The Other Side of Silence

THIRTY-TWO

The thugs from Portsmouth took me back to the red room, only this time they didn’t chain my hand to the radiator, or leave the light on, or even hit me, for which I was grateful. So I wandered round the room for a while, for the exercise, stood at the window, opened it, and then pushed at the louvered shutters. I was glad of the fresh air, but the shutters themselves didn’t shift a centimeter, not even with all my weight against the center gap. It was dark outside and I had no idea what time it was. I could hear and smell the sea and I longed to be outside. I felt sick and terribly tired. My jaw still ached and I was longing for a bath.

“Be careful what you wish for, Gunther,” I said to myself. “They might take you for a bath in the sea. The kind of bath for which you won’t need any soap. Just a pair of concrete overshoes.”

I went to the red room’s door, held my breath, and listened. I could hear nothing but silence, but I didn’t doubt that they were probably talking about me; I’d given the Englishmen a great deal to discuss. And even if they didn’t believe a word of it, at least I’d managed to upset Anne French. That alone would have been worth the effort. After a while I lay down on the floor by the window and closed my sore eyes. I’m not sure how long I slept but it was still dark when I awoke and for several pleasant minutes I stayed there with no knowledge of who or where I was. According to Betty Cornell’s Popularity Guide, you should always be yourself, but a lifetime’s experience had taught me differently. With my background, being yourself can easily get you killed. Minutes passed and I got up and made a token effort to push the shutters again, but they were just as unyielding as they’d been before. So I walked back to the radiator and managed to find what was left of the water they’d given me earlier. I drank it and returned to the door and listened. This time something was different. The house remained silent but now I felt a cool draft of air on my feet and when I dropped down onto my stomach to peer under the doorway I felt it on my face, too. A door was wide open somewhere. The front door perhaps. And an old prisoner’s instinct told me that if the front door was open then maybe another was, too. I stood up, grasped the brass handle, turned it gently, and pulled. The red room door was unlocked and opened with barely a creak. At the end of a long, unlit corridor I’d paid little attention to earlier, the main door was standing wide open. I waited for several long, frigid moments to see if someone came in, but I had a strong feeling that no one would and that the British had gone. I walked to the front door as quietly as I could and stepped outside onto the terrace, into the overgrown front garden, still half expecting that someone would emerge from the shadows and hit me, or worse, put a bullet in me. But nothing happened except I learned where I was. The house was situated somewhere on the slopes of Mont Boron, just to the south of Villefranche and overlooking Nice, to the west. It was a typical three-story bastide with peeling yellow walls and blue shutters. There were no lights on in any of the windows and no cars parked on the drive. The place looked deserted, almost derelict. For a moment I considered making a run for it down the graveled drive. Instead, curiosity got the better of me and I went back inside the big house. The room with the cobwebbed chandelier was deserted now except that my shoes lay on the table, next to my watch, a packet of cigarettes and some matches, and a set of small keys on a ring. I put on my shoes, grabbed the keys, and started to explore. Gradually it became even more obvious that the house was empty. I even risked switching on some lights, and it wasn’t long before I found Harold Hennig, chained to a radiator in one of the larger bedrooms up on the first floor like some forgotten prisoner in the Bastille. I decided that if I looked anything like him I was in bad shape. He was unshaven and had a blue eye the size of a beetroot from when he’d been slugged.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding,” I said.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he said, blinking uncomfortably at the light.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m supposed to be the caretaker. They’re gone, you see. The English. And I don’t think they’re coming back. Dunkirk all over again. There’s no one here but you and me and—for all I know—the man in the iron mask.”

“Are you sure?”

“The longer I stay here talking, the more sure of it I am.” I dangled the keys in front of his face. “I found these on the table in the room next door.”

“So?”

“Nothing. But I’ve an idea they might fit that bracelet you’re wearing.”

“How come you weren’t chained up?”

“Somebody had to release you, I suppose.”

“They obviously don’t know us very well,” he said.

“It’s best you don’t remind me of that,” I said. “I’m just liable to change my mind about this.”

I tried the key on the handcuffs he was wearing. The lock opened.

“Why are you helping me?”

