Absolute Friends (33 page)

"You are charging through open doors, Teddy. I exclude nothing. Neither does Dimitri."

"So this is penance. Guilt money. He's fucked up the globe, and now he's going to rebuild it. Don't tell me: He's an American."

"It is not penance, Teddy, it is not guilt, and so far as I know he is not American. It is reform. We do not have to be Lutherans to believe that men can be reformed. At the time he chanced to hear me speak, he was a pilgrim in search of faith, as you and I have been. He questioned everything and believed in nothing. He was an intellectual animal, brilliant, bitter and uneducated. He had read many books in order to inform himself, but he had not yet defined his role in the world."

"But you were the boy. You showed him the light," says Mundy roughly and, resting his head in his hand, closes his eyes for a bit of quiet, and realizes that his body is gently shaking from head to toe.

But Sasha allows him no quiet. In his zeal, he is unrelenting. "Why are you so cynical, Teddy? Have you never stood in a bus queue and overheard ten words that expressed something in your heart that you didn't know was there? It was my good luck to speak the ten words. He could have heard them anywhere. Today he knows that. Already at the time I spoke them, they were being spoken in the streets of Seattle, and Washington, D. C., and Genoa. Wherever the octopus of corporate imperialism is attacked, the same words are being spoken."

Mundy remembers something he once wrote to Judith about having no firm ground. He has none now. This is Weimar all over again. I'm an abstraction, talking to another about a third.

"So Mr. Dimitri heard you," he says patiently, in the tone of somebody reconstructing a crime. "He stood in your bus queue. And he was knocked out by your eloquence. As we all are. So now let me ask you again. How did you _meet__ him? When did he become flesh and blood for you? Or are you not allowed to say?"

"He sent an emissary. Exactly as he sent me to talk to you today."

"When? Where? Whom did he send?"

"Teddy, we are not in the White Hotel."

"And we're not deceiving anyone either. That's over. We can talk like human beings."

"I was in Vienna."

"What for?"

"A conference."

"Of?"

"Internationalists and libertarians."

"And?"

"A woman approached me."

"Anyone we know?"

"She was a stranger to me. She evinced a familiarity with my work, and asked whether I would be willing to meet an illustrious friend of hers, a man of distinction who shunned the limelight."

"So she didn't have a name either."

"Kolbach. Maria Kolbach."

"Age?"

"It is not relevant. She was not desirable. Perhaps forty-five."

"From?"

"It was not revealed. She had a Viennese accent."

"Working for whom?"

"Maybe Dimitri. It is not known."

"Was she part of the conference?"

"She did not say so, and her name was not on the list of delegates or organizers."

"Well, at least you looked. Was she Fräulein or Frau?"

"It was not revealed."

"Did she give you her card?"

"No. And I did not request it."

"Show you her driving license?"

"Teddy, I think you are actually full of shit."

"Do you know where she lives, if she lives anywhere? Did you look her up in the Vienna telephone directory? Why are we dealing with a bunch of fucking _ghosts?__" He catches sight of Sasha's crestfallen expression, and reins himself in. "All right. She accosts you. She pops the question. And you say, yes, Frau or Fräulein Kolbach, I would like to meet your illustrious friend. _Then__ what happened?"

"I was received in a substantial villa in one of the best quarters of Vienna, the name of which I am not at liberty to reveal. Nor may I reveal the burden of the discussion."

"She took you there, presumably."

"A car was waiting outside the conference hall. A chauffeur drove us. It was the end of the conference. There were no further engagements. When we arrived at the villa she rang the bell, presented me to a secretary and removed herself. After a short wait I was admitted to a large room, occupied only by Dimitri. 'Sasha,' he says to me, 'I am a man of great and illicit wealth, I am an artist of the unobserved life, also your devoted disciple. I have a mission of immense importance to offer you, but if the knowledge is too great for you to bear alone, kindly inform me immediately and leave.' I asked him: Is the mission legitimate? He replied, It is more than legitimate, it is essential to the benefit of all mankind. I then made him a vow of secrecy. In return, over several hours, he described to me the nature of his vision."

"Which was--?"

Sasha the great double agent has disappeared. In his place sits the credulous and impassioned dreamer of the Berlin attic.

