The Adventurers

by Harold Robbins

  From the proprietary manner in which they spoke about it one gathered that the Swiss had no intention of ever having to return it. When the war was over, most of the deposits would remain there because a great percentage of the depositors would not have survived, and they would have died without making adequate provision for the transfer of their funds. Thus they would properly become Swiss property. When the Germans outflanked the Maginot Line and overran France, it looked as if the Swiss were right. It was as if a curtain had suddenly been drawn across western Europe.

  It had been less than a month after that that Sergei happened to be in the bankers’ offices. Bernstein had looked at him and said, “Your father is a colonel in the German army?”

  Sergei was curious. They knew it as well as he. “Why?”

  “We should get in touch with certain of our clients,” the banker had answered, “and now there is no way we can do this.”

  “Why don’t you just go to them?” Sergei suggested. “You’re both Swiss. You should have no trouble.”

  “We couldn’t do that,” Kastele replied quickly. “The Swiss government would not permit it. It might be viewed as a hostile act by the Germans.”

  Sergei stared at them, then suddenly he realized the answers. Their clients were Jews. He didn’t speak.

  “If your father got you a permit,” Kastele said, “I’m sure we could arrange for a Swiss passport.”

  Sergei was intrigued. “You mean I would become a Swiss citizen?”

  The bankers exchanged glances. “That, too, could be arranged.”

  Sergei was thoughtful. As it stood he was neither French nor Russian. He was merely one of the many people who drifted around Europe after the last war. Stateless persons they were called. But it had been recognized that they were entitled to settle down somewhere, and most of the White Russians had done so in France. A Swiss citizenship might be very useful to him one day.

  “What would you want me to do?”

  “Merely try to locate our clients and obtain instructions about their holdings.”

  “And if they can’t be found?”

  “Try to determine if they are still alive. We will need that information to settle their accounts.”

  Sergei wondered if what he had heard was true, that the unclaimed balances were divided equally between the banks and the Swiss government. If it was true, then he could see why the bankers had a big stake in what happened. “And what would I get out of it?”

  “I’m sure we could work out an equitable arrangement,” Bernstein said. “We haven’t been such bad fellows to get along with, have we?”

  By the time Sergei left their office, he had agreed to write his father and find out what could be arranged. That had been several months ago. The reply from his father had finally arrived that morning. The day Sue Ann left.

  His father was in Paris, quartered in a suite at the same hotel at which he had been employed as doorman. Something could be done. His father would be very glad to see him once again.

  Sergei put down the empty whiskey glass. He had made up his mind to accept the offer of the bankers. Later that afternoon he would go to their offices and inform them of his decision. But first there was something else he had to attend to. He picked up the telephone and gave the operator a number.

  A woman’s voice answered.

  “Peggy,” he said quickly, “this is Sergei.”

  “Yes,” the brisk English voice replied.

  “Sue Ann is gone. How long will it take you to get the baby ready?”

  A faint note of happiness came into the voice. “The baby’s been ready all morning. I’ve been awaiting your call.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  16

  The only sound on the Avenue George V was the sound of his own footsteps on the sidewalk. Dax looked up the street toward the Champs Elysees. It was a feeling he could never quite get used to. Paris at midnight, deserted.

  The streets were empty. All the French at home in their flats behind locked doors. Fouquet’s on the corner closed, and the cafes with their deserted tables and chairs still outside. The shops, their windows usually filled with bright-colored goodies to attract the ladies, were shuttered. Paris in the summer of 1940, with no lovers strolling arm in arm pausing to kiss beneath the heavy-leafed chestnut trees.

  He pulled a thin cigar from his pocket and lit it. As he struck the match be heard footsteps and turned. A girl came out from the shadow of a doorway. In the glow of the match he could see her face. Sharp, thin, hungry.

  “Wohin gehen Sie, mein Herr?” she whispered. The sound of her German was alien to the night and clumsy on her tongue.

  He shook his head gently and spoke to her in French, then watched as she scurried back into the shadows from which she had come. He turned and began to walk again. Even the whores seemed defeated.

  It hadn’t been that way at the party he had just left. There the lights had been bright behind the heavy drawn drapes. There was music, laughter, champagne, attractive women. There were the Germans and the Frenchmen who accepted them. But after a while the party had palled. The French were too eager, the Germans too condescending, the laughter too forced. He decided to leave and had looked around for Giselle.

  He found her in the center of a group of Germans, her birdlike little French manager hovering on the fringe, and watching her with careful tiny glances. Her pert, bright face was alive and sparkling as she looked around at the men surrounding her. Giselle was an actress. She loved an audience.

  He smiled to himself. There was no point in asking her to leave. She was having too good a time. Quietly he slipped away. In the morning she would call him. Early, her voice still fuzzy with sleep, so that he would know she had left instructions with her maid to wake her. “Why did you leave without me?” she would ask reproachfully.

  “You were having too good a time.”

  “I wasn’t. I couldn’t stand them. German men are all so pompous. But I had to. Georges said so. It was business.”

