by Chris Petit
Even Sol was getting misty-eyed. The lawyer stared hard at the shoe. Frau Schmidt wiped her eyes with a clean handkerchief. The lawyer shifted in her seat. Eventually she asked, ‘What did your husband look like?’
‘Very tall. Handsome, like an eagle. I was so proud of him.’
Another long silence, then the lawyer said in a small voice, ‘I cannot accept your claim.’
I said, ‘Surely Frau Schmidt deserves an explanation?’
‘She does. But I cannot give it. There are complications.’
Frau Schmidt, still drying her eyes, asked, ‘What sort of complications?’
The lawyer shook her head and looked miserable. Sol leered and said, ‘Get a load off your chest.’ Frau Schmidt was pushed not to snigger. Sol lit up a cigar without asking, playing the rest of the meeting as Groucho Marx. He added, ‘It’s not often you see a lawyer squirming, so we might as well sit back and enjoy it.’
Frau Schmidt said she wasn’t budging. The explanation was slow in coming. Sol and I understood at more or less the same moment, but it was Frau Schmidt who said it out loud.
‘Willi is alive!’
Willi Schmidt was indeed alive. Not only that, but he had been in to claim his account, with documentation.
Wanting to see what sort of reaction it got, I said, ‘I was with Herr Schmidt when he died in 1945. The body was identified by a colleague.’
The lawyer, confidence restored, said, ‘You must be mistaken. There is no doubting the veracity of Herr Schmidt’s claim.’
Willi Schmidt in that very office, turning up after Frau Schmidt’s initial inquiry, had raised the question of her authenticity. Willi had denied ever having been married. He had been adamant. No Frau Schmidt, not ever.
Frau Schmidt asked, ‘Does that mean you do not believe me?’
The lawyer looked uncomfortable. ‘No. I believe you. And I shall tell that to the police. They asked me to take further meetings to see if there was a case for criminal proceedings. That will not be necessary.’
It was the emotional angle she was finding hardest. Frau Schmidt had no legal recourse, yet this lawyer, to her own surprise, had ended up feeling sorry for her. Willi had lied to deny his wife’s existence. Frau Schmidt’s worst fantasy had been confirmed: Willi was a rat who had dumped her.
We were about to go when the lawyer volunteered one last piece of information. ‘If it is of any consolation, I can tell you there was nothing of value in the account. It was empty, apart from a few francs.’
Sol blurted out, ‘That’s not possible!’
‘He must have known it was empty,’ I said. ‘Why did he bother?’
‘For the deposit box,’ said the lawyer.
‘And what was in that?’
‘Only Herr Schmidt knows. You’ll have to ask him.’ But she wouldn’t tell us where he was; client confidentiality, a Swiss last laugh.
We sat in a café opposite Allen Dulles’s old house, all of us in a state of shock. Sol because he had proof that Willi was still alive; me because Willi had broken cover; and Frau Schmidt because she said she had grown so comfortable with her fabrication that she had started to believe it. The tears she had cried had been real, for her lost husband.
Hey, Willi, I thought, sitting in the café. We’re getting close enough to smell each other.
I went for a walk, leaving Sol and Frau Schmidt (it had grown impossible to think of her by any other name) drinking pear liqueurs. Even by full daylight I could feel the ghost of Dulles hovering. After the slow tick of legal time in the lawyer’s office, everything felt telescoped, and the years fell away. I could feel Willi and Dulles and Betty and Karl-Heinz crowding me, their scene shifter.
Dulles’s house appeared the same as it ever was naturally. It was a fine and solid bourgeois building, with his old apartment on the ground floor, fronting right on the street, with heavy security grilles on the windows. I remembered the bars, and the chestnut tree, and the suspended street lamps which had gone off at ten at night during wartime, giving the city an eerie, abandoned feel.
Except for the cars, there was nothing to say that I wasn’t back in 1942. The road sloped away from Dulles’s house. To the right, in a hole in the wall, a familiar set of boxed-in steps went down to the wooded riverbank. They were exactly as I remembered, different only for being covered with spray-painted graffiti. I thought of Sol’s pro-mess motto, but sadly the Swiss turned out to be boring and pseudo-American even in their subversion. Darryl Sucks had been amended to Darryl Sucks What?
