“Something like that.”
“Let me tell you about Karpov, then.”
“Please do.”
“It would be tempting to describe Karpov as the archetypal Russian bear. But that’s only
half
the story. On Mr. Edward he acted like a revitalizing drug. ‘Karpov is my Spanish fly,’ he once remarked to me. Karpov’s irreverence towards the conventional norms of life struck a kindred spark in Mr. Edward’s heart. In the weeks preceding the inauguration of the Lipizzaner system, Mr. Edward had traveled to Prague, Paris and East Berlin for the sole purpose of meeting our new client.”
“With you?”
“With me sometimes, yes. With me often, in fact. And sometimes little Anatoly came along with his briefcase, bless him. I always wondered what he kept in it. A gun? Mr. Edward said it was his pajamas. Imagine a briefcase in a nightclub! And he paid for simply
everything
out of it! Just from one pocket at the front where he kept the cash. We never saw inside the
main
part. It was top secret. Being bald made it funnier somehow.”
She allowed herself a little girl’s chuckle.
“Not one dull minute, not with Karpov. Every encounter a blend of anarchy and culture and you never knew which you were going to get.” She pulled a sharp frown, correcting herself. “I will say this, Herr Schneider. Colonel Karpov was a genuine and passionate admirer of all forms of art, music and literature, also physics. And women too, of course. That goes without saying. In Russian he would describe himself as
kulturny.
Cultured.”
“Thank you,” said Bachmann, writing diligently in his notebook.
The same strict tone: “After carousing until dawn in a nightclub, and availing himself of the upstairs rooms—twice or even three times, I may say—
and
discoursing about literature in between visits—he would need immediately to explore the art galleries and visit the city’s cultural sites. Sleep as we understand it was not a concept to him. For Mr. Edward, and for myself personally, it was an unrepeatable journey of education.”
Her severity left her and she began laughing softly and rolling her head. To keep her company, Bachmann gave her his clown’s smile.
“And were the Lipizzaner accounts openly discussed on these occasions?” he inquired. “Or was it all hush-hush, secretive—just between the two men alone? And Anatoly when he was there?”
Another unnerving silence as her face turned suddenly bleak with memory.
“Oh, Mr. Edward, even at his most liberated, was never less than
secretive,
I grant you!” she complained, acknowledging the question without directly answering it. “In banking matters, well, that was natural, I suppose. But also in matters relating to the
private sphere.
Sometimes I wondered whether I was the only one, quite
apart
from Mrs. Brue. But then she died,” she added with a pout. “He was distraught, I’m sure. So sad, really. I’d thought we might marry, you see. It turned out there wasn’t a vacancy. Not for Elli.”
“And he was also secretive about his British friend Mr.
Findlay,
I seem to recall from your statement,” Bachmann reminded her, advancing featherlight on the question he had come to ask.
Her face had darkened. She thrust her jaw forward in rejection, lips clamped together.
“Wasn’t that his name?
Findlay?
The mysterious Englishman?” Bachmann lightly insisted. “That’s how it stands in your statement. Or have I got it wrong?”
“No. You have
not
got it wrong.
Findlay
got it wrong. Very wrong indeed.”
“Findlay the
evil genius
behind the Lipizzaner accounts, even?”
“
Nobody
should be interested in Mr. Findlay. Mr. Findlay should be relegated to oblivion forthwith and forever, is what should happen to
our Mr. Findlay,
” she said, adopting a furious nursery-rhyme voice. “Mr. Findlay should be
chopped up in little pieces and put in a pot until he’s done
!”
The sudden spurt of energy with which she delivered this pronouncement confirmed what Bachmann had for some time been suspecting: that while they might be drinking English tea out of fine china cups on a silver tray, with a silver strainer and a silver milk jug and a silver pitcher of boiled water, and nibbling tastefully at homemade Scottish shortcake, the fumes that came to him sporadically on her breath derived from something a lot more potent than mere tea.
“He was that bad, eh?” Bachmann marveled. “
Chop him up. Give him what he deserves.