  Georges always said so. Georges did not like Dax. Dax could not get him film for his cameras, or permission to make movies. Dax could only distract Giselle. And Giselle was Georges’s principal product. Without her he was just another producer.

  “Will you come over for lunch?” she would ask.

  “I’ll try.”

  “Until later then,” she would say in her sleepy, husky voice, and Dax would turn back to his desk knowing that she would go right back to sleep.

  It was more than a year now that he had known her. He saw her first at the railroad station in Barcelona. A mob was milling around the entrance.

  “What’s happening?” he asked a friend, a member of the Spanish purchasing commission.

  “It’s the movie star Giselle d’Arcy. She’s just come back from Hollywood and is on her way to Paris.”

  The name did not mean anything to him but when he saw her in the center of the crowd passing by, he knew her instantly. He could not help but know her. Her photograph had been on billboards and newspapers all over the world.

  The photographs did not do her justice. Her breasts were not as large as they seemed to be in the pictures, nor were the hips so round or the legs so long. And what the photographs did not catch was the sheer aliveness of her, the joyous vivacity of her walk.

  Dax stared and a real physical pain shot through him. It had been a long time since he had wanted a woman. Suddenly he was afire. This one. Only this one. He had to have her. It was as simple as that.

  She looked out over the crowd and caught him staring at her. Automatically she started to look away, then inexorably, as if drawn by a magnet, her eyes came back to his. He did not avert his. He saw her face pale slightly and then something in the crowd turned her away and she disappeared through the gate to the train. He followed.

  But he waited until the train was a half hour out of the station before he went looking for her. He found her alone in her compartment, Georges having gone to the lavatory.
She looked up from her magazine and saw him through the glass door. She watched silently as he opened the door. He closed it behind him and stood leaning against it. His breath constricted his chest. After a moment he said, “I’ve got to have you.”

  “Yes,” she answered, “yes, I know.” All she could feel was the sheer animal power, almost as if there were a powder keg contained within him.

  He reached down and took her hand. It was trembling slightly. “I know you,” she said, almost in a whisper, “though we’ve never met.”

  “No, not before this day. But now we have. Now, this time, this place, this day.”

  By the time Georges made his way back to the compartment, the shades were drawn and the door was locked. Nervously he knocked on the door. “Giselle, Giselle,” he called, “are you all right?”

  “Go away.” Her voice was throaty.

  He stood very still for a moment. He knew that sound; he had heard it before. He made his way to the bar and ordered a drink, then sat back in the seat and philosophically watched the countryside go by. He wondered who it was that she was with. Usually he was able to spot them in advance. He shrugged and ordered another pastis. You couldn’t win them all and, anyway, tomorrow they would be back in Paris where everything would be all right. He could control her in Paris.

  That had been more than a year ago. Many things had happened in that year. The Germans overran the Continent. France was trampled under the marching boot of the Nazis. There was a new government in Vichy. Desperately Georges tried to cling to the illusion of autonomy.

  But it wasn’t quite that easy. The Germans had the last say on everything. Now there were signs that they might allow some of the studios to go back into production, and Georges wanted to be among the first. Carefully he cultivated all the right people. The Germans and their French collaborationists. They, like everyone else, were impressed with Giselle.

  The only thing that bothered him was her attachment to Dax. It had lasted a great deal longer than he had expected. He didn’t understand it. Dax could do nothing for her, offered her nothing. Yet still she saw him. Dax never mentioned marriage, yet she showered him with gifts. Studs and cuff links of gold and diamonds.

  Georges would never understand it. It was all backward. Usually it was Giselle who received the gifts, not gave them. That was the long-time prerogative of an actress.

  Once he had gone to her with a proposition from an important German officer. Giselle had merely laughed and told him to go away.

  “But he can help us.”

  “Help you,” she said with her peculiar direct acumen. “I’m happy the way I am.”

  “Don’t you want to go back to work?”

  She shook her head. “I do but I have a feeling it wouldn’t be right. There’s beginning to be a lot of talk about the collaborationists.”

  “They’re fools!” Georges snorted. “The war is over, we are beaten.”

  “There are still Frenchmen fighting overseas.”

  “It’s 1870 all over again. This time it’s the Germans’ turn, the next it will be ours.”

  She looked at him, her large blue eyes sad. She knew how badly he wanted to return to work, how much he needed it. Without it he was nothing. “If we don’t win this time,” she said softly, “we may never have another chance.”

  But she did go to the parties and other functions he suggested. But always with Dax, never with him alone or another Frenchman, or even a German. She was determined that there be no talk about her having been a collaborationist.

  Once there she behaved normally; there were no outward signs that she was not going to cooperate. But she refused every offer with one excuse or another, and she avoided every affair that had any political significance. The proof that she had been discreet was that the average person on the street, when they saw her, still smiled and nodded. They did not avoid her or give her the contemptuously silent treatment they gave to so many of the others. As far as they were concerned she was still a star, whether she currently was making movies or not.

