by Morris West
We could not buy the brain. We rented its time. We hired systems experts to explain our needs to it. We employed programmers to feed it facts and figures. We based momentous decisions on the answers it fed back to us. But, because we were haunted by the fear that the programmers might fall into error, or be suborned into malpractice, we used monitors to police the brain for any hint of error or fraud. So, we believed, as religious men should, that the system was safe and sacred, proof against fools or knaves.
There was only one problem: the brain, and the programmers and the monitors, were all members of the same family – Creative Systems Incorporated; the father of the family was Basil Yanko, who was jealous to take us all under his control. Like it or not, we were locked in a magic circle, drawn by a twentieth-century wizard. The report, which lay still unopened on my desk, was a grimoire full of spells and dangerous mysteries. I had to get my courage up to open it. I needed silence and privacy to study it. I told Suzanne to hold all calls, locked my door and settled down to read. Two hours later, I faced the brutal fact: Harlequin et Cie had been milked of fifteen million dollars. The milkman was identified as George Harlequin himself.
Now, a simple question: like the rabbi who ducked synagogue, played golf on Shabbat and hit a hole-in-one, whom do you tell? The culprit – or the victim – was seven thousand miles away in hospital, waiting for a man in a white coat to say whether he would live or die. I had to cover fifteen million before the auditors came in. If I put all my personal holdings on the line, I was good for five million; which left a shortfall of ten. To whom could I explain the need? Who would hold me safe for so much? There are few heroes in the money-game. Bankers are sensitive as sea-anemones. Poke a finger at them and they curl up into jelly-blobs, quivering with outrage and apprehension.
I had to prove the report, true or false. But who was there to trust? Computer people are clubbish too. They marry and give in marriage and meet at the county ball. Besides, computer information is like sex. You can sell it ten times over and you still own it. And who is to know or care, provided you don’t peddle it under the nose of a passing policeman? If you don’t believe me, I can quote you chapter and verse. One of our clients spent twenty million on off-shore oil exploration only to find that his rivals were drilling on his site before the last figures were printed on the tape.
It was one o’clock. At one-thirty, I was due to lunch and talk at the Club Commerciale de Geneve. I knew that if I breathed half a word of doubt or discouragement, it would go round the world before the market opened in New York. I locked the report in my brief-case, freshened myself in Harlequin’s bathroom, opened my door and my telephone line and summoned Suzanne. Since I have to explain her, let me be done with it quickly.
Suzanne was Harlequin’s secretary. She was forty years old, give or take a twelve month, and she had been in love with him from the day she walked into his office fifteen years ago. She was greying a little, but she was still a very comely woman with a good body and a bright mind and a commonsensical attitude to sex and friendship. For a while, we were lovers by default. Then we were friends by choice. I would trust her with my life; but I had no right to trust her with Harlequin’s. So I told her only half the truth. It was the measure of her worth that she accepted it without question or resentment.
‘Suzy, we’re in a jam – a big one.’
‘Basil Yanko?’
‘Yes.’
‘I hate that man.’
‘So do I. But I have to treat with him. I have to move fast and far. No one but you must know where I am or whom I see. Clear?’
‘Quite clear.’
‘Telephone Executive Charter and have a plane standing by from three this afternoon. Get me Karl Kruger in Hamburg. Call the Club and tell them I’ll be late for drinks and on time for the speech. Then go to my apartment, pack a bag, pick me up after lunch and drive with me to the airport. I want to dictate a cable, to be sent in code, to all branch managers. Someone’s bugged our computers. We’re fifteen million down the drain.’
‘Dear God I Does George know about this?’
‘No.’
‘Are you going to tell him?’
‘Not until we know the medical verdict.’
‘Is he involved?’
‘Up to his neck. Suzy, you have to trust me.’
‘I do, Paul. But you have to trust me, too.’
‘What you don’t know helps us all. Leave it at that for the moment.’
‘Remember one thing, Paul. Harlequin is tougher than you think.’
