XPD, Page 21

  ‘They are patient and full of cunning,’ said Paul Bock. ‘The Third Reich was planned to last for one thousand years; Hitler himself said so. What is thirty or forty years to such people?’ He got up to put his plate in the sink. A floorboard creaked under his weight.

  ‘And you think these people are starting a Fourth Reich?’ said Stuart. ‘In what way is my name involved with such plans?’

  ‘We got your name from the computer,’ said Paul Bock. ‘We got a print-out and committed it to memory before destroying it. There were many names, each with a code word, the significance of which we have not yet decided; your name was the only one which sounded unmistakably Jewish. It seemed to us impossible that you would be a supporter of their aims. Therefore you must be an intended victim.’

  The two men, Jimmy and Paul Bock, looked at one another. They realized that they were not convincing their visitor. It had not been planned this way: to see Charles Stein up here in this grubby little house with the smell of yesterday’s boiled cabbage coming from next door. The plan had been to meet with him in the lobby of some luxurious hotel in central London, or even take him for a meal in a restaurant. Paul Bock looked round the greasy kitchen. Why should anyone take them seriously once they had seen this dingy slum?

  ‘It’s all true,’ said Jimmy. ‘You may not believe it, but it’s all true.’

  ‘We’ve done all we could,’ said Paul Bock, continuing the conversation with his friend as if their visitor had already departed. ‘We warned him.’

  Boyd Stuart finished his egg. ‘What about some hard information?’ he said. ‘What about more names?’

  ‘We wondered if you could be on some sort of death list, Mr Stein,’ said Paul Bock politely.

  ‘And I’m wondering if you have been watching too much late-night TV,’ said Stuart.

  ‘Get stuffed,’ said Jimmy. ‘We told you, and that’s that.’

  Stuart pushed his plate aside and stood up to get a paper towel to wipe his fingers. Through the rain-spattered windows he saw a grim industrial landscape and the Grand Union canal, its stagnant water littered with ice-cream wrappers and floating beer cans. A narrow boat, timbers rotting, had settled low enough for scummy water to lap on to its deck. Beyond the canal, the rusting tracks and ruined shed were the remains of a railway system which had once made the world gasp with envy. A diesel locomotive came into view, hooted and stopped. Stuart tossed the paper towel into the bin under the sink and said, ‘What about a little more evidence?’

  Paul Bock said, ‘We’ll talk about it.’ He took Jimmy out of the room and when they returned Bock was wearing the jacket of his smart grey suit.

  ‘Can you give me a lift to the tube?’ Bock said, looking out of the window. ‘I think I’ll need my raincoat.’

  ‘Certainly.’ Stuart turned back to Jimmy when he got as far as the landing. ‘But why the swastika badges and the Nazi decorations?’

  Jimmy smiled. ‘Then I don’t have to feel bad about lying and cheating my customers.’

  ‘I see,’ said Stuart. He followed Paul Bock down the narrow staircase into the gloomy shop and out of the front door. Summer seemed a long way away; the clouds were still grey and there was only the faintest glimmer of sunshine on the horizon. They got into the Aston and Stuart followed the insane maze of one-way streets to the underground railway station.

  ‘I wish you’d give me more information,’ said Stuart as Paul Bock got out of the car. ‘Give me some details of the Trust: what is its address? Do you know how it is funded?’

  The German leant close to the window. ‘Perhaps next time,’ he said.

  ‘Why not now? If my life is in danger the way you say it is, why not now?’

  ‘Because we don’t believe you are Mr Charles Stein,’ said the German. ‘Jimmy thinks you’re the police. I’m not certain who you are, but the computer print-out shows nearly one hundred million dollars against your name … I’ve worked in banks. You are not a man who’s ever had use of a fortune. Men who handle such money don’t come knocking on doors in King’s Cross early in the morning; they send others to do it for them. You tell Mr Stein to come in person.’ He smiled and was gone in the crowds hurrying into the station.

  Chapter 22

  Boyd Stuart did not view every foot of the Nazi newsreel film. It would have taken five working days to look at all of it: a fact that was clearly evident from the film tins which were stacked ceiling high in the two fireproof store rooms downstairs in the basement, along the corridor from the ‘viewing room’, as the cinema was officially called.

