‘I’ve got a triple-A priority, Kitty. There is nothing that takes precedence over whatever I need.’
She looked at him. She knew about the priority but didn’t understand it. She tried to find the answer in his face and, having failed, smiled at him. ‘It’s just history as far as I can see, darling,’ she said. ‘It’s only people who still remember those days who care: old fogies like the DG, and Mr Brittain in Plans, who won the MC and wears it on Remembrance Day.’ She touched her hair to push it back from her forehead, in a manner more narcissistic than remedial. She was especially beautiful there in the half-light of the cinema. Stuart felt a keen desire for her, and he saw her arch her body as if she sensed it.
‘I wish you’d move in with me,’ he said.
‘I’ll stay with you tonight, if you want me,’ she said softly. ‘But I’m not moving in; not with you, not with anyone.’
‘Why not?’
He expected her to raise her voice. They had had this sort of discussion before and it always had turned to the sort of jokiness that cloaked bitter recriminations. ‘Everything I touch… ’ she continued in the same lowered tone, ‘I sit down in a chair and I wonder if it was her favourite chair. I grab a dressing gown and I stop… wondering if I’m going to look like her in it. I look in the mirror and I see other women looking back at me. That’s not what I want, Boyd.’ There was something essentially feminine about her resentment of these inanimate objects, thought Stuart. She never seemed in any way jealous, or even curious, about any women he might have met in California.
‘Well, where would we find another place as good as the flat I’ve got now?’ said Stuart. ‘Those people upstairs are paying more than double the rent I’m charged. And your sister is not going to want us both moving in there with her.’
‘It’s all right for you,’ she said. ‘Men always expect women to adapt to anything they want.’
Boyd Stuart put an arm round her and gave her a brief hug. It was a far cry from all those earlier declarations of sexual freedom. But, like all cries for freedom, Kitty King’s had been more concerned with getting concessions than with giving them. It would always be like this, he supposed. She would tell him what made her unhappy but refuse to face any of the practical difficulties that would come from changing things. She smiled in response to his comforting arm. ‘Drink your tea,’ she said. ‘And I’ll take the cups back. I only came down to the vault.’
‘For what?’ said Stuart. ‘The ‘vault’ was the top-secret section of the archives stored in the basement strong room.
‘You’d never guess,’ she said. ‘To return the DG’s personal file.’
‘In the vault?’ They both laughed. It seemed like a good example of the Alice in Wonderland world in which they worked that something as innocuous as a biographical file should be locked away with such elaborate care.
‘He was in Switzerland for most of the war, wasn’t he?’
‘Except for the short time they let him serve with the army in Italy. He was deafened by the gunfire at Monte Cassino; that’s why he wears that hearing aid. He went back to Switzerland in time to work with Allen Dulles. They were negotiating the surrender of some German army units in Italy. He came back to work here in 1947.’ She repeated it as if it were some poem she had been compelled to learn at school.
‘I love you, Kitty.’
‘Don’t be silly, Boyd. Drink your tea. I must get back to work.’ She flicked through the DG’s file nervously, waiting for Stuart to finish his tea.
‘What’s that red sticker for?’ Stuart asked.
‘It’s a “stop mark”. The cover name must not be used at any time in the future. During the war, the DG used the name Elliot Castelbridge. It was common to have a cover name at that time. There was a wartime order, in case high-ranking department employees were captured by the Germans. Anyone who went to Switzerland or Sweden was redocumented into a permanent cover.’
‘The brief and exciting career of Elliot Castelbridge: eating warm fondue with cold wine, and waiting for the German surrender. Killed by a “stop mark”.’
‘You’re too hard on him, Boyd.’
‘He’s a Byzantine bastard,’ said Stuart without animosity.
‘Not at all. He is unmistakably Gothic.’
Stuart grinned. She was absolutely right. There was nothing of the devious oriental cunning that characterized so many of the senior staff of the department. The DG was a man of brutal bluffness, and even his appearance was more like the rough weathered stone of northern Europe than the smooth silks of the schism. ‘Don’t go.’
‘I must. Is your car here?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Will you be finished in time for dinner?’
‘There’s a very good new restaurant in Sloane Street.’
‘Just as long as it’s not curry.’ She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. For five minutes or more he sat there thinking about her, then he went back to work. He still needed ‘hard reference’ to the man in the film. Someone would be working all night on that one.
23
The following morning, Tuesday, July 17, while Boyd Stuart and Kitty King were having breakfast together in his comfortable London apartment, the man whose face he had been seeking in the old Third Reich newsreels was breakfasting in a tall building in Hamburg. His name was Willi Kleiber and the breakfast was a business meeting at which eight senior business executives met together under the chairmanship of Dr Böttger. These were the trustees of the fund collected for the needs of Operation Siegfried, and the meeting was held in the private dining room of one of the banks which Böttger controlled.
Willi Kleiber sat on Dr Böttger’s immediate right. It was an appropriate seat for the man who had given so much of his time to the initial planning of Operation Siegfried, who not only had worked hard at the scheme but had actually introduced the idea into Dr Böttger’s head. Had Boyd Stuart seen the hatchet face of Willi Kleiber he would have called him Reichsbank Director Frank. And had Colonel Pitman’s cashier seen him before he shaved off the blunt moustache he had grown over Christmas 1978 he would have called him Peter Friedman, the beau parleur whose letters of credit secured him the millions that had crippled the bank.
It was early and Hamburg was enjoying clear blue skies. From this glass-sided conference room, high above the city, there was a view of St Michael’s Church and the Bismarck Memorial, and the sun and the morning breeze were making the dark water of the Elbe shimmer like hammered copper.
Kleiber liked Hamburg. He liked its ever-changing weather, its bars and its restaurants, the smell of the sea and the fine clear German that its inhabitants spoke. His brief, and never to be repeated, attempt at marriage had taken place in this town. That would have blighted the location for some men, but Kleiber was able to accept the pleasures of past experiences without dwelling upon the miseries; he felt the same way about his time in the war. He seldom came here without seeing his ex-wife. She was still attractive and amusing, and always wanted to hear about Willi Kleiber’s latest sexual conquests. It was as if she got some perverse and vicarious enjoyment from these detailed descriptions of his lechery. More than once he fantasized about taking her back to his hotel room, undressing her and… But Willi Kleiber knew that that would never happen. Not because his ex-wife would not enjoy it-but because her new husband was a senior official with the BND. A man who went frequently to London for conferences with senior British intelligence officials was a contact too valuable to risk for the sake of an afternoon of grab-ass. Tomorrow he would be having lunch with both husband and wife. It was safer that way.
‘Things have not gone quite as smoothly as we’d hoped,’ admitted Dr Böttger. He was a scholarly-looking man, sixty years old, slightly plump, with silver hair and gold wire spectacles. His face was becoming flushed, Kleiber noticed. It was a sign of anxiety, like the way in which Böttger thrust his fist into the jacket of his expensive suit with enough force to break the stitching. ‘But the plan goes forward. When we took so much money from their bank in Geneva we expected them to offer these documents to us through Herr Kleiber’s man in Los Angeles. That proved to be a miscalculation on our part.’ Böttger twisted his head far enough to see whether Willi Kleiber showed some appreciation; actually it had been Kleiber’s miscalculation. Kleiber nodded with an almost imperceptible movement, but Böttger had become accustomed to such signals in the boardroom. ‘It was the sensible, logical thing to do,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps if these men had been Germans they would have reacted rationally… but they are Americans… ’ Böttger smiled, hoping to draw a response from his colleagues but only Kleiber acknowledged the jest.