Dead Secret

by Alan Williams

  She yawned. ‘Tom, I’m going to help you. We’re going to do this together.’ She smiled in the darkness. ‘You’re already seeing that wing dipping over another city at war.’

  CHAPTER 3

  The two Carabinieri had stopped in the grey of the dawn on a tiny bridge that bracketed two crooked canals somewhere between the Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge. They had been on duty since evening and were tired and hungry.

  One of them had lit a cigarette. The other grabbed his wrist. There was something half-floating in the slimy water off the steps at the end of the bridge. They swore quietly, reverently. They were God-fearing boys from Calabria and new to this kind of work. But both immediately saw the endless paperwork, the explanations to their superiors, perhaps a conference with the ubiquitous Press.

  The one with the cigarette said, ‘Shall we just leave it?’

  ‘It might be important — it might mean promotion.’ They had both moved towards the steps. The man’s face was half in the water; he was wearing a suit and decent shoes. This was what decided the two Carabinieri. They reached down and pulled the body out, until it lay dripping on the cold stone. One of them had his flashlight out. There was a little blood on the face, near the left eye. He smelt of nothing worse than the canal.

  One of them, who followed the television films, felt his pulse, then bent down and smelt his breath. He looked knowingly at his companion. ‘He had been drinking. Must’ve happened last night. Slipped — the imbecile. My God, I can think of nicer ways of dying than being drowned in one of these stinking canals!’

  He felt for the man’s wallet. It was still there — an expensive wallet, sodden with the black water. Not much money in it, but enough to suggest that there had been no robbery. The dead man’s credentials were stained, scarcely legible.

  The Carabiniere straightened up. ‘Dear God, we must go at once to the Commandants. This man was not just important, he was of the aristocracy! A sacred Prince!’

  He left his companion to guard the body, and hurried away in search of his superiors.

  Hawn heard the news by chance, on the bedside radio in his hotel while he was shaving. The police authorities were clearly splashing the story as a sign of their efficiency, even in the teeth of riots and disorder. The Prince Grotti Savoia had drowned on his way back sometime late last night. They were appealing for witnesses.

  Hawn took the news with superficial calm, and a certain decent professional scepticism. The back canals of Venice late at night were not the place to go wandering and stumbling when you were one over the eight. The Principe had been very drunk. He’d probably got even drunker after Hawn had left him. But he’d also been nervous, almost scared.

  Scared in his cups? Hawn knew he should have a conscience about the man — after all, he had contributed in no small measure to his drunkenness. But when Hawn saw a good story — or just a potential story — the last thing he wanted was to get involved with the labyrinthine complications of Italian officialdom.

  Besides, he had his date with Robak at the Gritti Hotel.

  He had told Anna about his meeting with the Prince, and she now looked shocked. ‘But isn’t he the one who gave you the original idea about the German oil supplies?’

  ‘Something like that. But there’s probably no connection. If there is, I doubt the Italian police could prove anything — even if they wanted to.’

  Hawn arrived at the Gritti Palace Hotel at 10.40. The receptionist rang Suite 104 and after a pause motioned to a uniformed youth to take him up. The door was hung with a ‘Do Not Disturb’ notice in four languages. After a moment it was opened by a girl with frizzy hair and a large mouth. A voice from inside shouted, ‘Tell him to hang on!’

  The main part of the suite was huge, with curtains still half-drawn. The girl said, with a German accent, ‘Mister Robak is in the bathroom. He will not be long.’ She sounded to Hawn like an au pair made good.

  He sat down in an armchair, while the girl wandered off into the bedroom. Robak appeared a moment later; he was wearing a short brown towelling gown and bedroom slippers trodden down at the heels. His hair was even more untidy than last night and there was a lump of shaving foam under his ear. ‘Hi — I forgot the name.’

  Hawn told him, stood up and shook hands.

  ‘Coffee?’ Robak said. ‘It should still be warm. Or beer — there’s some in the icebox. I’m off the booze. Damned hepatitis. I’m allowed to drink again at noon on 12 February — I got that date written down big and clear in my book.’

