‘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