” But she had retreated into her own memories, so he might as well have been talking to himself. “Mind you, I do see your point. If somebody took
my
employer for a ride, I’d be pretty angry too. To sit there watching your boss being led up the garden path.” No response. “Still, he must have been quite a character, our Mr. Findlay. Mustn’t he? Anyone who was able to lead Mr. Edward off the straight-and-narrow—introduce him to Russian crooks like Karpov and his
fixer extraordinaire
—”
He had broken the spell.
“Findlay was
not
quite a character, thank you!” Frau Ellenberger retorted furiously. “He wasn’t a
character
at all. Mr. Findlay was assembled
entirely
from characteristics
stolen
from other people!” Then promptly put her hand to her lips to shut them up.
“What did he look like, Findlay? Give me a word picture. Mr. Findlay.”
“Sleek. Wicked. Shiny. Dry nose.”
“How old?”
“Forty. Or he pretended to be. But his shadow was much,
much
older.”
“Height? General appearance? Any physical characteristics you remember?”
“Two horns and a long tail and a very
strong
odor of sulfur.”
Bachmann shook his head in wonder. “You really didn’t like him much, did you?”
Frau Ellenberger underwent another of her abrupt metamorphoses. She sat up as straight as a schoolmistress, pursed her lips and fixed him with a look of stern reproach. “When a man is deliberately excluded from your life, Herr Schneider—
one’s
life—somebody to whom you are emotionally attached, to whom you have revealed yourself in all your womanhood—it is not unreasonable to regard that man with loathing and suspicion, the more so if he is the seducer and corrupter of your—of Mr. Edward’s banking integrity.”
“Did you meet him often?”
“Once, and once was quite enough to form a judgment. He made an appointment, posing as a normal potential client. He came to the bank and I engaged him in light conversation in the waiting room, which was a part of my duties. That was the only time he appeared at the bank. Thereafter, Findlay worked his evil magic and I was excluded utterly. By both of them.”
“Could you explain that?”
“We could be in the middle of a private moment, Mr. Edward and I. Alone. Or a dictation, it made no difference. The phone rang. It was Findlay. Mr. Edward had only to hear his voice and it was ‘Elli, go and powder your nose.’ If Findlay wished for a
meeting
with Mr. Edward, it occurred in the town,
never
at the bank, and I was again excluded. ‘Not tonight, Elli. Go and cook a chicken for your mother.’”
“Did you complain to Mr. Edward about this shabby treatment?”
“His reply to me was that there are some secrets on earth that not even I could be party to, and Teddy Findlay was one of them.”
“Teddy?”
“That was his first name.”
“I don’t think you mentioned that.”
“I had no wish to. We were Teddy and Elli. Only on the telephone, of course. And on the strength of one encounter in the waiting room during which we discussed nothing of substance. It was all
pretend.
That was what Findlay was about: pretense. Our supposed familiarity on the telephone would never have survived reality, you may be sure. Mr. Edward wished me to be amused by his impertinence, so naturally I was.”
“What makes you so sure Findlay was behind the Lipizzaner operation?”
“He set it up!”
“Set it up with Karpov?”
“With Anatoly, acting on Karpov’s behalf,
sometimes.
So I understood. From afar. But the brainchild was his alone. He boasted about it.
My
Lipizzaners.
My
little stable.
My
Mr. Edward, was what he was really saying. It was all planned. Poor Mr. Edward never had a chance. He was
lured.
First the facetious phone call, very charming, requesting the appointment—private and personal, of course, no third parties, nothing on the file. Then the flattering invitation to the British embassy and a drink with the ambassador to make it all
official.
Official
what?
may I ask.
Nothing
about the Lipizzaners was official! They were the
opposite
of official. They were doped and hobbled from the start. Bandy-legged imposters posing as blood horses is what they were!”
“Ah yes, the
embassy,
” Bachmann agreed hazily, as if the
embassy
had momentarily escaped his memory—because a halfway-decent interrogator does not smash the door down. But in reality the British embassy was complete news to him and would be to Erna Frey. Nothing in her statement of seven years ago had prepared them for the involvement of the British embassy in Vienna.
