Spy Line

20

Summer is not the best time to be in southern California. Even ' La Buona Nova', the big hillside spread in Ventura County where Fiona was hidden away for her official debriefing, had long energy-sapping days when there was not a breeze off the Pacific. Bret Rensselaer was in charge. Some people – including me – had said he was too old ever to become a full-time Departmental employee again. But Bret was officially considered as Fiona's case officer. Bret had been a party to Fiona's long-term plan to defect to Moscow since that time when she first confided it to him. He'd monitored her progress. There was really no one else who could debrief her.

Bret Rensselaer was determined to make a big success of what would obviously be the last job he'd ever do. The prospect of a knighthood was never mentioned but you didn't have to be a mind-reader to know what Bret thought would be an appropriate thank-you from a grateful sovereign. No worries about Bret bowing the head for that one: he'd walk coast to coast on his knees for a K.

No one ever mentioned any kind of thank-you for me. When my salary cheque was paid I noticed that all the allowances and extras had been trimmed off it. I was down to the bare bones. When I mentioned this to Bret he said that I should remember that I wasn't having to pay for my food and keep. Good grief I said, what about the way I'm being deprived of contact with my children? I didn't mention Gloria for obvious reasons. It was Bret who brought Gloria into our conversation. He said that she had been told that I was on a special mission too secret for details to be revealed. The Department was making sure my children were happy and well cared for. He said it as if his words contained some not very veiled threat for me: I had the feeling that what Gloria was told would depend upon my good behaviour.

One day I noticed amongst the papers on Bret's marble-topped table a coloured postcard. It was van Gogh's portrait of a blue-uniformed postman, a picture of which Gloria was inordinately fond. 'Could that card be for me?' I asked him.

'No,' he said immediately and without hesitation.

'You're sure?'

'It's my private correspondence,' said Bret.

I felt like grabbing it to see but the table was big and Bret reached it before I did. He put it in a drawer. I knew it was a card from Gloria to me. I just knew it.

After that I was seldom allowed into Bret's 'office', and when I did go in there his table was always cleared. And in all that time the only correspondence that was forwarded to me was a picture of Paul Bocuse. It was postmarked Lyon and was from Tante Lisl describing the meal she'd eaten.

They put me and Fiona into a comfortable guest house set apart from the main buildings. It was complete with kitchen, dining room and a young Mexican girl to make breakfast and clean and tidy. Fiona spent four – sometimes five – hours almost every day with Bret. Neither of them emerged to eat a proper lunch. Sandwiches, fruit and coffee were sent into them and they carried right on talking. Bret had a part-time secretary but she wasn't with them during these sessions. His large and very comfortable office, with its window grilles and security locks, had maps and reference books and a computer that would feed into his screen and/or print out anything he required from all sorts of data banks. Everything Fiona said was recorded on tape and locked away in a huge safe. But there were no transcripts – all that would come later. This was the first run-through so that Bret could alert London and Washington to anything urgent.

Sometimes I went in and listened, but after a few days Fiona asked me to stay away. My presence made her too selfconscious, she said. I was hurt and offended at the time, but one-to-one was the usual form for such debriefings, and I'd never much liked having someone 'sit La' when I was doing one of these deep analysis stunts.

So I swam in the blue outdoor pool, caught up on my reading and listened to the 24 hours a day classical music on KSCA-FM or to cassettes on the big hi-fi. Most days I swam with Mrs O'Raffety, the artistic old lady who owned the place, and who had to swim on account of her bad back. And most days we took lunch together too.

I would have liked to go into Los Angeles, or, failing that, go for a beer in Santa Barbara which was much nearer. Walk along the beach, drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, do the tour of the Hearst Mansion – anything to break the monotony. But Bret was unyielding: both of us were confined inside La Buona Nova compound surrounded by the chain-link fences, the armed Mexican guards and the dogs. It was a prison, a nice comfortable prison but we were sentenced to stay there for as long as the Department decreed. I had the nasty feeling that that would turn out to be a very long term indeed. But what could I do? It was for Fiona's safety, said Bret. There was no arguing with that.

One night, soon after arriving, I'd tried to talk to Fiona about her time with Stinnes and his merry men. We were preparing for bed. She answered normally at first but then she grunted shorter replies and I could see she was getting very upset. She didn't weep or anything as traumatic as that. Perhaps it would have been better for all concerned if she'd done so: it might have helped her. But she didn't weep; she climbed into bed and curled up small and pulled the bedsheet over herself.

