The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

“You’re getting ready to go to Bordeaux, aren’t you? And I assume from the fact that you’re carrying that uniform that you mean to do so representing yourself as a British officer.”

  “Just spit it out, Nell.”

  Much to his surprise it was Eddie who answered.

  “You can’t just con the French out of the wine, Joe.”

  Wilderness sat down on the spare chair, so obviously set out for him, facing the three of them—“prisoner at the bar.”

  “I never said anything about a con.”

  “Whenever you wear that uniform, there’s summat dodgy going down, Joe.”

  “Eddie. I’m just going to ask about the wine. Is it still there? To whom does it belong? Do you think I stand a better chance of getting answers dressed as an RAF corporal or a lieutenant of the Welsh Guards?”

  Nell said, “Why ask? Why not let be?”

  “It’s a loose end.”

  “Europe is a loose end, France is a very loose end, Germany is the raggedyest end of all. You cannot gather up every thread. And you would not be gathering up these if you did not think there was profit in it.”

  “Do you think so little of me, Nell?”

  “You took a bribe to let a Nazi go.”

  “No, that is simply not true. Wölk bribed me after the Americans had told me I had to give him his soddin’ Persilschein. I almost binned it. I opened it out of curiosity . . . Pandora’s box . . . and once I did that . . . well, the wine became ownerless.”

  “The Americans?” she said. “Or just one American?”

  “Fine. It was Frank. Frank in his official capacity. Frank told me the Kommandatura had decided on Wölk’s reinstatement—Wölk and hundreds of others.”

  Erno said, “It’s true, Nell. I have heard this from half a dozen people. The Americans are putting the Nazis back in their old jobs. All is forgiven in the interests of efficiency.”

  “Forgiven but not forgotten. And it says nothing of what Joe is about to do.”

  “You think I will steal the wine?”

  “If you get the chance, I know you will.”

  “Nell, what would you have me do?”

  “It’s pointless asking you not to go . . . instead I would ask this of you. If you are serious about gathering up loose ends then . . . find the heirs of the man Wölk robbed. Where you can create justice, create it.”

  Wilderness said, “Eddie, Erno? Do you agree with Nell?”

  Erno nodded.

  Eddie said, “Yes. She’s right. We can’t work this con. It’s wrong.”

  “Then we won’t.”

  §126

  Upstairs, back in their own room, Nell slapped Wilderness across the face as hard as she could.

  “Why did I have to be your conscience, Wilderness?”

  Wilderness said nothing. Tasted blood. Looked back at her without flinching. If she was going to hit him again, so be it.

  “Without me would you even have a conscience?”

  In bed they lay awake, back to back, a no-man’s-land of vacant sheet between them.

  Hours passed. He could hear her breathing, and surely she could hear him? They each knew the other was not sleeping.

  Then Nell said, “What did you mean by ‘Pandora’s box’?”

  “It’s a Greek myth—”

  “I know that.”

  “Then its meaning should be obvious. Once you open the box, whatever comes out can never be put back in.”

  “The wine? The Frenchman? The matter of ownership?”

  “Yes.”

  “I regret to say you are right.”

  “Perhaps I should never have opened it.”

  “But you did. And now you cannot walk away from this.”

  §127

  Lawton Frères Wine Merchants,

  Quai de Bacalan, Bordeaux

  Wilderness would have put Auguste Lawton at about seventy-five. Short, bald with wisps, watery blues eyes paled into transparency, bespectacled, dapper—a sophisticated, upper-class Frenchman, who for unfathomable reasons spoke English with a faint Irish accent.

  He heard Wilderness out, nodding patiently once in a while.

  “Forgive me, Lieutenant Tatten-Brown, but you are just a boy . . . ”

  Exactly what Wölk had said to him.

  Wilderness bit his tongue.

  “Your war was spent where . . . school . . . university?”

  “Yes. I’ve never been in combat. I was called up after the war ended.”