“I’m not sure anyone else would come and find you here. The place looks more or less disused. I guess I’m not the type who can leave a man to die like that. Chained to a radiator like an abandoned dog. Even if it is what you probably deserve.”

“Thanks.”

“I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention it.”

“If the English spies left you unchained they must have believed something of what you said.”

“Perhaps.” I thought about Kim Philby, the Soviet agent in MI6, and reflected that but for my remembering his name, the English wouldn’t have believed a word of it.

“More than I did. I could see what you were up to, Gunther. And I congratulate you. That was quite a performance, the way you took the wind out of her sails with your story. I thought the best thing I could do—the only thing, to help your crazy story along, I mean, and fuck her up—was to try and hit you.” He moved his jaw in the palm of his hand. “I just didn’t realize that English bastard would punch me so hard. He knocked me out cold.”

“I appreciate your thoughtfulness.”

“But this has to be a trap,” said Hennig, rubbing his wrist and flexing his hand. “The English will probably shoot us when we try to walk out of the front door, don’t you think?”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know. But why would they let us escape, either? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Perhaps it makes more sense than you think,” I said. “As far as they’re concerned, we’re an embarrassment to them. And no use to the Stasi. I doubt Comrade General Erich Mielke would ever believe that the British secret service just let you escape, would he?”

“No, he certainly wouldn’t.”

“In which case the British think we’re both burned. As good as dead. There’s no need to kill us if they think that the Stasi will do it for them, in time. Presumably Hollis has been cleared of suspicion, and you and I are of no further use to them. So letting us escape is the simplest, least embarrassing, and most diplomatic solution. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s what happened to Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. That the Brits let them escape to Russia. To avoid a scandal. The British just hate scandals.”

“Any sign of Anne French?”

“Not so far.”

“That double-crossing bitch. I’d love to catch up with her again.”

“You were sleeping with her, too, then?”

“Of course. From way back. I’m afraid she was using you, old boy. I suppose we both were. Sorry about that. Comrade Mielke’s orders.” He stood up and rubbed his jaw again. “You really think they’re just going to let us walk out of here?”

“Yes, I do. But I still think we should get moving in case someone else shows up. The local police, perhaps. Or even the real caretaker.”

Hennig followed me out of the house, through the unkempt grounds and along a quiet main road that took us down Mont Boron and toward Villefranche, with me glancing over my shoulder from time to time to make sure he wasn’t carrying a rock with which to hit me on the head. I wouldn’t have put it past him. By now Hennig and I knew the road we were on was going to lead us right by Anne’s villa, but neither of us said anything about that. We didn’t need to. It was almost dawn when we reached the place on Avenue des Hespérides, and although the front gates were locked with a heavy chain, neither of us hesitated for a moment; we climbed over the gates and walked up the drive, but it was soon apparent that the villa was empty. There was no sign of her car, either. Hennig insisted we make sure she was gone and even clambered up to peer through the windows of her bedroom to check that she wasn’t hiding in there.

“The closets and drawers are all open,” he called down to me. “Looks like she packed in a hurry.”

“I’ll bet she did.”

He dropped down onto the terrace beneath her window and let out a sigh. “Bitch,” he said. “To treat me like this after all we went through together. I can’t understand it.”

“She must have left with the British,” I said, ignoring the pang of regret I felt at his casual mention of their earlier intimacy. “Perhaps she’s gone with them to the Belle Aurore Hotel on the Cap.”

“Maybe,” said Hennig. “But my guess is that they’re already on a boat to somewhere further along the coast. Or on a private plane back to London. Either way it doesn’t look like she’s coming back here soon.”

He knew where a key to the guesthouse was hidden in the garden and let us in through the front door. He switched on a light and found a cigarette in a drawer and then a bottle in a cabinet.

“You seem to know your way around,” I observed grimly.

“I’ve been staying here when I wasn’t at either of the hotels on the Cap,” he explained. “I kept the tapes here. Want a cognac? I know I need one.”

I thought about the state I’d left my stomach in after two bottles of schnapps; I was only just over that particular hangover.

“Sure,” I said. “Make it a large one.”

“Is there any other kind for men like us?”

