NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME in his life by any means, Ted Mundy has lost touch with who he is. A credulous fool, caught yet again in Sasha’s slipstream? Or the luckiest man on earth?
Making breakfast, making love, taking Mustafa to school and himself to the Linderhof, playing the loyal servant of the late King Ludwig, hurrying home again for Zara’s night off, adoring her, protecting her in her enormous and intelligent vulnerability, bringing her library books on nursing and enjoying a kick-about with Mustafa and the gang, he relives without pause his night visit to the mountaintop, says nothing to anybody, and waits.
If now and then he tries to persuade himself that the entire adventure is the wish-child of his hyperactive imagination, then how does he explain, please, the one thousand dollars he secreted under the driver’s floor mat of his Beetle for the return journey to Munich, and which he next day transferred to the safety of the plant room, where it now keeps company, appropriately, with Sasha’s letters?
The long night’s unreality began with Sasha’s ghostly reappearance, and ended with his departure. After a further promenade with Sven, Angelo and Richard through the technicalities of his resurrection, Mundy is returned to Sasha, who greets him with such effusive joy as puts to shame whatever reservations he may be harboring. The news of Mundy’s recruitment to the cause has reached him in advance. Seeing Mundy enter, Sasha seizes his hand in both his own and, to Mundy’s confusion, presses it to his damp forehead in a gesture of Oriental obeisance. In awed silence they board the Jeep and, with the same scraggy woman at the wheel, make an unexpectedly stately descent of the forest track.
Reaching the barn, she parks and waits while they transfer themselves to the Audi, where Sasha once more takes the wheel. But they have not driven two hundred yards before the Audi skids to a halt and Sasha staggers onto the grass verge, hands pressed to his temples. Mundy waits, then goes after him. Sasha is retching his heart out in rhythmic heaves. Mundy touches his shoulder but he shakes his head. The retching subsides. They return to the car.
“Want me to drive?” Mundy asks.
They change seats.
“Are you all right?”
“Of course. A matter of digestion.”
“What’s your next move?”
“I am required immediately in Paris.”
“What for?”
“Did Dimitri not tell you I am personally charged with the composition of our college libraries?” He has put on his Party voice. “In Paris, a committee of illustrious French and German academics under my supervision will compose a list of works that will be common to all libraries of the project. Once the core volumes are in place, each library will be invited to augment its collection. Librarians will of course be guided by the popular will.”
“Is Dimitri on this illustrious committee?”
“He has expressed certain wishes, and these have been placed before us for our consideration. He asks no preferential treatment.”
“Who picks the academics?”
“Dimitri made certain recommendations. I was graciously invited to add my own.”
“Are they all liberals?”
“They belong to no category. The Counter-University will be celebrated for its pragmatism. I am told that in American neoconservative circles, the beautiful word liberal is already a term of abuse.”
But when they reach the lay-by where Mundy’s Beetle is parked, the Party voice gives way to another outburst of emotion. In the predawn light, Sasha’s eager face is glistening with sweat.
“Teddy. My friend. We are partners in a historic enterprise. We shall do nothing to harm, nothing to destroy. Everything we dreamed of in Berlin has been delivered to us by providence. We shall stem the advance of ignorance and perform a service of enlightenment for all humanity. On the balcony, after you had signified your acceptance, Dimitri invited me to name the stars in the firmament. ‘That is the Big Dipper,’ I said. ‘And over there you can just make out the Milky Way. And here is Orion.’ Dimitri laughed. ‘Tonight, Sasha, you are right. But tomorrow we shall draw new lines between the stars.’”
Mundy climbs into his ancient car, Sasha moves to the driver’s seat of the Audi. For a while they maintain a companionable distance on the empty road, but as Sasha begins to outstrip him, Mundy has the momentary sensation that the car ahead of him is empty. But Sasha always comes back.
Thrown once more upon the banalities of his daily life, Mundy struggles to put himself in the position of the owner of a lottery ticket that may or may not have won the jackpot. If it happens, it will be true. If it doesn’t happen, nobody but myself needs to be disappointed. At the same time, the events of the long night circulate in his memory like a movie he can’t switch off, whether he’s pointing out the glories of the Italian waterfall descending the slopes of the Hennenkopf, or explaining to Mustafa, in the great tradition of Dr. Mandelbaum, that to possess another language is to possess another soul.
That woman in the headscarf who drove the Jeep, now—he asks himself. She drove like Jehu when I didn’t know where we were going, and like an undertaker when I did. Why?
Or take gloves—he asks himself. The woman in the Sherpa coat who was standing on the spiral staircase fumbling in her handbag for the door key: she wore gloves. Strong, new, yellowy, spotty, tight-fitting pigskin jobs with heavy stitching. Mrs. McKechnie had a pair, and I hated them.
But the woman who drove the Jeep was also wearing a new pair of Mrs. McKechnie’s gloves. And she had exactly the same resistance to eye contact as the woman on the spiral staircase. The woman on the spiral staircase kept her head down while she was fumbling. The woman in the Jeep wore a headscarf because when you drive you can’t keep your head down.
The same woman, then? The same head, with or without the scarf? Or only the same gloves?
Or take Richard’s carpet—he thinks. Everything in Richard’s upstairs lair was new, including Richard: new haircut, new blue blazer, new airline steward’s tie. But the newest thing of all was that deep-pile carpet. It was so new that when I stood up to shake Richard’s hand and looked down, I saw bubbles of fluff where our feet had been. And everybody knows that you can’t vacuum a new carpet, you can only brush it.
So was the carpet purchased in Dimitri’s honor? Or ours? And how about the blazer?
That carpet altogether—now that Mundy thinks about it—is a puzzle in its own right, whether it’s new or old. Or it’s a puzzle to Ted Mundy, the do-it-yourself homebuilder. Deep-pile wall-to-wall in an old chalet with lovely wooden floors? It’s daylight vandalism, ask Des.
All right, it’s a matter of taste. But that doesn’t take care of the feeling that everything in the room, including Richard, has come out of the showroom on the same day.