  “Combat isn’t quite the issue. I too have never fired a shot in anger. Too old for both world wars, and a babe in arms during the War of 1870. No, I meant the experience of war. Battle might be unimaginable, and we prize the artists who recall it or imagine it for us, do we not . . . Homer, Goya, Tolstoy. Can you imagine occupation? Do you know what we went through here in Bordeaux, keeping the semblance of normality?

  “The first phase might have been the worst. The first three months after Dunkirk. Being regarded as the defeated and everything we owned the spoils of war. Theft, looting, wanton destruction.

  “Some of our finest vintages disappeared down the throats of men who would not know Château Margaux from Château Wicklow . . . even more went on the backs of lorries to be shipped back to the Reich. I have it on good authority that Göring stole eighty thousand bottles from a single cave in Paris.

  “But . . . we had a month or more before the Germans arrived, knowing all the time that they most certainly would arrive. Our bricklayers had never been so gainfully employed. Every merchant and négociant in Bordeaux bricked up some part of their caves . . . some even moved wine out of the city and sealed it up in caves, not caves but caves . . . another sank two thousand bottles in his pond . . . and one of my oldest friends picked out his best two hundred bottles and vowed he would drink every single one before the Boche banged on his door . . . he got through less than a hundred and fifty but one has to admire the effort.

  “Then, the chateaux were taken over. Do you know how Haut-Brion spent the war? As a rest and recreation home for Luftwaffe officers. In Mouton Rothschild the Wehrmacht used priceless paintings for target practice, and at Cos d’Estournel they pinged bullets off the bells in the towers, just to hear them ring.

  “But, things settled down. The Germans appointed Weinführers to every region. Men who knew their job. Ours was a decent man. But from then on he was our only buyer, there was only one market, one customer, for French wine . . . and as they shipped more and more, so wine production fell . . . no men to prune the vines, no horses to work the land . . . a shortage of bottles, a shortage of copper sulphate . . . by 1942 wine production was barely half of what it had been in 1939 and they took more and more of less and less.

  “We resisted, of course we resisted. Silently. We hid our fine wines and shipped the pisse de cheval to Germany. It didn’t always work, but many a good bottle stayed home while someone in Germany drank our worst wine from a bottle with a fake label. We have a phrase for that—vin de trois hommes, two men to hold down a third as he will only drink it if forced.

  “Things changed. That brief if ambivalent stability was spent by 1943. Two things changed drastically—the Germans began shipping Bordeaux Jews east, and the Maquis had become organised and ubiquitous, and there were reprisals.

  “This brings me to my old friend Henri-Pierre Dukas. He was not a Jew, nor was he in the Maquis . . . but all his sons were. Dominic, Jean-Jacques, and Régis.

  “Knowing that he was at risk, Henri-Pierre decided to . . . consolidate, I choose that word carefully . . . to consolidate his wine. He was nothing to do with the wine trade—he was a publisher of crime novels . . . in the trashy American style of private eyes, hoodlums and fast women . . . but they had sold in the millions and Henri-Pierre became wealthy, and he put some of his wealth into wine. He’d been a regular buyer, but i
n 1934 he bought four vintages en primeur—Lafite-­Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, and Haut-Brion. We have always received an allocation from the four ‘first growth’ chateaux, and Henri-Pierre had bought two hundred cases of each, a total of nine thousand six hundred bottles.

  “He asked us to set them aside, a hole in our caves where the Boche would never find them. At the last minute he added forty cases of Mouton Rothschild ’29 which had been in the cellar of his own home. Hence the figure you have in front of you. Ten thousand and eighty. We redrew the certificate of ownership that May—that is the document you now have. Henri-Pierre was insistent on paying for storage for twenty-five years, until 1968. An odd thing to do, but it shows you how apprehensive, if not fatalistic, he was.

  “Two months later a train destined for Germany was derailed east of Mérignac. The Maquis killed very single German on the train, and the Jews being transported fled into the countryside. It was common knowledge that the Dukas brothers led the local Maquis. The Boche arrested Henri-Pierre, and announced that they would shoot him unless his sons surrendered themselves. What they did not know, what no one knew, was that two of the brothers had been killed in the raid on the train, and the third badly wounded. There could be no surrender.