  Hawn accepted coffee, and Robak poured two cups from a breakfast tray. He sat down and called towards the bedroom, ‘Hun, would you mind trotting downstairs for a moment?’ He waited until the girl had left. ‘Yeah, Mr Hawn. So you’re the guy who has this theory about the Nazis getting some of their oil from the West?’ He paused to sip his coffee, and winced. ‘God damn it, you’d think in the best hotel in Venice they’d serve better stuff than this. Tastes as though the cat pissed in it. I’ll ring down for more.’

  ‘Not on my account, please.’

  Robak’s bland face broke into a smile. ‘That’s what I like about you British — you always got good manners. Now about this theory of yours, Mr Hawn. What’s the true basis of it?’

  Hawn sketched in the facts that he had already computed in his mind, emphasizing the extreme difficulties which the German High Command must have experienced in finding fuel supplies following the Russian capture of the Rumanian oil fields in 1944.

  Robak lit a cigarette, tasted it, threw it away and lit another; then as an afterthought offered the packet to Hawn, who declined.

  ‘Are you an expert on the oil industry, Mr Hawn?’

  ‘I know something about it.’

  ‘It’s a hell of a complex industry — there are even some angles that I sometimes think I don’t understand. And you know something about World War Two? So you’ll no doubt know that in a war like that every kind of racket went on. Not just cigarettes and whisky — jeeps, trucks, even planes found themselves on to the black market. And guns, of course. Half your guerrilla wars at the moment are still being fought with the help of World War Two hardware. The Eyties here even dismantled a whole US cruiser in Naples in one night and sold it off for scrap.

  ‘But you wanna talk about German raw materials? Well, there were plenty of rackets there, too. Mostly through the neutrals — Spain, Sweden, Switzerland.’

  ‘I know about that,’ said Hawn: ‘Steel and nickel and chrome. Difficult stuff to transport, ’specially with a naval blockade throughout most of the world — at least, towards the end of the war. But oil’s fluid. It can be carried in bulk, or in very small quantities. It can be easily transferred, even easily disguised. Pump a small tanker three-quarters full, then top it up with milk or olive oil.’

  Robak sat watching him, very still, unblinking. ‘You got a darn fine imagination. But facts. Where are your facts?’

  ‘I told you, it was only a theory — and not even twenty-four hours old, at that.’

  ‘You say you know about the oil industry, Mr Hawn. Well, maybe you do, maybe you don’t. A lot of people know how the internal combustion engine works, but not many can fix an automobile when it breaks down. Let me give you a few facts. D’you know that of all the tankers at sea at any given time, only about half have a definite destination? For instance, take a tanker with a load of heavy crude from the Middle East bound for Rotterdam. In mid-ocean we may decide to switch that oil for a low-grade product bound for some other country. We switch it in mid-ocean. We can syphon that stuff — even a couple of hundred thousand tonnes — in a matter of hours. We also keep a lot o’ tankers floating around empty. It’s a quick, high-powered business. And plenty o’ scope for smartarses to get in and pull a fast one — sometimes against the insurance companies, sometimes against us. Only they don’t usually get away with it. We’ve got a darn good security system. And we don’t give people a second chance.’

  ‘How does this all tie in with my theory?
’ said Hawn.

  ‘I’m just trying to fill in the background for you. Maybe give you something to chew on. You got the theory — that Nazi Germany was starved of oil and somehow got it from the West. From us, maybe? Correct?’

  Hawn nodded.

  ‘So, can you explain why the Nazis were permanently, chronically short of fuel throughout the war? Why they had to manufacture it themselves? Why they made every desperate effort to block our own — and your — oil supplies across the Atlantic and in the Med, through North Africa?’

  ‘And can you explain,’ said Hawn, ‘how this permanently, chronically starved fighting force — one of the largest and most sophisticated the world has ever seen — somehow managed, for nearly six years, to have enough fuel to fight to the very last inch of territory? I’ll believe anything about the courage and ingenuity of the German race, but I won’t believe their Panzers and armoured vehicles ran on blood. They ran on high-octane fuel, Mr Robak, and I’d like to know where it came from.’

  ‘There’s a straight answer to that. Reserves and synthetic fuel.’

