The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [81]
“Who accepted the money at the bank?”
“One of the directors, Herr Wegel.”
“Where is his office?”
“Second floor, extreme northwest corner of the building. His name is on the door.”
“Could you sketch the layout of the office from memory?”
“Yes,” Klimenko said.
He produced a notebook and a pen and made a quick sketch, resting the pad on a gravestone as he drew.
“What’s this?” Christopher asked, pointing to a scribbled feature on one side of the sketch.
“A fireplace,” Klimenko said. “Herr Wegel had a coal fire going—he made a joke about being an unthrifty Swiss. I remember everything. I was worried about the lack of documentation.”
“So you decided to take some pictures and ask some questions?”
“Yes. I’d already decided not to go back. I thought the information might be useful.”
“Why didn’t you just take the million and run?”
“Where to? Mars? Besides, Paul, to steal official money? Why should I do such a thing? What would they think?”
Klimenko still held his hat in his hand. Astonishment drew wrinkles on his bald head: he could betray his service and his country, but he could not bear that his colleagues should think him a thief.
“This is an intriguing little mystery,” Christopher said, “but I don’t see why it should interest us. It’s incomplete. All you’ve given me is evidence of a big cash transfer and a couple of photographs. The rest is not even speculation.”
“I can speculate, if you like.”
Christopher waited.
“In the fifties, as you know, I was at the UN under deep cover as a Tass correspondent,” Klimenko said. “Mostly I handled Latin Americans—they’re easy, because they like women. Sometimes an African. My targets were all non-American, except one. I had a primary assignment targeted on a certain American group. The Latinos and the blacks were make-work. The American target was very, very difficult. I only made the recruitment three months before I was posted to Western Europe.”
“And you handed over the American asset when you left New York in 1956?”
“No, there was no handing over. I made the recruitment and told the man to go fictitious until we made contact again. It wasn’t really a recruitment. I didn’t tell him anything about his employers. We didn’t have him under discipline. He was an American patriot, he would have shot me if he had known I was a dirty Communist spy.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I represented a group in Belgium that might need work done in America. That my name was Blanchard. That the fee would be high. That he might not hear from us for years, but when he did, we’d expect action in whatever period of time we specified. I told him it might be as short a period as twenty-four hours.”
“How did you bind the recruitment?”
“I gave him one hundred thousand dollars as a retainer. We wanted him to know we were serious.”
“How did you set up the future contact?”
“Telegram and meeting. I rented a safe house in Chicago and put two unwitting people in it. The agent had the address. When he got a telegram from Naples saying, in Italian, that his uncle Giuseppe had died, he was to go to the safe house at 10:18 on the next night after the day of the week mentioned in the telegram as the day of his uncle’s death.”
“10:18—that sounds authentic,” Christopher said. “Why do you people split the clock that way?”
Klimenko was annoyed by the digression. “It’s just technique, it’s supposed to discipline agents. In czarist days no one could tell time in Russia. After the revolution, people were shot for being late. It was part of the pattern of changing everything, making a new society.”
“Who was the agent?”
“I told you it was a difficult target,” Klimenko said. “It took me three years to make contact. I wasted time. I should have realized their security is almost the same as ours. All clandestine organizations are more or less alike. When I did, I went in with almost no trouble, after I’d established my cover with them.”
“Who?”
“Franco Piccioni. He’s called Frankie Pigeon.”
“What is he?”
Klimenko