Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

“He’s a blackmailer. You said so yourself.”

“Think about it. How is it that you’re now able to discount what was in Burgess’s confession so quickly? So conveniently?”

“You’ll understand everything soon enough. We’ve decided that it would be quickest to assemble all of the interested parties here in this room, to go over all of the available evidence and to hear what the various people involved have to say. A chance to clear the air. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

I glanced at the open door at the end of the room where someone had coughed.

“Are my judges in there?”

“Judges?”

“What you’re describing here sounds suspiciously like a trial,” I said.

“I suppose you might say that, yes.”

“And if I’m found guilty?”

“That’s a very good question.”

“Maybe you’d like to answer it.”

“I think it’s you who needs to think very carefully about your answers, Herr Gunther. We’re asking the questions. And I would strongly advise you to cooperate. You’ll find life is so much easier for you that way.”

The two thugs took me back to the red room with the green ceiling and handcuffed me to a cast-iron radiator that looked like a giant silver anaconda. Unlike the lightbulb on the ceiling, it wasn’t switched on, fortunately. They gave me a pint glass of water and another cigarette and I felt as if life was almost worth living. Almost. I had a bad headache, but that was hardly surprising given two bottles of schnapps and two equally powerful punches. On the whole, I’d preferred the schnapps. It’s a much more effective means of cauterizing raw feelings, although when the stuff wears off it does leave you a little depressed. When the effect of two bottles finally draws to a close you just want to find a nice shallow grave and crawl inside. The way things were shaping up with the British, they’d probably find one for me or even dig it themselves. I had little faith in the fairness of British justice when it was just a kangaroo court convened in some disused villa on the Riviera, and I had no doubt that my life was at stake. I’d seen enough evidence of the brutality of the British army during the first war to know that these people were more than equal to the task of killing me in cold blood. The Tommies thought themselves fair, but they were just like Germans in that respect. Nearly every man I’d known in the trenches could tell stories of killing prisoners he could not be bothered to escort back to his own lines. That was just as true of the Tommies as it was of the Germans. I was a prisoner now, and I could hardly see how these particular Englishmen were going to transport me safely to a cozy jail in England without risking some sort of diplomatic incident with the French. Murder is a lot easier when the alternative is a lot of very time-consuming paperwork. I tried to sleep but without much success. It’s only the guilty man who can sleep when he’s wearing manacles.

They fetched me back to the room with the chandelier a couple of hours later. I figured something was wrong because Harold Hennig was already there and wearing handcuffs, like me; there was a large bruise below his eye and his shirt was torn. It seemed like a strange way to treat your star witness. They made us sit at opposite ends of the room. I tried to ignore him and he paid me the same compliment. There were now three men behind the desk, including the monk. One of the other men looked like a duchess who was aware of a bad smell under the floorboards. In that house, there probably was. The other man was an avuncular type with large ears and irregular teeth. Around his neck was a striped tie that matched the monk’s and I wondered if it meant they’d been to the same school, or if they just went to the same boring tie shop in London. The two thugs from Portsmouth were also there, but now they were accompanied by others of similarly anthropoid stature. And once again I had a strong sense that there were yet more people listening to these proceedings through the open door in the next room. From time to time I could hear matches being lit and chairs creaking.

“Well, we all know why we’re here,” said the monk.

“I wish I did,” I remarked.

“So let’s get started, shall we?” He nodded at one of the thugs who was standing by one of the other doors. “Would you fetch the witness in here, please?”

“So this is a trial,” I said.

The thug went out, and when he came back in he was followed by Anne French. I felt my stomach turn. And while I wasn’t yet able to understand why she was there, I was increasingly certain that I was facing something calamitous. Not least because she avoided my eye. That wasn’t so surprising, I suppose; it was what Harold Hennig said that really caught me unawares.

“Anne, my love. What are you doing here?”

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” I said, already wondering just how intimate they might have been while I was on duty at the Grand Hotel.

She didn’t answer Hennig any more than she looked my way. Me, I don’t believe in the devil but I’m still scared of him, and I was now possessed of an uncomfortable feeling deep in my guts that he’d arranged for something doubly unpleasant to come my way.

Anne French sat down on a chair beside the table and stared straight ahead of her. She was wearing a sober-looking sleeveless blue dress. Her hair was gathered at the back of her head in a knot. She looked like an innocent schoolgirl. By now I could smell the cloying scent of her perfume, and I suddenly remembered where the red wallet file I had seen on the table in front of the monk must have come from. It was one of her research files from the cabinet in her office in Villefranche.

“What is your name?” asked the monk.

“Anne French.”

“Would you please tell us why you’re here?”

Imperfect and partial evidence that she was about to betray me swiftly became something much more concrete.

“I’m an author by profession.” She smiled a rueful smile. “Not a very successful one, I’m afraid. It’s a job that enables me to travel to lots of different places and provides excellent cover for a spy. Like Somerset Maugham himself, you might say. Until recently I was also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and an agent of the HVA-the East German Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung.”

“What’s your connection with East Germany?”

“Originally my mother was German. From Leipzig.”

“Do you speak German?”

“Fluently.”

All of this was news to me. Not once had she ever given me to suspect that she could speak my own language.

“And for how long have you been an agent for the East Germans?”

“ I joined what was later to become the HVA on a trip to Leipzig in nineteen fifty; since then I have been involved in a number of clandestine operations here on the Riviera. Most recently I was asked to befriend the French minister of defense, Monsieur Bourges-Maunoury, who was staying at the Grand Hotel Cap Ferrat. I was to become his mistress so that I might spy on him for the HVA. This, however, was not successful. He’s a happily married man with two sons. Not long after this I received new orders from Berlin to-”

“Did you receive any special training for your work?” asked the monk.

“Some. I attended a few classes at an espionage school in Tschaikowskistrasse, in Berlin-Pankow. But to be honest it was mostly teaching table manners and social behavior to young East Germans who lacked social niceties. That wasn’t much good to me since I already had those manners. I was trained to use a radio transmitter, however. And a gun.”

“How did you receive your orders from Berlin?”

“Mostly by radio.”