The Elegant Lie

…

It took another twenty-four hours to reach Karlovy Vary, passing through Vienna, where they boarded a much smaller train, and then changing again at Prague, travelling in carriages barely half the size of the ones in which they had begun their journey.

The town was nestled in a valley, surrounded on all sides by thickly wooded hills. Instinctively, Carter found himself looking for traces of where the war had left its scars upon the landscape, but he found none here. The sight of burned-out buildings, pyramids of rubble and the skeletons of tanks and trucks lying half buried in weeds beside the tracks had been such a constant until now that Carter felt as if they had travelled not just into a different land, but into a parallel universe where the war had never taken place, and where the lifeless stones still held the memory of those who had gone before.

Arriving at Karlovy, the locomotive groaned to a halt beneath a rusted metal roof that covered only one of the tracks. The station building was a sandy yellow colour, with scabs of plaster showing where the paint had peeled away. Although it looked run down, it seemed that way by choice, surrendering gracefully to time.

The cab that drove them to the Orlovsky hotel was a white Skoda with a narrow, curved front grille. ‘Are you here for the cure?’ asked the driver, as he motored through the narrow streets. He was a nervous-looking man who wore a knee-length canvas coat of the type drivers used to wear in open-topped cars. He sat very close to the wheel, hands gripping the top, and as he steered the Skoda along the narrow zigzag streets, his whole body swayed with the effort.

It was evening now and the tall houses, with their brick red roofs and the same dusty yellow paint as the station, glowed in the setting sun.

The architecture was so ornate and colourful, like something out of a child’s picture book about fairytales, that to Carter it barely seemed real.

‘The cure?’ asked Teresa.

‘The Karlovy Cure,’ explained the man, with a stern patience that implied she must surely know about this but had simply forgotten in the moment. He talked quickly, as if the thoughts were piling up inside his head. ‘It is a regimen of sulphur baths and water from our thermal springs. It was once named the Carlsbad Cure, which had a better ring to it, in my opinion, but the past is the past, and Karlovy Vary is what it’s called today. Whatever the name, most people come here seeking to mend their broken and neglected constitutions. They have done for a thousand years and a thousand years from now, they’ll still be coming here. Sometimes we can undo what has been done, but in spite of everything you see, we do not deal in miracles.’ He studied them in his rear-view mirror. ‘But I see you have not come here seeking those.’

‘Not yet, anyway,’ said Carter.

The driver pulled up in front of the hotel and carried their bags into the lobby. Giant potted ferns made an archway just inside the door and a red carpet stretched towards a wide stone staircase which twisted to the left, passing out of sight beneath a stained glass window depicting a stag looking at its own reflection in a forest pond. Sunlight passing through red and green and yellow chips of glass seemed to fill the air, as if a ghostly flock of birds were flying around the room.

The concierge at the desk was an elderly man with a stiff grey moustache and piercing whitish-blue eyes, like the eyes of a sled dog. He wore a red tunic with a collar buttoned tight against his throat and brass buttons emblazoned with the willow tree logo of the Orlovsky.

He watched the couple approach, his face unreadable.

Carter paid the cab driver, who touched the brim of his cap and walked out beneath the archway of ferns into the almost blinding summer light outside, as if passing into a different dimension.

Then Carter handed his reservations to the concierge.

The man studied the documents. Then suddenly he looked up, and his expression was so stern and fierce that Carter felt sure that something had gone terribly wrong.

But it was nothing like that.

‘The Orlovsky welcomes you,’ the concierge said solemnly. He raised one arm above his head and snapped his fingers with a sound like cracking bones.

A porter appeared from a back room, buttoning his uniform as he dashed out to gather their bags.

Instead of going straight to their room, they walked out into the street and strolled along a boulevard beside the river that ran through the centre of the town. Rows of leafy trees sheltered benches on which people, some of them clearly very ill, sat and watched fountains of water rising from the shallow river. Music drifted from the cafes where some patrons, instead of wine, drank yellowy, sulphur-smelling water from glasses nestled in brass holders.

As Carter walked beside Teresa, his thoughts tripped back and forth with the relentlessness of a metronome between the work he had come here to do, along with all the danger that came with it, and the unmistakable sensation that he and Teresa had emerged from the lifeless twilight that they had once believed was the entire world into a hovering, in-between place where they were both dreaming the same dream◦– which was so real and yet so fragile that if either of them even breathed out of pace with the other, the whole thing would vanish like smoke and they would find themselves once more inside a cage of rust and rock.

There was a moment late that night after they had returned to their hotel when, half conscious in the gauzy veils of moonlight shining through the window, Carter felt himself falling away into the darkness which, for the first time in his life, he did not fear.