Dulles had liked the steps because with one smart move you could disappear from the street and materialise on a lower level without being seen, and the treads being wooden made it hard for anyone to follow.
The space was now the resort of junkies. Halfway down, a couple loitered, making it hard to pass. ‘Hey, Dad,’ one said in English. He had mouth scabs. There was a hypodermic on the steps. I trod on it and said, ‘Whoops, boys.’ Foolhardiness, perhaps, but I wasn’t in any mind to put up with their trouble. The other one wanted to make something of it.
There is a tremendous cheap thrill for someone of my age being able to take out a gun and show it around. Why was I carrying it? I figured Maurice and his pals would be, so it seemed stupid not to. It had the desired effect. The boys held up their hands in a ‘just kidding’ gesture and swallowed hard.
The steps emerged onto a dogleg path, hidden by trees. The noise of the fast river cut out any other sounds. The back entrance to Dulles’s place was still there, a door recessed into a tall, grey garden wall way too high to climb. It was locked. Dulles used to leave it open when he was expecting visitors. I had forgotten how secluded and sinister the place was.
The path climbed and turned below Dulles’s house, by the buttress of the big suspension bridge running high over the river. In the dirt by the pillar were the remains of a bonfire, more needles, and a bunch of used condoms. The sound of the river merged with the slap of tyres on the bridge above. Metal service steps ran up the buttress to a platform, with a gap to stop the public from climbing on the substructure, a complicated mesh of steel struts. A man dressed in faded denims sat on the platform, legs dangling, and made a point of ignoring me.
I was certain I was treading in Willi’s footsteps. He too would have come this way after meeting the lawyer, for old time’s sake. I could picture him, enjoying a rare day off from being Konrad Viessmann, being Willi again, signing Willi’s name on the release form.
Hoover
ZURICH
VAUGHAN IS IN THE DOG HOUSE after his escapade. I had told Bob Ballard to keep an eye on him because Vaughan was unpredictable and a possible liability; I also wanted to see how good Ballard was, which is pretty good, in that Vaughan didn’t spot him, but not that good, because Carswell did.
But it doesn’t answer my real worry, which is that Bob, and maybe even Beate, are Carswell stooges.
Abe’s desk space looked like a small crowd of football spectators had passed through, leaving discarded Styrofoam cups and half-eaten hamburgers. Shallow tin lids served for ash trays, full of the remains of Manny’s heroic smoking efforts.
Sol asked, ‘What have you got for us?’
‘We’ve got a mole in Vesco, Viessmann’s pharmaceutical business,’ said Abe.
Manny was more cautious. ‘Might have a mole.’
Abe was in contact with the prospective mole via e-mail through a series of carefully created blinds that bounced their messages through several untraceable stages. ‘We hope,’ said Abe. ‘He knows of drugs being tested on people without their consent. And has evidence of bad drugs being dumped onto impoverished markets.’
Manny explained. Several drug companies had secret links to specific relief and aid organisations. In some instances these organisations amounted to hidden subsidiaries of those companies.
‘It’s the perfect method of control and distribution,’ said Sol, impressed by the neatness of the conceit.
Vaughan asked, ‘What about the World Health
Organisation? Don’t they monitor stuff?’
‘Like traffic cops monitor speeding,’ said Manny. ‘But that doesn’t stop anyone.’ He shrugged, lit another cigarette.
The mole had come via a regular contact of Abe’s, a previous whistle blower who had fingered the banks over their bad handling of Jewish wartime accounts and afterwards had gone underground to offer his services as an information broker and systems spy. His present name was Riese, meaning Giant. The new mole was being offered under the name of Krebs. Cancer. Manny looked ironic. ‘Star sign, not illness. I get my lungs checked every six months.’
‘He’s scared,’ said Abe. ‘Last year a journalist working to expose Vesco was killed.’