Or put another way: the feeling that this was a first night; and that as usual the props and costumes had only just made it through the lines.
And if these quibbles seem trivial beside the splendor of Dimitri’s Grand Vision, perhaps that’s because I’m trying to bring it down to scale. If I don’t believe in the carpet, in other words, why should I believe in Dimitri?
But I do believe in Dimitri! When Mad King Dimitri builds his castle in the air, I believe every golden word. Becoming his loyal servant and getting my debts paid looks like a contract made in heaven. It’s only when Dimitri stops talking that the doubts come creeping to the surface.
Back and forth, night and day, while Ted Mundy waits to hear whether he’s won the jackpot.
And while he waits, he watches.
Ever since his undignified retreat from Heidelberg, he has put every possible inconvenience in the way of his mail. When an address has proved abusive he has changed it. The Munich apartment remains firmly on the secret list. At the Linderhof he is more vulnerable, but he has taken precautions. The staff pigeonholes are situated in the administrative offices. The letter M, being halfway down, is below the eye level of the casual passerby. It is perfectly reasonable that a diligent tour guide, hastening past the window on his way to quell a restless group of English Spokens, should neglect to check his mail. A whole week can go by easily—longer—before the equally diligent Frau Klamt pops out of her box and presses an ominous-looking envelope into his hand.
Overnight, all that has changed. From defense, Mundy has moved to attack.
Until now, he has observed the passage of mail vans in and out of the Linderhof much as he might log the maneuvers of enemy vehicles. No longer. A mail van is hardly out of the castle gates before Mundy is poking his head round Frau Klamt’s door, asking her whether there’s anything for him.
Which is how it comes about that, eight days after his descent from the mountaintop, in the ten minutes’ grace allowed to him between his third and fourth tours of the day, a breathless Ted Mundy learns that he is invited to call his bank manager in Heidelberg at his convenience to arrange a meeting at which will be discussed the disposal of credit payments received by wire transfer and amounting between them to 500,000 U.S. dollars.
The bank has fielded no fewer than three executives, which strikes Mundy as pretty rich, considering how many times he has had to listen to the incredibly boring Herr Frinck on the subject of paying people to sit around and watch other people work.
Herr Frinck himself sits at the center, Brandt and Eisner roost either side of him. Herr Doktor Eisner is from our insolvency department. Herr Brandt, a mere commoner, is a senior manager from our head office. Sometimes, head office likes to slum it, says Frinck—or, as he prefers to put it, participate proactively at client level. Has Mundy any objection to his presence? Mundy couldn’t be happier with Herr Brandt’s presence. He feels like the boy in the painting, waiting to be asked when he last saw his father. He has put on his suit for the occasion. It’s too heavy and he is puzzled to find that it has shrunk: the sleeves keep riding up to his elbows. Inside it, he feels stupid, sticky and nervous, which is how he always feels when money is the only subject on the agenda. Herr Frinck inquires after the health of—he offers a broad-minded smile—Frau Mundy. In accordance with bank protocol, the lingua franca today is English. When three German bankers face one penurious English client, it is self-evident that their English will be superior to his German.
“She couldn’t be better, thank you,” Mundy replies heartily to Frinck’s question. “Well, at her age, what else would you expect?”—bark.
The reminder that the bank’s client is supporting a young and doubtless extravagant common-law wife brings no joy to the faces of Herr Frinck or Herr Doktor Eisner. Herr Brandt from head office, on the other hand, seems to think it rather sporting of him. Herr Frinck laments the war. Deeply disturbing, he says, prodding the bridge of his spectacles with his fat forefinger. The consequences totally unforeseeable, puff, puff. It was all fine and well for Berlin to take the high moral ground, but America has made it clear there would be a price to pay, and now we are waiting for the bill. Mundy says, however much it is it will be a price worth paying. He practically offers to pay it himself. His generous instincts are grimly noted.
Herr Frinck has prepared a list of Mundy’s many creditors. Herr Doktor Eisner has run his eye over it. Herr Frinck wishes to make a statement in view of the presence of sleek Herr Brandt from head office. The behavior of Mr. Mundy throughout this whole matter has been exemplary. Mr. Mundy had every opportunity and indeed encouragement to declare himself legally bankrupt. To his credit he resisted. Now everybody, including the bank, can be paid in full. It is most gratifying, says Herr Frinck. It is admirable. Interest may safely be charged at the full rate, a most rare outcome in these circumstances.
Herr Doktor Eisner declares Mr. Mundy to be a true English gentleman. Herr Frinck seconds this. Mr. Mundy says, in that case he’s the last of a breed. The joke is either not appreciated or not understood—except by handsome Herr Brandt, who is moved to inquire, in the lightest possible of tones, where in heaven’s name Mr. Mundy got all this money from.
“We are looking at three transfers,” Herr Brandt announces. He has them among the papers before him as he speaks, in three separate folders of transparent plastic which he now passes to Mundy for his inspection. “From United Chemical of Guernsey, two hundred thousand, per order of client. Voilà! From Crédit Lyonnais in Antigua, two hundred thousand per order of client. Voilà! From Morgan Guaranty Trust, Isle of Man, one hundred thousand, also per order of client. Big banks in small places. But who are the clients, Mr. Mundy?”
Grateful that Sven, Richard and Angelo have briefed him for this eventuality, Mundy pulls a regretful and, he hopes, convincing smile. “Don’t think I can entirely answer that one, Herr Brandt. The negotiations are at a rather delicate stage, to be frank.”
“Ah,” says Herr Brandt, disappointed, and inclines his handsome head to one side. “But a little bit, maybe? Off the record,” he suggests. Winningly.
“The money’s by way of an advance. Start-up money,” Mundy explains, using Sven’s term.
“Against what exactly, Mr. Mundy?”
“Reopening the school on a profitable basis. I’ve been conducting some rather confidential talks with an international foundation. I didn’t want to tell the bank till it was pretty much a done thing.”
“Wonderful. Well done. So what is actually the orbit of this foundation? This is really most interesting, I must say,” Herr Brandt adds aside to his two colleagues, with the enthusiasm appropriate to a man from headquarters visiting his troops on the ground.
