Krysalis: Krysalis Read online

  He raised his voice and ordered the apartment emptied. The gray rats scuttled. Moments later the two men were alone.

  Huper eyed Barzel. “Want a drink?”

  For the first time since entering his domain, Barzel felt strong enough to speak. “There’s whisky … but of course, you know.”

  Huper nodded lugubriously. “I know.”

  They sat in the kitchen and drank. “Shakespeare,” Huper said between fastidious sips. “Proust.” Sip. “Boll.” Sip. “Orwell.”

  “Who told you?” Barzel asked.

  “One of your bookseller friends. Someone you’d tried to help get over the border, in exchange for a handful of first editions.”

  That must have been Ratner, Barzel supposed; Ratner who was so good on the Romantic poets. He did not feel resentment toward his betrayer, any more than he hated Colonel Huper, who had been a humane boss over the years. Rather, he felt a bizarre kind of gratitude toward this man, who at last had set him free. Perhaps in prison they would allow him to keep some of the books….

  Yes, that was it, Barzel told himself: Concentrate on doing a deal to keep the books with you in jail. Even if it’s only ten of them. The Analects. And Ovid, no, not Ovid, oh dear God in heaven, which …?

  Huper started to speak, sighed, tried again. “I know why you did it, Jürgen. Retirement. Old age. These books are worth a fortune on the black market, aren’t they?”

  Barzel stared at him, keeping his face expressionless. What was Huper talking about? Books were beyond price. They took you far away, into a world circumscribed only by your own mind, your own imagination. A world of civilized values, rare sensations, exotic scents. A world, above all, where the Communist party of East Germany, and its secret service, the HVA, occupied none of the space.

  Barzel looked into the colonel’s eyes and knew a moment of hope. “They’re worth a lot,” he admitted slowly. “In the right hands.”

  Could Huper be bribed?

  “We have a problem, Jürgen. Don’t we?”

  Hope died.

  “We have a problem … more than one. Does the name Krysalis mean anything to you?”

  Barzel thought the colonel must be referring to a book title. He frowned, shook his head.

  “We have a little problem, we have a little opportunity. The KGB invites our cooperation in obtaining a British file entitled ‘Krysalis.’ It must be done before the Vancouver summit.”

  Barzel, knowing himself to be at the end of his career, could not understand why Huper was telling him this. Might as well show interest … “Why have we been singled out for this …” The two men’s eyes met briefly. “… privilege?”

  “One of your agents in place has a connection with this file.”

  “Who?”

  “Gerhard Kleist.”

  Barzel had been struggling with the realization that Huper might offer him some kind of deal. But on hearing Kleist’s name, his hopes fell again. The steam had gone out of that one, long ago.

  Huper leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table. “Jürgen. Listen to me. You can keep the job. The car. The apartment. Even the books.”

  Breath rushed through Barzel’s lips, his heart jolted against his ribcage, he felt dizzy. “The books?”

  “Yes. All of them. Even the banned ones, the ones you stole on raids. But …”

  Barzel scarcely heard the “but.” “Thank you,” he breathed. “Thank you, thank you, thank you …” He could not stop speaking the meaningless phrase.

  “But it won’t be easy.”

  Barzel’s lips continued to move; now, however, as he caught sight of the glint in Huper’s eyes, they moved soundlessly.

  “You have to get that file, Jürgen. Soon. Otherwise …” Huper spread his hands, shook his head. “Finish. Sorry.”

  Barzel stared at him, his heartfelt elation dwindling rapidly now.

  “Gorbachev needs that file for Vancouver, you see. So the KGB must have it. So they’re leaning on me. I’m leaning on you.” Huper smiled, made a pathetic attempt at humor. “The only person nobody’s leaning on is Gorbachev.” His expression had turned painful. He wiped his face with his hand, then said: “I don’t like screwing you. Really. But we do have to have that file.” He paused. “Or I’ll make a bonfire, Jürgen. A four-thousand-volume bonfire.”