"It was a vision for which I personally and my savior and friend Ted Mundy are perfectly equipped in all respects. It was a vision that could have been deliberately crafted to accommodate our every need."

"And that's all you're telling me."

"The rest you must hear from Dimitri himself. In Vienna, he asked me whether, after all that I had endured, I still had faith in life."

"And you of course said yes."

"With conviction. And now that I have heard him describe his vision, with passion."

Mundy has risen from the table and with his back to Sasha is standing at a wide window. Far below him glow the last embers of the fair. The lake is black and still, the mountains beyond it shadows on a clouded sky.

"When did you last see him?"

"In Paris."

"In another villa?"

"An apartment. It was so big I wished for a bicycle to go to the bathroom."

"And before that?"

"Only Vienna."

"So how do you communicate? Leave each other notes under rocks?" Sasha declines to reply to such a facetious question, so Mundy asks another. "Does he know we worked together?"

"He knows that in Berlin you were a radical who was beaten by fascists as he too in his time has been beaten by fascists. He knows you sacrificed yourself for a comrade."

"How about you?"

"Please?"

"Does he know you did a little of this and that for Mr. Arnold?"

"He is aware that all my life I have fought the tyranny wherever I have found it, with whatever weapons were available to me. _Teddy!__"

Now it is Sasha's turn to be exasperated. Leaping to his feet he has hobbled down the room to join Mundy at the window, and is staring up at him, holding out his hands in angry supplication. "_Fuck__ this, actually, Teddy! Do you not understand how I have spoken for you? When Dimitri asked me whether I knew of other good men or women from my past, people of integrity, of like mind, courage and sound sense--who did I first think of, but Teddy? When he described to me, in glowing words, how together we may help to change the world--it was you, it was nobody but you, that I saw marching at my side!" He pulls back, lets his hands flop and waits for Mundy to speak, but Mundy is still staring at the black lake and the shadows of the mountains behind it. "We are indivisible, Teddy. That is my conviction. We have endured together. Now we can triumph together. Dimitri is offering us everything you need: money, a purpose, a fulfillment of your life. What have you to lose by hearing him?"

Oh, nothing much, thinks Mundy. Zara, Mustafa, my happiness, my debts.

"Go back to Munich, Teddy," Sasha suggests scathingly. "Better to be afraid of the unknown and do nothing. Then you will be safe."

"What happens if I listen to him and say no?"

"I have assured him that, like myself, you are an honorable man, capable of keeping a secret. He will have offered you a kingdom. You will have declined it, but will not speak of it."

Only the detail matters, Mundy is reflecting. Sasha does the grand thoughts, I do the little ones. That's how we get along. So let's think of getting Zara's teeth fixed, and buying Mustafa the computer he's pining for. He might even teach me to send e-mails to Jake.

"Snake oil," he says suddenly in English, and breaks out laughing, only to find Sasha scowling at him. "Snake oil," he repeats, now in German. "It's what confidence tricksters sell to gullible people. It's what I sold to the Professor, come to think of it."

"So?"

"So maybe it's time I bought a little. Who's driving?"

Not daring to reply, Sasha takes a breath, squeezes his eyes shut, opens them and hobbles eagerly back across the room. At the telephone, tapping out a number from memory, he pulls back his shoulders, Party-style, as a prelude to addressing authority.

"At the lodge in one hour!" he reports, and rings off.

"Will I pass like this?" Mundy inquires facetiously, indicating his workaday clothes.

A stranger to irony as so often, Sasha gives Mundy a quick up-and-down. His eye settles on the velcro Union Jack stuck to the handkerchief pocket of his elderly sports coat. Mundy tears it off and shoves it in his pocket.

Driving a car takes up all Sasha's attention. He is an eager schoolchild, straining upward, eyes just making it over the steering wheel as he hammers his horn or flashes his lights at whatever offends him.

He also knows the way, which is fortunate because within minutes of leaving the lay-by Mundy the topographical cretin has as usual lost all sense of direction. At first he reckons they are heading south, but soon they are following a skimpy, twisting path at the foot of great mountains. The moon that had earlier deserted them is back at full strength, lighting meadows and making white rivers of the roads. They enter forest and bump down a pitted alley of fir trees. Deer stare into their headlights, zigzag ahead of them into the blackness of the trees. An owl with a snow-white underbelly glides over the hood.