“Well, one thing it does is foster the spread of English,” Mundy replies, drawing again on his briefing. “English as Esperanto, basically. Giving the world a common language as a means to international understanding. They’ve got big institutional money riding on it.”
“Excellent. I’m impressed.” And Mundy can tell from Herr Brandt’s sunny smile that he really is. “And they have selected your school here for development? As part of their scheme?”
“Among others, yes.”
“How far have your talks progressed, if I am not being indiscreet?”
Mundy is aware that his briefing has about run its course. All the same, he hasn’t endured ten years of the Professor’s probings, not to mention months of hard sweat at the Edinburgh School of Deportment, without acquiring a few skills.
“Well,” he begins boldly. “I’d say, give or take a bit—you can never be sure of anything, of course—we’ve just about arrived in clear water. We’re not talking about what you’d call hard-nosed professional negotiations, obviously, but even a non-profit-making foundation has to satisfy its own criteria.”
“Naturally. And what criteria are we considering here, if I may be so curious?”
Never hesitate. “Well, for openers, the proportion of non-Caucasian students we take. It’s a global foundation, so naturally they’re looking for diversity.”
“Naturally. And what else, please?”
“Criteria?”
“Yes.”
“The syllabus, clearly. The culture content. The level of attainment we hope to reach after a specific period of instruction. Performance generally.”
“Religion?”
“What?”
“You are not a Christian organization?”
“Nobody’s talked to me about religion. If we’re multiethnic, presumably we’re multifaith.”
Herr Brandt has flipped a file open with a smack and is peering into it with an expression of cheerful confusion.
“Listen. I tell you what we did, okay?” He treats Mundy to a radiant smile. “You let us into your secret, we let you into ours, okay? We mounted a little exercise. Sometimes we do that. We traced one of these payments back to its roots—only one—not always easy, okay? All the way back to the bank behind the bank behind the bank. It took a lot of guesswork at first, but we did it. From Guernsey we went to Paris. From Paris to Athens. And from Athens to Beirut and from Beirut to Riyadh. End-station was Riyadh. Maybe you see now why I ask you about religion.”
If they try to put you in the dock, slam back at them. The truth is what is demonstrable.
“I’ve no doubt these people bank all over the world,” Mundy retorts testily. “For all I know they’ve got Arab backers, why not?”
“Arab backers who support the spread of English?”
“If they’re interested in furthering international dialogue, why not?”
“And use such complicated banking routes?”
“Shy, probably. You can hardly blame them these days, can you, when every Muslim is by definition a terrorist.”
Herr Frinck is clearing his throat and Herr Doktor Eisner is fidgeting ostentatiously with his papers, lest Herr Brandt from head office has forgotten that Mr. Mundy’s common-law wife is a Turk. But Herr Brandt’s handsome smile takes care of everything.
“And you have a contract, obviously, Mr. Mundy,” he says comfortably.
“I told you already. We’re still negotiating the small print,” Mundy replies, by now on the edge of indignation.
“Indeed you did. But in the meantime you have a short-term contract, no doubt. Not even the most benevolent foundation would provide so much money without a contract of some sort.”
“No.”
“Then, an exchange of letters.”
“Nothing concrete that I’m able to show you at this stage.”
“Is the foundation paying you a salary?”
“They’ve costed in an initial fifty thousand dollars for staff fees. I get ten thousand of them. That’s two months’ pay in advance. Once the school reopens, they’ll raise me fifty percent.”
“And your appointment is residential?”
“Eventually. Once the house is ready.”
“Plus expenses?”
“Presumably.”
“And a car?”
“Down the line. If it’s necessary.”
“So not a bad salary for a teacher with your financial record. I congratulate you. You are clearly a very tough negotiator, Herr Mundy.”
Suddenly everybody is standing. There is work to be done: checks to be signed, securities to be released and pledges redeemed. Herr Doktor Eisner’s department has everything prepared. Shaking Mundy’s hand and gazing reverently into Mundy’s eyes, Herr Brandt is anxious to reiterate his heartfelt admiration for Mundy’s acumen. It was purely a head office exercise, nothing personal; a bank these days lives with one foot in the law courts. Herr Frinck confirms this. So does Herr Doktor Eisner. Speaking as a lawyer, Eisner confides to Mundy as he leads him upstairs, he has never known a time when the banking industry was so beset with legal pitfalls.
The schoolhouse is still there. It hasn’t, like Number Two, The Vale, disappeared; no builder’s board offers family homes on a ninety percent mortgage. It’s the same faithful old aunt it always was, frowning down at him from its ivy-clad bay windows and slate-clad turrets and bell tower with no bell. The same arched front door with coach bolts like cardigan buttons awaits him. He advances shyly. First, he must open the padlock on the front gate with its wishing-well canopy. He does so, then walks slowly up the brick path to the six steps leading to the porch, where he stops and turns, and confirms as if he doubted it that the same magical view is also intact—across the river to the old city with its spires, then upwards, and upwards again, to the red ruined castle stretched along the Kaiserstuhl.
The house had been an idiotic choice from the start. He knows that now. Half of him knew it at the time. A commercial school, stuck on a hillside—parking for three cars only, the wrong side of town, convenient for nobody? Yet it was a fine roomy house. And a snip at the price, as Des would say, provided you were prepared to roll your sleeves up, which Mundy was, even if Egon preferred to sit and fiddle the books in the conservatory. The front garden had four good apple trees—all right, you don’t buy a house for its apple trees. But there’s a vineyard at the back, and once the school took off, he was going to make his own Château Mundy and send a few bottles to old Jake to put down.
And above the vineyard runs the Philosophers’ Path—he can see it now through the apple trees. And above the path, the Heiligenberg, and some of the best woods in Germany to walk in—if you walk, which admittedly not all mature students do.
Or look at the literary associations—weren’t they worth anything? Hadn’t Carl Zuckmayer and Max Weber lived a couple of hundred yards from here? The very street named after Hölderlin? What more does today’s upwardly mobile young executive want from a language school, for heaven’s sake?
