Spy Line

9

My plane took off from Salzburg airport in a Wagnerian electric storm that lit up the Alps with great flashes of blue light and thunder that shook the world. Rain beating upon the metal skin was audible over the muzak and the plane slewed and yawed as it fought the gusting winds and climbed through the narrow path between the mountains.

I still had to get the horrific vision of that torn apart body out of my mind. With nothing to read except the flight magazine I took the stamp catalogue from my bag and looked again at the cover I'd failed to get. I studied the picture closely and tried to understand what demon drove men to amass expensive collections of these pretty little artefacts. The colour photo was so realistic that it seemed almost as if I could lift it from the page. Using the scissors of my Swiss army knife I cut out the illustration and put it in my wallet.

It was late when we descended for the landing in Vienna. The storm had passed over and the stars were shining in a moonless sky. The address that Hoffmann had provided for me was in the Inner City. I looked again at the coloured map of Vienna that I'd picked up from the airline counter. It was a brightly coloured depiction of the city – with isometric drawings of such buildings as the Imperial Palace – garlanded with adverts for such diversions as a 'revue-bar', a 'kontakt club sauna', and 'private escort services' all captioned in German, Arabic and Japanese. Close study of the map revealed that my destination was a sidestreet off Kartner Strasse, a well-known thoroughfare which runs from the Opera Ring – that surrounds the inner city – to St Stephen's Cathedral at its centre.

It was dark when the taxi dropped me outside the huge shape of the State Opera House just after the curtain descended on the final act of Der Barbier von Sevilla. Many doors opened simultaneously so that yellow rectangles of light fell out on to the pavement. Then people emerged, not many at first, just a dozen or so, silently exploring the rain-shiny streets with an air of disoriented caution, as inter-galactic voyagers might emerge from a huge stone spaceship. From inside there came the muffled roar of applause. Moments later the ensemble's final bow released a flood of people, and these were clamorous and elated. A swirling press of them swept across the forecourt and the pavement and into the road with no thought of the traffic, laughing and calling to each other, like upper-class felons unexpectedly released from imprisonment.

'Fussgängerzone,' explained the cab driver, executing an illegal U-turn and positioning his cab ready for homegoing crowds who were already raising their arms to hail him. 'You have to walk from here.' By now the street was filled with people dressed in the sort of amazing fur coats and evening clothes that are de rigueur when Germans or Austrians attend a cultural event. A group of such overdressed opera-goers besieged the cab as it came to a stop and began bidding for it in loud voices that quickly became an argument between competing groups.

I paid off the driver and pushed my way through the hordes of people who were still spewing from the Opera House doors. But as I progressed the crowds thinned, for few people were heading into the narrow streets of the city centre. Soon I was alone and my footsteps echoed as I walked past the dark shops and closed cafes. Downtown Vienna goes to sleep early.

The address I wanted was in a narrow ill-lit Gasse, an alley of antique shops, their façades neglected and dilapidated in the way that only the most exclusive antique shops are. Through the gloomy shop windows rich oriental rugs, polished furniture and old glassware gleamed. The door for one shop displayed a brass plate with the discreet legend 'Karl Staiger'. I pushed the bell. It was a long time before there was any response. Even then it was an upstairs window being opened, and closed again shortly afterwards.

I could see through the shop window as eventually a dun light came on at the back of the shop, silhouetting the furniture and the shape of the short plump man who picked his way through the display to the door. It took him some time to release the bolts and security locks on the shop door. He allowed the door to open only to the extent that the security chain permitted. Through the gap he called, 'Yes? What is it?'

'I'm looking for Baron Staiger,' I said. 'I have come from Salzburg.' There was a sigh. The door was closed while the chain was taken off the hook.