“Now just where
did
the embassy come up?” he asked, in simulated embarrassment. “Run that by me again, if you would, Frau Ellenberger. Perhaps I didn’t do my homework as well as we thought.”
“
Mr.
Findlay had initially represented himself as some kind of British diplomat,” she replied scathingly. “An
informal
diplomat, if there
is
such a breed, which I doubt.”
To judge by Bachmann’s face he doubted it too, although he had been one himself.
“Later he reinvented himself as a
financial consultant.
If you ask me, he was never either one of them. He was a charlatan and that was all he ever was.”
“So the Lipizzaners began their lives courtesy of the
British embassy in Vienna,
” Bachmann mused aloud. “Of course they did! I remember now. Forgive my little lapse.”
“That was where the whole Lipizzaner plan was cooked up, I’ve no doubt of it. On the night Mr. Edward returned from that first meeting at the embassy, he outlined the entire arrangement to me. I was shocked, but it was not my place to appear so. Thereafter, whatever refinements or
improvements
were proposed invariably followed consultations with Mr. Findlay. Whether in a foreign town, or in Vienna, but well away from the bank, or over the telephone in an artfully disguised form that Mr. Edward insisted on referring to as their
word code.
It was a term I had never heard him use before. Good night, Herr Schneider.”
“Good night, Frau Ellenberger.”
But Bachmann didn’t move. And neither did she. In his entire career, he afterwards confided to Erna Frey, he had never come so close to a moment of psychic intuition. Frau Ellenberger had ordered him to leave but he hadn’t left, because he knew she had more she was dying to tell him, but she was afraid of telling it. She was grappling with her sense of loyalty on the one hand and her outrage on the other. Suddenly, the outrage won.
“And now he’s
back,
” she whispered, her eyes widening in astonishment. “Doing it all over again to poor Mr. Tommy, who isn’t half the man his father was. I
smelled
his voice the moment he telephoned. Sulfur, that’s what I smelled. He’s a Beelzebub.
Foreman.
This time he called himself
Foreman.
Boss of the show, he has to be, always did. Next week it’ll be Fiveman!”
Just a hundred meters along the road from where Bachmann’s car was waiting stood a clump of lakeside woodland with a public footpath winding through it. Handing his briefcase to the driver, he was seized with a spontaneous desire to saunter there alone. A bench offered itself, and he sat on it. Dusk was falling. Hamburg’s magic hour had begun. Deep in thought, he gazed at the darkening lake and the lights of the city rising round it. For a moment back there, like a thief with a conscience, he had had a sense of having robbed the wrong person. Shaking his head at this momentary weakening of purpose, he hauled a cell phone from a pocket of his bureaucratic suit and selected Michael Axelrod’s direct line.
“Yes, Günther?”
“The Brits want the same as we do,” he said. “Without us.”
On the phone, Ian Lantern couldn’t have been sweeter, Brue had to hand it to him. He was apologetic, he fully accepted that Tommy had a frightfully busy schedule and he wouldn’t dream of trespassing on it for the world except that London was breathing down his neck.
“I can’t say any more on the open line, unfortunately. I need a one-to-one with you by yesterday, Tommy. An hour should do it. Just tell me where and when.”
No fool, Brue was at first guarded. “Would this be on the same matter that we discussed at length over lunch, by any chance?” he suggested, not giving an inch.
“Related. Not totally, but near. The past rearing its ugly head again. But unthreatening. Nothing to anyone’s discredit. Actually to your advantage. One hour and you’re off the hook.”
Reassured, Brue glanced at his diary, although he didn’t need to. Wednesday was Mitzi’s opera night. She and Bernhard both had
abonnements.
For Brue it was cold cuts from the fridge or supper and a game of snooker at the Anglo-German: on Wednesdays he could take his pick.
“Would seven-fifteen at my house be any good to you?” He started to give the address but Lantern cut him short.
“Fab, Tommy. I’ll be on the dot.”
And he was. With a car and driver waiting outside. And flowers for Mitzi. And that damned smile he kept in place while he sipped sparkling water with ice and a slice of lemon.