Carter woke at 5 a.m.

He sat up in bed and looked down at Teresa, still fast asleep beside him, and in that moment, seeing her hair spilled out across the pillow, he realised that he had fallen in love. Until this moment, there had been a part of him that still believed that, when the time came, he could walk away and simply add her to his tally of regrets. But the possibility of that had slipped away from him. Perhaps it was when she handed him the photograph. Perhaps when they were walking the streets the night before. And perhaps it had always been that way, from the moment he first saw her, and it had taken this long for him to admit it to himself. You have either killed me or saved me, he thought as he looked down upon her, but I’m damned if I know which it is.

He slipped from the bed and got dressed, careful that his belt buckle did not clink as he fastened it. He took the map that Ritter had given him, picked up his shoes and stepped out of the room, closing the door soundlessly behind him. Still moving carefully, as if across a sheet of ice, he made his way along the carpeted corridor to the stairs. There, he sat down and put on his shoes.

There was no one at the front desk as he passed through the foyer of the hotel. He opened one of the great double doors at the entrance and stepped out into the dove grey light before the dawn. Mist hung in tatters in the mountains. He looked at the map, turning it this way and that until he found his bearings. Then he set off towards the old airfield, six kilometres outside town. The streets were empty and at first he only walked, so as not to draw attention from anyone who might be looking from a window, but as soon as he cleared the last of the houses, he began to move more quickly. Soon he was running, not flat out but at a steady pace. The first rays of sunlight showed through the trees, lying across the road like scattered bolts of brass.

The road narrowed as it climbed into the hills, and the old map showed a turn-off to the south, which led to the airfield. But when he came to the place where the turn-off should have been, he found the path so overgrown that he felt sure it must lie further up ahead. He kept on, sweating through his shirt, his shoes unfit for the punishment they were taking. He went for another kilometre and then realised he had gone too far. Doubling back, he returned to what seemed to be the path, but whole trees with trunks as thick as his leg had grown up in the ruts where vehicles had once passed through. He knew he must be close, but the thought that he could spend hours searching for the last section of the path that would get him to the airfield sent a flutter of panic through his chest.

He set off down the overgrown trail, sweeping aside undergrowth as if he were swimming to his destination. The sun was up now, and mosquitoes whined around his face. He heard birds singing off in the forest and the chuntering of squirrels in the branches above his head.

Just at the moment when he thought he might have to turn back, he saw a clearing in the woods ahead. A minute later, he emerged onto the old runway. It had been tarmacked years ago and, although the surface was cracked and wavy, exposing a bedrock of concrete below, he saw at a glance that it was a well-chosen location. He walked out into the middle of the runway, his feet brushing through the hazy globes of dandelions that had grown up through fissures in the ground. After the closeness of the forest, Carter felt uneasy to be out there in the open. He made his way to the other side of the runway and skirted the edge from then on.

Garlinsky had said that the plane went down south of the runway, and that it had been on its final approach when that happened. Carter knew that the wreckage couldn’t be too far, but the forest was so dense here that he might not see the aircraft until he was practically on top of it.

He forced himself to be calm, knowing that the work which lay ahead of him might take hours. He might not even find the plane in a day, in which case he would have to return and keep looking. He hoped it didn’t come to that. The longer he spent out here, the more likely it was that he would be noticed, and yet still in the back of his mind was the nagging fear that the wreckage might already have been spotted and was being watched, in which case he would be walking right into a trap.

Carter pushed forward through the first screen of trees, which grew more thickly than those that lay deeper in the forest. The ground was uneven, with stones banked up by some ancient force and fallen trees blocking his path. Soon his clothes were filthy, smeared with dirt and streaks of frog-back green from the moss that grew on the rotted trunks.

It was almost half an hour before he found his first clue that he might be heading in the right direction. A tall, spindly birch tree had been snapped off at a height of about twenty feet, leaving a pale gash of bark and branches.

A little further on, he came across two more broken trees and one of them bore traces of pale blue paint, which he realised must have come from the underside of the plane.

He moved more quickly now, oblivious to his torn shirt and the way his feet were sliding in the stretched-out leather of his shoes.

He almost ran right into the first piece of wreckage before he realised what it was. A large wheel, still attached to its strut, lay by itself, almost hidden among a tangle of young pine trees. A little further on, he glimpsed the forward section of the plane, the sloping shape of its nose reminding him of a whale he had once seen beached upon the Jersey shore when he was a child. The tail had broken off and lay to one side, exposing bare metal where it had torn away.