When he opened the door to look at me I saw it was Otto Hoffmann himself. I had every excuse for not recognizing him sooner, for this was a more sober fellow than the jolly little man who'd given me three thousand Austrian schillings and a lecture on philately in Salzburg. Now he was dressed up in a stiff shirt and formal bow tie, wearing over it a colourful embroidered smoking jacket. He stared at me for a moment without replying. It was almost as if he was trying to find reasons to send me away. But, grudgingly, he said, 'Hello Samson.' It was not a warm welcome. 'I told you to phone.'

'It wasn't possible to phone.'

'Why not?'

'I had no change,' I said facetiously.

'You'd better come in. Here in Vienna I'm von Staiger.' His accent was the same: pure Viennese, right down to the ih instead of ich. He let me step inside the shop and I waited while he went through the rigmarole of securing the front door again.

He switched out the light in the shop and led the way to the very back and up the narrow wooden staircase. From the basement there came those smells of bonding materials, freshly shaved wood and polish that together distinguish the workshop. The three upper floors were given over to living quarters. On the staircase there were engravings and embroidery in antique frames, and on the landing was a fine oak commode in pristine condition. It seemed that some of these rooms doubled as showrooms. As we got near the top of the house I could hear music, and a smell of cooking – or rather the legacy of some former meal preparation – replaced the more acrylic odours from the basement. 'I have company,' explained Staiger. 'Put your coat on the rack and leave your bag here. We will talk later.'

'Okay.'

At the top of the house two small rooms had been made into one, and there were about a dozen people there. They were all dressed in an extravagant fashion that in London I might have mistaken for fancy costume. The women wore lots of jewellery and decollete dresses, one of them smoke-coloured silk with tiered flounces, and another spectacular design was trimmed with antique lace. The men were in evening dress suits with vivid cummerbunds, or sashes, and some of the older men wore medals.

This fellow Baron Staiger had none of the merriment I'd seen in Hoffmann in Salzburg. He made no attempt to introduce me to his guests, listlessly addressing those who had noticed our entrance with the words, 'This is Mr Samson, a friend from Salzburg.' I was damp. The heavy rain had penetrated my trenchcoat, and my baggy old suit had creases in all the wrong places. They looked at me without enthusiasm.

In the corner a pianist was wrestling with George Gershwin, and they were both losing. After my entrance he played a few desultory bars of waltztime and then gave a smile as if he knew me. The piano stopped soon after that. I had the feeling that my entrance had spoiled the gemutlich atmosphere.

The waiter bore down. Asked what I'd like to drink, and hearing there was no hard liquor, I took the Gspritzter and stood around waiting for everyone to go home. I could not avoid the impression that Staiger wanted to be distanced from me in every way, for after making sure I had a drink in my hand, he moved to a group on the other side of the room.

'So you live in Salzburg now?' asked someone from behind me. I turned and saw it was the piano player, who in the better light I now realized with a shock was someone I knew.

Jesus H. Christ! It was a malevolent reptile named Theodor Kiss, who preferred to be called Dodo. The last time I'd seen him he was threatening to tear me to pieces and was equipped with the means to do so. Now he smiled sweetly, his long white hair giving him a rather august appearance despite the unpressed dinner suit. He was a vicious old man, a Hungarian who'd changed sides when Germany lost the war and carved a new career with the victors. 'No, do you?' I replied.

' Vienna actually. I have a wonderful new apartment. I decided to move… the south of France has become so… so vulgar.'

'Is that so?' I could see the new red scar tissue across Dodo's scalp: the wound made when Jim Prettyman felled him and probably saved my life.

'And how is my darling Zu?' He was a friend of Gloria's family.

I mumbled something about her being well.

He knew I didn't want to talk with him but he enjoyed persisting. 'I studied in Vienna of course. The city is like a home to me; so many old friends and colleagues.'

I nodded. Yes, indeed: plenty of old colleagues here for a one-time Nazi like Dodo. The waiter offered us a tray with dabs of Liptauer cheese on small shapes of toast. I popped a couple in my mouth. I'd had no food on the plane.

' Vienna is the most beautiful city in the world,' said Dodo. 'And so gemutlich! Do you like the opera?'