  Two ‘research clerks’ had begun viewing and sorting the footage as soon as the first reels arrived. It had come to the SIS Ziggurat building south of the river via a cover address in Wardour Street. Most of it came through agencies and libraries but there was privately owned footage too, and some poor-quality pirated material which had been made by reversal process from positives. All of the film submitted was in response to the news that a film company, compiling a documentary for TV, was paying top footage rates. It was wanted urgently but that was a normal requirement in the business of film and TV.

  Boyd Stuart had spent all day screening the film that had been shortlisted for him. By the afternoon of Monday, 16 July, he was growing dizzy with images of Adolf Hitler and his followers. He had watched the Führer staring stern-faced at maps, striding past ranks of soldiers, climbing into the Führerwagen of the train and climbing down from it, leaning out of its lowered windows to shake hands with Hitler Youths or accept flowers from flaxen-haired girls.

  At four P.M. he first caught sight of the face he sought. He picked up the phone and told the projectionist to stop the film, mark the frame and bring it to the editing bench. Only fifteen minutes after that, he found the same man in two lengthy sequences of Hitler meeting Benito Mussolini alongside a train at Anlage Süd in August 1941. A large crowd of Hitler’s immediate staff had wanted to see the two dictators together, and there were many cameras in evidence amongst the German soldiers, SS men and Italians, jostling together on the raised wooden platform made especially for the dictators to alight from the train.

  Stuart put the reel of film on to the editor’s flat bench. He wound it with his hand to find the frame he wanted, and held it illuminated and magnified on the small screen. He put a magnifier over the part of the image that interested him, but it enlarged the patterns of film grain and the texture of the viewing screen’s fresnel glass so that the picture became a confused blur, like some abstract painting.

  Kitty King came into the room and put a cup of tea down by his elbow. ‘You’ve found something?’

  ‘Three different sequences, and there will be more.’

  ‘And this is the photo you found after the Wever farm explosion?’ She leant forward to study the big enlargement which was pinned over the bench.

  ‘Wever said he’d never worn one of those camouflage jackets before that journey to Merkers. I’ve looked up the dates and times of the American advance. That photo must have been taken at the salt mine on or about 2 April 1945. That’s Breslow next to him. The civilian is the one I’m trying to identify. Reichsbank Director Frank he was calling himself in 1945.’

  ‘And now you’ve found him?’

  ‘I think so but I’d like to find him enough times to get a positive identification.’

  ‘He’s in uniform for this one.’ She pointed at the lighted screen.

  ‘But the Germans let their security people wear any uniform and any rank they fancied when they were at work. I’ve got other photos that resemble him. Now I’ll enlarge them to some reasonable size.’

  ‘The dark room will curse you, Boyd. They’re up to their ears in work.’

  ‘I’ve got a triple-A priority, Kitty. There is nothing that takes precedence over whatever I need.’

  She looked at him. She knew about the priority but didn’t understand it. She tried to find the answer in his face and, having failed, smiled at him. ‘It’s just history as far as I can see, dar
ling,’ she said. ‘It’s only people who still remember those days who care: old fogies like the DG, and Mr Brittain in Plans, who won the MC and wears it on Remembrance Day.’ She touched her hair to push it back from her forehead, in a manner more narcissistic than remedial. She was especially beautiful there in the half-light of the cinema. Stuart felt a keen desire for her, and he saw her arch her body as if she sensed it.

  ‘I wish you’d move in with me,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll stay with you tonight, if you want me,’ she said softly. ‘But I’m not moving in; not with you, not with anyone.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He expected her to raise her voice. They had had this sort of discussion before and it always had turned to the sort of jokiness that cloaked bitter recriminations. ‘Everything I touch …’ she continued in the same lowered tone, ‘I sit down in a chair and I wonder if it was her favourite chair. I grab a dressing gown and I stop … wondering if I’m going to look like her in it. I look in the mirror and I see other women looking back at me. That’s not what I want, Boyd.’ There was something essentially feminine about her resentment of these inanimate objects, thought Stuart. She never seemed in any way jealous, or even curious, about any women he might have met in California.