Each evening we'd eat dinner with Bret, our hostess and her son-in-law, an amiable lawyer. They were dull affairs at which the Mexican servants hovered all the time and the rest of us made small-talk. Sometimes I'd see Bret Rensselaer at the pool and exchange pleasantries with him. His only response to anything I said about Fiona seeming unwell, was bland reassurances. The doctor had given her a physical the day following her arrival and she had lots of vitamin pills and sleeping pills if she required them. And he told me that she'd been through a tough time and generally treated me like a neurotic mother worrying about a child with a grazed knee. But the changes I saw in Fiona were perhaps not evident to those who didn't know her so well. The changes were all small ones. She seemed shrunken and her face was drawn, and she didn't walk absolutely upright in the attractive way that I remembered so well. There was the soft and hesitant way she spoke and the diffidence she showed to everyone from me and Bret right through to the Mexican house servants.

One evening at dinner she spilled a couple of drips of barbecue sauce on the tablecloth – the kind of thing I do all the time – and she slumped back in her chair and closed her eyes. No one round the table gave any sign of noticing it but I knew she was close to screaming, close perhaps to breaking point. The trouble was that she'd confide nothing to me, no matter how I tried to get her to talk. Finally she accused me of harassing her, so then I stopped and left it all to Bret.

Two days later Bret asked me to sit in with them for the morning session. 'There are a few things unexplained,' said Bret.

'From where I'm sitting there are a lot of things unexplained,' I said.

Fiona sat slumped in a big armchair. Bret was behind a table – an elaborate modern design of pink marble with polished steel legs – with his back to the tinted window. The garden was packed with colour. Against the whitewashed wall of the yard there were orange and lemon trees, jasmine, roses and bougainvillaea. There was no perfume from them, for the window was tightly closed and the air-conditioning fully on. Bret looked at me for a long time and finally said, 'For instance?'

'The traces of heroin in the Ford van.' It was a bluff and it didn't work.

'Let's not get side-tracked,' Bret said. 'We're supposed to be establishing the identities of the other people there.'

'Fiona can tell you that,' I said. 'She was in the car with them.'

'Erich Stinnes,' said Fiona somewhat mechanically. 'Plus a Russian liaison man. And there was a man I had never seen before. He arrived on a motor cycle.'

'Good! Good!' murmured Bret as he laboriously wrote it down in case he forgot. He looked up. 'Three men,' he said and gave a quick nervous smile. Bret Rensselaer was one of those slim elegant Americans who, whether sick or healthy, always look well cared for: like a vintage Bugatti or a fifty-carat diamond. Sitting behind his desk, golden pen in hand, he looked like a carefully posed photo in a society magazine. He was wearing tailored white designer slacks and a white tennis shut with a red stripe at the collar. It all went well with his white hair and made his tanned face seem very brown.

I wondered if the mysterious 'extra man' was going to be identified as Thurkettle. I didn't volunteer that idea, and I noticed that Fiona said nothing of his American accent.

'Have the monitors picked up anything?' Fiona asked.

'Nothing in any of the newspapers or periodicals and certainly nothing on the radio.' He gave another of his crisp little smiles and fidgeted with his signet ring, 'It would be surprising if there was,'

'And even more surprising if you told us about it,' I said.

Bret wasted no more than a moment on that one. He grunted and turned to Fiona again. 'Why would they burn the car, Fiona?'

'Bernard says it was to destroy the evidence,' she replied.

'I was asking you, Fiona.'

'I really have no idea. It might have been an accident. There was still one man there.'

'Ah! The man on the bike?'

'Yes,' she said.

'I wish you could tell me more about him.' He waited in case Fiona said something. When she didn't he said, 'And you didn't talk with Stinnes or this liaison guy during the car journey?'

'No, I didn't.'

'Did they talk together?'

'I don't think there's much to be gained in this line,' said Fiona. 'I've told you all I know about them.'

Bret nodded sympathetically. He looked at his yellow legal pad and said, This "other man" came by motorcycle? Unusual that, don't you think?'

'I really don't know how unusual it was, Bret.'

'But if the car was set on fire after you left, it has to be the biker who did it?'

'I assume so,' said Fiona.

'So do I,' said Bret. 'Now we come to the final stage of this strange business – him letting you get away so easily.'

Fiona nodded and wet her lip as if she was distressed to think about it. 'Strange, yes.'

'What would be the motive for that? Bernie here had just shot his two buddies. Then he let you go. Does that sound a little crazy?'

Fiona said, 'It was a stalemate. He couldn't move without getting shot. He knew Bernard couldn't get to the van without offering a target. Some kind of compromise had to be reached.'