I was eventually rescued from the conversation by a man who asked me if I was a newspaper reporter. Dodo moved away. The newcomer was thickset, with a little beard of the sort called a van Dyke, although on him it looked somewhat Mephistophelean. I answered that I wasn't and he seemed content that I shouldn't be. He raised an arm to indicate a large painting: a grotesque arrangement of abstract shapes in primary colours. 'You like it?' he asked.

'What is it?' I said.

'It is modern art,' he said with a patronizing drawl. 'Do you know what that is?'

'Yes. Modern art is what happened when painters stopped looking at girls.'

'Really?' he said coldly. 'Is that not Kulturbolschewismus? It was a low blow. Cultural Bolshevism was the name the Nazis coined to condemn anything other than the state-approved social realist art.

'I'm getting to like it,' I said in my usual cowardly way. 'Are you a painter?'

'Andras Scolik!' He clicked his heels and bowed from the neck. 'I write music,' he said. 'Viennese music.'

'Waltzes?'

'Waltzes!' he said disdainfully. 'Of course not! Real music!'

'Oh, yes,' I said. I caught the attention of a passing waiter and this time I had local champagne. It tasted just like the Gspritzter.

'No,' he said, 'I didn't write the famous "Yodeler" or shepherd songs like "In the Salzkammergut folk are gay". I hope that doesn't disappoint you too much.'

'No,' I said.

'It is a battle against history,' he said. 'We Austrians do everything to excess, don't we?'

'No,' I said.

'Yes, we do. Foreigners laugh at us. Our national costume is comic, our version of the German language is incomprehensible, our cuisine indigestible, our bureaucracy indomitable. Even our landscape and our climate are absurd and extreme. Mountains and snow! How I hate it all. Ask a foreigner to name a famous Austrian and he says Julie Andrews.'

I was not expecting to arouse such fervour. I tried to calm him down. 'I was thinking of Mozart,' I said hurriedly.

It seemed only to infuriate him more. 'Don't talk to me of Mozart. This damned country is enslaved by his memory. We musicians are prisoners of Mozart and his wretched eighteenth-century music. Tum-titty-turn-titty-tum-tum-tum. I despise Mozart!'

'I thought everyone liked Mozart,' I said.

'The English like him. That anaemic eighteenth-century music suits the bloodless English temperament.'

'Perhaps that's it,' I said, having given up hope of cooling his temper.

'Dead composers! They only like dead composers. When Mozart was alive they seated him with the servants: one place above the cooks but well below the valets. That's what they do to musicians when they are alive.'

'You don't really despise Mozart, do you?' I asked him.

'Tum-titty-tum-titty-tum-tum-tum.'

'Consider,' I said authoritatively, 'the psychological insight, the dramatic integrity and the musical elegance.'

'Rubbish! Why did that foolish boy waste so much time with German operas – toy music – couldn't he see that the future of opera was rooted in the sublime genius of the Italians? Listen to La Traviata. You will hear passion… profound human feelings as expressed by the lush sound of a full-sized orchestra and scored by a composer of real genius who understood the art of singing in a way that little Mozart never could.'

'Andras!' called someone from the other side of the room. 'Could you settle an argument over here?'

The angry musician bowed stiffly from the neck and, spilling a few drops of his wine, took his leave of me with all the formalities. I sipped my drink and looked round. There was a distinct heightening of atmosphere in the room. Instead of that jaded weariness that so often attends the mourners at a dying party, there was a feeling of expectancy, but what was expected I could not guess.

I examined the room. It would seem to have been cleared of some of its furniture in preparation for this gathering. Some faded rectangles on the wall revealed the places from which large pictures had been removed and replaced with smaller ones. Those few items of furniture remaining were choice antiques, inlaid occasional tables and a sideboard of Hepplewhite style. But my attention went to a set-piece at one end of the room. It had obviously been arranged to captivate some rich client. Three lovely chairs designed in the stark and geometrical Secessionist style, and behind them two superb posters by Schiele. I went to get a closer look at the chairs. My reluctant host must have seen me admiring his wares for he was smiling as he came towards me with a bottle of champagne in his hand.