  As Barzel stared into the older man’s eyes he felt such an implacable hatred, such rage mixed with terror, that the colonel must have seen it, for he sat back, turning away as he did so.

  Barzel looked down to see that the hand holding his glass was dead white. Very slowly he made himself relax his grip; but his hand shook long afterward.

  “Just tell me one thing, colonel,” he said, and the calmness of his voice surprised him. “How long have I got?”

  One week later, almost to the hour, Jürgen Barzel caught a whiff of smoke from some nearby domestic log fire and again felt ice penetrate his bone marrow. A bonfire, Huper had promised him. Unless …

  It was twenty minutes past midnight. He stood concealed behind a cypress in the garden of a large house in Hampstead, a wealthy area of London where property owners valued their privacy; hence gardens like this one contained numerous trees and shrubs. Barzel had been waiting here for over an hour. During that time he had chewed all ten fingernails down to the quick. Now there was blood in his mouth, and his thumb hurt where his teeth had scraped the flesh raw.

  Movement. Lights coming on in the hallway …

  A group of people appeared at the front door, twenty feet or so away. He drew back into the shadows. Three silhouettes against the house lights: Kleist and two guests. Barzel ground his teeth. Why don’t they go.

  He heard them speaking a language he didn’t know. Ah yes, Spanish: his contacts had told him Kleist would be entertaining friends from the Paraguayan embassy. Kleist’s late wife had been half American, half Paraguayan; he still kept up friendships in South America. Sometimes Barzel wondered whether he shouldn’t have checked that out long ago: a man could hide in Paraguay, or Peru, even from the East German secret service….

  Barzel heard feet crunch along the gravel drive; a gate swung on rusty hinges, the noise of the departing guests died away. He peered through the foliage. Gerhard Kleist, the man who owned this imposing residence, was resting his back against the door frame. He lingered a moment, scanning the night sky, then closed the front door and turned off the light.

  Barzel hesitated no longer. He glided up to the now-darkened house and laid one ear against the front door, his hand resting on a brass plate to one side. He could not read the plate in the dark, but he knew well enough what it said: GERHARD KLEIST, MA, ABPSS, CONSULTANT PSYCHOLOGIST.

  Barzel reached up to unscrew the light bulb, and rang the doorbell.

  Nothing happened. Then he heard footsteps approaching. The hall light came on to reveal a shadow through the glass-mullioned upper half of the door. But the shadow’s hand froze on the latch; for despite its having pressed a switch, no exterior light came on.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Gerhard,” Barzel said; his tone was imperative, urgent. “Gerhard, lass mich rein!”

  “Barzel?”

  “Ja. Mach schnell!”

  Kleist turned off the hall light. Only then did he slip the latch.

  “What the—”

  “Ssh!”

  Barzel ran inside and held the door open while he surveyed the driveway. “Clear,” he said after a long minute. “Here, you’ll want your light bulb back.”

  “You’re mad! To visit this house—”

  “If I had a choice, believe me, I wouldn’t come within a mile of you.”

  “Then why—”

  “Time! This can’t wait one hour, let alone a day. Let’s get out of sight, for the love of God!”

  The two spoke rapid German, keeping their voices low from habit, but Barzel knew his fear showed through, in every clipped, breathless syllable.

  Kleist escorted Barzel into his living room. He made sure that th
e curtains were drawn before switching on the desk lamp, then poured two large whiskies. Barzel dropped into a leather armchair with its back to the windows. He still was breathing fast.

  Kleist sat at one end of a sofa. “You haven’t changed,” he said, a touch of envy in his voice.

  Barzel, though in his early fifties, knew he’d maintained the face and figure of a younger man. His sandy hair had kept its youthful texture, like his mustache, and his pale gray eyes were free of broken veins. With his cultivated German accent, slim figure, and understated manner, he prided himself on passing for a well-to-do member of one of the modern Euro-professions: publisher, perhaps, or financial consultant. Certainly no one taking a casual glance would have been likely to fasten on his real job, deputy chief of Directorate One/A of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or HVA: East Germany’s secret service.

