Len Deighton - XPD

‘Sit down, Kleiber,’ said Kalkhoven. He took a box of matches from his pocket. ‘You’ve run out of stock to trade, the shelves are empty, man. Grechko was your dinner ticket. You talk with this nice man here, or else… ’ Impassively Kalkhoven took Grechko’s suicide note by the corner and set light to it. London and Washington had agreed that all such evidence would be destroyed on the spot, and that had been the order.

‘Go to hell,’ said Kleiber, but there was no conviction in his words.

‘ “I have set before you life and death,” ’ said Kalkhoven, ‘ “blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” ’

Kleiber looked at Boyd Stuart. ‘Can you find a bottle of scotch?’

‘Probably,’ said Boyd Stuart. ‘Let’s go and find somewhere quiet to sit down. This place will be a madhouse when the heavy mob from Langley arrive to show us that the training manual way is the only way.’

Someone had parked a large truck so that it obscured the view from the windows that faced away from the courtyard. Kleiber did not think that the truck had been parked like that by chance. All he could see of it from the kitchen window was the bottom of a gigantic K for Kleenex, or perhaps it was Kelloggs-he could not see enough of the truck to decide, it was so close to the wall.

From the front window there was a view of the pool, artificially blue, lit by underwater floodlights, and the other three sides of the units which made up the motel. Behind the low, sloping roofs there were a few dusty palm trees and a high chimney which at night was lighted by a red warning light. Kleiber wondered whether that meant they were near an airfield, but there was little sound of aircraft. He knew they must be near Washington.

It had been like this ever since leaving Geneva. The Americans hauled him round the country like freight, never divulging where they were, where they had been or where they were going. They did not trust him; he could hardly blame them. Would they eventually kill him, he wondered. Was this process just a way of ensuring that there was no paperwork, no trace, no witnesses to his having arrived in the USA?

‘You say the Hitler Minutes never existed?’ he asked the Englishman. He did not wait for him to reply. ‘Well, I know they did exist.’

‘Really,’ said Stuart, without displaying too much interest. ‘How could you know?’

‘I was at the Merkers mine when Wever and Breslow delivered them there.’

‘So you were the mysterious Reichsbank Director Frank?’ Kleiber nodded and smiled. ‘Is that why Dr Böttger and the others selected you to get them back?’

‘Can I have a drink?’ said Kleiber. Stuart broke the sealed cap of the whisky bottle and poured some into the clear plastic beakers the motel provided. He had watched Kleiber fidgeting but now, with the drink in his possession, he was calm and made no haste to consume it. ‘No, it was the other way round. I selected them ,’ He put the whisky to his mouth and drank some. ‘I selected them. I went to them and told them that someone named Lustig was collecting material to make a film. I told them he was digging deeply into the story of the Kaiseroda mine. I told them he’d already found an officer named MacIver who was spilling his guts out and that the story of the Hitler Minutes was sure to surface. I’d had money from Böttger before for such missions; I knew he’d buy this project.’

‘Well, you won’t get any more cash from him, Kleiber. He knows now that you were working for Moscow.’

Kleiber’s mouth tightened but he managed to force a strained smile. ‘What did he say?’

‘I wasn’t there,’ said Stuart. ‘But they’re returning a hundred million dollars to the bank in Geneva. Their official explanation is that there was a computer error. The name of Friedman is not mentioned.’

‘Young Stein will benefit,’ said Kleiber. ‘He’ll take the money and get married to Mary Breslow… that’s the final joke, eh?’

‘A lot of people will benefit,’ said Stuart, who knew that the final horrible joke was yet to come. ‘There’s Delaney, the night-club owner, an ex-gangster named Petrucci, Pitman’s nephew in Arkansas… They’ll all benefit but the real beneficiaries are the clients of the bank, they’re the people you swindled, Kleiber.’

‘Put away your violin,’ said Kleiber.

‘How did you hear that Lustig was making a film?’

‘I was having dinner with Max Breslow one evening in Frankfurt. He mentioned the film quite casually. He asked me if I thought it could prove dangerous to us. I told him it wouldn’t be dangerous if the production was in our hands. I told him I might be able to raise enough money to buy Lustig out.’

‘Did Breslow know the money came from Böttger?’

Kleiber settled back in his chair and sat in silence for a moment before replying. ‘Max Breslow was a war casualty. When he was a young soldier he had guts. Once, long ago, he was tough, Mr Stuart, in the way that you and I are tough.’

‘Do we have something in common?’

‘You don’t fool me with your soft voice and your fancy accent, your old school tie and your vague smiles and deferential manner; I recognize the killer in you, Mr Stuart. I’ve had too many like you on my payroll to make a mistake.’

‘And Max Breslow?’

‘He believed that propaganda shit that the Nazis fed us all. He couldn’t see that the penpushers writing all that stuff about Aryans, the historical destiny of the Fatherland and ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, were writing it because it paid better than doing translations of Karl Marx.’

‘But there came a time when doing translations of Karl Marx paid better?’

‘You play the music; I’ll sing the words, Mr Stuart. But poor old Max wasn’t so adaptable. When he realized that the Nazis were just another set of crooked politicians, it broke his spirit. He was never the same again. Now what is he-a nothing!’

‘But he took over the Lustig film when you asked him.’

Kleiber laughed. ‘You think he might have turned me down, eh? Max is finished; nearly bankrupt. Who’d invest money in one of Breslow’s shoddy little films? His house is mortgaged to the very limit, he’s got no money saved, and only put his daughter through college by selling off his wife’s jewellery piece by piece. Sure, he jumped at the chance of taking over the Lustig film with the finance guaranteed, and a standard producer’s fee. He couldn’t afford to do otherwise.’

‘And all the time you were reporting to Moscow?’

‘The Russians were threatening to release some phoney evidence about me being implicated in war crimes.’

Stuart allowed the word phoney to go unremarked. ‘And the KGB approved of your idea to involve Böttger and his Trust?’

‘The Trust provided perfect cover, and through them I got help from people who would never have helped the Russians. And what expertise! I could never have arranged that hundred million dollar coup against Pitman’s bank without having all the resources of the Trust behind me.’

‘What exactly did you tell Dr Böttger?’

‘They didn’t need much persuasion. Those fat businessmen could see the economic consequences of rewriting the history books to make Hitler into a hero. They didn’t want anyone saying that he’d been clever enough to make Winston Churchill come cringing.’

‘But Churchill changed his mind; Churchill turned down the peace terms.’

‘So Churchill becomes the warmonger who continued with the war that caused twenty million deaths. Any way you present the facts, Hitler comes out best.’

‘And that would have hurt the West German economy?’