‘He’ll need to be, Suzy…Make the calls like a good girl.’
Karl Kruger, president of Kruger & Co. AG, was still at his desk, swilling beer and knackwurst, while his juniors were lunching clients at the Four Seasons. I could imagine him, sixty-five years old, grizzled as a Baltic bear, growling at my intrusion.
‘Also! In Geneva you play marbles with money! Here, we have to work for it. What the hell do you want?’
‘Dinner, bed and a talk tonight.’
‘No chance. Hilde’s in town. You know what that means. She’s the only woman I can cope with these days.’
‘So we talk first and then we both take her to dinner. Please, Karl!’
‘You sound worried, Paul. Something wrong?’
‘Everything. Harlequin’s in hospital in California. I’ve got a dog’s dinner on my plate. I need you, old friend.’
‘Make it six at my house. And if you keep me late, you’ll have to sleep with Hilde.’ Wiedersehen!’
‘’Wiedersehen, Karl. And thanks.’
I was on time for lunch. I delivered twenty minutes of optimistic flim-flam which would make half a column in the morning press. At three-fifteen we were airborne and at five minutes to six I was knocking at the door of Kruger’s stronghold on the Alster Park.
If you met Karl Kruger, you wouldn’t like him. Very few people do. The English will tell you he’s an old-line junker who played ball with Hitler, bribed the Americans for a clean bill of health and settled down to renew his fortunes in the Bundesrepublik. Perhaps he did; perhaps he didn’t; I don’t know. What I do know is that Helli Anspacher swears he laid out millions to save her husband from the butchers after the Schellenberg plot, and Chaim Herzl in Tel Aviv says he owes him his life and Jim Brandes hid for three weeks in his house after he was shot down in a raid on Lübeck. It’s all old history now, too tangled to unravel. I can only give you Karl Kruger as I know him in this year of the Lord.
He is as broad as he is tall, with a shock of iron-grey hair, big ham fists, a shambling gait and a face mottled with strawberry marks and liver spots. He looks as battered as an old boxer; but his mind is clear and quicker by half than yours or mine. He greeted me like a long-lost brother, threw his arm round my shoulder and shoved me, staggering, to the fireside.
‘Loving God! You look pale as a nun! Let’s put some fire in your belly. I told Hilde you were coming. She says she’ll keep her love till she meets you Scotch, isn’t it?…You know, Paul, I first saw Hilde when she was making kitsch films for Gregory in Munich. That’s twenty years ago now and she’s still beautiful. So let’s put the business to bed first. What do you want to talk about?’
‘Fifteen million dollars.’
‘What are you selling?’
‘Nothing. That’s the shortfall in our accounts. We’ve been milked, Karl.’
‘Who did it?’
‘The record says George Harlequin.’
‘What do you say?’
‘I say it wasn’t George.’
‘Have you asked him?’
‘I will, when I know whether he’s going to live or die.’
‘So it wasn’t George. Who then?’
‘Someone with access to our computer system.’
‘Name?’
‘I say Basil Yanko.’
‘Why? He’s got money running out of his backside.’
‘He wants to take us over. He told me that today when he delivered our security report.’
‘Cover for ten million, on call, to keep us dean until I can tidy the books and make necessary transfers.’
‘Where’s the other five coming from?’
‘Me. It’s all I’ve got.’
‘You’re a sentimental fool. You bail Harlequin out; but Yanko still has evidence of defalcation.’
‘If we’re covered, it’s harder for him to use it. If he tries, it points to complicity. I may never have to call the funds, Karl. For Christ’s sake, we’re solid as Gibraltar. But I have to buy time until I get authorities from Harlequin and set up an independent investigation.’
‘Why me? Why not your own shareholders?’
‘Yanko says they’re in his pocket. You’re the only man I can trust to keep his mouth shut – whether you cover me or not.’
‘And who’s going to do your investigation?’
‘That’s another problem. I need an international expert, or a well-known security firm. It’s a tight market and the moment I go shopping, Yanko has to know.’
