’ll want a credit card; what does he put on the application? Then there are documents for travelling. He’ll probably want some freedom of movement and that’s always a headache. Incidentally he must give us some identity photos for his passport and so on. One good full-face picture will be enough. A picture of his wife too. I’ll get the copies done at the embassy.’

Werner nodded. He realized that this was his briefing. I was talking around the sort of offer he would be able to make to Stinnes. ‘You’re assuming that he would live in England?’ said Werner.

‘Certainly for the first year,’ I said. ‘It will be a long debriefing. Would that be a problem?’

‘He’s always spoken of Germany as the only place he’d ever want to be. Isn’t that true, Zena?’

‘That’s what he’s always said,’ Zena agreed. ‘But it’s the sort of thing everyone says at the Kronprinz Club. Everyone is drinking German beer and exchanging news of the old country. It is natural to talk of Germany with great affection. We all do. But when you are offering someone a chance to retire in comfort, England wouldn’t be too bad, I think.’ She smiled.

I said, ‘Dicky thinks Stinnes will jump at any decent offer.’

‘Does he?’ said Werner doubtfully.

‘London thinks Stinnes has been passed over for promotion. They think he’s been stuck away in East Berlin to rot.’

‘So why is he here in Mexico?’ said Werner.

‘Dicky thinks it’s just a nice little jaunt for him.’

‘It’s a convenient thing to say when you can’t think of any convincing answer,’ said Werner. ‘What do you think, Bernie?’

‘I’m convinced he’s here in connection with Paul Biedermann,’ I said cautiously. ‘But why the hell would he be?’

Werner nodded. He didn’t take me seriously. He knew I disliked Biedermann and thought this was clouding my judgement. ‘What makes you think that, Bernie?’ he said.

‘Stinnes and his pal didn’t know I was listening to them out at the Biedermann house. They said they were running Biedermann and I believe it.’

‘Paul Biedermann has been koshering cash for the KGB,’ Werner told Zena. ‘And sending it off for them too.’

‘What a bastard,’ said Zena. The family property in East Prussia, which Zena had failed to inherit because it was now a part of the USSR, made her unsympathetic to people who helped the KGB. But she didn’t put much venom into her condemnation of Biedermann; her mind was on Stinnes. ‘What’s so special about Stinnes?’ she asked me.

‘London wants him,’ I said. ‘And London Central moves in strange and unaccountable ways.’

‘It’s all Dicky Cruyer’s idea,’ she said, as if she’d had a sudden insight. ‘I’ll bet it’s not London at all. Dicky Cruyer went off to Los Angeles and had a meeting with Frank Harrington. Then he returned with the electrifying news that London wants Erich Stinnes, and he’s to be coaxed into defection.’

‘He couldn’t do that,’ said Werner, who hated to have his faith in London Central undermined. ‘It’s a London order, isn’t it, Bernie? It must be.’

‘Don’t be silly, Werner,’ his wife argued. ‘It was probably made official afterwards. You know that anyone could talk Frank Harrington into anything.’

Werner grunted. Zena’s brief love affair with the elderly Frank Harrington was something that was never referred to, but I could see it was not forgotten.

Zena turned to me. ‘I’m right. You know I am.’

‘A successful enrolment would do wonders for Dicky’s chances of holding on to the German Desk,’ I said. I got up and walked over to the window. I had almost forgotten that we were in Mexico City, but the mountains just visible behind a veil of mist, the dark ceiling of clouds, the flashes of lightning and the tropical storm that was thrashing the city were not like anything to be seen in Europe.

‘When do we get the money for finding him?’ Zena said. My back was to her and I pretended to think that she was asking Werner.

It was Werner who replied. ‘It will work out, darling. These things take time.’

Zena came across to the window and said to me, ‘We’ll not do any more to help until we’ve been paid some money.’

‘I don’t know anything about the money,’ I said.

‘No, no one knows anything about the money. That’s how you people work, isn’t it?’

Werner was still sitting heavily in his chair, munching his biscuits. ‘It’s not Bernie’s fault, darling. Bernie would give us the crown jewels if it was only up to him.’ The crown jewels had always been Werner’s idea of ultimate wealth. I remembered how, when we were at school, various prized possessions of his had all been things he wouldn’t exchange for the crown jewels.

‘I’m not asking for the crown jewels,’ said Zena demurely. I turned to look her in the face. My God but she was tough, and yet the toughness did not mar her beauty. I suddenly saw the fatal attraction she had for poor Werner. It was like having pet piranhas in the bath, or a silky rock python in the linen cupboard. You could never tame them but it was fun to see what effect they had on your friends. ‘I’m asking to be paid for finding Erich Stinnes.’ She picked up a notepad by the phone and entered the cup and saucer on to her list of breakages.