'I hope Andras was not too abusive,' said Staiger. He filled my glass. He seemed reconciled to my gate-crashing his party.

'He was most informative.'

'Are you with the Diplomatic Corps?' This time there was a smile and a twitch of the nose. 'Or is London Central sending us a more subtle type of man these days?' Staiger was a decade younger than me and yet he could get away with such a remark without inciting anger or resentment. Baron Staiger of Vienna, and Herr Hoffman of Salzburg, and God knows what in the other places he went, was provided with more than his full share of that Viennese Zauber that the rest of the world calls schmaltz.

He said, 'Andras has had a disappointing evening, I'm afraid. He has spent ten years trying to get his string quartet performed. Tonight it was. His loyal friends went but there were not enough of us to fill the hall.' He sipped his drink. 'Worse still, I think Andras realized that his composition wasn't really very good.'

'Poor Andras,' I said.

'His parents own the Scolik Konditorei,' said Staiger ironically. 'Know it? Each afternoon old ladies stand in lines to devour that superb Scolik poppy-seed strudel with a big dollop of Schlagobers. It is like owning a gold mine. The strudel will help him survive his crisis of confidence.'

'Is that what he's having?'

'Strudel?' he asked mockingly. 'No, you mean a crisis of confidence. Tomorrow he will face the music critics,' said Staiger. 'And Vienna breeds a savage race of critics.'

'Karl!' said a small sharp-featured woman who soon made it evident from her manner that she was Staiger's wife. Ignoring me she said, 'Anna-Klara has arrived, Karl.' She touched his arm. I wondered if she knew about her husband's other lives. Perhaps she thought I was a part of them.

Staiger smiled in a satisfied way. 'She has? Kolossal!' I was later to discover that he considered this lady's visit a social coup of some magnitude. He looked round to make sure that there was no aspect of the room that would disgrace him in the eyes of this renowned visitor, and found only me. For a moment I thought he would hide me in a cupboard, but he swallowed, looked at his wife apologetically and – as if explaining his predicament – said, 'When the guests have gone home, I have some work to do with Herr Doktor Samson.' He smoothed his thinning hair as if checking that it was in place.

The wife looked at me and nodded grimly. She knew I wasn't really a Doktor, a real Doktor would have been called 'Baron' and a real Baron 'Prince'. That's how things worked in Austria. I smiled but she didn't respond. She was a dutiful Austrian wife who let her husband make decisions about his work. But she didn't have to like his down-at-heel work-mates. 'Here comes Anna-Klara,' she said.

The arrival of the guest of honour was what they had all been waiting for. This soprano had been performing at the opera that night, and when she came into the room it was an entrance befitting the reverence that this assembled audience afforded her. She swept in with a flourish of the long flowing skirt. Her yellow hair was piled high and glittering with jewels. Her make-up was slightly overdone, but that was de rigueur for someone who'd hurried from the opera stage.

Her fellow guests greeted her with a concerted murmur of awe and devotion. With the Staigers at her side, the gnädige Frau went from one to another of them like a general inspecting a guard of honour. Here, bowing low, was a Doktor Doktor and a Frau Doktor, his wife; the bureaucrat's wife – Frau Kommerzialrat – gave a sort of a curtsy; the Hofrat – court adviser for a Habsburg Emperor long since dead and gone – kissed her hand. Anna-Klara had gracious words for all of them, and special compliments for Andras Scolik and the string quartet performance she'd missed. Scolik brightened. Anna-Klara had praised him. And, after all, there was always the strudel.

It was a bravura performance, and with impeccable instinct Anna-Klara stayed for only one glass of champagne before departing again. Once she had gone the party broke up quickly.