Answer, unfortunately: a great deal.
The latchkey turns, and when he puts his weight against the door it yields. He steps inside and is ankle-deep in junk mail. He closes the door and stands in three-quarter darkness because of the ivy over the windows, and for the first time in months allows himself to remember just how much he loved the place, and how much of himself he invested here only to look on helplessly while it all slipped away from him: the money, the friend he trusted, the dream of getting it right at last.
Lost in marvel at his own folly, he picks his way through the wreckage of his too-recent past. In the central hall where he is standing, the pupils assembled for classes and were sorted according to need into four tall rooms. The splendid staircase got its light from the art nouveau skylight, and if the sun was up as you crossed the hall, colored shards of red and green and gold slid over you. His old classroom is bare: desks, chairs, coatracks, all gone, sold. But his writing is still on the blackboard, and he can hear his own voice reading it:
As a valued customer of British Rail, we would like to
apologize to you for the presence of the wrong kind of
snow on the line.
Question: Who is the customer?
Question: Who is the subject of the sentence?
Question: Why is this the wrong kind of sentence?
He is perching as if by magnetic power on his old spot in the window bay: just the right height for a beanstalk like me, and a nice bit of evening sun while you’re waiting for your last class to arrive.
End of reverie. The past isn’t what you came for.
Dimitri told you his money stinks. So now it does. Does that make him a liar?
All right, slipping half a million bucks to a washed-up language tutor may not be normal business practice to some anally oriented apparatchik from head office. But it could be all part of the day’s work for a fellow who buys and sells ships out of his back pocket.
Assuming Herr Brandt is a senior executive from head office, of course. That quick confiding eye and overready smile of his could come out of quite a different stable. There was more than one occasion during our uncomfortable pas de deux when I wondered whether I might be back in the Presence.
For twenty minutes or more Mundy lets his thoughts drift free-range through his head. Many surprise him, but they often do. For instance, that he is mysteriously underimpressed by his newfound affluence. If he could transfer himself by magic wand to anywhere in the world just now, he’d either be in bed with Zara in the flat, or closeted in the woodshed with Mustafa, helping him finish off a chaotic model of the Dome of the Rock in time for his mother’s birthday.
Mundy jumps to his feet and swings round. A thunderous banging has broken out behind his right ear.
Recovering his composure he is delighted to find himself staring at the gnomic features of old Stefan, his former gardener and boilermaster, floating six inches away from him on the other side of the glass. It is a sash window. In a trice, Mundy has prised open the central lock, stooped, grabbed the brass handles and with a great unfolding of his body sent the lower half of the window rattling up its ropes. He stretches out his hand, old Stefan seizes it and, with the agility of a gnome half his age, vaults into the room.
A tumult of breathless small talk follows. Yes, yes, Stefan is fine, his wife Elli is fine, the Söhnchen—he means his hulk of a fifty-year-old son—is excellent—but where has Herr Ted been, how is Jake, is he still studying in Bristol? And why has it taken Herr Ted so long when we all miss him, nobody in Heidelberg bears him a grudge, for God’s sake, the little matter of Herr Egon is long forgotten! . . .
And it’s while all this is being thoroughly gone over that Mundy realizes that old Stefan was not hanging around the garden by chance.
“We have been expecting you, Herr Ted. We knew two weeks ago that you would soon be here.”
“Nonsense, Stefan. First I heard of it myself was ten days ago.”
But old Stefan is tapping the side of his nose with his crooked finger to show what a shrewd old gnome he is. “Two weeks ago. Two weeks! I told Elli. ‘Elli,’ I said. ‘Herr Ted is coming home to Heidelberg. He will pay his debts like he always said he would, and he’ll take back the villa and start the school again. And I’ll work for him. It’s all agreed.’”
Mundy keeps his tone light. “So who slipped you the news, Stefan?”
“Your surveyors, naturally.”
“Which surveyors are they? I’ve got so many.”
Old Stefan is shaking his head and squeezing up his twinkly eyes while he tut-tuts in disbelief.
“From your mortgage company, Herr Ted. The people who are giving you your loan, of course. Today, nobody can keep anything secret, it’s well known.”
“And they’ve been here already?” Mundy says, managing to sound as if he was expecting them, and is perhaps a little irritated to have missed them.
“To look round, naturally! I was passing, I saw some figures in the window, a little light moving about, and I thought, Ahah! Herr Ted’s back. Or maybe he’s not back and we’ve got some burglars. I am too old to die, so I banged on the door. A nice young fellow, a good smile, overalls. A flashlight in his hand. And in the background some other fellows I didn’t see, maybe a woman. Women these days are everywhere. ‘We are surveyors,’ he tells me. ‘Don’t worry. We are nice people.’ ‘For Herr Ted?’ I say. ‘You are surveying for Herr Ted?’ ‘No, no. For the mortgage company. If the company lends him money, your Herr Ted will come back.’”
“What time of day was this?” Mundy asks, but the person he is really listening to is Kate, the day she came home early from school and saw shadows in the window at Estelle Road: Light on their feet . . . moving back and forth across the doorway.
“Morning. Eight o’clock. It was raining. I was on my way to Frau Liebknecht’s garden on my bicycle. In the afternoon, on my way back, five o’clock like now, they were still here. I’m so nosy it’s ridiculous. Ask Elli. I’m incorrigible. ‘What takes you so long?’ I ask them. ‘It’s a big house,’ they said. ‘It will cost a lot of money. A lot of money takes a lot of time.’”
He has done walks like this in Edinburgh. They went this way:
All right, Ted, in a minute you’re going to step out of the front door of this house and you’re going to the main railway station. You can use any public transport you like barring taxis, because we never take taxis, do we?—not the first one that comes along, not the second nor the third nor the thirteenth. Not when we’ve got our ears up. And by the time we reach the railway station, I’ll want to know whether we’re being followed and who by, and I don’t want to know they know you know. Are we clear on that? And I want you at the station within half an hour because we’ve got a train to catch. So don’t start giving me the scenic route by way of Edinburgh Zoo.