I looked at Werner but he was trying on some new inscrutable faces, so I said, ‘I don’t know who told you that there was a cash payment for reporting the whereabouts of Erich Stinnes but it certainly wasn’t me. The truth is, Mrs Volkmann, that the department never pays any sort of bounty. At least I’ve never heard of such a payment being made.’ She stared at me with enough calm, dispassionate interest to make me worry whether my coffee was poisoned. ‘But I probably could sign a couple of vouchers that would reimburse you for air fares, first class, return trip.’

‘I don’t want any charity,’ she said. ‘I want what is due to me.’ It wasn’t ‘us’, I noticed.

‘What sort of fee would you think appropriate?’ I asked.

‘It must be worth sixteen thousand American dollars,’ she said. So she’d decided what she wanted. At first I wondered how she’d come to such an exact figure, but I then realized that it had not been quantified by the job she’d done; it was the specific amount of money she wanted for something or other. That was the way Zena’s mind worked; every step she took was on the way to somewhere else.

‘That’s a lot of money, Mrs Volkmann,’ I said. I looked at Werner. He was pouring himself more coffee and concentrating on the task as if oblivious of everything around him. It suited him to to have Zena giving me hell. I suppose she was voicing the resentment that had been building up in Werner in all the years he’d suffered from the insensitive double-dealing of the birdbrains at London Central. But I didn’t enjoy having Zena bawl me out. I was angry with him and he knew it. ‘I will see that your request is passed on to London.’

‘And tell them this,’ she said. She was still speaking softly and smiling so that a casual observer might have thought we were chatting amicably. ‘You tell them unless I get my money I’ll make sure that Erich Stinnes never trusts a word you say.’

‘How would you achieve that, Mrs Volkmann?’ I asked.

‘No, Zena …’ said Werner, but he’d left it too late.

‘I’d tell him exactly what you’re up to,’ she said. ‘I’d tell him that you’ll cheat him just as you’ve cheated me.’

I laughed scornfully. She seemed surprised. ‘Have you been sitting in on this conversation, and still not understood what Werner and I are talking about, Mrs Volkmann? Your husband earns his money from avalizing. He borrows money from Western banks to pay in advance for goods shipped to East Germany. The way he does it requires him to spend a lot of time in the German Democratic Republic. It’s natural that the British government might use someone such as Werner to talk to Stinnes about defecting. The KGB wouldn’t like that, of course, but they’d swallow it, the same way we swallow it when they use trade delegates to contact trouble-makers and float some ideas we don’t like.’

I glanced at Werner. He was standing behind Zena now, his hands clasped together and a frown on his face. He’d been about to interrupt but now he was looking at me, waiting to hear what I was going to say. I said, ‘Everyone likes a sportsman who can walk out into the middle of a soccer field, exchange a joke with the linesmen and flip a coin for the two team captains. But “enrolling” doesn’t just mean offering a man money to come to the other side; it can mean beating him over the head and shipping him off in a crate. I don’t say that’s going to happen, but Werner and I both know it’s a possibility. And if it does happen I want to make sure that the people in the other team keep thinking that Werner is an innocent bystander who paid the full price of admission. Because if they suspect that Werner is the kind who climbs the fence and throws beer cans at the goalkeeper they might get rough, Mrs Volkmann. And when the KGB get rough, they get very rough. So I advise you most sincerely not to start talking to Erich Stinnes in a way that makes it sound as if Werner is closely connected with the department, or there’s a real risk that they’ll do something nasty to you both.’

Werner knew I was going to spell it out for her. I suppose he didn’t want her to understand the implications in case she worried.

I looked at her. She nodded. ‘If Werner wants to talk to Stinnes, I won’t screw it up for you,’ she promised. ‘But don’t ask me to help.’

‘I won’t ask you to help,’ I said.

Werner went over to her and put his arm round her shoulder to comfort her. But she didn’t look very worried about him. She still looked very angry about not getting the money.

6

‘If Zena ever left me, I don’t know what I’d do,’ said Werner. ‘I think I’d die, I really would.’ He fanned away a fly using his straw hat.

This was Werner in his lugubrious mood. I nodded, but I felt like reminding him that Zena had left him several times in the past, and he was still alive. He’d even survived the very recent time when she’d set up house with Frank Harrington – a married man more than old enough to be her father – and had looked all set to make it permanent. Only Zena was never going to make anything permanent, except perhaps eventually make Werner permanently unhappy.