'No, it didn't, honey,' said Bret. 'These people were in their own country. Let's say Mr X holds out until it's daylight. Passing traffic will see what's happening. The construction workers will arrive. Just about anything that happens will resolve things his way. Right?'

'I don't know who he was,' said Fiona, as if she hadn't listened to Bret's question.

'What does that mean?' said Bret.

Fiona looked at me needing support. I said, 'Fiona means that if some CIA agent was in a shoot-out on the Pacific Coast Highway, along the road from here, how keen would he be to have himself discovered by the local cops and passers-by when daylight comes?'

'Well, okay,' said Bret in a voice that conceded nothing. 'But this is the U.S. of A. Liberal newspapers who are looking for ways to take a swipe at the government, crackpot Senators ditto. In a situation like that, maybe some CIA agent might want to keep a low profile at whatever cost. But in the DDR… I don't see it.'

'Why don't you just tell us what you want us to say, Bret?' I said.

'Come again,' said Bret, the frayed edge of his temper showing through.

'We all know you're writing a fairy story,' I said. 'It's a scenario that was probably all settled months, maybe years, ago. You don't want to know what really happened: you just want to find excuses for saying everything went as planned. I know what the report will be: fifty pages patting all the desk men on the back, and saying what a wonderful job they did. The only decisions still to be made are who gets the knighthood and who will have to make do with an MBE or a CBE.'

'You're a rude bastard, Bernard,' he said softly.

'Yes. I know. Everyone tells me the same thing. But what I say is true, all the same.'

He looked at me and conceded just a fraction. 'Wasn't it Goethe who said, Der Ausgang giebt den Taten ihre Titel – how's that? The outcome decides what the title will be? Sure. This is a phenomenal success story. It's Fiona's success. She won't ever get a proper credit for it because that's not the way the Department handles these things: we all know that. What she will get is the report. Would you rather I write it up as some kind of turkey? You want me to say she screwed up?'

'No,' I said. Bret could always find a way of putting his opponents in the wrong.

Fiona said nothing. Her contribution to the talking was minimal and yet she was not uncooperative: she was like a sleep-walker. She knew her sister was dead – Bret had told her – but she avoided mention of Tessa. It was as if Tessa had never been there, and Bret left it like that. There were a lot of things that Fiona would not talk about, she seldom even mentioned the children. I didn't envy Bret his task.

Bret looked at his watch. 'Well, let's move on to a few easier questions. We'll get some of those rare roast beef sandwiches sent in, and break early. How about that?'

The sandwiches were lousy too.

A couple of days later we had a visitor. James Prettyman was an Americanized Englishman who used to work alongside me. Since then London Central had sent him to Washington in some deep cover plan that enabled him to do things for them at arm's length. Atone time we'd been close friends. Now I wasn't so sure, although I suppose I owed him a favour or two.

Jim was in his early thirties. He had the wiry form and presence of mind that are associated with the pushier type of door-to-door salesmen. His complexion was pale and bloodless. His head was domelike and he was losing his silky hair but sometimes a strand of it fell across his eyes. I think he was glad to see it.

It was early in the morning when he arrived. He was wearing a blue striped suit, the lightweight cotton you need in Washington DC at this sweaty time of the year. There was a paisley silk square in the top pocket and the trousers were very rumpled, as if he'd been strapped in to his seat for a few hours.

'Good to see you, Bernie,' he said and gave me a sincere handshake and fixed me with his eyes, in that way that Americans do when they are trying to recall your name. I'm sitting in.' He looked at his watch. 'Later this morning. You, me and Bret: okay?'

'Good,' I said, uncertain of what was expected of me. I thought he must have come to talk with Fiona but she was taking breakfast in bed having been given a morning of 'free activity'.

Bret Rensselaer went into secret session with Jim Prettyman and I was summoned to join them at ten o'clock. The remains of their breakfast were still distributed around the room. Bret couldn't think without striding round the room so there were plates of half-eaten corn muffins, cups and unfinished glasses of orange juice on every side. I poured myself coffee from the vacuum jug and sat down. I reached for the cream jug but when I poured from it only a drip or two remained.

Bret Rensselaer said, 'Jim would like to hear your version of what happened.'

I looked at Bret and he added, 'On the Autobahn.'

'Oh,' I said. 'On the Autobahn.'

'Who was this man on the motor cycle?' said Prettyman.

'No one seems to know,' I said.

'I told Jim you had theories,' said Bret. 'And I told him you wouldn't open up.'

Jim said, 'Off the record, Bernie.'