He walks and lets Heidelberg take him into its protection. Back into the lane, and a careless look at the surrounding cars and windows: Oh how I love this little square with its leafy villas and secret gardens! Across the main road, down to the river’s edge, and are those the same lovers who were canoodling on that bench when I came up here? Then over the Old Bridge, which was blown to smithereens in 1945 in a vain effort to halt the advancing American army, but everyone’s forgotten that, and a lot don’t even know it, least of all the schoolkids and tour groups that walk up and down it, admiring the barges and the statues, much as Mundy does as he leans over the parapet waiting to see who stops behind him to light a cigarette, study a guidebook or take a photograph. The day is hot, the Hauptstrasse, which is a pedestrian precinct, is as usual jammed with slowly moving crowds, so Mundy improves his speed as if he has a train to catch, which indeed he has, but not quite yet, and keeps an eye on shopwindows for anyone who might recall a forgotten engagement and similarly accelerate. He keeps going fast, cycles overtake him, and perhaps his followers called for them because following a six-footer going at full throttle when you are a few sizes shorter and also a pedestrian is a mug’s game. He leaves the old town and enters the flat industrial ghetto of gray-block houses and logo cafés. But by the time he reaches the station, all he can tell his absent Edinburgh instructors is that, if he is being followed, he’s being given the VIP coverage, which comprises everything from road sweepers to satellites, and the squirt of all-day hair spray on your shoulder that in the words of one eloquent instructor makes you glow like a fucking firefly on their grubby little television screens.
In the station concourse he goes to a public phone and with his head stuffed inside an enlarged helmet calls home. Zara has left for work. She will be at her café in an hour. He gets Mustafa, who howls. What - about - Dome - of - Rock - Ted? You - very - bad!
“We’ll give it a double dose tomorrow night.” He does the banter. Yes, yes, I’m tucked up with my girlfriend.
Zara’s cousin Dina comes to the phone. Dina, I’ve got to spend the night in Heidelberg, there’s another meeting with the bank tomorrow. Can you explain to Zara, please? Can you try and get Mustafa into bed before midnight, please? Don’t let him use the Dome as an excuse. Dina, you’re a brick.
He calls the Linderhof, gets the machine, pinches his nose and leaves a message saying he won’t be in tomorrow: flu.
The train to Munich leaves in forty minutes. He buys a newspaper, sits on a bench and watches the world go by while he wonders whether the world is watching him.
What were they doing in the schoolhouse all day? Measuring it for deep-pile carpets?
Nice. Young. Good smile. Overalls. Flashlight in his hand. No, we are only surveyors.
It’s a local train and takes forever. It reminds him of the local from Prague the time he sat with Sasha in the guard’s van with their bicycles. At a tiny station in a flat field he alights and moves back two carriages. A couple of stations later he moves further back. By the time he reaches Munich there are six people left on the train, and Mundy is the last by fifty yards to leave it.
The parking garage has an elevator but he prefers the stairs, although they stink of piss. Men in leather haunt the half-landings. A black prostitute says twenty euros. He remembers Zara joining him for breakfast at the outdoor café on the day his life began again. Please, sir, would you like to go to bed with me for money?
His Volkswagen Beetle is on the fourth floor, in the corner bay where he left it this morning. He walks once round it, checking the doors for smear marks; and for clean patches where smear marks have been wiped off; and for new scratch lines on the fascias of the locks. Good lad, Ted. We always said you were a natural and you are.
Affecting to look for oil leaks, he crouches front and back, gropes for clever boxes, homers, and whatever else he can think of that was in fashion thirteen years ago. Always try to focus your fear, Ted. If you don’t know what you’re scared of, you’ll be scared of everything.
Fine, I’ll focus it. I’m afraid of bankers who aren’t bankers, money launderers, crooked billionaire philanthropists who send me half a million dollars I don’t trust, wealthy Arabs who pay for the spread of the English language, fake surveyors and my own shadow. I’m afraid for Zara, Mustafa and Mo the dog. And for my ever-tenuous hold on human love.
He unlocks the car and when it doesn’t explode he makes a long arm into the back and unearths a gangrenous khaki vest with kapok padding and poacher’s pockets. Hauling off his suit jacket, he slips on the vest and changes over the contents of his pockets. The car starts first time.
To descend to earth he must enter a hellish iron car-lift that reminds him of the Steel Coffin. For half the official parking price in cash, an old attendant unlocks the doors for him with a prison-sized key and consigns him to the nether world. Emerging in free air, Mundy takes a right and another right to avoid passing Zara’s café, because he knows that if he caught sight of her, he would scoop her up and drive her home and cause a lot of unnecessary confusion in everybody’s minds including his own.
He reaches a roundabout and heads south. He is watching his mirrors but sees nothing to focus his fear on—but then if they’re any good, I wouldn’t, would I? It’s midnight. A pink moon is shining, the road in front of him is as empty as the road behind him and there’s a brave showing of stars. Tomorrow we shall draw new lines between the stars. Dimitri may have pillaged the globe in order to save it, but along the way he found time to take a course in kitsch.
He is heading south down the road he drives every day and in forty minutes he will reach the first of the two intersections and filter left. He does. No blue Audi with Sasha crouched apelike at the wheel shepherds him, but he doesn’t need one. In defiance of the lousy sense of direction that he shares with Trotsky, he knows the way. On the drive back with Sasha he made a mental record of the lefts and rights, and now he’s following them in reverse order.
He passes the lay-by where he left his car in order to follow Sasha up the spiral staircase and keeps driving until he reaches the skimpy path that ran along the foot of the mountains. His fuel tank is a quarter full, but it won’t stop him getting there. Soon he’s driving through forest, down the same pitted alley, though the pits are deeper because the moon is brighter. He enters the forest clearing that was like the clearing outside Prague, but instead of crossing it he scans the trees for another opening, spots one below him and, switching off his headlights then his engine, coasts quietly towards it, cursing the twigs for snapping under his tires and the birds for screaming murder.
He rolls the car under the fir trees until he feels the weight of foliage on the roof, parks and picks his way between the boulders towards the concrete ramp.
