Charles Mccarry - The Tears Of Autumn

“It was more interesting than selling watches, I’ll say that. I still climb a little in the summer. Last year I did the Matter-horn-from the Italian side.” Dimpel thumped his chest with a forefinger. “Fifty years old.”

“I compliment you.”

Dimpel decided to stop speaking. He watched Christopher alertly, a look of broad amusement on his face. He flicked his brandy glass with a fingernail and listened to it ring.

“I have a simple job,” Christopher said. “I thought you might undertake it.”

Dimpel pursed his lips, sipped his cognac, made the glass ring again. “What made you think that?” he asked.

“Johnson’s description of the way you worked in Berlin. He thinks you were a genius at what you did.”

“What I did was certainly good for Major Johnson. I was much younger in Berlin. Besides, that sort of thing seems stupid once you’ve stopped doing it. Men like yourself, who go on with it all their lives, find that hard to understand.”

“I’ll describe the job,” Christopher said. “It involves entering a room through a fireplace, opening a file with a simple tumbler lock, photographing documents.”

“What building?”

“A bank in Zurich.”

Dimpel burst into laughter. He had a deep voice. “A bank? In Switzerland?” he cried. “It would be safer to commit sodomy at high noon in the middle of the Bahnhofstrasse.”

“It’s a test of skill,” Christopher said. “However, it can be done, and done cleanly. The security is nothing compared to the headquarters of the GRU in Berlin. Nor are the possible consequences.”

“This is not Berlin in 1946.”

“No. But, with respect, Herr Dimpel, this operation is incomparably more important than anything you did in Berlin.”

Dimpel agitated his cognac glass and again inhaled its fragrance. He seemed deep in thought; then the smile of a man who remembers a pleasure parted his thin lips.

“Let me hear a little more,” he said.

Christopher sketched the roof of Dolder und Co. and the adjoining buildings, showing the distances involved. From memory, he reproduced Klimenko’s drawing of the interior of the bank director’s office.

Dimpel, taking a pair of horn-rimmed reading glasses from his handkerchief pocket, examined the sketches. “What is the access to the roof?” he asked.

Christopher tapped the sketch. “I have a room on the highest floor of this hotel. There’s access to the roof by the fire stairs. One crosses the adjoining roof without difficulty. The roof of the bank will give trouble.”

“Yes. It’s a drop of seven meters from the roof next door, then a climb of what-five meters? On what sort of surface?”

“Copper sheathing.”

“Slippery stuff, and it’s snowing. Then a vertical climb of four meters to the top of the chimney.” Dimpel lifted his cognac and poured the entire contents of the glass into his mouth. “Very challenging,” he said.

“I know nothing about the alarm system, nothing about the internal security,” Christopher said. “This is a high-risk operation, Herr Dimpel. There may be a night watchman. If there is, he cannot be harmed.”

Dimpel folded his spectacles and tapped his front teeth with them. “There is no watchman at Dolder und Co., and certainly no alarms in the chimneys. They’re an old-fashioned firm, and the Swiss have faith in locks. It’s in their national character.”

“Entry has to be made tonight,” Christopher said. “The time element is very strict.”

Dimpel’s clocks struck the half hour, and he gave Christopher a tight-lipped smile full of sly pleasure.

“Why should I do this?” he asked. “Can you explain that to me?”

“I can’t think of a single reason, and if I could I wouldn’t disclose it to you. There’s nothing I can give you, in a material way, that you need. I will say that you’re the only man in the world who can do it.”

“You’re quite right-I have no material needs. Johnson put me beyond the reach of your organization, you know, when he set me up in the watch business. I thought that rather a joke on you people. The British would never have done that, or the Russians.”

“Would you have preferred working for them?”

“An agent always works for himself. It’s a mental disease, that work. Quite incurable.”

The sing-song tone of German sarcasm had crept into Dimpel’s voice, and Christopher thought he had failed. Dimpel went to the window and stood on tiptoe to look out. He carried himself erect and all his movements were stylized; he planted his feet firmly on the Chinese carpet, drank from his glass with soldierly precision. Christopher remembered Trevor Hitchcock’s description of Dimpel: the midget did have the manners of a field marshal. He clasped his hands behind his back and turned to face Christopher.

“The snow is coming down harder,” he said. “Another difficulty.”

“Yes, you’d leave tracks on the roof.”

“Who would see them? I was thinking of the danger of a fall.”

“Then perhaps we’d better talk no more about it,” Christopher said. “I’ve enjoyed meeting you, and the cognac.”

He stood up and held out his hand, palm upward, for his coat. Dimpel looked Christopher up and down and shifted his feet on the carpet.

“One moment,” Dimpel said.

He strode out of the room. When he returned he was carrying Christopher’s coat and a scuffed, bulging rucksack. He wore a leather trench coat and a woolen cap. He nodded briskly to Christopher and slung the rucksack. They went out together into the snowstorm.

In Christopher’s hotel room, Dimpel changed into climbing clothes and attached crampons to his boots. He inspected the rope Christopher had bought in Milan with great care and tossed the pitons contemptuously onto the bed.

Dimpel put the camera in the chest pocket of his parka, draped a coil of rope over his shoulder, and handed Christopher the extra rope. He ran up the stairs to the hotel roof; once in the open air, he spread his arms and took deep breaths one after the other, exhaling noisily through his nose. Snowflakes gathered in his thick eyebrows. He showed Christopher with gestures how he wanted him to assist.

Christopher, braced at the edge of the roof with the rope belayed around his waist, felt only a slight strain as Dimpel rappelled down the wall of the building. He was lost from sight for a moment, then Christopher saw him on the roof of the bank, running up the steep pitch of the gambrel, his weight thrown into the slope.

Dimpel reached the top, swung his arms for balance, and walked across the roof, leaving footprints behind him. At the base of the farthest chimney, he uncoiled the second rope and cast it toward the top of the chimney; Christopher heard the faint rattle of the grappling hook. Dimpel tugged on the rope and walked up the bricks, his body nearly horizontal. He sat on the top for a moment with the snow drifting down around him before he adjusted the grappling hook, seized the rope, and dropped out of sight down the chimney.

While Dimpel was inside the bank the storm worsened. Christopher, waiting on the roof, was unable to see the street six stories below, and he glimpsed Dimpel’s climbing figure only faintly when it emerged from the chimney and came back across the housetops.

Dimpel didn’t speak until they were inside Christopher’s hotel room again. Dimpel’s face was blackened like a commando’s as a result of his passage through the chimney and he smelled of coal smoke. He bent his arm with a brisk movement and looked at the large sporting watch on his wrist.

“Thirty-one minutes exactly, from start to finish,” he said with a satisfied nod. He dropped the coil of rope on the floor and handed Christopher the camera.