We see Finn stepping out of the limousine, his driver holding the door, and then he walks up to the bank’s front entrance. The Troll gets out of the car and leans against it looking at a map. I watch James leave the booth, the chauffeur’s phone disabled, and walk around to the far side of the car park nearest the bank.
The bank’s doorman, evidently expecting Finn, nods to him and presses a buzzer and that is the last we see of him as he enters the building.
From the car where I’m sitting–a little too far from the bank for my liking–I scan the front of the building and look for anything unusual. The Troll is back in the car smoking incessantly and rattling through several puzzles in a newspaper before it is time for him, too, to enter the bank. As I watch him finally crossing the road, I think that nobody will believe he has ever worn this suit or any other suit in his life.
Less than three minutes after Finn entered the building he was in the lift to the top floor in the company of a dark-suited man Finn later described as the maitre d’hotel or butler. The Banque Leman devoted a sizeable proportion of its staff to the greeting and general welfare of its wealthy clients, rather than to actual banking.
The two of them emerged on to a thick-carpeted hallway, a private floor within the private bank, dotted with priceless antiques, Chinese vases, prints and paintings collected during the bank’s illustrious history. Another uniformed butler appeared to receive Finn from the first man, who silently disappeared, and the butler beckoned him to an ornate Louis Quatorze chair. The butler made the quietest knock on a pair of black lacquered double doors, gesturing to Finn to step inside the president’s office. The butler announced Finn like a hushed party greeter and silently withdrew, closing the doors behind him.
The room was in a different style to the hallway, decorated with early Art Deco masterpieces and French Empire furniture. A lion’s head, the bank’s symbol, was mounted on a wall to the far left of the room, and a drinks cabinet was tucked away discreetly in the opposite corner. In the centre of the far wall was a long, finely polished antique desk that looked as if no actual work had been done on it for at least a couple of centuries. In front of the desk was a broad guest’s armchair designed to make the bank’s fattest customers feel comfortable. To the left of the room was a seating area of comfortable softer armchairs, and to the right an aquarium, the bottom of which seemed to have been scattered artfully with real gold coins.
Finn noted two cameras; one was trained on the desk and the area around it, the other on the doors through which he’d entered. There seemed to be no coverage of the armchairs to the left.
Clement Naider stood up from behind his ornamental desk and came round to the front to shake Finn’s hand. White-haired, somewhere in his mid-sixties, he wore a three-piece pin-striped suit of the faintest chalk against dark blue. His hand was tanned, warm and manicured. He smelled of cigars and polished leather. His face had the soft, bronzed cragginess of a well-pampered social skier, a face like those described by Finn of the wealthier inhabitants of Tegernsee.
‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ Naider said in a soft German accent and beckoned to the chair where Finn would sit. But Finn didn’t sit. When Naider had already sat down on the other side of the desk and pressed a concealed buzzer underneath it, which Finn mentally noted along with the cameras, Naider saw him still standing and a look of mild consternation crossed his face.
‘I’d prefer the softer chairs, if you wouldn’t mind,’ Finn said. ‘It’s my back. I’m recovering from a recent car accident.’
Naider’s expression immediately cleared to be replaced by one of unctuous understanding of his guest’s requirements.
‘Of course,’ he said and, standing up, gestured to Finn to lead the way. ‘Nothing too serious, I trust,’ Naider said.
‘A small injury in the middle lumbar region, that’s all,’ Finn replied. ‘Certain chairs are easier on it. The doctor tells me I’ll be fine in two weeks.’
‘Good, good. But how very frustrating.’
Finn took one of the four chairs and Naider sat opposite him. A small round table stood between them.
The double doors to the room opened and a second butler, summoned by Naider’s discreet buzzer, entered carrying an empty silver tray. Finn asked for a whisky and soda and Naider repeated the same for himself.
‘How often do you visit Geneva, Mr Robinson?’ Naider asked.
‘Several times a year,’ Finn said. Behind the desk across the room he saw a safe in the wall, and on the far side where the butler was pouring the drinks, a wooden filing cabinet with locks. The butler delivered the drinks in heavy crystal tumblers and left the room.
‘We’re delighted to be able to offer our services to you,’ Naider said. He raised his glass. ‘To your swift recovery.’
Finn responded and they drank.
‘And after we’ve had our chat here, perhaps you would like to accompany one of my directors to the vaults,’ Naider said. ‘If you do us the honour of acting for you, I would like you to see the security that comes with our service.’
Finn nodded, only half listening now, as he reached inside the leather case he was carrying, withdrawing a brown envelope. He placed it on the table in front of Naider.
‘I’d like you to have a look at some proposals which weren’t in my lawyer’s letter,’ he said.
Naider seemed surprised but not unduly troubled. Perhaps he had a client with some very special request that could only be mentioned in a private meeting, it was not unusual. He replaced the tumbler of whisky on to the table and picked up the envelope.
When he withdrew the pictures, wrapped in photographic paper, he seemed interested. When he unfolded the thin sheet to reveal the first photograph, Finn had his hand in his pocket ready to press the agreed mobile number in the Troll’s pocket, the signal to break the fire alarm downstairs.
But Naider simply stared at the first picture. His life seemed slowly and visibly to drain from him, leaving the soft flesh of his craggy features to sag as if into an empty carcass. His suit crumpled from its perfectly measured and ironed state into something Naider might have bought at a second-hand store. The tan leached down his face into the collar of his sparkling white shirt.
‘There are six pictures altogether,’ Finn said. He paused. ‘I want you to move slowly to the safe. I want you to open it and retrieve the file marked “Dresden”. Then you will close the safe and bring the file here. Go now.’
Naider didn’t move, didn’t look beyond the first photograph.
‘Do it now,’ Finn said. ‘I have to be out of here in five minutes with the Dresden file, or the pictures will be wired right around the world.’
He watched Naider struggle with the enormity of the blow. How many years had he lived with the secret of his sexual perversion? And how many years had he lived with the fact that others, his Russian masters, knew his secret well enough to have finally trapped him?
The life of Clement Naider did not pass before his eyes. By this time, there was only one thing left in it. Locked inside him, the citadel of his terrible secret now protected only outlying areas of his being. The inside had been laid waste long ago, scorched to oblivion with nothing left alive. And as he had compensated for this empty interior by cultivating his fine exterior with each stroke of the manicurist’s brush, each fine cut of the tailor’s scissors, each expensive plucking of the barber’s instruments–the pruning, the tanning, the aromatic oiling of Clement Naider, and finally the clothing of him in distinguished dummy’s inch-perfect cloth–his interior had responded by withering still further so that now it lay untended, poisoned and finally devoid of human life. The Clement Naider Finn saw in the flesh had become an expensive mechanical doll and nothing else.