  ‘I know. I got that in the Danieli. From Logan. Only that Frenchman there, Pol, rather shot him down. Pointed out that the synthetic fuel was only suitable for aircraft, not for the heavy stuff. And I don’t know about reserves — but they must have had not just millions, but billions of tonnes stashed away, to carry them right through.’

  Robak put another cigarette in his mouth, without lighting it. ‘They had Russia. And they captured huge reserves in France. God knows what they captured in other places.’

  ‘The Russian oil fields, from what I know, never yielded very much — far less than Rumania, and the Rumanian fields in Ploesti were bombed to hell after 1943, when the Allies captured the airbase at Bari here in Italy.’

  It was a moment before Robak answered. He took a bottle out of his dressing-gown pocket and shook out two pills which he swallowed. ‘Just vitamins. Keeps the metabolism going. This hepatitis is one hell of a drag. You got a pretty pat theory there, haven’t you, Hawn? What I call a “negative theory”. Like trying to prove a man’s guilty just because he hasn’t got a cast-iron alibi. Let’s try and be a little more constructive. Let’s just suppose — without mentioning names — that a Western oil company did supply the Germans. How would they have done it?’

  ‘I was rather hoping you might tell me.’

  ‘So you want me to write your lines for you, huh?’

  ‘Let’s say, just a bit of prompting.’

  ‘Sure. Well, there might have been several ways — as I said, all dependent on the neutrals. Broken convoy across the Atlantic from the Gulf of Mexico, into Norwegian waters and down to Sweden. Bills of Lading made out to Swiss laundering syndicates. Money-laundering, that is. Switch cargoes and ship the stuff across to Kiel or Rostock. Those were the main German railheads on the Baltic. You’re not writing any of this down. Why not?’

  ‘I’ve got a good memory. I never forget good stuff.’

  ‘I’m flattered. All right, take the Middle East. Bring the stuff round through the Canal and ship it up to Turkey, where every kind of dirty game was being played. The Turks swap it over into barges for the Danube. Or maybe they do better — maybe they swap it over on to neutral tankers and bring it up to Trieste or Genoa where there was the only pipeline in Europe at the time, up into Switzerland. And once in Switzerland — well, it was anybody’s oil. Then there was Franco’s Spain, of course. It could have gone through the Straits of Gibraltar, been transferred, shipped down to Oran or Algiers, then up to Vichy, France. But of course, that was before the Rumanian fields fell.’ He paused. ‘How am I doing?’

  ‘Fine.’ Hawn knew Robak was just playing, but he couldn’t decide just what at. The man was handing him a whole set of plausible theories to work on. They were no doubt the sort of theories he could come up with himself, but why was Robak helping him? Hawn was a poker player and was well-versed in the art of bluffing. The bluff that Robak might be pulling was to give him a broad basis for his theory which might be highly plausible, but because it came from a senior ABCO executive, could not possibly be true. That might be the way Hawn was supposed to take it, anyway.

  Since Robak was playing, Hawn decided to play, too. He would bet against Robak’s hand, just to find out how strong it was. ‘What about the Royal Navy, the RAF, Strategic Air Command? By 1944 they had total control of sea and air.’

  ‘So — maybe they just got a dribble through. A dribble topped up with milk or olive oil, as you so cutely put it. But you’re maybe forgetting that milk and olive oil sink to the bottom?’

  ‘That’s where the taps are, aren’t they? In any case, there are always sealed compartments. Isn’t that the usual trick?’

  Robak allowed himself a second smile. ‘You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you?’

  ‘Some of it. I’m just working on it, as I go along.’

  ‘Fine. So why don’t you talk to your Royal Navy boys? Talk to the RAF chiefs, to our guys in Washington. Talk to retired chiefs of Strategic Air Command, the guys who ran the blockade, guys whose job it was to go through the Nazi archives at the end of the war. Talk to the experts. Get your facts. It’s no good just walking into a bar and shooting your mouth off, accusing us of helping the Nazis. That’s tantamount to accusing us of mass murder. Now I’m thick-skinned — I don’t give a damn what you think personally of ABCO, or of its methods of business. But I don’t like being called a murderer. I like it even less when it’s done by a stranger, and in front of other people. Logan may be a buddy of yours, but that Frenchman Pol’s in the business. OK, he looks like a clown, but he’s got a lot of funny-money tucked away in Liechtenstein and he wants to do business with ABCO, and ABCO’s business is to do business.