  “Of course, they did not shoot Henri-Pierre. Once the track was repaired, they put him on the next train east.

  “Three weeks later, this arrived.”

  All the time Auguste had been talking, two documents had sat on the desk between him and Wilderness. The folded foolscap certificate of ownership and a small brown envelope of wartime economy paper. He slid the envelope across.

  Wilderness opened it. Read the single page.

  “May I ask what this means?”

  “It is a deed of transfer, whereby Henri-Pierre Dukas transferred ownership of the wine to one Rüdiger Wölk. It is signed, witnessed, and dated.”

  “But hardly legal?”

  “The problem is it is. The signature is Henri-Pierre’s.”

  “But it was done under duress.”

  “I know that. You know that. But what proof do we have? And I think at this point, Lieutenant Tatten-Brown, you know more than I do and that I have talked quite enough. Who is Rüdiger Wölk?”

  “He was an official of the Berlin railways. In innocence, he ran passenger trains through Berlin’s stations. In guilt, he oversaw the marshalling yards in the east where people were herded into cattle trucks and shipped to death camps.”

  “A Nazi?”

  “Yes. He dispatched thousands to Auschwitz.”

  “Am I to assume that was Henri-Pierre’s fate?”

  “Treblinka is more likely. The journey from Bordeaux to Auschwitz would be unlikely to have taken him through Berlin. The Nazis tried not to draw any more attention to what they were doing than was necessary. A train to Treblinka would have passed through Berlin. They might have chosen that point to turn their prisoners off one train and onto another. It’s not unheard of. That’s when Monsieur Dukas met Wölk. He bribed Wölk, and Wölk cheated him.”

  Auguste removed his glasses, tilted his head back slightly, and pinched the top of his nose as though fighting back tears.

  “How odd to still be shocked by what one has always known.”

  “I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you.”

  “Is this man Wölk in British custody?”

  “No. I’m afraid not.”

  “But you confiscated the certificate of ownership?”

  Being Tatten-Brown was in itself a lie, but if he could get through this meeting and utter just one lie, Wilderness would be relieved.

  “Yes,” he lied.

  “Then perhaps you should be its custodian, as I see no proper resolution to this matter.”

  Auguste slid the certificate back to Wilderness.

  “I was thinking,” Wilderness replied. “Of Monsieur Dukas’s heirs. The boy who was wounded in ’43 . . .”

  “Was dead by ’44. No, there are no heirs. Henri-Pierre was an only child. There are no cousins, no nephews. The Dukas family was originally German. From the Hamburg area I believe. But after the War of 1870 no one ever mentioned their origins again. There might be distant relatives in Germany. Who knows. Europe has lost its link with much of its own history. Every church—bombed by one side or the other, it really doesn’t matter which—was a repository of record. Many of them are gone now. We may never get back the Europe we knew.”

  “But . . . supposing someone were to turn up . . . supposing someone were to present themselves as the owner of Monsieur Dukas’s wine?”

  “Clutching the document you have?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I would feel obliged to call the police. The wine is . . . what would be the word? . . . the wine is the object of a war crime. A crime I cannot prove, and nor, I fear, can you . . . but we both know it happened. I would not set myself up as judge. I would leave that to others. And in order to do that my first recourse would be to call the police.”

  He drew the brown envelope back to his side of the desk, opened one of the drawers and dropped it in.

  “It’s past noon, Lieutenant. I have been preoccupied, but my manners have not yet deserted me. Would you care for a glass? Nineteen forty-five was our best vintage ever. A small harvest but a rich one. A gift from God, as though peace and freedom were not their own rewards. Far too young to drink now, of course, but I believe I can find a ’34 that might convince you your journey was not entirely wasted.”

  VI

  Walls & Bridges

  Где говорят деньги, там молчит совесть.

  Where money speaks, conscience is silent.