They make a right turn, start to climb and after ten minutes reach a clearing stacked with felled logs. Mundy remembers the forest clearing outside Prague on the day Sasha told him about his father the Stasi spy. They mount a concrete ramp and enter a barn big enough to house a zeppelin. Half a dozen smart cars, German and Austrian, are parked in an orderly row as if for sale. Set apart from them stands a black Jeep. Sasha pulls up beside it.

It's a new Jeep, a big American one with a lot of chrome and lights. A scrawny, middle-aged woman in a headscarf sits motionless in the driving seat. It crosses Mundy's mind that she could be the same woman in the Sherpa coat who was fumbling for her door key when he climbed the spiral staircase three hours ago, but for Sasha's sake he dismisses the idea. There is no greeting. Sasha clambers out of the Audi and beckons to Mundy to do the same. The woman continues to glower ahead of her through the windshield of the Jeep. Mundy calls good evening to her but she ignores him.

"Where are we going?" he asks.

"We have another short journey to make, Teddy. Our friend prefers the hospitality of Austria. It is irrelevant."

"I haven't got my passport."

"A passport will not be necessary. The border here is anyway a technicality."

_I am an artist of the unobserved life.__

Sasha hauls himself into the Jeep. Mundy climbs after him. Without putting on her lights, the woman drives out of the barn and down the ramp. She is wearing leather gloves. So was the woman on the staircase. She switches off the engine, listens for something, doesn't hear it, apparently. Then with headlights blazing she plunges the Jeep into the blackness of the mountain and at a giddy speed begins the climb.

The wooded hill is a wall of death and she is mad to attempt it. Mundy clutches the grab handle in front of him. The trees are too close together. She can't possibly squeeze the Jeep between them. The path is too steep, she's going too _fast!__ Nobody can hold this speed, but she can. She can do all of it. The Edinburgh academicians would be proud of her. Her gloved hand whips the lever through the low gears and the Jeep doesn't falter.

They have scaled the wall. By the half-moon Mundy sees four valleys stretched below him like the spokes of a white wheel. She weaves the Jeep between rocks strewn over a wide grass plateau. They are on tarmac, descending a gentle slope towards a large converted farmhouse surrounded by barns and cottages. Smoke is coming out of the chimney of the main house. There are geraniums in the window boxes. The woman hauls on the hand brake, slams her door open and strides off. Two fit young men in anoraks step forward to receive them.

In Estelle Road, thinks Mundy, I opened the door to a couple of kids like these, and they turned out to be Mormon missionaries from Missouri wanting to save my soul. Well, I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them now.

The room where they are made to wait is long and timbered and smells of resin and honey. It has flowered sofas and a coffee table strewn with brand-new art magazines. Mundy sits and tries to interest himself in an article on the postmodernists in architecture while Sasha prowls. It's like taking Mustafa to the nice Turkish doctor, he thinks, watching him: in a minute he's going to tell me he feels all right now, and he'd like to go home.

"Been here before, Sasha?" Mundy asks conversationally.

Sasha puts his hands over his ears. _"No,"__ he hisses.

"Just Vienna and Paris then?"

"Teddy, please. It is not appropriate."

Mundy is reminded of a truth he has learned about people constantly at war with authority: they're also in love with it. An aseptic blonde in a business suit is standing in the doorway.

"Mr. Mundy?"

"The same," he agrees cheerfully, clambering to his feet because he's in the presence of a lady.

"Richard would like to speak with you, please. Will you come this way?"

"Richard? Who's Richard?"

"Richard handles the paperwork, Mr. Mundy."

"What paperwork's that?" He wants to hear her more, place her voice.

"It's no big deal, sir. Richard will explain it to you, I'm sure."

Vassar with a German accent, he decides. Air hostess courtesy. One more question, sir, I'll break your fucking neck. He glances at Sasha in case he's proposing to come along too, but he has his back to both of them and is examining a print of peasants in Tyrolean dress. The Vassar blonde leads him down a corridor lined with antlers and up a narrow back staircase. On the walls, muskets and racks of pewter plates. An old pine door stands ajar. She knocks, pushes it open and steps aside for Mundy to brush past her. I'm in a movie, he's thinking, as their hips graze each other: James Bond visits the ogre's castle. In a minute she's going to inject me with a truth drug.