Carter stopped, panting. He had been so focused on finding the wreck that only now did it occur to him how difficult it might be to dispose of the cargo without drawing unwanted attention. His original idea had been to burn the money using fuel from the plane, if there was any, or the whisky itself to start the fire. But now he wondered if it might be better to bury the money instead, and avoid the risk of any smoke being spotted by somebody else in these hills.

Garlinsky’s contacts had been right. The aircraft had not burned. Its fuel supply must have been exhausted by the time it crashed. It may even have been the reason for the crash. The plane had nosed into the woods and come to an almost immediate halt against the tall maples and oaks that made up the surrounding forest. The front section had crumpled into the ground and several trees, snapped off nearly at ground level, had fallen over the cockpit. Carter could tell at a glance that if the pilot and co-pilot had been in their seats at the time of the crash, neither of them would have survived. Both wings had broken off. One port-side engine lay half buried in the ground and the starboard engine had torn loose, tumbling past the crash site until it had come to rest in the undergrowth. Now it was nothing more than a tangle of pipes, valves and an engine block already filmed with rust. Only the tail section had remained more or less intact. Most of the cargo had been thrown forward and lay crushed in a large pile where the broken-off section had slammed into the ground. Only a few of the crates had been disgorged from the severed mid-section. These had disintegrated into shards of wood and broken glass, some of which were now embedded in the nearby tree trunks. And now, almost buried amongst the carpet of dead leaves, ferns and moss-scabbed stones, he saw the mangled confetti of rouble notes. Here and there, stray bills, some of them torn to shreds, twitched in a breeze blowing through the tops of the trees.

Carter realised that very little of this crash could have been seen from the air. The camouflaged topside of the aircraft had been further concealed by a matting of leaves and branches torn loose from the surrounding trees. The plane had come in at such an angle, and must have been travelling so slowly when it crashed, that there was no scar of cleared vegetation that might otherwise have been visible if anyone had thought to look. Given how dense the forest was and the fact that he was far from any path, Carter thought it might be years before anyone stumbled across the plane, and even then they might ignore it as just another of the thousands of wrecked aircraft that lay scattered across Europe after the war. As Carter stepped around to the other side of the tail section, he came across a body spread-eagled and face down on the ground. He swore and stumbled backwards. He had tried to prepare himself for the sight of the dead crewmen, but it still caught him by surprise to find one of them lying here. A moment later, once the initial shock had passed, he realised that it wasn’t one of the crewmen, after all. This man was not wearing flight gear. In fact, he was dressed in a pair of thick corduroy breeches, long woollen socks and a pair of hobnailed boots. He also wore a turtleneck sweater. It was the same kind of walking gear he had seen worn by people back in town.

As Carter struggled to piece together what a hiker could be doing this far from the path, he heard a twig crack behind him. Spinning around, he found himself face to face with a man who was holding a gun.

Carter recognised him, but he seemed so out of place that it took him a moment to grasp that this was the same man he had met at the American airbase in Dornheim, when Wilby first made him the offer, who had neither smiled nor said a word and whom Wilby had refused to identify, calling him a figment of Carter’s imagination. He was even wearing the same tweed jacket, which barely contained the bulk of his muscular shoulders.

Carter knew that if the man had intended to kill him, he would already be dead. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t change his mind.

‘I guess I didn’t dream you up, after all,’ said Carter, slowly raising his hands.

And then, to Carter’s surprise, the man laughed. ‘It’s your lucky day,’ he said, and put away the gun.

‘Who are you?’ asked Carter.

‘My name is Babcock.’

‘Colonel Babcock? The station chief at Bonn?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I thought you were dead.’

‘To paraphrase Mark Twain, that would be a slight exaggeration.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Well, first of all, keeping you alive,’ replied Babcock, nodding at the body. He set his boot upon the man and rolled him over, revealing a face half masked with old pine needles that had stuck to his skin as he lay there on the ground.

Carter gasped. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘That’s Eckberg!’

The dead man’s eyes were half open, his teeth outlined in blood. A bullet had gone through his right cheekbone and blown out the back of his head. A piece of his skull, with a shred of skin and blond hair still attached, lay beside his outstretched arm, as if he had tried to catch that fragment of bone in the final moment of his life.

‘He tried to dress himself up like a local,’ said Babcock, ‘but this guy never could figure out how to stop looking like an American. Now, as it turns out, he might not even be one, after all.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You spoke to him, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ admitted Carter. ‘He tracked me down. He told me you had concerns about Wilby, about how he might be falling apart. He said you had authorised me to tell him about the operation.’

Babcock sighed. ‘Unfortunately, I never did that.’

Carter stared at the body. ‘You mean he was the leak?’

‘Yes,’ said Babcock, ‘and I wish I could say that we had our suspicions about him, but the truth is we had assumed it was one of the secretaries.’