  ‘Well, where would we find another place as good as the flat I’ve got now?’ said Stuart. ‘Those people upstairs are paying more than double the rent I’m charged. And your sister is not going to want us both moving in there with her.’

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ she said. ‘Men always expect women to adapt to anything they want.’

  Boyd Stuart put an arm round her and gave her a brief hug. It was a far cry from all those earlier declarations of sexual freedom. But, like all cries for freedom, Kitty King’s had been more concerned with getting concessions than with giving them. It would always be like this, he supposed. She would tell him what made her unhappy but refuse to face any of the practical difficulties that would come from changing things. She smiled in response to his comforting arm. ‘Drink your tea,’ she said. ‘And I’ll take the cups back. I only came down to the vault.’

  ‘For what?’ said Stuart. The ‘vault’ was the top-secret section of the archives stored in the basement strong room.

  ‘You’d never guess,’ she said. ‘To return the DG’s personal file.’

  ‘In the vault?’ They both laughed. It seemed like a good example of the Alice in Wonderland world in which they worked that something as innocuous as a biographical file should be locked away with such elaborate care.

  ‘He was in Switzerland for most of the war, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Except for the short time they let him serve with the army in Italy. He was deafened by the gunfire at Monte Cassino; that’s why he wears that hearing aid. He went back to Switzerland in time to work with Allen Dulles. They were negotiating the surrender of some German army units in Italy. He came back to work here in 1947.’ She repeated it as if it were some poem she had been compelled to learn at school.

  ‘I love you, Kitty.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Boyd. Drink your tea. I must get back to work.’ She flicked through the DG’s file nervously, waiting for Stuart to finish his tea.

  ‘What’s that red sticker for?’ Stuart asked.

  ‘It’s a “stop mark”. The cover name must not be used at any time in the future. During the war, the DG used the name Elliot Castelbridge. It was common to have a cover name at that time. There was a wartime order, in case high-ranking department employees were captured by the Germans. Anyone who went to Switzerland or Sweden was redocumented into a permanent cover.’

  ‘The brief and exciting career of Elliot Castelbridge: eating warm fondue with cold wine, and waiting for the German surrender. Killed by a “stop mark”.’

  ‘You’re too hard on him, Boyd.’

  ‘He’s a Byzantine bastard,’ said Stuart without animosity.

  ‘Not at all. He is unmistakably Gothic.’

  Stuart grinned. She was absolutely right. There was nothing of the devious oriental cunning that characterized so many of the senior staff of the department. The DG was a man of brutal bluffness, and even his appearance was more like the rough weathered stone of northern Europe than the smooth silks of the schism. ‘Don’t go.’

  ‘I must. Is your car here?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you be finished in time for dinner?’

  ‘There’s a very good new restaurant in Sloane Street.’

  ‘Just as long as it’s not curry.’ She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. For five minutes or more he sat there thinking about her, then he went back to work. He still needed ‘hard reference’ to the man in the film. Someone would be working all night on that one.

  Chapter 23

  The following morning, Tuesday, 17 July while Boyd Stuart and Kitty King were having breakfast together in his comfortable London apartment, the man whose face he had been seeking in the old Third Reich newsreels was breakfasting in a tall building in Hamburg. His name was Willi Kleiber and the breakfast was a business meeting at which eight senior business executives met together under the chairmanship of Dr Böttger. These were the trustees of the fund collected for the needs of Operation Siegfried, and the meeting was held in the private dining room of one of the banks which Böttger controlled.

  Willi Kleiber sat on Dr Böttger’s immediate right. It was an appropriate seat for the man who had given so much of his time to the initial planning of Operation Siegfried, who not only had worked hard at the scheme but had actually introduced the idea into Dr Böttger’s head. Had Boyd Stuart seen the hatchet face of Willi Kleiber he would have called him Reichsbank Director Frank. And had Colonel Pitman’s cashier seen him before he shaved off the blunt moustache he had grown over Christmas 1978 he would have called him Peter Friedman, the beau parleur whose letters of credit secured him the millions that had crippled the bank.