He handed me a fist-size tumbler like his own and we both downed the brandy in a couple of gulps. Meanwhile I glanced around the room, noticing first that Anne’s portable typewriter was gone and then that the Hallicrafters radio had been put beyond use with a hammer that now lay on the stone-flagged floor like a murder weapon.

“Looks like someone has been in here, too,” I said.

“Looks like.”

“Her?”

“More likely the British. Just in case either of us felt like radioing Berlin.”

“I wouldn’t know how.”

“No, but I would. As soon as they find out that she’s betrayed this operation, she’s dead anyway. They’ll send a squad of killers after her.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what they do.”

I went into the bathroom for a pee and saw my forgotten jacket was still hanging on the back of the door where I’d left it on the night I’d come from Julia Rose’s house in La Turbie. That seemed a long time ago now. Because the early morning air was cool, I put the jacket on. When I came out of the bathroom Hennig was pacing up and down like a neurotic bear, with another drink in his hand. There were even tears on his cheeks and I almost felt sorry for him, he looked so like the way I felt myself.

“It’s a pity,” he said. “I really would have liked to get even with that damn woman myself. I feel really angry about it. Jesus, I think she affected me much more than I realized.”

I shrugged. “Get used to it. I have.”

“No, really.” He put down his tumbler, picked up the hammer, and hefted it meaningfully for a moment before tossing it onto the sofa. “I think bashing her brains in would make me feel so much better. I don’t know how else a man is supposed to heal after something happens to him like that.”

“In this particular case, getting away alive is the best revenge, don’t you think?”

“Says you. Me, I think I’d prefer to bash in her brains. But slowly, you know. I’d like to take the time to enjoy it. One blow a minute.”

“You’re just saying that. And you think it will be sweet. But take it from one who knows. It isn’t. It never is.”

“What are you? Hamlet? Look, Gunther, don’t try to handle me. I know what I want, okay?”

“Then it’s just as well she’s not here, I guess.”

“It makes no difference,” he said. “One day I will catch up with her and I’ll pay her back.”

“You mean that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. She’ll walk into a hotel room and I’ll be there, waiting behind the door, with a garrote in my hand.”

I shrugged. “Have it your own way.”

“You really don’t feel the same? She betrayed you. She played you like a hand of cards. Believe me, if anyone should want to kill her, it’s you, Gunther.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right.”

“As a matter of interest, what were your orders, Hennig? Just to help discredit Roger Hollis, I suppose.”

“That’s right. It was a good operation, too. And it would have worked but for Anne French. She’s got a mad streak, don’t you think? Either that or the woman is made of steel. Probably both.”

“Of course, it’s perfectly conceivable that it wasn’t Anne who betrayed you, but Mielke and Wolf. That the whole operation was really meant to put Roger Hollis back in good odor with his Whitehall masters. That she was told to do it from the outset.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you? I’m afraid I’ve formed the opinion that she was always meant to betray your operation. Yes, from the very beginning. That those were General Wolf’s orders. I’m afraid I really didn’t buy all that stuff about falling out of love with the Communist Party. It would certainly explain why Wolf picked her and not someone with family back in the GDR, who could be threatened with reprisal. No one like that would ever have done what she did.”

But Hennig wasn’t having any of it. I didn’t blame him; it sounded madly convoluted to me, too. Just madly convoluted enough to be the kind of thing that people in the secret services might actually think of.

“Nonsense,” he said. “What you’re saying—there’s no way I wouldn’t have known about a plan like that. Mielke and Wolf would certainly have said something.”

“Why? Because you’re that important? Nonsense. The whole operation worked all the better if you were ignorant of it. Anne’s betrayal now puts Hollis in the clear. And forever after, probably. Which can only mean MI5’s deputy director was Moscow’s man all along and will remain so. That Othello was never meant to discredit Hollis but actually to achieve the exact opposite.”

“No, it was Anne who betrayed me. Not them. Wolf isn’t that clever. Nobody is.” He clenched his fists and walked around the room cursing Anne and swearing to a whole variety of ugly revenges on her. I almost felt sorry for him. And in a way for her, too.

“Kill the goldfish in the pond or burn the house down if it makes you feel any better,” I said.