‘You mean the one who turned up dead?’

‘That’s right,’ said Babcock. ‘We thought she had committed suicide after realising that we were closing in on her. It now seems more likely that Eckberg killed her to throw us off the trace, and I’m ashamed to say that it worked. At least until today.’

‘So he put the bomb in the safe house?’

‘It might have been him. It might have been someone he works with. Either way, he’s the reason Wilby is dead. It must have been on a timer, or else they would have waited for us to arrive.’

‘But why did he do it at all?’

‘Because as soon as he learned about that planeload of counterfeit money, he knew he had to stop you from getting to it first. That’s why he tried to have you kidnapped in the alley behind the train station. If Wilby hadn’t shown up, they’d be finding you in the reeds right about now, with a bullet in your skull. But you got away. Then, when Wilby informed us that he had set up a meeting at the safe house, he decided to get rid of all three of us at once. But that didn’t go the way he had planned either and, by then, his cover was blown. As soon as that bomb went off, we knew who must have set it. The only choice he had left was to set out on his own and get here before you. And for once, he actually succeeded. He just didn’t count on the fact that I would be here waiting for him when he arrived.’

‘You knew he’d come?’

‘I knew he had to try,’ said Babcock.

‘But why was it so important that he stop me from coming here? Surely the Russians would have wanted it destroyed.’

‘This was their best chance of tracing the money back to the people who made it. They already knew that someone was producing high-grade counterfeit roubles. This wasn’t the first load that had found its way into Russia. It was showing up all over the place, and they had a hunch that it was coming from somewhere in Europe. Of course, they assumed we were behind it. They just didn’t have any proof. The fact is, we had nothing to do with it and, until you came across this man Garlinsky, we were no wiser than the Russians as to who it might be.’

‘What about now?’ Carter gestured at the tail section and the splintered mass of crates and broken bottles, from which the sour smell of whisky drifted through the air. ‘Did you find anything that might help?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ sighed Babcock. ‘We’ll get them eventually, whoever made this stuff, but not today. Until this plane went down with half a million roubles stashed inside it, I had been inclined to let these counterfeiters carry on as they’d been doing. One day, the Russians would realise we weren’t behind it, but between now and then, this whole thing was giving them a heart attack. And that made me very happy. But this crash, and the fact that the Russians know about it, thanks to Eckberg, has changed the whole equation.’

‘What happens now?’

‘To you?’

‘That will do for a start,’ said Carter.

‘As far as I’m concerned, you are not here. An imaginary friend, if you will.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Your contract with us as an Agent of Opportunity has been terminated. We no longer require your services. I’ll leave the timing up to you, but all you have to do is put a call in to my office at Bonn station, give me the go-ahead and, as per our original agreement, an announcement will be made that you have been working undercover in western Europe, for which your dishonourable discharge was only a part of your cover. You will receive a public apology from the mayor of Elizabeth, New Jersey, as well as the governor. You will be reinstated into your old job, if you want it, and I seem to remember something about a parade.’

‘You can skip that part.’

‘As you wish.’

‘What about Dasch?’

‘I have nothing personal against the man. He was never anything more than a symptom of human desire, without which crimes like his would not exist. Nor did I care about the goods themselves. Fine wine and liver pâté will not be the start of World War Three. But men who can get their hands on such luxuries, and who can move them so skilfully from one country to the next, will soon develop an appetite for more dangerous cargo. It was only a matter of time before Dasch started running guns, or even worse. That’s why we were much more interested in his links to the criminal organisations in other European countries, and the government officials who helped him circumvent the borders.’

‘There were no government officials,’ said Carter, ‘or any criminal organisations that helped him.’

Babcock stared at him. ‘But that’s impossible,’ he said.

Carter told him about the underground depot in the ruins of the Eisengasse bunker complex.

‘Son of a bitch,’ said Babcock. ‘Wilby had Dasch pegged for a genius.’

‘I think Dasch knows he isn’t one,’ replied Carter, ‘and that makes him smarter than all the people I’ve met who thought they were.’

‘We have been chasing a mirage,’ said Babcock. ‘At least we were until Garlinsky showed up. Because this’◦– he held up a block of the counterfeit money◦– ‘this is every bit as dangerous as guns.’

‘So are you going after him?’

‘No,’ said Babcock. ‘We’ll make him come to us. We’re going to make an announcement about the discovery of the plane and the counterfeit currency it was carrying. And then we’re going to let Garlinsky finish what he started.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you really think Garlinsky and whoever the hell he works for are going to wait around for someone to put together the pieces of where that plane came from, and all the money it was carrying? They’re not going to take a risk like that. Since Dasch is the only person who can lead the Russian or the West German authorities back to them, they’re going to make sure that can’t happen. They’re going to find him and they are going to shut him up. Dasch might not know it, but he’s just bait for a trap now, like a goat tied up in a clearing. And when the wolf comes we’ll be ready.’