‘But Zena is very ambitious,’ said Werner. ‘I think you realize that, don’t you, Bernie?’

‘She’s very young, Werner.’

‘Too young for me, you mean?’

I worded my answer carefully. ‘Too young to know what the real world is like, Werner.’

‘Yes, poor Zena.’

‘Yes, poor Zena,’ I said. Werner looked at me to see if I was being sarcastic. I smiled.

‘This is a beautiful hotel,’ said Werner. We were sitting on the balcony having breakfast. It was still early in the morning, and the air was cool. The town was behind us, and we were looking across gently rolling green hills that disappeared into gauzy curtains of morning mist. It could have been England; except for the sound of the insects, the heavy scent of the tropical flowers, and the vultures that endlessly circled high in the clear blue sky.

‘Dicky found it,’ I said.

Zena had let Werner off his lead for the day, and he’d come to Cuernavaca – a short drive from Mexico City – to tell me about his encounter with Stinnes at the Kronprinz Club. Dicky had decided to ‘make our headquarters’ in this sprawling resort town where so many Americans came to spend their old age and their cheap pesos. ‘Where’s Dicky now?’ said Werner.

‘He’s at a meeting,’ I said.

Werner nodded. ‘You’re smart to stay here in Cuernavaca. This side of the mountains it’s always cooler and you don’t have to breathe that smog all day and all night.’

‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘I do have Dicky next door.’

‘Dicky’s all right,’ said Werner. ‘But you make him nervous.’

‘I make him nervous?’ I said incredulously.

‘It must be difficult for him,’ said Werner. ‘You know the German Desk better than he’ll ever know it.’

‘But he got it,’ I said.

‘So did you expect him to turn a job like that down?’ said Werner. ‘You should give him a break, Bernie.’

‘Dicky does all right,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t need any help. Not from you, not from me. Dicky is having a lovely time.’

Dicky had lined up meetings with a retired American CIA executive named Miller and an Englishman who claimed to have great influence with the Mexican security service. In fact, of course, Dicky was just trying out some of the best local restaurants at the taxpayer’s expense, while extending his wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Dicky had once shown me his card-index files of contacts throughout the world. It was quite unofficial, of course; Dicky kept them in his desk at home. He noted the names of their wives and their children and what restaurants they preferred and what sort of house they lived in. On the other side of each card Dicky wrote a short résumé of what he estimated to be their wealth, power and influence. He joked about his file cards; ‘he’ll be a lovely card for me,’ he’d say, when someone influential crossed his path. Sometimes I wondered if there was a card there with my name on it and, if so, what he’d written on it.

Dicky was a keen traveller, and his choice of bars, restaurants and hotels was the result of intensive research through guidebooks and travel magazines. The Hacienda Margarita, an old ranchhouse on the outskirts of town, was proof of the benefits that could come from such dedicated research. It was a charming old hotel, its cool stone colonnades surrounding a courtyard with palmettos and pepper trees and tall palms. The high-ceilinged bedrooms were lined with wonderful old tiles, and there were big windows and cool balconies, for this place was built long before air-conditioning was ever contemplated, built at the time of the conquistadores if you could bring yourself to believe the plaque over the cashier’s desk.

Meanwhile I was enjoying the sort of breakfast that Dicky insisted was the only healthy way to start the day. There was a jug of freshly pressed orange juice, a vacuum flask of hot coffee, canned milk – Dicky didn’t trust Mexican milk – freshly baked rolls and a pot of local honey. The tray was decorated with an orchid and held a copy of The News, the local English-language newspaper. Werner drank orange juice and coffee but declined the rolls and honey. ‘I promised Zena that I’d lose weight.’

‘Then I’ll have yours,’ I said.

‘You’re overweight too,’ said Werner.

‘But I didn’t make any promises to Zena,’ I said, digging into the honey.

‘He was there last night,’ said Werner.

‘Did he go for it, Werner? Did Stinnes go for it?’

‘How can you tell with a man like Stinnes?’ said Werner. ‘I told him that I’d met a man here in Mexico whom I’d known in Berlin. I said he had provided East German refugees with all the necessary papers to go and live in England. Stinnes said did I mean genuine papers or false papers. I said genuine papers, passports and identity papers, and permission to reside in London or one of the big towns.’

‘The British don’t have any sort of identity papers,’ I said. ‘And they don’t have to get anyone’s permission to go and live in any town they like.’

‘Well, I don’t know things like that,’ said Werner huffily. ‘I’ve never lived in England, have I? If the English don’t need papers, what the hell are we offering him?’

