He looked at his watch. 'Is that all, then? Because if it is my Delilah awaits me.' He paused, unsmiling again. 'But just you dummy4
watch it, David, my old friend. You're not dealing with simple Jewish farm boys and stupid Arab peasants any more. You're dealing with real chess players now. If I were you I'd wear belt and braces. They haven't changed one bit, the Russians, whatever your starry-eyed liberals say.'
Audley had one more self-appointed contact to establish before going to the office, but there was no time unfortunately to make it a face to face one. The hated telephone had to be used this time.
'Dr Freisler? Theodore–David Audley here.'
Theodore Freisler was outwardly the archetypal German of the twentieth century world wars, hard-faced and bullet-headed. But within the Teutonic disguise lived an old nineteenth century liberal, whose spiritual home was on the barricades of 1848. His books on German political history were highly regarded in the new Germany, though even in translation Audley found them unreadable. The mind which produced them, however, was at once gentle and formidable: Theodore was a wholly civilised man, the living answer to Jake's unshakeable suspicion of everything German.
'Theodore–I'm glad to have caught you. I'm always expecting to find you've gone back to Germany.'
Theodore had quite unaccountably settled in Britain, in an uncomfortable flat near the British Museum, during a historical conference in 1956. And although he was always revisiting Germany and talking of returning to the Rhineland he had showed dummy4
no sign of actually doing so. Audley had wondered idly whether he was producing some terrible successor to Das Kapital, to set the next age of the world by the ears.
'One day, David, one day. But until that day I shall make my personal war reparation by letting your chancellor have most of my royalties. That is justice, eh?'
'You'll have to work a lot harder to shift our balance of payments, Theodore. But you may be able to help me just now.'
Their friendship had started years before when Theodore, no Nazi-lover, had volunteered the information which had set the Israeli propaganda on the German experts in Egypt in its proper perspective. Since then he had been Audley's private ear in West Germany on Arab-Israeli policies.
'I am at your service, Dr Audley.' The formality marked the transition from banter to business.
'Theodore, I've got a riddle for you: what is it that was of great value to the Russians in 1945, was attractive enough for a private individual to steal, and is still of interest to the Russians today?'
There was a short silence at the other end of the line.
'Is this a riddle with an answer?'
'If it is I haven't got it.'
'Do you have any clues?'
'It came out of Berlin in the summer of '45, possibly in seven wooden boxes, each about the size of that coffee table of yours, Theodore. Roughly, anyway.'
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'You don't want much, do you? In 1945 there were a great many things of value to be had in Berlin, and the Russians took most of them. But of value now—'
'You can't think of anything?'
'Give me time, Dr Audley, give me time! But it is time that makes a nonsense of your riddle. There was much plunder to be had then, but that would not interest them now. Not even Bormann's bones would interest them now! That is perhaps the one thing that you can say for them: their sense of material values is not so warped as ours in the West.'
'But you're interested?'
'Interested in your riddle? Yes, of course. It is the lapse of time which makes it interesting. But can you give the date of the theft more precisely?'
'Not the theft, Theodore. But it left Berlin end of August, beginning of September.'
Theodore grunted. 'I will ask my friends, then. But it is a long time ago, and I cannot promise success. Also, some riddles do not have answers. And if there is an answer, is it a dangerous one? I don't wish to embarrass my friends.'
'To be honest, Theodore, I don't know. But just give me a hint and I can get someone else to do the dirty work.'
Theodore chuckled. 'Ach, so! I do the searching, others take the risks and the good Dr Audley sits in his ivory tower putting all our work together–that is the way of it! But I think I shall move circumspectly, since you do not know what it is I am to find.'
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Audley had to take it in good part, for it was true enough.
'If you're too busy—'
'Too busy? I'm always too busy, David. But not too busy for a friend–never too busy for a friend. And besides, it interests me, your riddle. Something old, but still valuable to them, eh? And
"them", I presume is the Komitet Gosudarst-venoi Bezopasnosti?'
'That's by no means certain, Theodore.'
Nothing was certain, that was the trouble. All he had was an elaborate house of cards built on only partially interlocking theories. But as he drove back to the office Audley felt fairly satisfied. He had set things moving for which he did not have to account to Stocker: Jake would dig further out of sheer curiosity, and anything Theodore turned up could be cross-checked in the Israeli Berlin files as well as the London ones. If only he had one good hard fact to convince himself that it was all worthwhile . . .
Without that one hard fact, however, there was really nothing he could do. Butler was hard at work in Belgium; half an hour with Roskill should be long enough to work out Monday's schedule.
There was no point in rushing things, and he could look forward to a blessedly peaceful weekend. Even the presence of the Steerforth-Jones girl seemed acceptable now. It made a change to have a girl about the house again, even though she hardly qualified as a girl-friend. She might even cook Sunday lunch!
Even the department was reassuringly empty, with Mrs Harlin's chair unoccupied, a certain sign of the absence of external crises.
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On such a quiet Saturday as this Lord George Germain had lost the American colonies–and well lost them, too, in the interest of his long weekends.
He tiptoed past Fred's door and slipped into his own room noiselessly.
Stocker, the man from the JIG, was sitting in the armchair opposite the door.
'Good morning, Audley. I hope you don't mind me lying in wait for you like this in your room, but I wanted to get to you first. Have you made any progress?'
Audley composed his face. 'Here and there,' he said guardedly. 'It's rather early days yet for anything concrete -if there is anything.'
Stocker gave him a thin, satisfied smile.
'Well, I can give you something nice and hard: Nikolai Panin's coming to see you.'
Audley carefully set his brief-case alongside the desk, undipped it and drew out the Steerforth file. It never did to let anyone throw you. Or to show it when they did. Friend or enemy, the same rule applied.
But if Panin was coming to England, then the thing -whatever it was–must truly be in England and could be found. Until now he had never quite believed in his own theory: it had been a mere intellectual exercise in probabilities. Now it was all true because it had to be.
'You don't seem very surprised.' Stocker sounded disappointed.
The devil tempted Audley, but only momentarily. There were dummy4
times to take undue credit, but assumed coolness was usually more highly regarded than omniscience.
'On the contrary,' he replied mildly. 'I'd rather discounted the possibility. But then we've got twenty years of lost ground to make up. He didn't say what he wanted of me by any chance?'
Stocker sat back, seemingly reassured by Audley's fallibility.
'Actually he doesn't know yet that he'll be meeting you, so you have one small advantage at least. To be precise we've simply been informed that a certain Prof. N. A. Panin, a distinguished member of the Central Committee, would like to visit England informally, in a semi-official capacity. Apparently he wants to discuss "a matter of mutual interest" with what they term "an official of appropriate seniority".'