Distances are real now. He’s entering Badland and the rat is gnawing at his stomach. The barn looms ahead of him. Without the Audi’s headlights shining on it, it’s bigger than he remembers: two zeppelins’ worth at least. Its doors are shut and padlocked. He edges along one side. Unlike the all-day surveyors in Heidelberg, he has no flashlight and no assistants.
He is handing himself along the barn’s wooden wall, using its stone footings as a walkway, waiting for a window or a gap in the timber. There isn’t one. He finds a loose plank and eases it. He needs his tool bag. Mustafa’s got it. He needs Des. We’re divorced.
The plank is warped. He warps it a little more. It writhes, bends back on itself and comes free. He peers through the gap. Shafts of moonlight show him what he needs to know. No shiny Jeep, no rows of quality cars for sale. In their place, three businesslike tractors, a wood saw and a pyramid of baled hay.
Have I come to the wrong address? No, I haven’t, but the tenants have changed.
He walks back to the front of the barn and sets off along the track towards the wall of death. The Jeep’s ascent by his reckoning took ten to twelve minutes. The walk will take him an hour. Soon he wishes it could be longer. He wishes it could take all his life, with Zara and Mustafa, and Jake if he’s not too busy, because in Mundy’s book there’s nothing in the world to beat plodding through pine forest by the light of the moon with mist in the valley and the first pale flush of dawn coming up ahead of you, and the clatter of spring streams half deafening you, and the scent of resin bringing tears to your eyes, and the deer playing hide-and-seek as you trot along.
It’s not the same farmhouse.
The house I came to was enormous and hospitable, with merry lights in the windows and geraniums in the window boxes and Hansel and Gretel smoke coming out of the chimney.
But this farmhouse is low, gray, shuttered and sullen. It is surrounded by a previously unobserved high-wire perimeter fence and backed against a blue rock face, and everything about it—but particularly the painted signs—says private, dangerous dogs, forbidden, one step further and you’ll be prosecuted so fuck off. And if anyone is asleep in the rooms upstairs, they’re sleeping with their windows bolted and their curtains open and they’ve padlocked themselves in from outside.
The fence is neither electrified nor new, which at first makes him feel a fool. But then he tells himself that not even the smartest Edinburgh graduate can be expected to notice everything on a first flying visit. And certainly not when he’s being driven at breakneck speed at dead of night by a pigskin-gloved Amazon with Sasha in the back breathing down his neck.
There is razor wire at the top of the fence and conventional barbed wire below. There is a locked iron gate, but inside the perimeter there are also two roe deer that want badly to get out.
So somehow they got in. Maybe they jumped. No, they didn’t, it’s too high, even for them.
What they did—Mundy discovers, as he follows the fence round and searches the barns and outbuildings for signs of life and sees none—is cross a flattened stretch five feet wide where a tractor or other farm vehicle has ignored the warning signs and smashed its way in or out, and now the deer can’t find it again.
But Mundy can find it and, better than that, he has discovered in his state of febrile agility an easy passage up a low-pitched slate roof to a window on the upper floor. And he has the wit, before he attempts the climb, to equip himself with a bit of rock. It’s solid slate, weighs a ton, but for smashing open windows can’t be bettered.
What have I come here for?
To make sure they’re all as beautiful in the morning as they were at night.
To take a second look at the hidden signal in Dimitri’s baby-blue eyes, the one that said, You asked for this.
To inquire, in the most casual way, what they think they’re doing, at this extremely delicate point in all our histories, fooling around with funny money out of Riyadh.
And what caused them to conduct a day-long survey of my insolvent schoolhouse two weeks ahead of asking me how much space it has.
Assuming it was a survey, which we don’t.
In short, we are here to shed a little healthy light on an increasingly perplexing experience, my dear Watson.
Only to discover that he has arrived on the scene too late. The troupe has packed up its props and costumes and moved on.
Next gig Vienna. Or Riyadh.
It is a well-worn dictum, and not only of the spy business, that you can tell who people are by what they throw away.
In a long moonlit bedroom, six bunk beds, slept in and abandoned. No pillows, sheets or blankets. Bring your sleeping bag.
Spread round the beds, the sort of waste the rich leave for the maid—to use, dear, or to give to somebody you like.
A can of fashionable men’s deodorant, half full. One of the Mormons? An anorak? A suit? A blazer?
Unisex hair spray. Richard?
A pair of Italian court shoes that weren’t comfortable after all. Tights, lightly snagged. A high-necked silk blouse left hanging in a wardrobe. The aseptic blonde? Her chastity kit?
Three-quarters of a liter of good Scotch. For Dimitri, to mix with his soy milk?
A six-pack of Beck’s beer, two left. A part-used carton of Marlboro Lights. An ashtray full of stubs. Angelo? Sven? Richard? You’d think all three had sworn on their mothers’ knees never to touch nicotine or liquor.
Or is Ted Mundy, supersleuth, chasing his usual wild goose? Has a new crowd moved in here since the old one left, and I’m reading the wrong entrails?
Mundy gropes his way along a corridor, descends a couple of steps and makes a soft landing in carpet. There are no windows. He pats the walls around him and discovers a light switch. Billionaire philanthropists don’t bother to switch off the power when they leave. He is standing opposite the door to Richard’s office. He steps inside, half expecting to see Richard with his new haircut sitting at his brand-new desk, dressed in his brand-new blazer and airline steward’s tie, but the desk is all that remains of him.
He pulls open the drawers. Empty. He drops to his knees on the deep-pile carpet and lifts the edge. No tacks, no Smooth Edge, no easy-grip or underlay: just deep, expensive, crudely cut carpet to cover the wiring underneath it.
What wiring? Richard had no telephone and no computer. Richard was sitting at a bareback desk. The ends of the wires are taped off. He follows the wires under the carpet to a painted chest of drawers beneath the window. He pulls out the chest. The wires run up the wall and across the sill and through a freshly drilled hole in the window frame.