‘What about Teresa?’

‘What about her?’ muttered Babcock.

‘She has nothing to do with it. She’s asleep back at the hotel.’

‘That saved her from me. If she had seen my face, Mr Carter, even if only for an instant, this would have ended differently. But that isn’t going to save her from Garlinsky. The fact that she came on this journey, even if she didn’t know why, is more than enough to get her killed.’

‘You really think they’d do that?’

‘They might. They might not. Who knows what rules they play by? But one thing is for sure◦– it’s what I would do if I were them. It sounds to me like you might have a personal stake in this.’

‘I might.’

‘Wilby did warn you about her.’

‘He tried. I’ll give him that.’

‘Well, I can’t help you there,’ said Babcock. ‘You just have to get her back to Cologne, so that her father thinks she’s safe and that his problems have been solved, and to get yourself out of there before we make the announcement about the counterfeit money and all hell breaks loose. Which it will, I guarantee you. Listen to me, Carter. You’re almost there. Just keep your eyes on the finish line. Keep reminding yourself why you spent the last nine months in prison, not to mention almost getting yourself killed I don’t know how many times. In one week, you can have your life back, just as we agreed.’

‘I don’t even know if she’ll be there when I get to the hotel.’

‘Then hurry,’ Babcock told him. ‘And I’ll be waiting for your phone call.’

By the time Carter returned to the Orlovsky, he had cleaned himself up as best he could. He made his way through a staff entrance at the back.

He found Teresa sitting on the end of the bed.

She was dressed. Her bag was packed and sitting by her feet. ‘You look like you’ll need some new clothes,’ she said.

He glanced down at the ruins of his suit. ‘Yes,’ he whispered.

‘I didn’t know if you were coming back.’

‘Of course I was,’ he said.

Teresa looked around the room and sighed. ‘Do we really have to leave so soon?’ she asked. ‘I was just getting used to this place.’

Carter sat down on the bed beside her. ‘There’s one train a day, and it leaves in three hours. You know that we have to be on it.’

The journey took two days. They spoke very little, but the silence did not trouble them now as it had done before.

Babcock’s words echoed relentlessly in Carter’s head◦– that in one week he would have his life back, the way it had been before they took it. He thought about those months in Langsdorf prison. He thought about Ritter’s gun aimed at his face and the sound of the iron knuckles when they made contact with his skull in the alleyway behind the train station. He looked at Teresa and told himself that none of what he felt for her was real. That it had never been real. It was simply what he had been forced to do. In one week, none of it would matter. He would look back on this chapter of his life as the time he almost fell for his own lies. And nothing more.

That was what he told himself.

They arrived at Cologne station just as the work day was ending. Evening light filtered through the dirty glass panels in the roof, refracting crookedly off the smoke and steam that billowed through the crowds milling about upon the main platforms.

He walked her to the taxi stand.

‘Are you coming with me,’ she asked, ‘or are you going back to your apartment?’

‘I’ll go to the apartment,’ he told her. ‘I need to get some rest and some clean clothes. I’ll see you again in the morning.’ The words felt like stones in his mouth, clattering against his teeth and chipping them down to the nerves.

She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him. ‘I’ll see you then,’ she said.

Carrying his suitcase, Carter walked across the city, heading for his apartment above the electrical appliance repair shop. As he plodded through the darkened streets, all the lies that he had told himself as he sat beside her in the train caught up with him at once. There would be no tidy closing of this wound. The best that he might do was learn to live with it and hide his memories from the world as he had done before, but there would never be peace in his heart. He thought about the people he had seen in that strange little town in the mountains, with their broken bodies and their worn-out souls, pouring sulphur down their throats to burn away the debts they owed the past. And he knew he was one of them now.

He unlocked the door and walked inside, not even bothering to turn on the light. He flopped down on the bed, springs groaning as they took his weight, and it was only then that he realised there was somebody standing in the doorway to his kitchen. ‘Oh, shit!’ he said, and sat up, heart stamping in his chest. He rolled off the bed and onto his feet, looking around for anything he might be able to use as a weapon. A chair. The bedside lamp.

The figure in the doorway raised his hands to show he wasn’t carrying a gun. ‘Mr Carter!’ hissed a man’s voice. ‘I mean you no harm.’

‘Then what the hell are you doing here?’

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ said the man. And now he stepped forward into the last faint puddle of light still shining through the window.

It was Garlinsky.

Carter felt the dread rise in his throat.