‘And he’ll buy your man from under your nose.’
‘Or worse. People get killed in that game, Karl.’
‘Who said money had no smell? You’re in a bad way, young Paul. Pour yourself another whisky. I have to think.’
Karl Kruger thinking was like a stone-crusher masticating gravel. He paced up and down the vast room, puffing and belching and mumbling to himself. He wrenched open the drapes, planted his vast bulk at the casement and stood a long time staring out at the lights of the old Hanseatic city, rooted so deep in burgher money and Baltic mud that it had survived even the cataclysm of mass bombing and the post-war partition of the Reich. Its people are bankers and traders and shipbuilders and roistering sailormen, jealous of their town and its historic liberties. They are shrewd and stolid, fast friends and stubborn enemies. If Karl Kruger would buttress me I could begin to fight. Without him, I was naked to the storm. He turned back to me at last, grim and questioning.
‘I’ve met Basil Yanko. I think I understand him. He’s a genius, all head and no balls; so he plays power-games. Your George Harlequin, what is he? A playboy, a buffoon, an amateur? Money is a man’s business. This town is proof of it. Your Harlequin loiters through it as though it were a children’s game.’
‘Are you jealous of him, too, Karl?’
‘Jealous? God in Heaven! I should be jealous of a man who needs cover for fifteen million because he can’t keep track of his own accounts!’
‘Come off it, Karl! You know damn well any system can be corrupted. There’s a security man in London who gets clients by proving just that. If you’ll indemnify him, he’ll undertake to steal you blind in six months and pay the money into a trust account. What you’re really asking me is whether Harlequin’s worth saving. I say he is. You don’t have to wear sackcloth and ashes to prove you’re a good banker. You live just as well as Harlequin. You’ve played a damn sight harder in your time. Will you kill him just because you don’t like his life-style?’
‘That’s not the point. Why did Yanko pick him? Why not me? Why not half-a-dozen others we could both name? He picked Harlequin because there’s a weakness in the man as well as in your system. I want to know what it is.’
‘I’m the wrong man to ask, Karl.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s a good friend, I’m godfather to his child and I’m in love with his wife.’
‘God Almighty! So, instead of stealing her, you make yourself a martyr to brotherhood! You’re a bigger fool than I thought.’
‘Now that you know it, what’s the answer, Karl?’
‘You’re covered – on one condition.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Whether he’s on his last legs or not, Harlequin has to know. And I want first option on his shares and on his rights over other shareholdings. If he won’t consent, the deal’s off.’
‘That’s rough trading, Karl!’
‘This is Hamburg, little brother! Nothing for nothing. And keep your fly buttoned if you don’t want to catch the clap.’
‘I’ll put the deal to Harlequin.’
‘Do that. Now, about your investigator…You can’t shop in the computer market because Yanko will pre-empt every move you make. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
‘You could go to the police.’
‘We operate in too many jurisdictions. We’d make a scandal in every one.’
‘You could use private investigators.’
‘We’d still need a computer man to check back through the system.’
‘I think you need more.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Yanko has everything at his disposal…money, information, global influence. He conjures power. He can build a lie and sell it overnight to half the world. Once you engage him, you must set out to ruin him before he destroys you. That’s why I ask if George Harlequin has the guts for it. If not, he’d better sell out now, while he’s still got a market.’
‘I’ll put that to him, too, Karl.’
‘If he’s ready to fight, there’s a man in New York who can help. He has several names. His real one is Aaron Bogdanovich. He, too, is a kind of genius; but his greatest merit is that he can’t be bought.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He organises terror.’
In one instant, we were two thousand years away from the old mansion on the Alster Park. We were back in the black forest called Hamma, with the bale-fires lit, and the warriors drunk and lusting after the kill. In that visionary moment I saw the true name of our trade, a bloody battle for money and power – with the wolves waiting to eat what the axemen left behind.
Karl Kruger sat down heavily, splashed liquor into a glass and tossed it off at a gulp. Then he fixed me with a sardonic eye and quizzed me. ‘You think I’m joking, eh?’