  (Russian proverb)

  §128

  Pariser Platz, East Berlin: November 1965

  “I didn’t steal ten thousand bottles of claret, Yuri. I don’t have ten thousand bottles of claret.”

  “Split hairs. You have the certificate of ownership—the one that Nazi gave you back in ’47—and don’t tell me you haven’t. To have lost it or thrown it away would be stupid, and you’re not stupid.”

  “Did you set this up just to get your hands on the booze?”

  “No. But I knew Masefield was Burne-Jones’s man. Just as you are Burne-Jones’s man. If I offered to trade Masefield, who else would he have sent but you. And as you’re here . . . let’s talk wine.”

  “I’m giving you Liubimov. A far bigger fish than Masefield. Why on earth would I give you ten thousand bottles of claret?”

  “Give? Did I say ‘give’?”

  “You’re losing me here, Yuri.”

  “Find out the current market price of the wine and I will top it by ten per cent. And I pay cash. Dollars.”

  “Ten per cent?”

  “I can sell on at better than that.”

  “Back home?”

  Yuri nodded.

  “You’ll sell on to all your old cronies in Moscow? Every apparatchik in every rural dacha gets to drink first growth vintage claret?”

  Yuri nodded.

  “I take your point, even though you state it silently. Pearls, swine, Russians. And no, not perhaps every old crony. And not every apparatchik. I wouldn’t waste a drop on Khrushchev. But it’s enough to give me a more comfortable old age than I can expect as a hero of the Soviet Union. You can’t eat medals. And I am looking to my old age, Joe. Think of it as my pension.”

  Wilderness wondered for a moment if Yuri was joking, and could find nothing in that walnut of a face to make him think he was.

  Yuri eased his backside off the stone he’d been sitting on for the last five minutes.

  “Now, let us walk a while. My arse has gone to sleep and we would appear to have Unter den Linden to ourselves.”

  “You mean you’ve had it closed off.”

  “If you got it, baby, flaunt it
.”

  “Yuri. It’s not going to be as straightforward as you think. Rüdiger Wölk—the Nazi—is still the owner of the wine. The Frenchman made it over to him. Under duress, but actually the paperwork was legal. The French acknowledged this, but say they regard Wölk as a war criminal and would call the cops if there were any attempt to claim or remove the wine.”

  “Hmm . . . as you English say, they sent you away with flea in your ear.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And where is this Herr Wölk now?”

  “I don’t know. He’d only be in his mid-fifties, he may still be in his job, he might even be respectable or prosperous. I haven’t given him a lot of thought over the last fifteen years.”

  “I have. Not the last fifteen years, but the last fifteen days. He left the Berlin railways in ’61. We had, after all, made his job all but impossible. We chopped the railways up like yesterday’s spaghetti. He went into private haulage, air freight and such, and, as you have suggested, prospered. He is a wealthy man. He has a villa out in Dahlem, an apartment in Charlottenburg, a summer home in the South of France, a Mercedes, a Maserati, one of your British mini-cars . . . and a chauffeur. I know. I asked Nell.”

  “Nell?”

  “You think I would come to Berlin and not get in touch? Her mother was . . . the love of my life.”

  Wilderness let this go. He had no wish to discuss Nell’s mother—a woman he’d never met—and had a temptation to ask about Nell that he would resist.

  “So, Joe . . . who would you like the papers transferred to?”

  “What?”

  “We can snatch Wölk any time. Dahlem to the Glienicke . . . what? . . . fifteen minutes, twenty? A pleasant holiday in the DDR . . . just what he needs. And his signature on a transfer of ownership.”

  “You want me to sanction a kidnapping?”

  “Do you really care what happens to Herr Wölk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell me what you want.”

  “If you snatch Wölk . . . it has to be seamless . . . no cock-ups . . .”

  “We’ve done this before, Joe.”

  “And once he’s signed . . . he vanishes without trace . . . no dumping him back on our side . . . no gulag . . . no shallow grave . . . dig it deep.”