‘I have a message from my employer,’ said Garlinsky. ‘He would like to meet you. He has something for you. Something of great value, which he hopes you will accept in trade.’

‘In trade for what?’

‘Information that he knows you possess.’

‘And if I say no to this meeting?’

Garlinsky breathed out slowly. ‘Please, Mr Carter, don’t let it come to that.’

There was a car waiting outside. Carter and Garlinsky sat in the back. The driver glanced at Carter in the rear-view mirror and then did not look at him again.

‘How did you know I wasn’t armed?’ asked Carter.

‘I didn’t,’ replied Garlinsky.

‘Then you were taking a hell of a risk.’

Garlinsky looked at him and laughed. ‘Not for the first time,’ he replied.

They drove around the edge of the city, along the Eifelwall, the Zülpicherwall and the Venloerwall, heading north past the Gereon rail yard and into the Nippes district.

By now, the windows had grown a silvery sheen of condensation and when the car pulled up outside a building, Carter wiped away the moisture to see where they were.

It was Thesinger’s bookshop.

Carter turned and stared in confusion at Garlinsky.

But Garlinsky said nothing. He just got out, came around to the other side and opened Carter’s door.

The lights in the shop were off.

Garlinsky used a key to let them in and Carter followed him to the back room, where he and Wilby had met the owner of the shop.

Thesinger was there, sitting on a stool and wearing the same heavy cardigan. His hair was precisely as dishevelled as it had been the time before. The room was lit by the single bulb of the lamp perched on his work table, where he had examined the counterfeit roubles shown to him by Wilby.

‘Garlinsky works for you?’ asked Carter.

‘I prefer to think it is more of a co-operative arrangement.’

‘Why have you brought me here?’

‘To express my admiration for your work.’

‘Somebody else once told me that,’ said Carter, ‘and no good came of it.’

‘I imagine that person might have been Hanno Dasch.’

Carter did not reply.

Thesinger gave a slight wave of his hand to show that no answer was required. ‘The difference,’ he said, ‘is that Mr Dasch was aware only of the illusion that you created. My admiration, Mr Carter, is for the creation of the illusion itself. A subtle difference perhaps, but a fundamental one nonetheless.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Believe me, Mr Carter, I know what I’m talking about. You see, like you, I am also a maker of illusions, so complex that they can sometimes be revealed only by those who have created them.’ He reached into his pocket and removed something, which he hid in his palm. And then, between his hands, he unfurled the tiny banner of a twenty-five-rouble note. ‘This illusion, for example.’

‘Wilby didn’t let you keep any of that money,’ said Carter.

‘He didn’t have to,’ answered Thesinger. ‘I have more than enough of my own.’

It took a moment for the truth to sink in. ‘You’re the counterfeiter?’

‘Not just me,’ explained Thesinger. ‘There are others◦– Mr Garlinsky for example, and those men you might have seen gathered around the table just inside the front door of this shop the last time you were here.’

Carter remembered the thin man with the suitcase and the clothes that were too big for him.

‘We are the survivors of an experiment,’ continued Thesinger, ‘conjured into life by the Nazis, and by one in particular, a man named Bernhard Krüger. In the autumn of 1942, I was an inmate at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. One day, when I had just begun my work breaking stones with a sledgehammer, I was summoned to appear before the commandant. I dropped the sledgehammer and ran to the commandant’s office. There, I found myself in the presence of an SS officer named Krüger, who asked me many questions about my previous employment at the Reichsbank. I had worked there for more than a decade as an engraver of the copper plates that were used for printing German currency. Krüger offered me the chance to take part in a special programme, which would make use of my particular training. In exchange for my full co-operation, I would be given proper clothes, not the grey and blue striped sackcloth worn by regular inmates, as well as three meals a day, a shower once a week and an actual bed, as opposed to the wooden-slatted bunk in which I currently slept. I agreed at once. I did not need to be told what this work might be for. Anything was better than breaking rocks, for which an inmate’s life expectancy was less than six months.’

Carter had seen pictures of those death quarries, and of stone staircases that prisoners were forced to climb, carrying heavy loads, day after day, until they inevitably collapsed.

‘I was taken to a barracks known as Block 19,’ said Thesinger. ‘Until that day, I had not even known of its existence. Even though it was within the grounds of Sachsenhausen, it was completely cut off from the rest of the camp by barbed wire and tall wooden fences. No one outside Block 19 could even see into our barracks. In Block 19, I was introduced to a group of men who would become my friends, and my only companions, for the next two and a half years. Each of them had special skills, much like my own. There were engravers, jewellers, graphic artists, photographers and collotypers. It was explained to me by Krüger that I was now part of Operation Bernhard, which was a plan to destroy the British economy by flooding it with counterfeit currency. Although with considerable difficulty◦– especially with the production of the correct paper and also a seal that could be found in the upper left hand corner of each note, depicting Britannia◦– we eventually managed to produce millions of notes of such high quality that, as I mentioned to you at our first meeting, even the Bank of England certified them as genuine.’

