‘How did it come together, Dieter?’ Finn asks urgently. ‘East and West. What did you learn from Schmidtke?’
‘What did we start to learn.’ Dieter corrects him, and stops walking and turns to look at the river. The barge is approaching level with them, its small bow wave sending thin lines of brown water out from behind it.
‘I can give you three things, Finn,’ Dieter says at last. ‘I can give you a man, a bank and a company. These are just a brief glimpse, a dirty peephole into a large network that is more complex, more closely bound than the guts of a golf ball. Some would say this network is inextricable. As my masters eventually decided,’ he adds drily.
‘But not you, Dieter.’
‘Everything is possible,’ Dieter says. ‘Our enemies knew that and we should be proud enough to know it too.’
They walk back from the field towards the buildings and Finn realises they’ve made the detour so that Dieter can establish who he is now, a retired agent, a viticulturalist. Dieter is making a statement about his present life.
They reach the first of the outbuildings where the car is parked and then Finn sees that there is a small house hidden from the track between them and the river. He is cold and sees Dieter is too. The German fumbles with numbed hands for a key and opens the door to the house and they enter. It is too cold to take off their coats even in the small, low kitchen, and Dieter switches on the central heating and puts logs into a wood burner and lights it while the heating grumbles into action. He puts a pot on the stove and makes coffee and pours two glasses of good Napoleon cognac and, by that time, the wood stove is kicking out a good heat and they remove their coats.
‘The name of the man is Otto Roth,’ Dieter begins. ‘Or sometimes he’s Osvald Roth, or Rottheim, or any number of variations. What’s for certain is that none of these is his real name. Even he probably hasn’t used his real name for so long it’s meaningless. We’ll call him Otto Roth. Nor is his true nationality certain. Some say he is originally a Russian-German, like Schmidtke, but born on this side of the divide. Some say he is Scandinavian, but that his parents were from Russia and worked in the thirties for the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. In this theory, Roth’s parents came to Western Europe before the war, maybe during the Spanish Civil War, and were placed as sleepers in the West, to be used some day in the cause of Russia. If so, it was their son who turned out to be the gold seam of Russian intelligence and the investment made in the thirties was perfect. So the Russians have always played a very long game, so long that Roth’s obscurity was assured.’
Dieter lights a cigarette and sips from the glass of cognac.
‘Roth was born in 1939, in Antwerp where his parents were passing through. At least that’s what it says on his birth certificate. We believe he has four brothers, younger than him, and an older sister. A brood of sleeping agents, perhaps? I don’t know for sure. If that is so, we don’t know with absolute certainty if any of them are alive, what happened to them in the war, virtually nothing, in fact. We do have our suspicions, however, which I will tell you in a while. They are suspicions which were nipped in the bud when our investigation of Schmidtke was terminated. At any rate, now Roth is a citizen of Switzerland and lives in considerable comfort in Cologny, a very wealthy suburb of Geneva. They say the lawns around his mansion are clipped with scissors,’ Dieter says. ‘But you know of Roth, of course, Finn, so what about him?’
Dieter answers his own question before Finn can speak. ‘At the beginning of the sixties he became a trader, mainly in sugar, and was based in London for a while. Then he disappears. When we next hear of him, he’s trading small arms. He’s in Africa, the Far East, Oman. And then it grows, this arms business of his, and Roth is connected to a shipment of artillery, then spares for warplanes, oil, armoured personnel carriers, you name it, but it all originates from East Germany, most of it with KoKo’s implicit stamp on it, exported out of Rostock. Rostock was Schmidtke’s Stasi-controlled port. And Schmidtke had the goods stamped with false declarations and false destinations.’
Dieter looks hard at Finn. ‘How much do you know of Roth?’ he asks.
‘Go on,’ Finn says.
‘All right. Roth and Schmidtke are by now as close as brothers,’ Dieter says. ‘Roth travels back and forth to the Soviet Union under the cover of a Swiss sporting organisation. The usual cover. He gets himself on to an international committee of Olympic target shooting. Roth’s little joke. The cover is good for him, as it is for many others in the years of the Cold War.’
Dieter gets up from his chair and puts a pot on the stove for more coffee and pours two more nips of cognac, but now he continues his story without a break.
‘That’s Roth,’ he says. ‘We’ll come back to him in a while.’
Dieter sees that the coffee has run out and scrabbles in a cupboard for a jar of instant coffee that has, Finn sees, congealed with age and dampness around the rim.
‘And then there’s the bank,’ Dieter says. ‘It is called Jensbank and it was founded before the war in a little town in northern Bavaria called Fürth; the town where Henry Kissinger was born, as it happens. After the war, and after the Wall went up, Jensbank was one of very few that operated in both East and West Germany. Most people don’t know that there were banks operating on both sides of the Wall. Well, there were. As I say, the Wall was a metaphor, an abstract in many ways, certainly not as solid as people think.
‘Jensbank had more than three hundred branches, on both sides of the Wall. Many were concealed under different names, of course, but they were all Jensbank. And Jensbank dealt in very large funds indeed. Our investigations were stopped when they reached one of the world’s few clearing banks, across the water there in Luxembourg. Jensbank has over fifty secret accounts there, what they call modestly in the banking world unpublished accounts. And there are trusts over there,’ Dieter waves vaguely across the river, ‘and there are trusts of Jensbank in Switzerland and Liechtenstein too, some of which we found our way into, most of which we didn’t. What we saw, however, were huge transactions in cash, before the shutters got pulled down on us.’
Dieter looks back at Finn as he turns the heat off and the pot sends out its steam into the room.
‘Roth, of course, was-is-a big client of Jensbank, its biggest, perhaps, even the reason for its existence in the first place. KoKo was wrapped up in Jensbank too, before KoKo ceased to exist. And what we believe is that two-at least two-of Jensbank’s directors are these mysterious brothers of Roth.’
‘What is Jensbank now?’ Finn says. ‘Since the Wall came down?’
‘Very well connected,’ Dieter replies. ‘It has forty years of business with the East and the Russians behind it. And forty years of parallel business with the West. Since the Wall came down the bank has continued its activities, with a new twist. It has recently been raising hundreds of millions of dollars from Western investors to buy property that doesn’t exist in the former East Germany.’
‘So it’s in trouble?’ Finn says.