  ‘So I say it again — I don’t like guys come butting in and making wild accusations that can’t be substantiated. I hear you’re a good newspaper man? Well, that’s not the kind of conduct I expect from any kind of newspaper man. So get your facts. Get all the facts, and get ’em straight.’ He stood up. ‘I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Mr Hawn. I just hope I’ve made myself clear?’

  ‘Thank you. You’ve made yourself admirably clear, on a number of points.’ Hawn stood up and was about to shake hands, when he said, ‘You heard, did you, that that Prince fellow — Grotti Savoia, the one who’s been making himself rather tiresome for you lot in the last few days — he was found dead early this morning, drowned in one of the canals? Pure coincidence, no doubt.’

  ‘I’d say so. Or maybe you don’t believe in coincidences, Mr Hawn?’

  ‘Sometimes. Don’t you?’

  ‘I prefer to call them Acts of God — like the insurance companies do. Might also be a kind of moral in it all — a tragic lesson to silly people who spread lies and try to make trouble.’

  ‘Sentimental, aren’t you?’

  ‘Good morning, Mr Hawn. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.’

  They shook hands, and Hawn left.

  CHAPTER 4

  The fat man ate with his fingers, with neither grace nor deference. And he talked as he ate: ‘I fought in Spain as an anarchist. I am not ashamed of it. We had the most superb ideals. We wanted to burn down the banks, abolish money, run public restaurants for everyone, rich or poor. I was a happy man then. I believed. I was even happier when that water rat, Franco, invaded. I kidnapped one of his generals and ransomed him for three hundred rifles. We asked for a thousand but they wouldn’t pay. I assume he wasn’t much of a general. Then they captured me near Salamanca and I only just escaped, disguised as a priest.’

  ‘When the war came, it was not quite so easy to choose sides. I hated the Nazis, and I hated the Communists because they had a pact with the Nazis. But I also hated the French bourgeois establishment. If there hadn’t been a war, I suppose I might well have become an urban terrorist. I’m quite skilled in some of their practices.’

  Grease dripped from his fingers, down his chin, to become matted like succulent seaweed in
his little goatee beard.

  ‘Unhappily, the war did not end well for me. In 1944 I was caught by the Gestapo. I was rather important at that time, and they wanted to ask me some questions. I didn’t want to answer them. They didn’t kill me. They castrated me instead. So when the war finished, I found myself not a war hero, but a eunuch. I don’t know which was the more embarrassing! I took refuge in starting a shop for women’s undergarments behind the Gare St Lazare. The enterprise has been remarkably successful. It has now expanded into a supermarket!’ He giggled and broke off to order another bottle of wine.

  ‘My last reputable role was in Algeria, helping Long-Nose de Gaulle sell two million Europeans to the Arabs. Of course, I had no great sympathy with the European cause — except for one thing. It was a popular movement. I have great sympathy with popular movements — but on one condition. They must have a chance of winning. Today, for instance, if the Whites in Africa had just one chance in a million of winning, perhaps I would support them. But they don’t even have that.’

  He had a second helping of Ossobuco and recounted various escapades in South-East Asia — where he had hijacked a plane-load of American money to Hanoi — and in Russia, where he had double-crossed both the KGB and the British Intelligence Service, over the disappearance of one of Britain’s most notorious traitors — and later in an ill-fated attempt to assassinate the then Shah of Iran.

  Hawn and Anna listened to him, neither believing nor disbelieving. Most people live dull lives, and some try to make them sound exciting by inventing outrageous escapades. A few have had remarkable lives, and are usually wary of discussing them, least of all with a stranger. But on balance Hawn inclined to the view that Pol was telling the truth. The crucial question was of motive: for one thing was sure. The fat man was not merely being sociable.

  He was generous with the wine, and his choice was impeccable. They were all three in an excellent mood: though Hawn was still curious, even puzzled. Cheese, fruit and Strega arrived, and Pol finally brought his curriculum vitae up to date. The only gaps were ones of vagueness, and these mostly concerned his recent business affairs.