‘Now Mönch himself would not normally have worried me. He’d been a bureaucrat and an administrator, but strictly second-rank. He’d have only become dangerous if you knew exactly what questions to ask him. You did — at least, you knew some of them. The names of Rice and Salak would become clearer, more isolated. It would have been like the early stages of developing a film — the shapes would no longer be varying shadows, they would have been taking on definite outlines.
‘But here I know what you’re going to ask. What about Pol? Here you must understand that while you were carrying out your preliminary investigations, both Pol and I had you under increasing surveillance — but, unfortunately, independently of each other. Pol trusts no one, and only a fool would trust him. I tried to keep track of him, but he was too clever. When you went to Istanbul, for instance, I suspected that Pol was behind it.
‘Now I have to be careful here — careful not to impute motives to Pol. As I said, the man’s a total scoundrel, a rogue — even in a business like oil which breeds rogues. But fortunately I have some knowledge of Pol, and some insight into how he works. I’d made discreet inquiries at your newspaper, and found out that you were acting strictly freelance — a mixed blessing, since you would not have the resources of your paper behind you, but also because a little pressure applied in the right places would no doubt have dissuaded your editor and his executives from pursuing the story.
‘I also ran a routine check at your bank, and found that your account is not in good shape. I even made similar inquiries about Miss Admiral here. At the last count she was fifty-two pounds in credit, and had two hundred pounds on deposit with a Building Society.’
Shanklin sank his head on to his chest and smiled at Anna from under his thick pale eyebrows. The deranged bishop turned gentle don: ‘Hardly enough, my dear girl, to finance a round-trip to Istanbul — and staying at the old Pera Palace, too! Particularly since Imin Salak was not a man given to disposing of information gratis. It was then that I guessed that Pol was funding you.’
‘Do you still not know what Pol’s motives were?’ said Hawn.
‘Well, let’s say, some of them — not all. Those motives were the same as mine.’
‘You’re not a member of Jacques? Or are you?’
Shanklin sat back and rubbed his hands together. ‘The French Resistance and the SOE had a lot in common, I’ll grant you. I’m tempted to answer in the affirmative — it would be rather a feather in my cap, at my age, even if it wasn’t true. It isn’t. Justice pour les Anciens Combattants is an obscure and distasteful organization whose aims are to eliminate former Nazis. Pol is not a member of that organization. He never has been. He has been using its name purely as a cover.’
‘Then how the hell did your motives coincide with Pol’s?’
‘Simply, to protect ABCO. But in order fully to understand, it is also necessary to understand the full complexities of an organization like ABCO. Simplicity is something they do not understand, even on the most basic level. And in order to protect themselves, they devised at least two alternative scenarios. They could have eliminated you — which was the method preferred by certain executives, including Robak, who was delegated to do the hatchet-work. I was able to overrule that plan. It seemed to me unnecessarily crude, as well as risky. To have got rid of you would have meant getting rid of Miss Admiral too — and if anything went wrong, a lot of awkward questions might have been asked, leaving us in even worse trouble than when we’d started.’
‘My goodness, Mr Shanklin,’ Anna said, looking up from her glass of whisky, ‘should I go down on my knees and kiss your hand?’
Shanklin looked serene. ‘A most charming and worthy sentiment, my dear. But unnecessary. No, I persuaded my colleagues at ABCO to pursue a different course of action — one favoured, incidentally, by our Intelligence circles. I decided to let you both run free, financed by Pol, in order to find out just how far you would get. I wanted to find out just how strong, or how weak, ABCO’s wartime secrets were. I reckoned — I hope, justly — that as a journalist of above-average ability, you’d prove an excellent probe. If you couldn’t get at the full story — given your original inspiration, combined with the various helps and leads you had been given — then ABCO could be considered reasonably safe.
‘However, I still had to reckon with Pol. As I was careful to say, while some of our motives were similar, his methods have been rather different.’
‘He was in it for revenge,’ said Hawn.