‘Never mind all that, Werner. What did Stinnes say?’

‘He said that refugees were never happy. He’d known a lot of exiles and they’d always regretted leaving their homeland. He said they never properly mastered the language, and never integrated with the local people. Worst of all, he said, their children grew up in the new country and treated their parents like strangers. He was playing for time, of course.’

‘Has he got children?’

‘A grown-up son.’

‘He knew what you were getting at?’

‘Perhaps he wasn’t sure at first, but I persisted and Zena helped. I know she said she wouldn’t help, Bernie, but she did help.’

‘What did she do?’

‘She told him that a little money solves all kinds of problems. Zena said that friends of hers had gone to live in England and loved every minute of it. She told him that everyone likes living in England. These friends of hers had a big house in Hampshire with a huge garden. And they had a language teacher to help them with their English. She told him that these were all problems that could be solved if there was help and money available.’

‘He must have been getting the message by that time,’ I said.

‘Yes, he became cautious,’ said Werner. ‘I suppose he was frightened in case I was trying to make a fool of him.’

‘And?’

‘I had to make it a little more specific. I said that this friend of mine could always arrange a job in England for anyone with experience of security work. He’d just come down here for a couple of weeks’ holiday in Mexico after travelling through the US, recruiting security experts for a very big British corporation, a company that did work for the British government. The pay is very good, I told him, with a long contract optional both sides.’

‘I wish you really did have a friend like that, Werner,’ I said. ‘I’d want to meet him myself. How did Stinnes react?’

‘What’s he going to say, Bernie? I mean, what would you or I say, in his place, faced with the same proposition?’

‘He said maybe?’

‘He said yes … or as near as he dared go to yes. But he’s frightened it’s a trap. Anyone would be frightened of it being a trap. He said he wanted more details, and a chance to think about it. He’d have to meet the man doing the recruiting. I said I was just a go-between of course …’

‘And he believed you are just the go-between?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Werner. He picked up the orchid and examined it as if seeing one for the first time. ‘You can’t grow orchids in Mexico City, but here in Cuernavaca they flourish. No one knows why. Maybe it’s the smog.’

‘Don’t just suppose so, Werner.’ He made me angry when he avoided important questions by changing the subject of conversation. ‘I wasn’t kidding last night … what I said to Zena. I wasn’t kidding about them getting rough.’

‘He believed me,’ said Werner in a tone that indicated that he was just trying to calm me down.

‘Stinnes is no amateur,’ I said. ‘He’s the one they assigned to me when I was arrested over there. He had me taken to the Normannenstrasse building and sat with me half the night, discussing the more subtle aspects of Sherlock Holmes and laughing and smoking and making it clear that if he was in charge of things they’d be kicking shit out of me.’

‘We’ve both seen a lot of KGB specimens like Erich Stinnes,’ said Werner. ‘He’s affable enough over a stein of beer but in other circumstances he could be a nasty piece of work. And not to be trusted, Bernie. I kept my distance from him. I’m no hero, you know that.’

‘Was there anyone with him?’

‘An older man – fifty or so – built like a tank, cropped hair, can’t seem to speak any language without a strong Russian accent.’

‘Sounds like the one who went with him to the Biedermann house. Pavel, he called him. I told you what they said, didn’t I?’

‘I guessed it was him. Luckily Pavel isn’t really fluent in German, expecially when Stinnes and I got going. Stinnes got rid of him as soon as he realized the drift my conversation was taking. I thought that might have been a good sign.’

‘I can use all the good signs we can get, Werner.’ I drank some coffee. ‘It’s all right telling him about language lessons in Hampshire, but he knows the real score would be him sitting in some lousy little safe house blowing KGB networks. And drinking half a bottle of Scotch every night in an effort to forget what damage he’s doing to his own people, and that he’s going to have to start doing it all over again next morning. Hey, don’t look so worried, Werner.’

He looked at me, biting his lip. ‘He knows you’re here, Bernie, I’m sure he does.’ There was a note of anxiety now. ‘He asked if I knew an Englishman who was a friend of Paul Biedermann. I said Paul knew lots of Englishmen. He said yes, but this one knew all the Biedermann family and had done for years.’

‘That description fits lots of people,’ I said.

‘But it doesn’t fit anyone else who’s in Mexico City,’ said Werner. ‘I think Stinnes knows you’re here. And if he knows you’re here, that’s bad.’

‘Why is it bad?’ I said, although I knew what he was going to say. I’d known Werner so long that our minds ran on the same track.

‘Because it sounds like he got it from Paul Biedermann.’

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