AS I SIT now in the vault at Tegernsee, I recall how well Finn guarded his great secret from me while he remained in Moscow. Had he been about to tell me on those two occasions, by the pond on New Year’s Eve and at the Baltschug Hotel? He had come close. But he drew back both times. And I know now that it was for my sake that he had kept his secret to himself. I doubt otherwise whether I would ever have been able to act as ignorant in front of Patrushev as I had.
Down in the vault below the little pink house, the oil in the burner is low and I reach for a can, fill the container, and the burner picks up. I stop and listen. A footstep upstairs? People passing by in the cobbled street outside? How much time have I got? Where is Finn?
I’m certain that I’m the only person to have read his record of that time. I can see, on this winter’s night six years later, that everything here in the vault in Tegernsee is as Finn left it. It is here for a purpose and that purpose is to hide what happened, not just from us at the Forest, but from his own people in London too. He didn’t trust them not to destroy the evidence.
I am reading an unread, virgin script and it feels appropriate to be reading it in a place that has been the refuge for illegal bibles, religious tracts, secret meetings and wounded fugitives from the religious wars that ravaged Europe five centuries ago. I am in a place of secrets.
Finn chose his hideaway at Tegernsee well. He found a small, pale pink wood-shuttered house, with a sharp-leaning roof against the snow. But evidently the most important reason he chose it was for the vault below. The entrance to the vault was behind a mantelpiece with a false gas log fire beneath it, its copper pipes unconnected. The whole mantelpiece and fire slid sideways. The entrance to the vault in the space behind the fire was protected by steel doors.
It was a modernised version of an old religious hideaway that existed beneath the site of the sixteenth-century house and, in recent times, someone had seen fit to improve on it. Finn had leased the building in the name of an offshore, brass-plate company in the British Virgin Islands.
But he also chose Tegernsee, the town itself, with his typical eye for the dramatic. Two streets away, the old bull-necked Stasi spy Anatoly Schmidtke lives out his retirement in the upstairs apartment of a wooden chalet, next door to a lingerie shop. The cameras of the BND, the German security service that made their deal with him and brushed over the tracks that could have embarrassed their masters, have long since gone from across the river at the back.
‘But Schmidtke doesn’t just live with his memories,’ Finn writes. ‘Tegernsee is the home of other interesting characters, Anna. They are people well known to Schmidtke from the past, some of whom play a part in this story. It is just as I told you and Nana on that New Year’s Eve.’
These residents of Tegernsee are not old spies, like Schmidtke, but Western European financiers, businessmen from the former East Germany, wealthy and now ancient ex-Nazis, and a few retired politicians with multi-tentacled connections. There are people here, apart from Schmidtke, who played double roles in the Cold War and are a link to the extension of that war in this, the new millennium.
‘Tegernsee is so beautiful, so perfect, so private,’ Finn writes, ‘that it is a place where the devil himself might choose to reside, hiding himself behind high gates in a multimillion-dollar chalet like so many of its other inhabitants. And from where, like them, he might choose to emerge in a Hermès jacket, silk polo neck and St Laurent slacks, perfectly tanned, immaculately silver-haired, his features, like theirs, appearing at any time of day or night as if shaved and oiled and pampered by some privately retained gentleman barber only a moment before.
‘This is how these men always look,’ he writes, ‘wherever we see them in the world. They seem to have been briefly animated in order to step out from the pages of a retirement edition of Harpers & Queen, money and deceit oozing from their pores. The devil’s most devilish when respectable. These are men to whom power belongs and, in their Faustian bargain, they themselves belong to that power.’
He lists them, these elite inhabitants of Tegernsee. They are politicians, bankers and financiers, industrialists, ex-Communists and ex-Nazis, and the grey capitalists who hide somewhere in the centre ground.
‘I’m writing up this journal late at night, darling Rabbit. I’m a little drunk and maybe I’m emotional from the loneliness of it all. Loneliness is playing tricks on me, in fact. Last night I dreamed that all the world’s a stage and I’m fighting some devil at the centre of it. “And thus I clothe my naked villainy. And seem a saint when most I play the devil.”
‘That’s what some of these residents of Tegernsee are like, Anna. They seem so perfect.’
I close the book. That’s how he signs off his night’s work, quoting Shakespeare. I imagine him, from this distance in time of his writing, falling into bed, exhausted but fulfilled from choking up the bile of his anger.
Despite the renewed vigour of the burner, the cold drives me out of the vault and into these old streets and I do what I promised myself I wouldn’t do for security reasons; I take with me Finn’s book that recounts those summer months in the year 2000, after his sudden departure from Moscow. Lastly, I slide the handgun with its twelve-inch barrel into a shoulder holster and fill my pockets with shells. Outside it is snowing and a driving bitter wind rushes down from the Algauer mountains.
Tegernsee’s charming medieval streets with their low houses and discreet, expensive shops weave around the lake. Tegernsee, I’m now beginning to see, is also perfect for its geographical position. A short road takes you across the Bavarian Alps to Austria or, a little further, to the old Communist East. A different, equally short route, rides over the Algauer Alps to Liechtenstein, and, further west, beside Lake Bodensee, to Switzerland.
Tegernsee is a place of crossings. It is like some petite and perfect geographical transaction, in which money and secrets are exchanged, with private banks and borders of every kind neatly close at hand.
I walk up the street, on to a pavement beside the frozen lake- the See of Tegernsee- and into the thick warmth of a gasthaus, Finn’s precious exercise book tucked safely into my coat.
It is Saturday night and the place is full of locals. Loud Bavarian music is playing from a band on a small, improvised stage and there is dancing. Bavarian regional dress is everywhere: feathered hats, lederhosen, braces, big boots for the drinkers or patent shoes with buckles for the dancers, and the waitresses wear long white full dresses and colourful, embroidered waistcoats. Bavarian traditions are not reserved for tourists.
I sit at a table by the monumental stone fireplace, flaring its flames and heat from monstrous logs, and order food and wine. And then I open Finn’s ‘book of record’, as he calls it.