'It was a dark night, Jim,' I said.

He leaned forward and switched off the tape recorder and said, 'Off the record.'

'Oh, that kind of off the record,' I said. I drank some coffee. It was cold. 'I think your vacuum flask is on the blink,' I said. 'Yes, well… He had an American accent.'

'They've all got American accents,' said Bret. 'It's the teaching machines.'

'So I hear,' I said.

'Did you recognize the voice?' said Prettyman.

'Are you putting me on?' I asked. 'Do we have to go through with this nonsense?'

'Who was it?'

'Jesus, Jim! You know who it was. It was a thug named Thurkettle, a renegade American. A hit man the Department brought in to make sure Tessa Kosinski was blown away.'

'Why you dumb…' started Bret, but Prettyman waved a hand that silenced him.

'Tell me more,' said Prettyman. 'Why would the Department want to kill Fiona's sister?' It was casually put, but in his voice there was that specially kindly tone with which psychiatrists coax maniacs.

'The car burned,' I said. Tessa Kosinski's remains – no more than a few bone fragments and ashes – will be identified as her sister Fiona. Fiona is hidden here: Moscow won't know that she is alive and well and spilling everything to you guys.'

'You're forgetting the teeth,' said Bret. They are sure to find some jawbone. Fiona had dentistry – a crown and a filling – while she was over there in East Berlin.' If anything was needed to convince me that my theory was right, it was Bret's remarkable knowledge of Fiona's dental chart.

Prettyman looked at Bret and then at me and then sneaked a quick look at his wristwatch.

'I'm forgetting nothing,' I said. 'Let's suppose a skull, sufficiently like Fiona's, was fitted with dental work that exactly matched hers. That would have been put into the car.'

'Two women's skulls in the car?'

'That's why you need a madman like Thurkettle. Hacking a head from a body is covered by his all-inclusive fee.'

'Thurkettle is the one who wasted the CIA man in Salzburg,' said Prettyman, as if remembering the name from something in the dim and distant past. Then he said, 'It would need a lot of planning… a lot of cooperation. Who would put him in position and so on?'

'There was drug trafficking: officials on both sides. A scapegoat was needed. All concerned were desperate to close the file. That spot, with the construction work on the highway, would provide a chance to bury any inconvenient evidence.'

'Where did you get all this?' said Prettyman.

I said, 'It's the only feasible explanation.'

'You'll have to do better than that, Bernie,' said Prettyman in a voice that seemed truly friendly. 'I'll listen to anything you have to say. I learned what I know from you: all of it. But you'll have to do a rewrite for that cockeyed script.'

'So what in hell was Tessa doing there?'

It was Bret's turn to speak. 'Isn't that a question for you to answer, Bernard? You took her there with you. Remember?'

'Will you go and see Gloria?' I asked Prettyman on a sudden and desperate impulse. Tell the children I'm well and that I love them?'

Bret said nothing.

Prettyman calmly said, 'There's not much chance of me getting a trip to London anytime in the foreseeable future, Bernie.'

I drank my tepid black coffee and didn't answer.

'I'll be back,' Prettyman told me like a dutiful son visiting a difficult octogenarian. 'But I have to be at Camarillo Municipal Airport by two. Next month maybe… Good to see you, Bernie. Really good! I mean that sincerely.'

'Get stuffed!' I said.

Prettyman looked at Bret. Bret responded with a tiny shrug as he was showing Prettyman out. I remained where I was but I could hear them in the next room. As they parted I heard Prettyman say, 'What a tragedy. Both of them.'

I heard Bret reply, 'It's not too late. Let's see what happens.'

It was a week afterwards that I learned that Camarillo Municipal Airport used to be a fully equipped US Air Force operational base and that the runways are still in good order. So when Prettyman went there he hopped back into the supersonic military jet that had brought him, and he was in Washington for happy hour. I suppose it was something that Fiona had said to Bret and Washington had to be told double quick.

We'd been at the house for over a month before Fiona began to open up to me. Even then what she said was fairly banal stuff about her day-today work in Berlin, but it was a start. Then each evening it became routine for us to talk for half an hour or so. Sometimes we'd talk over a drink in our sitting room, and sometimes we'd take a walk around the perimeter fence. Then one evening Fiona almost trod upon a big grey rattlesnake, and after that we kept to the paths and the terrace. It was a big property, and high enough so that on a pitch-black night like this the California coastline shone like a diamond necklace laid out all the way to Los Angeles.

'What really happened?' she said one night as we were standing there looking at the view and listening to the ocean.

