Finn wondered if the banker had even the strength to stand. But slowly, without letting go of the pictures in his hand, Naider got to his feet. He never looked at Finn. He walked slowly towards the safe.
‘Touch nothing but the safe,’ Finn said softly. ‘If I’m not on the street in ten minutes, the pictures get wired anyway.’
He watched Naider move into the arc of the camera’s view and stoop slightly to turn the dial on the safe. He watched Naider swing open the door and reach into the dark interior. He saw the file in Naider’s hand as he withdrew it, closed the safe, and walked back across the room, clutching the file in one hand and the pictures in the other. Naider sat down in the same chair and placed the file on the table. Still he didn’t look at Finn.
Swiftly Finn emptied the file of a sheaf of documents and placed them on to the table, flicked through them while keeping an eye on Naider, and then took out a small camera and photographed sixteen sheets in all.
‘Sit still,’ he said.
He walked to a window which was open at the rear of the office, slipped the camera into a reinforced bag in his pocket and lobbed it out. Somewhere below, James was there to break its fall. Then he replaced the documents and told Naider to return them to the safe. It took five minutes in all and Finn told Naider to hurry now or it would be too late. Naider still didn’t speak or look at Finn.
Finn drank the remainder of his whisky and soda in one gulp and slipped the crystal glass into his leather case. The courtesy of Naider’s servants in opening the doors did not require him to brush the surfaces in the room for fingerprints. He stood and walked to the desk.
‘My envelope,’ he said. Naider didn’t want to part with the pictures, his last hope being, perhaps, that there was just one set, and he held his safety in his hands. But he saw the pointlessness of this and let them fall on to the desk. Finn picked them up.
‘Press the buzzer.’
Naider pressed it.
‘Now sit back over there.’
Naider obeyed, a slave for so long to his secret.
And the butler appeared, ushering Finn from the room. Naider sat bent over in the armchair, speechless and dazed, as if he’d had a seizure.
The butler escorted him to the lift, pressing the buttons for the distinguished customer.
And as he stepped inside the lift, Finn heard the double doors closing behind him, as Naider attempted to place another layer between himself and the world and to shut himself away from its cruel glare.
28
'THE DRESDEN FILE gives us five names,’ Finn says. He pushes the small camera he used to photograph the file at the bank across the table towards me, leans back in his chair, and looks out of the window of the inn towards the mountains. ‘Five names, five account numbers that correspond to the names, and monthly payments of twenty-five thousand euros into each account.’
I look at the names, clicking through the first five pictures he took.
‘German?’ I say.
‘Looks that way. Maybe Swiss-German.’
‘Twenty-five thousand euros a month paid to five people is hardly an explanation of Exodi,’ I reply.
‘On the face of it, no.’
‘And yet it must be.’
‘Mikhail says so,’ Finn grunts. ‘Mikhail said the file is the explanation. So it must be.’
I take a laptop from my bag and begin to Google the names.
When Finn left the bank, he and I took a taxi out of Geneva and then the slow red train from Montreux that heads up over the passes to the Bernese Oberland. There were a few hikers on board on their way to the small, rich resorts of Chateaux d’Oeux, Gstaad and beyond, and some tourists who simply wanted the thrill of seeing the high pass from the train.
The train hauled itself up to its highest halt, where it stopped to pick up and drop off the mail, and we looked over the great expanse of cragged mountains that stretched eastwards.
We got off the train in Gstaad after a winding descent into the high valley. A taxi took us a dozen miles beyond the town to the Bären Inn at the foot of the road’s long ascent to the glacier of Les Diablerets. We ate supper in a wooden dining room with a slow log fire that crackled and spat its pine sap, and then went up to bed in another wooden room which had red-and-white chintz curtains with shepherdess prints and a faux wooden spinning wheel in the corner. We didn’t talk much. Making love with Finn that night was a ritual of purification for both of us.
It is late on a fine summer’s morning and we have eaten breakfast in the room. Finn then gently cuts the lining of an old, oiled coat that was so thick it stood up on the floor by itself.
From inside the lining he extracts the camera and mobile phone and places them on the pine table. The first five photos are the five names with their account numbers. A further four pictures of the Dresden file are a list of transactions, all of which consist of money paid into the accounts of the five names. Twenty-five thousand euros a month. The rest of the ‘pages’ are a long list of the names of companies.
‘Each name receives his or her monthly payments from a bank affiliated with Clement Naider’s Banque Leman,’ Finn says. ‘This bank is a small regional bank that deals with local agricultural loans, mortgages and meagre personal savings. Way below the radar, in other words. It’s on the far side of the mountains from here, in the canton of Valais, and is called the Banque Montana.’
Valais, Switzerland’s poorest canton, is free with handing out residency permits compared to the rest of Switzerland, particularly with permits for Russians since the Wall came down. And there was a KGB-owned ski hotel there, from long before the end of the Cold War. We used it to entertain officers from the American Sixth Fleet based in Naples.
‘Clement Naider has a seat on the board of the Banque Montana,’ Finn says.
‘A bit below his status, isn’t it?’ I say.
‘Exactly.’
‘So Naider sits on the board of an insignificant bank in the backwoods…’
‘…and his presence on the board is for just one purpose, to oversee these payments,’ Finn says, completing my own thought.
‘From an Exodi account?’
‘I think the Troll will find that it’s Exodi in Geneva which is making these payments,’ Finn says. ‘But it hardly explains the vast sums that Exodi controls.’
I have found the five names on my laptop. Four men, one woman. Each has a list of company directorships to their name, all German companies, some companies that Finn or I or both of us know-big, international names-others that neither of us have heard of.
Finn looks over my shoulder.
‘Dieter will understand this better,’ he says.
Finn sits on the bed and begins to compose a message for Dieter. He leaves the coding books open so that I can see his workings.
I’ll give you plenty of opportunity to betray me. His words on the night in Geneva came back to me, and he is being true to them. How can he be so sure, I wonder, that I won’t betray him? Or is it a leap of faith, a necessary passage on his intended journey for us to be one?
When he’d completed the message to Dieter, Finn wanted to get away from the room, the file, the names. We both did. He suggested we try some summer skiing up at the glacier and we eventually find some boots and skis for rent and take a taxi up to the cable car. It is a clear blue day and the cable car takes us to the top and we ski a few hundred yards and admire the view, the wind blowing out the intensity of the past few days and restoring some kind of sanity, clarity perhaps. We find a rock to shelter from the wind and Finn puts his arms around me.
‘I love you, Rabbit,’ he says.