‘That may have played a part, but only a small part. Pol’s motive was still to protect ABCO — it was simply that his method of doing so was to eliminate, one by one, the main protagonists and potential witnesses in the “Bettina” conspiracy.’
‘But why!’ said Anna. ‘Pol may be a rogue, but he’s no worse than the rest of you. And one thing is certain — he hates ABCO’s guts.’
Toby Shanklin looked down at her, chin on his chest, hands cupped together. ‘With respect, my dear girl, the people Pol never hates are those who bring him money. And Pol has — or had — a thriving little petroleum enterprise going in France which he wanted to expand. He was negotiating a deal with ABCO when I met you both. One of the further prices for that deal was that Pol share a hand in snuffing out this “Bettina” business. His job was to liquidate every witness down the line. He simply used both of you, as two apparent innocents, to lead the way down that line. And you — and he — were very successful. Except that you all made your own mistake.
‘You, Hawn, made the mistake of contacting me — on the prompting of the late lamented Prince Grotti Savoia. Admittedly, you would not have thought of getting on to Norman French, and without French your whole idea would probably have withered on the bough. No matter. I was alerted, and under the circumstances I knew what to do. But Pol’s mistake was more mysterious. He killed Rice.
‘Now here, apart from your fortuitous meeting with Pol and Robak in Venice, we come to the second and last real coincidence in this story. It was something which Pol should have checked out — or at least, which ABCO should have told him, if he hadn’t insisted on working entirely on his own. Six months ago, ABCO signed a deal with the East German Ministry of Trade to build a complex of petroleum-gas that will supply most of the Comecon countries. Because the deal is highly controversial, it has been kept secret. Rice was to be in charge of the German side of the deal.’
‘Rice doesn’t entirely make sense,’ said Hawn. ‘First I hear of him studying in a pre-war German University, with a British passport, then he’s working with one of the Nazis’ big industrial firms, and next he pops up as a so-called political refugee in the Caribbean, where he gets a top job working for ABCO. And it’s about this time that you come into the picture. The files show that you knew Rice — knew him well enough to have been travelling in the same car with him when a certain young British diplomat was killed, run over by you.’
‘It was Rice’s car, and he was driving. We must get that straight. As for the rest, I am not here to prove my innocence. Far from it. I simply want to get matters in perspective — so you don’t go running around with any other funny ideas. All right?’
Anna sucked in her breath; otherwise there was silence.
Shanklin stared into the fire. ‘Rice was a scientist. One of the best. And as a petroleum expert, he understood the workings — the political workings — of the oil industry backwards. In the war that became almost as important to the Germans as his scientific knowledge. He was also half English and bilingual, and could therefore pass himself off as a refugee. He had started by helping to co-ordinate the Middle East operation, by way of Istanbul — making the right contacts through certain British diplomatic circles there and in Ankara — and went on to recruit his own men, the chief of whom was Salak. He did so well that the Germans decided to sacrifice his services as a scientist and ship him over to the Caribbean, when the Mediterranean was becoming too hot for the Germans. So Rice was put in charge of the Mexico-Venezuela end — and I’ll
hand it to him, he did it damn well.’
‘Hardly a very alluring personality,’ Hawn said, ‘if I’m to judge from what I saw of him this morning. It was Rice that Pol killed this morning, I suppose, and not some grotesque decoy-duck put up for shooting practice by the Vopos?’
‘No — it was Rice all right. That’s why the East Germans are so annoyed.’
‘So the East Germans are annoyed, are they? And what was their role in all this — apart from playing footsy with ABCO on some big petro-chemical deal? Hell, what was their moral stand? Rice’s knowledge has presented them with conclusive evidence of a massive war crime by the West — a war crime committed by one of Communists’ favourite pet aversions, a multi-national Capitalist corporation which is one of the very foundations of the bourgeois economy. Yet they sit back and let one of Pol’s mercenaries pick off one of their plum scientists. Why?’