‘No.’
‘You want to ask questions?’
‘Yes. How do you know Aaron Bogdanovich?’
‘I’m agent for his bankers.’
‘Who employs him?’
‘The State of Israel.’
‘Why would he undertake a private service?’
‘He owes me a personal debt. I brought his brother and sister out from Latvia.’
‘And what could he do for us?’
‘Almost anything I think. Terror is a flexible trade. The public sees only its crudest products – the murder of an agent, the hijacking of an airliner. In fact, we all live under a blackmailer’s thumb. Speculators debase our currency; the Arabs cut our oil supplies. In these terms, Yanko’s report to you is a terrorist act.’
‘How do I get in touch with your Aaron Bogdanovich?’
‘He runs a flowershop on Third Avenue between 49th and 50th Street. You walk in and present my note. I’d better write it now. Hilde will be here soon and we’ve got a wild night ahead of us.’
I was frayed raw. I was free, white and a long way past the age of consent. If Karl and Hilde wanted a night on the town, I was ready to keep them company. We dined at home because Karl has the best chef in Schleswig-Holstein. Hilde, who is plump, comfortable and chirpy as a spring chicken, played Wirtin for both of us. Then Karl, flushed and randy, decided to invade Saint Pauli. I couldn’t hold him; Hilde didn’t want to. So, between midnight and four in the morning, we scoured the Reeperbahn: private bars, sex shows, lesbian joints, gay clubs and sailors’ dives where Karl Kruger played the accordion and danced clog-steps on the sawdust floor. I expected him any moment to keel over with apoplexy. Instead, he closed the show with an actor’s flourish. As Hilde was unbuttoning his shirt and I was peeling off his socks, he opened one eye and declaimed:
‘You see, young Paul, if you can’t fight ’em, you do the other thing. If you can’t do either, you lie down and die.’
It was a fine ringing sentiment for the end of a boozy evening. I doubted I could make it palatable to George Harlequin, the least combative, the most civil of
men.
Thirty-six hours later, I was in Los Angeles, pacing the garden of the Bel Air Hotel with Juliette, sharing her elation at the news that George was reprieved from the death sentence, that he would be out of hospital in a week and, in another month, would be ready for light work.
Juliette was full of their plans. ‘…We’ve decided to go down to Acapulco. Lola Frank is lending us her villa. There’ll be a staff to look after us. There’s a boat and…Oh, Paul, it’ll be like a second honeymoon! I can hardly wait to get away. It’s been a terrible few weeks. I would jump every time the telephone rang. George was like a stranger, so calm and remote. It was as if he had to conserve every particle of strength against the day of the verdict. He never complained. He was always careful for me; but he was living in his own twilight country. Even when they told him the good news, he was so reserved it was almost uncanny. He smiled and thanked the doctor for his care. When we were alone, he held me very close and wept a little; then he said a strange thing: “Now I know the name of the angel.” When I asked him what he meant, he said it was something he didn’t want to explain…’
‘When can I visit him?’
‘This afternoon. Why don’t you go along and surprise him?’
‘If you’re sure…’
‘Of course. It’ll give me a chance to get my hair done and do some shopping. But you won’t let him talk business, will you?’
‘Not for too long, I promise.’
‘He’ll be so glad to see you. Oh, Paul l Isn’t it a wonderful, wonderful day!’
I thought it was a stinking hellish, day. I understood why, in the old times, bearers of ill-tidings had their throats cut. As I drove downtown to see Harlequin, I felt like cutting my own. I toyed with the idea of holding back the news, but I could not do it. Without Harlequin’s consent, I had no power to act.
When I saw him, my heart sank. He was sitting in an armchair, dressed in silk pyjamas and dressing-gown, but so pale he was almost transparent. When I took his hand, it was dry and creped. Only his smile was the same; luminous, grave, but still with a touch of mischief in it. He did not, as the sick are prone to do, claim attention for himself. He brushed off my inquiries with a shrug.