‘The only part of the story you left out,’ said Carter, ‘was that you were the one who had made them.’

‘You weren’t ready for the truth, any more than I was ready to tell you.’

‘I’m surprised the Nazis let you live after taking part in something like that,’ remarked Carter.

‘It was never their intention for us to survive,’ replied Thesinger. ‘Those of us who worked for Krüger had been under no illusion that, once this operation had been completed, we would be murdered and all trace of Block 19 obliterated. So we always knew that we were playing for time, and we would often create delays in production, just to stretch out the process a little longer. In the end, with the Russian and American armies closing in, we and our equipment◦– which included some very valuable printing presses◦– were moved from Sachsenhausen to a smaller camp called Ebensee, near the site of a rocket-building facility in the Austrian Alps. By then, the war was almost over. Many of the guards who had accompanied us simply vanished into the mountains. In the end, there were not even enough of them left to execute us, as I am certain they had planned to do. Some, like me, were fortunate enough to be taken prisoner by the Americans. That is how Major Wilby came to know of my existence, since he was the one who debriefed me before I was released back into the world with the status of “displaced person”.’

‘What about the others?’ asked Carter.

‘Many were less lucky. They fell into the hands of the Russians as they tried to make their way back to their homes. In spite of the fact that they had been selected from among a population of concentration camp inmates, they were accused by the Soviets of collaborating with the Nazis. In one sense, of course, it was true. Technically, all of us had volunteered to work for Krüger. The fact that we would all have been dead if we did not was, to the Russian mind, irrelevant. Having only just emerged from years of captivity, my friends were now sent to a particularly notorious labour camp in Siberia known as Borodok, some of them with sentences of more than twenty years.

‘Could nothing be done to help them?’ asked Carter.

‘We weren’t sure,’ answered Thesinger, ‘but we knew we had to try. We decided to reincarnate Operation Bernhard, only this time we were working for ourselves and, instead of British currency, we would set our skills towards the forgery of Russian roubles. We traced the equipment we had been using at Block 19, including a top of the line Monopol Type IV flatbed press, to a warehouse outside Vienna, where it had been put into storage and forgotten. Posing as representatives of a German newspaper whose facility had been destroyed in the war, we purchased the equipment from the warehouse manager. Eventually, through several intermediaries, contact was established with the commandant of Borodok and an offer was made to purchase the freedom of our friends.’

‘Did this commandant have any idea that the money was fake?’

‘None at all, and he had no reason to suspect. Our copies of Russian currency were even more accurate than those British pounds we made for Krüger.’

‘But where did he think the money came from?’

‘We passed ourselves off as former Nazis who had looted huge quantities of gold during the war and smuggled it into Swiss banks. From there, with the help of unscrupulous bankers, we were able to exchange the gold for any currency we chose to purchase.’

‘But why would former Nazis care about a bunch of concentration camp inmates?’

‘We made no secret of the fact that these men had been part of Operation Bernhard, since we assumed the camp commandant would eventually figure it out on his own. We told him that we were planning to begin a counterfeit operation of American dollars, which was actually something Krüger had been working on before the war ended. Whether the commandant of Borodok cared one way or another what we were doing is still a mystery to me. All he cared about, I think, was lining his own pockets in exchange for the lives of a few men who were going to die before long, anyway.’

‘How did he get them out of the camp?’

‘It could not be done all at once without attracting suspicion, so we agreed that he would smuggle them out one at a time. He was already supplementing his income by selling the bodies of those who had died at the gulag as cadavers to various medical institutions, not only in Russia, but also in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The bodies were sealed inside barrels filled with formaldehyde and sent out on flatbed railcars along with wood cut from the forests around Borodok. Our men, listed as dead but still very much alive, were sent out among these shipments of barrels. For each man, thousands of roubles were smuggled back to Borodok inside the empty barrels, which were being returned so that more bodies could be placed inside them. Our contact worked at a hospital in Prague, so that was the place where our friends were delivered. From Prague, they travelled here to Germany. Seeing these men after they had spent two years labouring in a gulag was enough to break my heart, but at least they are free now. We provide them with housing, clothes and enough money to make a new start.’

Carter thought of the men he had seen that day in the bookshop, and how happy they had looked to see their friend, in spite of his ragged appearance.

‘And if they need documents,’ continued Thesinger, ‘we provide those as well.’