‘My dear fellow, I’m surprised that you should be so naive — that you are under the illusion that the Communists have any morality about anything. The Communists are, and always have been, supremely pragmatic beings. They operate from self-interest — a characteristic which I find rather encouraging. Personally, give me the self-seeking any time, rather than the self-righteous. And in the case of the East Germans, the moment one of our hated multinationals could be an advantage, they happily seize that advantage. As for war crimes, fortunately, as I have said, our fraternal friends in the East do not indulge in self-righteous recriminations, unless it is for a specific purpose.’ Hawn said: ‘But you do admit that a war crime was committed by ABCO?’
‘Look, what is a war crime? Auschwitz — Belsen? So, it’s naughty to kill Jews. What about the bombing of Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden? Were they war crimes?’
‘You sanctimonious shit!’ Anna, sitting very straight and white-faced, had dashed her glass to the floor; and for a moment she seemed about to spring at Shanklin. ‘You loathsome old hypocritical gangster — armchair gangster — gambling club room gangster! You haven’t got the guts to commit crimes yourself! Pol was a hypocrite and a gangster, but at least he took some part in what he was doing — was out there when the shooting started! But people like you…’ She paused, about to cough with rage. ‘You have no conscience, no compassion, no morality. You’re nothing but an ugly, greedy, wicked old man. And as long as ABCO pays your bills, you’ll go on licking their arses!’
‘Tut, tut, my dear lady — such language. I wouldn’t have expected it.’ He was peering at her from under his eyebrows, still the benevolent don rather than the wild bishop. ‘But no matter, sticks and stones, sticks and stones.’ He glanced at Hawn. ‘I’m merely trying to put your minds at rest — by giving you some useful information, which is more than your friend Pol apparently did. If, however, you only wish to indulge in trivial abuse…’
‘All right, Shanklin. How did you get tied up in all this? Apart from having worked as a junior executive with ABCO before the war?’
‘Well, I was drafted into SOE, which made me a lot more than a fly on the wall. Undercover work, with responsibility for the Middle East and the Balkans. Istanbul happened to be slap in the middle. And in Istanbul in those days you didn’t just hear rumours — you could buy them on the street corner like lottery tickets. Some of the numbers came up, most of them didn’t. And the people selling them were usually selling to both sides. There was even an occasion when the desk-wallahs in Cairo bought a piece of information already sold to the SOE in Sofia. Usual Snafu — situation normal, all fucked up. If you’ll pardon the expression, Miss Admiral,’ he added, with a snigger of sarcasm.
‘But there was one rumour that wasn’t sold — it was given to me by that young Englishman, de Vere Frisby, who held a junior post at the Istanbul Consulate, which was his cover for Intelligence operations. He was neurotic and drank too much — which in some ways helped his cover — and when he was sober, he wasn’t at all a bad agent.
‘It was from him that I first heard about Salak, who — as you no doubt know — was also working for us. We knew that oil was getting out of Istanbul and going astray, but because Turkey was doing a nice balancing act by remaining neutral, and because the Allies were desperate to get her in on our side and not to upset her, we had to be very careful how we acted. I put in a tentative report to POE, but it got mysteriously mislaid. At least, it never seems to have reached London — and if it did, somebody sat on it or flushed it down the toilet.’
‘There’s nothing in the Public Record Office.’
Shanklin crossed his legs. ‘I’m sure there isn’t. Anyway I got shot up in Yugoslavia, and at my own request was transferred to the Caribbean. I did more than that — I managed to get de Vere Frisby transferred with me, to Mexico. Frisby hadn’t known about Rice by name, until he saw him face-to-face when Rice was working for ABCO in Vera Cruz. He recognized him at once as a German agent he’d known in Istanbul. Rice almost certainly recognized him, but unfortunately he was not only a good scientist — he was a good agent. He didn’t let on and, stupidly, I didn’t act on the spot. I made the mistake of sitting on Rice and following up further leads.’
‘In what capacity?’ said Hawn. ‘Fearless undercover agent fighting for King and Country? Or as ABCO’s faithful, well-paid lapdog?’
‘Both. The two were the same. The interests of ABCO were part of the interests of Britain. The two were indivisible. They still are. You might both do well to remember that. Anyone who tries to hurt ABCO is trying to hurt this country. And when anyone does that — my God, they have me to answer to. And I’ll smash them — I’ll grind them underfoot. I’ve told you that before. And I mean it.’
