'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.
‘Thank you.’
‘So you win the bet,’ he says. ‘I told you first.’
I look down at the snow beneath my skis.
‘I knew I’d win,’ I say.
‘Sometimes I wonder what you feel.’ He looks at me. ‘Whether your feelings flit across your surface like a breeze on the sea, or whether they take a hold somewhere below the surface.’
I take his hand in mine.
‘You have a glass wall around you, Rabbit,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I can get behind it. Sometimes you lower it a little, but you never lower it altogether. I want you to understand you can trust me. Telling you I love you is the freest thing I’ve ever done.’
‘I’ve decided to leave,’ I say finally.
‘Leave?’
‘I’ve decided to come over.’
Finn is silent and we listen to the wind whistling around the rock.
‘Are you leaving Russia, or coming to me?’ he says eventually.
‘It’s the same.’
‘Not quite. You’re leaving because of the pictures of Naider.’
‘Yes. But it’s everything at once. My past. The Forest. And you too, of course, Finn.’
‘What about Nana?’
‘She’ll understand. It’s what she’d want.’
‘I’m very happy,’ he says, and we hug each other.
‘Me, too.’
‘You don’t have to tell me you love me, by the way,’ he says, and grins.
‘Well, I do,’ I reply. ‘I love you, Finn.’
He gets up and draws with his ski pole in the snow the words ‘I love you, Anna’.
I hold his arm and look down into the snow, unseeing.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ he says.
And we ski the several kilometres of the long glacier run and return by taxi when the light has faded into black, and the mountains glow a dull grey-blue in the moonlight.
We spend three days at the Bären Inn. On the fourth day, two things happen that shatter the brief illusion. Finn had gone downstairs to fetch the newspapers as he always did when he got out of bed. While he was gone I checked my e-mails and saw that I was being summoned to Moscow. On the ‘next plane’. It was not a friendly message and it was the first time in four years I’d been summoned at all.
Finn came back with the newspapers. He threw them one by one on to the bed and I saw they all contained the same story. The headline on the front page of one of them, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, summed up the story in all of them. ‘Bank President Shot Dead in Geneva Apartment,’ it read, and there was a wire-service picture of Clement Naider–head and shoulders only-taken on a better day than the day of his death.
Naider had been found dressed in a white towelling dressing gown in the bedroom at his expensive duplex bachelor apartment inside the walls of a converted medieval building up in Geneva’s old town. He’d been shot three times, in the stomach, the shoulder and in the head, to finish him off. It was an execution Russian-style, but who else knows our methods nowadays? The stomach and shoulder shots were his punishment, the rest his death. One of the stories in a Swiss paper claimed that he had been tortured, and then his still-living body had been rolled around the walls of the bedroom, which were covered in blood. This story added that the body was then tossed over an internal balcony on to a white rug in the living room below. This may have been a sensational and untrue addition to the truth, but I doubted it.
The police were following several leads into the identity of the killer and were looking over the appointments Naider had made in the previous weeks. They had a letter written by Naider which, it was evident to me at any rate, had been extracted by the killer before Naider’s death and deliberately left for the police to find. But the police were not divulging the contents of the letter to the press, not yet.
When we had finished reading it all, Finn said, ‘They’re getting very close, Anna, your people.’
‘Naider must have cracked,’ I replied. ‘He thought that if he told them what happened, they’d give him credit for it.’
‘Why torture him?’
‘They probably thought he could tell them more about Robinson than he had,’ I said. ‘And he couldn’t.’
I put my hand on Finn’s shoulder.
‘I’ve been called to Moscow,’ I said.
Finn looked up from the chair to where I was standing behind him. There was a frown on his face.
‘This?’ he asked, turning back to the papers.
‘I’m sure.’
‘What do you want to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘If you do go back,’ Finn said slowly, ‘what will you do if they don’t let you out again?’
‘I’ll find a way.’
‘Maybe. You know what I want most of all,’ he said.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘They’ll go over you with a fine-toothed comb,’ he said.
‘I’ll be OK.’
‘Do what you feel is right, Anna.’
‘I must say goodbye to Nana.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand that.’
‘Will you tell me something?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘When this is finished, will we be free?’
‘Yes, we’ll be free,’ he said.
We left the Bären Inn after breakfast and took the train to Basle, where Finn was to change for a train to north Germany. Finn carried my bag across the platform for me to board a train for Zurich and the flight to Moscow. When he’d put the bag down, he kissed me and wished me luck. Neither of us wanted to be the first to let go, until we each became conscious of the other’s thoughts. Then we laughed.
Finn threw my bag into the open door of the train as the whistle blew.
‘Don’t be a stranger,’ he said.
I didn’t reply, just watched him as the train pulled away from the platform.