  “You’re not quite the same, I think,” Barzel remarked at last. “Fatter—a little. More lines in the face.” He drank a slug of whisky. “You should try a few early nights.”

  Kleist looked away. Barzel studied the drawn face opposite and felt his heart sink. Kleist had once been his best mole, the man he called on when all else failed, an ingenious spy. Since Clara, his wife, died of breast cancer a year ago, however, things were not the same. Barzel knew that Kleist had long ago ceased to love Clara, but he’d relied on her to keep his life running smoothly. When she died, it was as if an inner spring had broken. Barzel, obsessed with his future, silently cursed the fate that made him now so utterly dependent on this man.

  “I have to be out of here fast, so listen to me,” he said. “I need some information. Hypnosis. You’re an expert, yes?”

  Kleist shrugged. Barzel took it for confirmation and swiftly moved on. “You once told me that a person can be hypnotized to remember things that the conscious mind has long since forgotten, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even things that the subject doesn’t know he knows: events that he once witnessed without realizing, things like that?”

  “There’s no particular magic about it. The human memory is ultra-retentive. A lot of the things we’re privy to get shunted into the equivalent of a back file, that’s all.”

  “But you can retrieve that back file.” Barzel leaned forward eagerly. “Can’t you?”

  “Usually. What’s the point?”

  “Suppose a patient of yours had watched somebody open a safe. Could he—or she—have retained the memory of the combination, subconsciously, in such a way that you could dredge it out of her?”

  “Her?”

  Barzel chewed his mustache. Now or never, he told himself, no choice … “You once had a patient, Anna Lescombe.”

  “Haven’t seen her for years. If you came here just to say that—”

  “Shut up. I’m here to give orders, not listen to a dissertation. You were in love with her, once.”

  When Kleist stared at the floor, Barzel exploded: “Weren’t you in love with her? Answer!”

  “Yes. But I was married.” The look in Kleist’s eyes struck Barzel as far from pleasant. “You ordered me to stay married. Remember?”

  “You were too valuable in those days for me to lose you.”

  “And then you ordered me to point Anna in the direction of the man who married her. And I’ll …”

  Yes, Barzel thought, say it! Say you’ll never forgive me, Kleist, show me you’ve still got some spunk inside that gone-to-seed body of yours; show me you’re willing to fight! For you, for me … But Kleist stayed silent. “So when did you last see her?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “Professionally?”

  “No.”

  “When did you last treat her, then?”

  Kleist thought. “Five years ago, I suppose. Minor counseling, nothing serious.”

  Barzel concealed his disappointment. “No other contact?”

  “I phone her every other month, to chat, one friend calling another. What’s the point of all this?”

  Barzel hesitated. The task facing him was near impossible, yet he had no option other than Kleist, and that maddened him. “You know about the Vancouver summit, perhaps?”

  “Who doesn’t?” Kleist scoffed. “Arms reduction in Europe, my God! Bush and Gorbachev between them will put you out of a job.”

  “No, they won’t. David Lescombe, the husband of your one-time patient, has just been appointed to a committee that has only one job: to maintain a file called Krysalis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Listen! Never mind what it is, just take it from me, this is urgent, like in panic! If we can lay hands on Krysalis before Vancouver, we are going to change the balance of power in Europe. So heads are on lines, Gerhard, mine, yours …”

  Mine, Barzel thought savagely. I don’t give a toss for yours, my friend, but if I can’t swing this I’m going to jail, and my precious books, the only friends that make life worth living, will be burned, and that’s if I’m lucky!

  “I do as I’m told.” Kleist turned sulky. “You’ve no complaints.”

  “If we don’t get Krysalis, we shan’t complain, we shall, well …” Barzel laughed, and glanced around the room. “We both know that this oh-so-pleasant lifestyle requires more than professional fees to keep it going.”

  “Just tell me what you want and get out.”

  Barzel experienced real anger at being spoken to thus by an inferior, but he reminded himself of what was at stake, swallowed his rage, and said, “You have to contact the wife, Anna. Bring her under control, before the summit meeting. Long before.”