  Once when she and Dax were having lunch in her apartment, which overlooked the Bois de Boulogne, they had heard the sound of marching. She went over to the window and looked down at the goose-stepping Germans. After a moment she turned to Dax. “Do you think they will ever leave?”

  “Not until they’re forced out.”

  “Will it ever happen?”

  He left the window and went back to the table. He didn’t answer.

  She was suddenly angry. “You don’t care, do you? You’re not French, you’re a foreigner. Besides, you’re doing business with them. You’d do business with anyone!”

  He took the cigar from his mouth and placed it carefully in an ash tray. “I care,” he answered quietly. “I have friends who are both French and Jews. I don’t like what is happening to them but I dare not interfere. I am a representative of my government.”

  She stared at him. It was the first time she had ever heard him express himself about the war. And she sensed the anger under the pleasantness of his voice. Contritely she walked over to him. She bent and pressed her cheek against his. “I’m sorry, darling. I should have known. It’s not easy for you either.”

  He looked up into her face. “It’s easier for me than it is for you French.”

  17

  Fat Cat was waiting for him as he entered the consulate building. “There are some Germans waiting for you in the office.”

  “Oh? Who are they?”

  “I don’t know; two officers.”

  I’ll see them.”

  Fat Cat stopped in front of the door. “I’ll wait out here in case there’s any trouble.”

  Dax smiled. “Why should there be?” he asked, a faint sarcasm in his voice. “They’re our friends.”

  “They’re nobody’s friends!”

  Dax opened the office door and went in. The two officers leaped to their feet. Automatically their hands shot out. “Heil Hitler!”

  “Gentlemen.” Dax walked around behind his desk and sat down. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  The older of the two straightened up. “Permit me, your excellency.” He clicked his heels in a military bow. “Lieutenant Colonel Reiss. My assistant Lieutenant Kron.”

  Dax nodded and took a thin cigar from the box on his desk. He lit it without offering them one. “It’s late and I’m tired. Please state the purpose of this visit.”

  The Germans exchanged glances. He could see that they were not used to being so received. Noting the SS emblem on their uniforms he could understand why. They were used to evoking fear when they appeared. He smiled inwardly. To hell with them. They needed him more than he needed them.

  No agreement had been reached with the Germans over Corteguayan beef, though discussions were still going on. As a matter of fact he was to attend another tomorrow. He was aware that Spain was sending them a good share of the supplies they received from Corteguay. It was one of the prices that Franco had to pay for their past assistance.

  The colonel took out a paper from his tunic and glanced at it. He spoke a heavily accented French. “You are acquainted with one Robert de Coyne?”

  Dax nodded. “Yes, we went to school together. He is a friend of mine.”

  “You are aware of course that he is a Jew?” The colonel’s voice was thick with contempt.

  Dax’s was equally full of contempt. “I also have some friends who are German.”

  The colonel ignored the sarcasm. “Have you seen him recently?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you tonight?” the younger officer asked suddenly.

  Dax stared at him. “None of your business!”

  “I remind you, sir,” the colonel said stiffly, “that we are here on the business of the Third Reich!”

  “And may I remind you,” Dax replied angrily, “that you are in the embassy of Corteguay.” He got to his feet. “You may now leave!”

  As if by magic, the door behind them opened. The officers stood there awk
wardly.

  “You may leave, gentlemen!”

  “General Foelder won’t like this!” the younger officer said.

  Dax’s voice was cold. “You may inform your superior that after this, when he wishes to approach me, he may do so through regular diplomatic channels. This may be arranged through your own foreign ministry.”

  He turned his back as they left the room. A moment later Fat Cat was back. “What did they want?”

  Dax smiled. “You already know, why ask? Unless you’ve lost your skill at keyholes. Or have you grown so fat you can’t bend down?”

  “Have you heard from Robert?”

  “No.” A worried look crossed Dax’s face. “Nor have I heard from his sister in the past few weeks.” He was angry with himself for not having thought of it sooner. He and Caroline spoke on the telephone at least once a week.

  He had seen her only a few times and then at her house. Caroline did not go out much anymore. He still thought she should have gone to America with her father when the Germans had begun their invasion of France. But she hadn’t. In a way she was very much like her brother. She didn’t believe in running either.

  “I’d better call her,” Dax said, reaching for the telephone. He dialed the number. There was no answer. He let it ring for several minutes.

  When he put the telephone down there was genuine concern in his eyes. Someone should have answered. Even if Caroline was not in, there was always a servant or two around.

  “There’s no answer?”

  Dax shook his head silently.

  “What do you think?”

  Dax took a deep breath. “I’m afraid that our friends may be in trouble.”

  Caroline sat on the edge of the chair staring at the ringing telephone. A German sat opposite her, leaning back comfortably in his ordinary gray business suit. “Why don’t you answer it?” he asked. “It might be your brother. He may be hurt and in serious trouble.”

  Caroline tore her eyes away from the telephone. It was almost a relief not to look at it. “I haven’t heard from my brother in months. Why should he call now?”