'They got you out,' I said. 'That's what happened.'

'What was Tessa doing there? That's what I can't understand. What was Tessa doing there, Bernard?'

'I told you,' I said. 'She was having an affair with Dicky. She thought it would be fun, I suppose.'

'I loved you so much when I married you, Bernard. I loved you because you were the only man I'd ever met who had a real respect for the truth. You never lied to me, Bernard. I wanted my children to be like you.'

I was holding her hand, staring into the darkness and trying to recognize the distant coastline.

She said, 'You wouldn't be working against me, would you, Bernard? You wouldn't do that?'

'What do you mean?'

'They haven't even told George that Tessa is dead.'

'Why not?'

'Poor George. He'd never do harm to anyone.'

'Why haven't they told him?'

She turned to look at me. 'He's been sworn to secrecy and told that Tessa went to Berlin with you and that you've run away together… run away somewhere where no one can find you.'

'So that's the story,' I said. It fitted so neatly: the hotel room that Dicky had shared with Tessa was registered in my name.

'They want Moscow to believe that Tessa is alive. The story is that it was me who was killed at the Brandenburg exit.'

'The burning car. Yes, that would be it.'

'Could they get away with such a deception, Bernard?'

'There was trade in heroin. Could Erich Stinnes have been involved?'

'Erich? No!'

'A lot of people think he was,' I persisted. 'And he was working for the Department. Do you see how he could have been set up?'

'Stop worrying about Erich.'

'Who says I'm worrying about him?'

'You identify with him…the way he grew up in Berlin with a father in the army… you identify with him.'

I didn't deny it: she knew. I suppose I'd been shouting in my sleep. I'd had a couple of nightmares. I killed him.'

'It's all over, darling. Stop torturing yourself. Why was Tessa there? That's what I want to find out.'

'Tessa was an addict, you know.'

"That's what Bret said.'

'That might have been the reason she went to Berlin. There was a man named Thurkettle who probably supplied her. I think he might have cut off her supply to make her follow him there. There were a lot of people involved. A scapegoat was needed. You can bet the official explanation is that you were bringing it in.'

'That I was bringing it? Heroin? Whose explanation? East or West?'

'Everyone. It was a chance to close the file,' I said.

'How far would the Department go with that?'

'This is an unprecedented situation. We can't be guided by past examples.'

'Uncle Silas knew what I was really doing.'

'Yes, I know, I talked to him. Uncle Silas said they needed six months with Moscow still believing you remained loyal. They'll be using all the material that they were frightened of using before in case you were compromised.'

'You're saying someone deliberately planned it so that Tessa would die?'

'I don't know.' My answer came too pat and she thought I was not telling her all I knew. 'I really don't know, Fi.'

She put her arm round me. 'I have no one to trust any more. Sometimes that frightens me.'

'I understand.'

'Was it like that for you?'

'Sometimes.'

'Who would plan such a terrible thing?'

'Perhaps I've got it all wrong,' I said.

'Bret?'

'I wouldn't start going through the possibilities. Probably it was a mixture of planning and opportunity. Maybe it's nothing like that. As I say: maybe I've got it all wrong.'

'I suppose Tessa did look like me. Daddy always said so.'

'I have no evidence one way or the other,' I said. 'The most important thing is to give Bret the sort of answers he wants. We have to get out of here. The children need us.'

'I abandoned them,' said Fiona. 'They must hate me.'

'Of course they don't.'

'Why wasn't it me? Tessa so loved life, and you and the children can manage without me. Why wasn't it me?'

'You've got to start again, Fi,' I said.

'I didn't even recognize her,' said Fiona. 'I left her there in the mud.'

I could hear the ocean but I couldn't see anything there but darkness. I said, 'Why don't we see if Bret would let the children come here for the final three or four weeks?'

'Bret says we'll be here for a long time,' she said casually, as if she didn't care.

I shivered. I was right. We were imprisoned here. Maybe for years. Maybe indefinitely. I knew of defectors, needing protection, who were tucked away out of sight for a decade or more. 'Tell Bret you insist upon seeing the children,' I suggested.

She didn't reply immediately, and when she did her voice was listless. 'I love the children and I desperately want to see them, but not here.'

'Whatever you say, Fi.'

'I need time, Bernard. I'll be that lucky joyful girl you married, and the good times will come round again. We'll live happily ever after. But I need time.'

From the Pacific Ocean there came that smell of salt and putrefaction that is called fresh air. The sky was very dark that night: no stars, no glimmer of moonlight. Evens the lights along the waterfront were being extinguished.