To Mundy the homebuilder, the hole is cowboy work. The window frame is of fine old wood. The bastards might as well have shot a bullet through it. He opens the window and leans out. The wire goes down the wall for six feet and ducks back into the house: there. No staples, of course, which is typical. Just let it dangle till the next foehn wind slings it into the forest.
He returns to the staircase, descends a flight and makes for the living room where the philanthropist and his acolytes received their latest novice. Early dawn light is filling the windows on the valley side. At the spot where he watched Dimitri in his tracksuit bearing down on him, Mundy pauses. Dimitri came in through that door and went out through it.
Making the same diagonal traverse, Mundy reaches the door, shoves it open and enters not a greenroom but a glazed lean-to kitchen tacked onto the north side of the house. It is part of a covered balcony—the same balcony, no doubt, where Dimitri invited Sasha to name today’s stars.
The wires from upstairs are poking through the window. This time, instead of putting a bullet hole through the window frame, the cowboys have bashed out a pane of glass. The wires’ ends are once more taped.
So this is where Dimitri hid after delivering his great soliloquy. This is where he held his breath and waited till I’d left the auditorium. Or did he amuse himself by playing with some clever piece of machinery, something that connected him with Richard upstairs? What for, for heaven’s sake? Why stoop to humble wires in our modern high-tech age? Because low-tech wires that aren’t tapped are a bloody sight safer than high-tech signals that are, Ted, the sages of Edinburgh reply.
With a sense that he is outstaying his welcome, Mundy returns upstairs and climbs down the slate roof to hard ground. He remembers the dangerous dogs and wonders why they haven’t bitten him yet, and why they have left the roe deer in peace. Perhaps they decamped with the rest of the philanthropists. At the bit of flattened perimeter fence he makes a halfhearted effort to persuade the deer to come with him, but they dip their heads and eye him reproachfully. Maybe when I’ve gone, he thinks.
Flare-paths of orange cloud sweep across the sky. Mundy bounds down the steep track, trusting in physical exertion to produce some kind of enlightenment. With each stride the voices in his head grow more emphatic: abort, send the moneyback, say no—but who to? He needs to talk to Sasha, but has no route to him: I am required immediately in Paris . . . I am personally charged with the composition of our college libraries . . . Yes, damn you, but what’s your phone number? I didn’t ask.
“Checkpoint,” he says aloud, and feels the rat give a bite at his abdomen.
A line of frontier guards or policemen—he can’t tell which—is strung across the goat path twenty yards below him. He counts nine men. They wear blue-gray trousers and black jackets with red piping, and Mundy guesses they are Austrian not German because he’s never seen uniforms like that in Germany before. They are aiming their rifles at him. Plainclothesmen are hovering behind them.
Some of the guns are aimed at his head, the rest at his midriff, all with a marksman’s concentration. A loudspeaker is booming at him in German to put his hands on his head now. As he does so, he sees more men to his left and right, as many as a dozen on each side. And he notes that they have had the sense to stagger their positions so that when they shoot at him they won’t shoot each other by mistake. The loudspeaker belongs to the group below him, and its voice is bouncing all over the valley like a ricochet that won’t lie down. Deep Bavarian accent, could be Austrian.
“Take your hands off your head and stretch your arms above you.”
He does as he is told.
“Shake your hands around.”
He shakes them.
“Take off your watch. Drop it on the ground. Roll back your shirtsleeves. Further. All the way to the shoulders.”
He pushes his sleeves up as far as they’ll go.
“Keep your hands in the air and turn round. Keep turning. Stand still. What have you got in your vest?”
“My passport and some money.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
“Anything inside the vest?”
“No.”
“No gun?”
“No.”
“No bomb?”
“No.”
“Sure?”
“Positive.”
Mundy has pinpointed him. He’s the odd one out in the middle of the nine. Peaked cap, mountain boots. No rifle, but a pair of field glasses. Each time he speaks he has to drop the glasses and pick up the microphone.
“Before you take off your vest, I’m going to tell you something. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“If you touch the pockets of the vest or put your hand inside it, we’ll kill you. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“With one hand only you take off the vest. Slowly, slowly. No fast movements or we shoot you. It’s not a problem. We kill people. We don’t mind. Maybe you kill people too, yes?”
Using his left hand and punching his right stiffly in the air, Mundy finds the zipper at his neck and draws it gingerly downward.
“Okay. Now.”
He slithers out of the vest and lets it flop to the ground.
“Put your hands back on your head. Good boy. Now you take five big paces to your left. Stop.”
Mundy takes his five paces and sees out of the side of his right eye a brave young gendarme approach his vest, prod it with the barrel of his rifle, then turn it over.
“All clear, captain!” he reports.
As a supreme act of courage, the boy shoulders his rifle, picks up the vest and takes it down the hill to his leader, where he dumps it like dead game at his feet.
“Take off your shirt.”
Mundy takes it off. He wears no undershirt. Zara says he’s too thin. Mustafa says he’s too fat.
“Take off your left shoe. Slowly!”
He takes off his left shoe. Slowly.
“Right shoe.”
He stoops and takes off his right shoe. Equally slowly.
“Now socks. Good boy. Now take five paces to your right.”
He’s back where he started, standing barefoot in thistles.
“Unbuckle your belt. Slowly. Put it on the ground. Strip naked—yes, your underpants too. Now put your hands back on your head. What’s your name?”
“Mundy. Edward Arthur. British subject.”
“Born?”
The captain is holding Mundy’s passport in the hand that doesn’t hold the field glasses, and he is checking Mundy’s answers against it. He must have fished it out of the pocket of the vest.
“August 15, 1947.”
“Where?”
“Lahore, Pakistan.”
“Why do you have a British passport if you’re from Pakistan?”
The question is too large for one unarmed naked man to answer. When my mother began her labor the sun was still Indian. By the time she was dead it was Pakistani, but you wouldn’t understand that.
“My father was British.” And my mother was Irish, he might add, but he doesn’t feel the need.
An old trooper with Father Christmas eyebrows is waddling up the hill to him, pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. He is accompanied by the brave young gendarme carrying a pair of crimson pajamas.
“Bend over, please, son,” the old trooper says quietly. “You make any problems, they’ll shoot us all, so be a good fellow.”