‘In a routine traffic accident, ha ha.’ Manny put in. ‘According to Krebs, a backpacker who died in Turkey in a mountain fall was an undercover journalist working on a story about aid relief and drugs company connections—particularly the role of an organisation called Faraid.’
Manny flicked ash. ‘Faraid has a reputation as a trouble-shooter. It gets in where others don’t.’
‘Or can’t,’ added Abe. ‘It functions a lot in cesspool countries. It’s the Foreign Legion of aid relief organisations. Mobile, compact, and tough.’
Abe had chased Faraid down a maze of false company setups and offshore locations, and had come up with the slenderest of connections, which he nevertheless believed was the first strand in a thread that would prove Faraid was run by Vesco.
The connection was a name. Van Boogaert.
‘A tale of two Dutchmen,’ said Manny.
Abe said, ‘The other’s called van der Valden.’ He had a print-out on van Boogaert. It showed a Dutch military background, specialising in hostage negotiations and counterterrorism, a subject on which he had become a leading expert.
Abe said, ‘Van Boogaert went solo and made a lot of money selling terrorist scenarios to governments before working out there was more money in the private sector.’
‘He became head of security at guess where?’ asked Manny. Vesco. Van Boogaert was a board member of Vesco and a founder of Faraid.
The Dutchman was also listed as being a member of a quasi-religious body with a Latin name that translated as ‘Arms of Christ.’ I remembered it well. It was an extreme right organisation with occasional CIA funding, a direct successor to the anti-Communist arm of the church which had accommodated the fascist riffraff during the second world war.
Manny asked if we remembered the terrorist siege on a Dutch train which had made headlines in the 1970s. He turned to Abe, who said, ‘I’m pretty pleased with this nugget. Van Boogaert was one of the hostage negotiators. He was the guy delegated to deal with the media. The next bit was pure hunch.’
He called up an item on the screen. It was a programme shot list pulled from the ITN archive, which translated into a terse shorthand log of the news item filmed and coverage involved.
WS HOSTAGE TRAIN, plus GVs of vicinity, incl. WS negotiators’ command post. INTERVIEW with COL VAN BOOGAERT: states optimism at the way negotiations going. [Dur: 00.45 secs. Interviewer: DOMINIC CARSWELL.]
‘Where do you dig up this stuff?’ I asked.
Abe said it was just gumshoe work. Where once he would have had to make a lot of house calls, and several trips abroad, now he could sit and do it from home. ‘Provided you know where to look.’
‘On the matter of Vesco’s security,’ Manny said, ‘Carswell is the main supplier of its surveillance systems. Our friend Dominic is a nonexecutive board member of Faraid. Carswell has a TV company office in Ankara on the same floor as Faraid and an electronic security company called Systemsinc. Systemsinc has further offices in Budapest and London. Company director?’
Abe said, ‘DC himself. Systemsinc in Budapest shares an office floor with a wholly owned subsidiary of Faraid called—and this stretches the imagination—Fai raid, and some registered charity organisation we can’t identify, named the Kalona Institute.’
Manny said, ‘We checked it against Vesco because everything else connects up. Nothing yet.’
Abe brought up several images sent by Krebs, showing tough-looking men entering or leaving buildings, and getting in and out of cars. The pictures were not well defined and looked hastily grabbed, but their point was clear. These men were there to protect the privacy of the company.
Vaughan asked, ‘Just where is Vesco based?’
Manny said everywhere and nowhere. The company produced several high-street brand products that were ubiquitous, including a shampoo range. But these had been recently subcontracted to another concern, and Vesco seemed to be in the process of relocating in the Third World and the Far East. ‘Cheap labour,’ Manny shrugged.
‘And a less regulated market,’ finished Abe. ‘But if Vesco is anywhere, it’s in Turkey. Turkey’s the key. Carswell, Viessmann, and van Boogaert all connect through Turkey.’
‘Faraid is well dug in there, though it doesn’t publicise itself there or anywhere else.’
The question was whether Krebs would break cover and meet. Abe wasn’t sure. Manny looked doubtful. There was another side to the story, according to Abe’s original mole, which made Krebs a tricky prospect. He had been fired by Vesco for stealing drugs. Abe said he knew this sounded like standard disinformation, but unfortunately it was true. Krebs was a doper, eager to sell information for cash.