It was midnight when I sat down with Karl Staiger in his office at the back of the shop. All the church clocks in Vienna were proclaiming the witching hour. The room smelled of varnish, and Staiger opened the window a fraction despite the bitter cold night outside. Then he moved a lot of unopened mail from where it was leaning against an antique carriage clock and compared the time with that on his wristwatch. It was a beautiful clock, its face decorated with dancing ladies. The movement ticked happily inside the glass-sided case. He nodded proudly at me as a father might smile to see his child play the piano for guests. Satisfied, he moved more books and papers to clear a space on his desk where a green-shaded lamp made a perfect circle of light upon a pink blotter.

'What happened?' said Staiger.

'I haven't got it,' I said. I had no intention of talking to him about the death of Johnson, or mentioning Thurkettle and his possible role in the murder.

'Haven't got what?' He had his arms loaded with books.

From my jacket pocket I produced my wallet and I laid the coloured photo of the cover exactly in the centre of the pool of light. This,' I said, smoothing it out. 'I haven't got this.'

He put the books on to a cupboard and looked down at the photo. Then, without speaking, he took the bundle of unopened mail propped against the clock. Going quickly through it, he chose a packet that bore the large and impressive-looking labels of a courier company. It was a small padded bag secured with metal staples. He tore it open with an effortless twist and shook the contents from it.

On to the table slid a blue envelope with Paraguay stamps and Zeppelin marks: the same cover as that depicted in the colour photo upon which it fell.

'But I've got it,' said Staiger with a satisfied smile.

'What's the story?' I picked up the cover that had caused so much trouble and probably brought about the amiable Johnson's death. I turned it in my hands. It seemed such a useless piece of paper to be sold for such a high price.

'I only know what I can read between the lines,' he said. 'But I think the Americans sent someone to buy it over your head. I had to get on to one of the biggest dealers in Vienna – an old friend – and ask him to get it at all costs.'

'He must have phoned his bids.'

'There was no time for anyone to get to Salzburg.'

'The room bidder was chiselled, the auction was rigged. At least, that bid was.'

'These things happen,' said Staiger. 'I had no idea the Americans would try to intervene or I would have given you more cash. But it turned out all right. I was told to get it; I got it.' He picked up the cover and held it against the light.

'Is there something inside?'

'Usually there is some stiffening to protect such covers, a piece of card, sometimes one that advertises some long-forgotten stamp dealer.' But while saying this he took from the drawer of his desk a beautiful ivory letter opener and tapped it against his hand. 'You know that the best items in the sale were from a private collection put together in the nineteen thirties by a famous Hungarian airpost dealer named Zoltan Szarek. He was the author of the 1935 Szarek Airpost Manual, long out of print. Now that the Szarek collection is broken up it is the end of one of the world's greatest.' He turned the letter opener round. One end of it concealed a tiny penknife blade. He opened the blade and to my surprise cut open the precious Paraguay envelope.

Having seen the sort of passion that these philatelic objects aroused in men like Staiger I was amazed at this vandalism. But there was a surprise to come, for inside the blue envelope there were two passport-sized photos. The photos were obviously recent ones. The people had grown older since the last time I'd seen them and the photos were dull and lacking in true blacks because they were printed on that sort of grey-toned photo-paper that is used in countries that can't afford much silver. He placed them on the blotter in front of me. 'Anyone you know?'

Two people stared back at me: a man and a woman. One was a Russian KGB man who operated under the name of Erich Stinnes. It was a stiffly posed version of the photo Bower had shown me in Berlin. The other was my wife.

That was not all. The 'stiffener' was provided by the presence of two small identity cards. They were pink: both printed on a typical example of the coarse stock standard for Eastern Europe 's endless flood of official paperwork. Each was a specific journey visa: one person, one journey, one admission to the socialist people's republic, one exit. The rubber stamp was that of the Statni Tajna Bespecnost, Czechoslovakia 's Secret Security Organization. One card bore Staiger's photo, the other mine.