  “In two months’ time? No, I can’t help you.”

  “Kleist, I am telling you—”

  “You don’t understand. I haven’t seen her for two years. I can’t just force her into psychotherapy. There’s professional ethics to consider.”

  Barzel tipped his head back and found himself laughing at the ceiling. “Ethics!” he said, suddenly bringing his head forward again. “You wouldn’t know an ethic if it got up and spat at you!”

  Kleist flushed. “How the hell do you think I manage to—”

  “I don’t know and I don’t give a shit. Now listen. David Lescombe is going to be away for the coming weekend and for some days after that, too.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “How am I sure of anything? Just accept that he won’t be home. You will use that opportunity to contact Anna Lescombe—you said you phoned her sometimes?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “So she won’t be surprised to hear from you. Good. Now listen. Every member of this Krysalis committee has a safe installed in his house. They’re allowed to take the papers home, as long as everything’s kept locked in the safe when not being used. You will put Anna Lescombe under your control, just as before. You’ll program her to open her husband’s safe and bring us what’s inside. Then she will take the material back. You will ensure she remembers nothing. Then, Gerhard, and only then, you can relax.”

  “Barzel, allow me to tell you something.” Kleist’s voice was restrained, even polite. “Understand that I speak purely in a professional capacity now, and what I must tell you is that you are insane. Just that. Insane.” He stood up. “If that’s all you—”

  Barzel’s hands moved with dazzling speed, and Kleist flinched. But Barzel held only a photograph. When Kleist looked down at the image, his face turned white.

  “Sit down.”

  Kleist hesitated.

  Barzel shouted, “Sit down!”

  Kleist obeyed, very slowly. “Please … my housekeeper, you’ll wake her….”

  “To hell with your … your servant! You forget, in the Democratic Republic there aren’t many servants.” Barzel poured acid into his voice. “Your sister Ilsa, for example.” He jiggled the photograph. “She does all her own housework. Cooks for the kids. And for Walther, that layabout husband of hers.”

  He saw with satisfaction that Kleist could not take his eyes off the photo, which showed a blond
e woman, her face lined and unremarkable, standing beside a man a full head shorter than herself, with her hands resting on the shoulders of a small boy. The man was holding a baby.

  “The hospital has given her a raise.” Barzel flipped the photo over so that he too could look at it. “They are considering taking a bigger apartment. Four rooms instead of three, think of that!” He let his eyes roam around Kleist’s richly furnished living room. “You no longer have a wife, but you have money. This house. Reflect, Gerhard; those are things that can change.”

  “I’m a naturalized citizen. No one can throw me out of England.”

  “Naturalized, yes … on the strength of Institute 631′s forgeries. A phone call, that’s all it takes.”

  “You wouldn’t risk that. I’ve run too many of your people.”

  Barzel looked into Kleist’s eyes. They belied his confident words. “My orders are to procure Krysalis forthwith,” Barzel said. “For that, I am both authorized and prepared to make any sacrifice.”

  “Why can’t you just burgle the house, steal this Krysalis thing, and have done with it?”

  Kleist’s voice had become a bleat and Barzel, hearing it, felt hope stir. “Because we can’t risk leaving the slightest trace, that’s why. When the General Secretary leaves Moscow to go to Vancouver he wants Krysalis in his pocket, but no, repeat no, fingerprints on it.”

  “And if Anna has never seen her husband open the safe, so that there’s nothing for me to discover even under hypnosis?”

  “Then you’ll have failed.” Something clawed at Barzel’s guts as he spoke those words. “But at least you’ll have tried.”

  “Suppose I do get the combination out of the wife, which is by no means certain, let me tell you, and the safe turns out to be empty?”

  Barzel sensed that his host’s breathing was slowing, calming. Yes, he was hearing a new note in Kleist’s voice. Interest. Attentiveness. Why? Could it be that Kleist missed Anna Lescombe?

  “Then you’ll have to do it again,” he said. “And again. As often as is necessary until the safe is not empty.”