“What would be the point of that? It’s not hers. It’s rented. She’s not coming back here. If I thought there was even half a chance of that happening, I’d wait here and burn the house down with her in it.”

“You know, there’s a difference between revenge and vengeance,” I said, putting my hand in my jacket pocket.

“Is there? I can’t say I appreciate the difference very much, or even care.”

“Revenge is personal. An act of passion. An injury is revenged. But I think vengeance is about justice. That’s something very different. Crimes are avenged, don’t you think so?”

“Does it matter which it is when you’re the one being shot?”

“Probably not,” I said, and brought my hand out of my pocket. There was a gun in it. Julia Rose’s Beretta 418. The one that had killed my friend Antimo Spinola.

“That’s the second time you’ve pointed a gun at me,” he said. “There better not be a third, Gunther. What’s the idea this time?”

“You’re going to have to try very hard to convince me why I shouldn’t kill you, that’s all.”

“You’re sore about the girl. I can see why. Look, she was sorry about that. She really liked you, Gunther. She liked you more than she liked me. She told me. She didn’t have to go to bed with you. That was her choice.”

“Sure.”

“Listen, Gunther, there’s ten thousand francs in my toilet bag at the Grand Hôtel. That’s for you. And don’t forget that there’s a bank account in Monaco. At the Crédit Foncier. That much is true. There’s another twenty thousand francs more in that account that was meant to finance this operation. You’re already a signatory. All you have to do is show your passport to the manager and the money is yours. We could go there right now. Get the cash. You needn’t ever see me again.”

“No.”

I worked the slide on the little gun and put one of the little twenty-five-caliber bullets in the chamber. It wasn’t much of a gun to kill a man, but at a range of less than two yards it didn’t have to be. Hennig knew that, too, and started backing away.

“You’re not the type to kill me, remember?” He was starting to sound scared now. “You said so yourself, Gunther. You’re a decent man. I knew that the first time I met you.”

“No, I said I wasn’t the type to leave a man to die chained to a radiator, like an abandoned dog. But this is different.” I pointed the gun at him.

“This is for those nine thousand people who died on the Wilhelm Gustloff in January nineteen forty-five. It’s been eleven years in coming, and for them this is an act of vengeance. But for Captain Achim von Frisch, Irmela Louise Schaper and her unborn child—my unborn child—it’s revenge, pure and simple.”

And then, as he was probably about to speak again and beg me for his life, I shot him in the chest five times and then once more between the eyes when he was oozing blood down on the floor.

I stepped outside the guesthouse for a moment and lit a cigarette to help slow my pounding heart. The cicadas were quiet now, holding their breath probably, shocked that human emotions could make other, more intelligent living creatures such as ourselves behave in such a barbarous fashion. What did they know about real tragedy anyway? Without emotion, pain is just pain; it’s human feeling that makes pain such absolute agony. I had no regrets about killing Harold Hennig, but I was wrong about revenge, of course. It was sweet, after all. And I wasn’t finished with it yet. Not by a long way.

I went back into the house, wiped my brandy glass and the little Beretta clean of fingerprints, and tossed it onto the floor next to Harold Hennig’s dead body. Then I placed the keys to Spinola’s apartment near the front of Anne’s desk drawer. I also wrote his address onto a card in her Rolodex, in block capital letters. It wasn’t much in the way of evidence for the police, but in my experience you don’t need to be a Georges Simenon to frame someone for murder, just a corpse and a murder weapon and a set of keys and perhaps a woman who’s suddenly left the country. The police love things to be neat like that. This one had crime of passion written all over it. I told myself I might even stay around the Cap just long enough to answer their questions and recall Anne and Herr Hebel in the bar at the Grand Hôtel and perhaps remember something important I must have forgotten, about how Spinola had once mentioned a writer in Villefranche he was seeing sometimes and how he’d had a fight with her new German boyfriend. Threatened him. Either way I could easily cause enough trouble for Anne French to make sure she could never return to France. Or perhaps she would be extradited back to face a murder trial. But to carry off a story like that I would need to speak to someone else first. I would need to speak to a master storyteller. I would need to go and see Somerset Maugham.