  It was early and Hamburg was enjoying clear blue skies. From this glass-sided conference room, high above the city, there was a view of St Michael’s Church and the Bismarck Memorial, and the sun and the morning breeze were making the dark water of the Elbe shimmer like hammered copper.

  Kleiber liked Hamburg. He liked its ever-changing weather, its bars and its restaurants, the smell of the sea and the fine clear German that its inhabitants spoke. His brief, and never to be repeated, attempt at marriage had taken place in this town. That would have blighted the location for some men, but Kleiber was able to accept the pleasures of past experiences without dwelling upon the miseries; he felt the same way about his time in the war. He seldom came here without seeing his ex-wife. She was still attractive and amusing, and always wanted to hear about Willi Kleiber’s latest sexual conquests. It was as if she got some perverse and vicarious enjoyment from these detailed descriptions of his lechery. More than once he fantasized about taking her back to his hotel room, undressing her and … But Willi Kleiber knew that that would never happen. Not because his ex-wife would not enjoy it – but because her new husband was a senior official with the BND. A man who went frequently to London for conferences with senior British intelligence officials was a contact too valuable to risk for the sake of an afternoon of grab-ass. Tomorrow he would be having lunch with both husband and wife. It was safer that way.

  ‘Things have not gone quite as smoothly as we’d hoped,’ admitted Dr Böttger. He was a scholarly-looking man, sixty years old, slightly plump, with silver hair and gold wire spectacles. His face was becoming flushed, Kleiber noticed. It was a sign of anxiety, like the way in which Böttger thrust his fist into the jacket of his expensive suit with enough force to break the stitching. ‘But the plan goes forward. When we took so much money from their bank in Geneva we expected them to offer these documents to us through Herr Kleiber’s man in Los Angeles. That proved to be a miscalculation on our part.’ Böttger twisted his head far enough to see whether Willi Kleiber showed some appreciation; actually it had been Kleiber’s miscalculatio
n. Kleiber nodded with an almost imperceptible movement, but Böttger had become accustomed to such signals in the boardroom. ‘It was the sensible, logical thing to do,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps if these men had been Germans they would have reacted rationally … but they are Americans …’ Böttger smiled, hoping to draw a response from his colleagues but only Kleiber acknowledged the jest.

  Dr Böttger pressed his lips with his fingertips. ‘All of us have given a great part of our lives to making Germany prosperous, strong and a good place to live,’ said Böttger. ‘Has anyone forgotten what we suffered under Hitler and his fellow criminals? Do I have to tell you what the Nazis did to our country and to our people; not just the physical destruction that came from the war, but the moral damage that the Nazi propaganda did to our children. Are you unaware of what our compatriots in the east suffer under a regime of Moscow-trained puppets? We live in the west, and we count our blessings; but German democracy is a delicate flower, transplanted from other climes. What we have built from the ashes of 1945 could be quickly destroyed by neo-Nazi madmen or by communist lunatics who would like to see Russian soldiers patrolling our streets.’

  ‘You’re right, Dr Böttger,’ said a voice from the far end of the table.

  ‘Hitler is dead,’ said Böttger. ‘Let him remain dead. We want no revelations, no so-called Hitler Minutes, no secret plans to bring Hitler out of the grave and adorn him with the glories of newsworthy historical triumphs. Make no mistake, there are men who would snatch political power from such apotheosis.’ He stroked his face. ‘What do the British care about Churchill’s reputation; they have history books full of such men. Democracy is the fabric from which their society is woven. It is our frail newly created democracy which needs the reputations of Churchill and Roosevelt and other such leaders who have proved that a man can be warm, well fed and happy, as well as being free to say what he likes and to vote his masters out of office. That’s why we must go to any lengths to make sure that Moscow doesn’t get these documents. Neither must they fall into the hands of the muck-raking journalists who think only of their careers. Nor of those men who’d tell us that Hitler was a twentieth-century Bismarck.’ He looked round at them. ‘Don’t weaken now, my dear friends, don’t weaken now.’