‘Are those also forgeries?’

‘Of course. It’s what we do.’

‘So why did you start working with Dasch?’ asked Carter.

‘We knew that the Russians had become aware of counterfeit roubles in circulation, and that they were searching for a source. It was only a matter of time before one of our shipments of currency was discovered. That was when we realised that we would have to begin working with black marketeers, since their livelihoods, just like ours, depended on being able to outwit the authorities. Our contract with Mr Dasch was to contain the final shipment of currency, which would secure the release of the last two men from Operation Bernhard still in captivity at Borodok. Of course, he thought he was transporting crates of whisky. He had no idea of their true value. When you and Major Wilby showed up with some of the currency, I almost did not recognise our own work! It was only with some difficulty that I spotted a slight variation in the print quality. You see, we took a shortcut in the construction of the intaglio plates, which need to be engraved by hand. This would have taken months to complete, and it was time we simply didn’t have.’

‘Why have you told me all this?’ asked Carter. ‘Are you planning on killing me now?’

‘No, Mr Carter.’ Thesinger gave him a pitying glance. ‘That might have been the method of the people who enslaved us, and perhaps even the method of the people for whom you’ve been working, but as far as we are concerned, there has already been enough killing. I brought you here because, after recent events, it seemed to me only a matter of time before you found your way on your own. And I am not optimistic about the treatment my friends and I would receive, either from your masters or from the Russians, no matter how noble our intentions. But you are the key to their knowledge. Without you, they may have several pieces of the puzzle, but they do not understand the picture they are trying to assemble.’

‘So you would like me to keep quiet.’

Thesinger nodded. ‘Precisely.’

‘Without actually killing me.’

‘If at all possible, yes.’

‘And how did you plan on doing that? With a slab of your counterfeit money?’

‘With something far more valuable,’ said Thesinger. He reached into the drawer of his desk and removed a handful of small booklets, which he handed to Carter.

They were passports. Swiss. German. American. Canadian. All of them brand new and unissued.

‘What makes you think I might need one of these?’ asked Carter.

‘Maybe you do and maybe you don’t,’ replied Thesinger, ‘but I imagine one of them might come in handy for Teresa Dasch when Mr Babcock and his friends have grown tired of waiting for us to appear and turn her over to the German police, along with her father and everyone who works for him. This, they will do. I assure you.’

Carter knew that Thesinger was right, and an idea began to form inside his head◦– no more than a shred of thought, but there was hope in it where no hope had been before. ‘You can fill this out correctly, with a photograph and issue stamps?’

‘Why not?’ asked Thesinger. ‘We made the whole passport from scratch. Everything else is child’s play by comparison.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t just stick with faking money.’

‘That would have been a waste of so much talent,’ said Thesinger. ‘So are we agreed, Mr Carter?’

For a while, Carter gave no reply. He was thinking about something his father had once said◦– that if you wanted to leave on your own terms, you had to wait for the precise moment in time when such a thing was possible. And if that moment ever came, you could not hesitate. ‘There is one final thing,’ he said at last.

Thesinger opened his arms. ‘Name it, Mr Carter,’ he said.

Carter turned to Garlinsky, who had been standing in a corner of the room the whole time, waiting and listening, his stare burning into the back of Carter’s head. ‘Dasch was terrified of you,’ he said.

‘Indeed he was,’ replied Garlinsky.

Carter jabbed a finger against his own chest. ‘I was terrified of you.’

‘I did have that impression.’

‘I have to know,’ he said. ‘What in God’s name are you?’ An assassin, thought Carter. Some kind of torturer, at least.

Garlinsky glanced across at Thesinger.

Thesinger shrugged. ‘You might as well tell him.’

‘I was a high school history teacher,’ said Garlinsky.

‘A teacher?’ mumbled Carter.

‘I spent twenty-five years in the classroom,’ explained Garlinsky, ‘perfecting a look to make a student’s blood run cold, and it has come in handy ever since.’

‘So why did Krüger take you on?’ asked Carter. ‘What do you know about counterfeiting money?’

‘Nothing at all,’ answered Garlinsky.

Now it was Thesinger who spoke. ‘When Krüger asked a group of prisoners at the concentration camp if there was anyone who knew about collotyping, Garlinsky stepped forward.’

‘And you knew nothing about collotyping?’

‘Not even what it was,’ replied Garlinsky.

‘But he gave Krüger the look,’ said Thesinger, ‘and nothing more was needed.’

‘Some of the other prisoners taught me the basics,’ Garlinsky continued. ‘I learned enough not to get myself killed and Krüger never questioned me.’

‘He didn’t dare!’ laughed Thesinger.

‘I can’t say that I blame him,’ said Carter.