So, we had a flaky mole. I asked if Krebs had given them anything by way of a sweetener. That was the standard method. Some juice, payola, and maximum garbage once the money was down.
‘Two things,’ Manny told me. ‘The other Dutchman, van der Valden, is also based in Budapest, but spends time in Turkey. The guy has a background in drugs research and is now some kind of sales broker. According to Krebs, Valden will talk. At a price.’
‘Talk about what?’ I asked.
‘We pay, we find out,’ said Abe.
Krebs also had a line on Viessmann. Apparently he was now just the titular head of the company and no longer knew the score. Manny said that Viessmann seemed to have moved into a realm of his own. ‘I guess you’d call it saintly disassociation. He spends most of his time doing good works and running some model refugee camp. I checked it against the Kalona Institute and got nothing. Anyway, the word is, Viessmann’s got God on the line. A faction at Vesco is annoyed by having to underwrite some cranky utopian dream, plus putting up with a man way past retirement age. But everyone agrees on one thing. Viessmann looks terrific and has the energy of someone half his age.’
Sol caught my eye. ‘I wish he were dead already, so I could have a few days to myself not having to think about him. You can’t punish a man who has repented.’
I asked Abe again if he thought Krebs would meet. Face to face there would be a chance of evaluating the quality of his information. ‘We can ask,’ Abe said.
Krebs came back with a demand for a heap of money, which we didn’t have, even after we had beaten him down five thousand. Manny told Abe to ask if U.S. dollars would be acceptable, and the answer came back affirmative. Sol was grinning by then, Abe, too. I repeated that we didn’t have the money. When Manny went and fetched a pile of dollars from out back, we were all laughing. I hadn’t realised he was still active. Manny lit another cigarette, with hands that had forged for Himmler.
Vaughan
ZURICH
KREBS AGREED TO A preliminary one-on-one to see the colour of our money, in a car park on the shore of a small lakeside town, after dark. I got delegated once it had been established that he spoke English. Everything was going undercover again, and I didn’t like it.
It was squally over the lake. I had done my best to see I wasn’t followed, but I was no expert. Krebs turned out to be not the wired skinny guy I had been expecting but a bulky man who looked more like he belonged in the Vesco security programme.
We stayed in our cars and talked with the windows down. First he wanted to make sure I had the money, then proceeded to lecture me on pharmaceuticals. Krebs had a bore’s voic
e. ‘Billions of profit,’ he said, and lit a Pall Mall.
He explained that Vesco’s trick was to control everything. Through carefully screened outlets it offloaded surplus requirements while guaranteeing maximum tax write-offs, including dumping old drugs into the charity market. ‘Example,’ said Krebs. ‘Vesco wanted to donate a large supply of an influenza vaccine to the Philippines, but was told it was the wrong strain for the local population. It ended up there anyway, via another route and a different set of charities. Vesco had known it would be useless, but got its tax write-off.’
He moved on to generic drugs, explaining that he wasn’t talking about copies of market drugs produced legally after a patent had lapsed. He meant those being produced illegally in violation of the patent. These, and the large sales of substandard and counterfeit drugs packaged to look like the real thing, accounted for a tenth of the world market, maybe more. The big companies spent fortunes hiring people to chase and close them down, but Vesco took the line, if you can’t beat them, join them.
‘Are you saying Vesco operates its own black market?’ I asked.
Krebs chain-lit another Pall Mall. ‘Oral contraceptives. There’s a repackaging exercise. Nearly a million lookalike sachets produced for a test run. The pills inside are useless. What happens? They “get stolen,” in quotes, before they can be destroyed, and end up on the black market in South America and, hey, lots of unexpected babies. That was one of van Boogaert’s operations. Go to Tijuana, and you will find Vesco Méjico, except it doesn’t call itself that. It’s a handful of people in a tin hut repackaging drugs past their expire date, pushing the date on a couple of years. It’s all profit, man.’ Krebs looked at his watch. ‘Time for the money.’