Anna blurted out, her voice shuddering with fury: ‘But wasn’t ABCO doing everything it could to hurt this country by giving the Nazis oil?’
‘They had very good reasons. But I’ll come to those in a minute. Let’s go back to Rice and Frisby in the Caribbean. I was, by now, pretty certain that elements in ABCO, and their agents, were shipping oil out under phoney Bills of Lading, even using false passports for the masters. Trouble was, there was no absolute proof. The only way we could have stopped it dead would have been to blockade the whole Caribbean and search every ship. That was out of the question — the oil was keeping our war effort alive, even if some of it happened to be keeping the enemy alive, too.
‘Then I got my first piece of hard evidence against Rice. He’d been in contact with the German Embassy in Mexico City. And that was when I made my second mistake — I didn’t arrest him there and then. Instead, I arranged for a meeting between him and Frisby — on some incidental pretext, I can’t remember what. I went armed, in Rice’s car. Rice was supposed to have the impression that I was on his side, ready to fix a deal. We arranged to meet outside the town, without witnesses — the sort of place where I could use some strong-arm stuff, if necessary.
‘It was dark. I suspect Frisby had been drinking — though I can’t be sure, because there was never an autopsy. He just stepped out into our lights as we approached, and Rice accelerated and ran him down, splitting his skull open. Rice said he thought it was a wild dog, but I knew damn well it was a lie. I was mad at the man, I can tell you. I filed official complaints, to the Mexican authorities and through ABCO, that Rice had driven with intent to kill, but both somehow managed to get bunged up in the works. Finally I made out an official report to London, and it seems London was worried enough to send out those two MI6 men. I told them what I thought, as well as what I suspected about Rice’s activities, and why he wanted Frisby out of the way. I was even beginning to fear for my own life and took to going about armed, even sleeping with a gun under my bed.
‘The trouble was, without Frisby I didn’t have much of a case. Rice was grilled, but denied everything. Eventually the two officers went back to London. I don’t think they were entirely happy, but whatever report they made, it conveniently disappeared. It was as though somebody up there was seeing that Rice led a charmed life! It always seemed that way, until this morning.
‘Anyway, shortly after the agents flew back to London, ABCO — in the form of some of their top brass from New York — put a Big Brotherly hand on my shoulder and showed me the error of my ways. Rice’s activities had to be tolerated, and my suspicions — not only in the interests of the Consortium, but also in the national public interest — had to be suppressed. In short, I was told to belt up.’
‘And you went along with that?’ said Hawn.
Toby Shanklin gave an impatient wave of his hand. ‘I was a wild young man in those days. But not so wild, or green, to bite both hands that fed me. And I certainly wasn’t going to finish up like de Vere Frisby, lying like a dead dog in a ditch.’ He gave Hawn a hard, unambiguous stare. ‘There was too much at stake — there still is. And nothing to be gained. Oil is our life-blood — quite as much today as it was during the war. And ABCO is still the heart that pumps that blood. We don’t rock the boat, Hawn.
‘I agree that there may have been a few bad boys about — some of them are now big boys with fat pensions and handles to their names. But we don’t touch them — we absolutely must not touch them — or we not only upset the apple cart, we upset the whole rhythm of Western industrialized society.’ He leant forward and stared grimly at each of them.
‘And here I’m not talking about just a few retired ABCO executives in London and New York — or put out to pasture in Haslemere or Palm Springs. I’m not even talking about protecting ABCO’s reputation. I’m talking about senior figures in the British Wartime Government. No, no,’ he added hastily, holding up both hands this time: ‘You don’t catch me playing the dirty sneak. No tittle-tattle, no smear stories from me!’
Hawn spoke calmly. ‘Civil servants, or politicians?’
‘Both. The whole system was involved. And it wasn’t just a matter of money — not for all of them, anyway. No — they were acting, as always, in the national interest. Because, like all of us, they were shit-scared of the Russians.
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