The last time anyone did this to me was in the early days of my recruitment to the secret flag. Kate decided I had prostate cancer because I was peeing too often, but it was nerves. The old trooper has his fingers so far up Mundy’s arse he wants to cough, but he doesn’t find whatever he is looking for, because he shouts “Nix” to the captain. The crimson shirt has no buttons so Mundy must haul it over his head. The trousers are too big for him, even after he has drawn the tapes as tight as they’ll go.
Two men have grabbed his arms and are pinning them behind his back. Leg irons snap round his ankles. A gumshield forces his teeth apart. Blackened goggles descend over his eyes. He would like to shout but he can only gurgle. He would like to fall over but he can’t do that either, because a dozen hands are toppling him crablike down the hill. His mouth fills with exhaust fumes as more hands shove him facedown on a throbbing steel floor between a gauntlet of toe caps. He is back in the Steel Coffin, heading for the marshaling yards, but without Sasha’s monkey wrench to look forward to. The floor jerks forward and his feet crash against the rear doors. This act of indiscipline earns him what, despite the darkness, is a blinding kick over the left eye. Change of reference: he is Sasha in the dog van on his way to lunch with the Professor. Then he’s Ted Mundy again, in the grüne Minna, being driven to the police station to make another voluntary statement.
The van bumps to a halt. He is hopping up an iron ladder under the churning rotaries of an unseen helicopter. He is flat on the floor again, this time chained to the deck. The helicopter lifts off. He feels sick. The helicopter flies, he doesn’t know for how long. It lands, he is grappled down more steps, across tarmac and through a succession of clanging doors. He is chained to a dunce’s chair in a gray brick room with no windows and a steel door, but it takes him a while to realize he can see.
After that, in his later memory, it is only a matter of a few hours and several lifetimes before he is a free man again, wearing his own clothes and sitting in a flowered armchair in a pleasantly furnished office with rosewood furniture and regimental trophies and photographs of heroic pilots waving from their cockpits and an eternal gas-fired log burning cheerfully in the grate. With one hand he holds a warm poultice to his eye. In the other, a king-sized dry martini. And across the room from him sits his old friend and confidant Orville J. Rourke—call me Jay—of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia—and dammit, Ted, you don’t look a day older than when you and I took those crazy walks through darkest London all those years ago.
Mundy’s return to life, now that he is able to reconstruct it, came in three set pieces.
There was Mundy the Terrorist Prisoner, chained to a chair and being asked a lot of aggressive questions about his movements by two young American men and one matronly American woman. The matronly woman kept gabbling Arabic at him, presumably in the hope of catching him out.
Then there was Mundy the Object of Concern—initially to a young male doctor, also American and by his demeanor military. This doctor was accompanied by an orderly bearing Mundy’s clothes on a hanger. The doctor needed to take a look at this eye of yours, if I may, sir.
The orderly also called Mundy sir. “Sir, there’s a restroom right across the corridor here, also a razor for your convenience,” he said, hanging Mundy’s clothes on the handle of the open cell door.
The doctor advised Mundy that the eye was nothing to worry about. Just rest it. If it gets sore, put a patch over it. Mundy, ever the wag, said thanks, he had one over it not long ago.
And after that there was Mundy the Magnanimous, holding court in the same room where he is now sitting, being plied with hot coffee and cookies, and Camel cigarettes he didn’t want, while he received the apologies of people he didn’t recognize and assured them that he had no hard feelings, everything’s forgiven and forgotten. And these embarrassed young men and women had names like Hank and Jeff and Nan and Art, and they wanted Mundy to know that our chief of ops was on his way from Berlin right now, and meanwhile—well, jeez, sir—all we can say is, we’re so sorry, we had no idea who you were and—this is Art speaking now—I am truly proud to meet you, Mr. Mundy, sir, they taught your fine record on my training course. By which was meant, Mundy assumed, his fine record as a Cold War spy rather than as a language tutor on the skids or a loyal servant of the late King Ludwig. Though how on earth Art was able to put Mundy’s name to a standard case history taught at his CIA training school was another mystery, unless Jay Rourke in his outrage had used it to rub their noses in the mess they’d made. Because Mr. Rourke is really pissed with us, sir, and he needs Mr. Mundy to know that before he gets here.
“I guess the best we can say for those kids is, they were obeying orders.” Rourke is summing up, with a doleful shake of his head, an hour later.
Mundy says he knows, he knows. Rourke hasn’t changed either, he’s thinking. Which is a pity. With people, you see in them what you think you already know, so Mundy sees the same droll, spare, good-looking, lazy-spoken Bostonian shit that Rourke always was, with his Dublin suit and Harvard shoes with heavy treads and easy Irish charm.
“Just too bad we never got to say a decent goodbye,” Rourke recalls, as if he feels there is something else he needs to get off his chest. “Some bushfire crisis blew up so fast there wasn’t time to pack my toothbrush. And dammit, for the life of me, Ted, I don’t believe I remember what it was. Still, I guess hullo is always better than goodbye. Even in these circumstances.”
Mundy guesses it is too, and takes a pull of his martini.
“We tell Austrian liaison we’re interested in a certain house—we suspect a terrorist connection and we want first look at anybody acting suspiciously around the place—well, I guess that’s what we asked for and that’s what we have to live with these days. Overcompliance from our friends and allies, and a disregard for innocent people’s human rights.”
And you’re still peddling the same spurious sedition, Mundy notes.
“Enjoy the war?” Rourke asks.
“Hated it,” Mundy retorts, whacking the ball back as hard as his weightless condition allows.
“Me too. Agency never gave those fucking Washington evangelists one scrap of encouragement, you have my word.”
Mundy says he can well believe it.
“Ted, can we stop pissing around?”
“If that’s what we’re doing.”
“Then why don’t you just explain what you were doing up there, Ted, four in the morning for Christ’s sake, taking bearings in an empty house that we have a certain very specific interest in? I mean, frankly, between you and me, getting on that plane and flying down here, I couldn’t help asking myself whether we weren’t right to pull you in.”