by Morris West
I knew that he was putting me through my paces, testing what Tanaka had told him about me. I did not blame him. I gave him full marks for style and effort. After all, he had set the whole project in motion. He had to be sure I would not fumble my part of it.
We talked about Tanaka’s conviction that a Middle East war was imminent. Leibig was more hopeful: ‘I believe that there can be a bottom line compromise. Unfortunately the risks of war increase daily. However, precisely because of the danger our project assumes a very special importance…Historically, you see, German involvement in Russian trade goes back to the twelfth century, which was about the time the Hanseatic League began to come into existence. The north Germans controlled all the Baltic trade in the East. In the West, the Rhinelanders were dominant in the Low Countries and England. Gradually their interests merged. They began to co-operate to suppress piracy, to provide navigational aids like beacons and lighthouses, buoys and pilots. They agreed a common code of trading practice which came to be known as the “Law of Lübeck”, because Lübeck was the key city of the Baltic network which included Visby, Novgorod, Riga, Tallinn and Gdansk. By the close of the thirteenth century, all North German towns and their trading bases abroad were joined in the League. The old word hanse means just that: an association of those with like interests. My family were originally Lübeckers, but one of my ancestors moved to Hamburg…I’m very proud of that tradition. Every young man in those days had to do a term of service at a kontor, an overseas trading post of the League. All the buildings were corporately owned. The traders lived under the “Law of Lübeck” and if they broke the discipline were kicked out, excommunicated. They even had a word for it: “unhansing”…It was this tradition, you see, which enabled us to settle so easily into Japan in the Meiji period. We weren’t just merchant adventurers, we weren’t colonisers; we were old-style Baltic traders, keeping ourselves to ourselves…I hope I’m not boring you, Mr Langton.’
‘On the contrary. You’re giving me fresh insights which I badly need.’
‘There’s much that people have forgotten. For example, who except the historians remembers that after the Russian revolution there was an autonomous German Volga Republic in the Soviet Union? Nearly seventy per cent of its inhabitants were of German stock, descendants of the original settlers invited by the Empress Catherine. The Republic lasted until 1941, when Stalin abolished it, split the territory between Saratov and Stalingrad and deported the German inhabitants to Siberia. However, the real point is that the ethnic and psychological links are already established. Our new Germany is the natural begetter of industrial and commercial reform in Russia…’
‘So why have you chosen to make this a joint exercise with Japan?’
‘Commonsense, Mr Langton.’ He was quite precise about it. ‘Common interest – and the simple facts of geography. The line of communication between Moscow and Vladivostok is too long, too vulnerable to climatic and ethnic influences. So we cut the distance in half.’
‘And divide the spoils?’
He was obviously angry, but he controlled himself very well. ‘I’m not sure I understand your meaning, Mr Langton. The word you use, beute, has an ugly sound. In English you would call it “booty”, “plunder”, would you not? We are not talking war. We are discussing a commercial proposition equitable to all parties.’
‘I’m glad to hear it, because that’s the situation I’ve agreed to mediate. I just have to be sure we’re all working from the same text…Please! I don’t mean to be offensive; but you’re testing me; you can’t blame me for giving you the same treatment.’
He thought about that for a moment and then relaxed again into good humour. ‘Clearly you have some reservations either about your role or the matter of the conference itself. Can you tell me what they are?’
‘Let’s not even call them reservations. Let’s just say I’m a born sceptic, and I know there is no such thing as a free lunch. You, Tanaka and the other members of the consortium are supplying the meal – a huge technical infrastructure of production and processing, a new transport system, road, rail and air, and even retail outlets. It’s a wonderful scheme. It could revolutionise the social and political life of the country, but who’s picking up the tab?’
‘In the beginning it’s external funding. We’ve undertaken to raise all the capital for the first two years of operation.’
‘Against what security? Who pays the interest on the funds? What tenure do you have? What tax arrangements? Who is your guarantor of last resort?’
‘All these matters are covered in the outline report. Tanaka assured me he had put it in your hands and that you had read it.’
‘True. However, the report Tanaka gave me was in Japanese.’
‘Which I understand you speak, read and write fluently.’
True again. That’s where my problem begins. I’m very conscious of nuances and qualifications in the language which may not be apparent to others. What was the original language of the document?’
‘German. I wrote the first draft myself and did the final editing before it went to print.’
‘And who did the translation into Japanese?’
Tanaka arranged that. My Japanese is good, but I was not prepared to rely on it in legal matters. We had the translation checked and certified by a linguist on our Embassy staff. Are you suggesting…?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m doing with you what I did with Tanaka, insisting on a verbal rundown, which will express your intentions more clearly than the briefing document. We can address ourselves to the text itself after lunch.’
‘Good. I’d like that. I have to tell you, Mr Langton, although my company has been trading here for a hundred and thirty years, we learn something new every day.’
‘Has Tanaka made his intentions clear to you?’
‘I believe,’ Leibig answered with a certain hesitation, ‘I believe I’m interpreting them correctly. He needs sources of raw materials – timber, minerals, foodstuffs. He needs markets for his manufactured goods. He wants, as if they were the fabled city of gold, the return of the Kuril Islands. That issue sticks like a fishbone in his throat. Personally, I think he’d be crazy to insist too hard just at this moment.’
‘Perhaps not so crazy.’
His head came up like that of a snake ready to strike. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because his peers in the keiretsu, the big family of bankers and industrialists, are scared of a commitment to the Soviets. They know it could be a bottomless pit, devouring money. However, if the Kuril Islands were handed back as part of the deal, Tanaka would become a national hero overnight.’
‘A triumph which he might not live to enjoy. You know he’s a sick man?’
‘I learned it only last night.’
‘He told you?’
‘No. Miko did.’
A gleam of appreciative lechery showed in Leibig’s blue eyes. He nodded approval. ‘Now, that’s quite a lady. I’ve been tempted more than once to bid for her.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I couldn’t afford it, my friend! I’d have a war on two fronts. Tanaka would chop me off at the ankles. My own people would have my head!’ He gave an open, happy laugh. ‘I like Oriental women. But not enough to die for! I’m still a Lübecker, remember. The old rule of the kontor was that members could have local concubines, but they could not marry without the consent of the group. Our family always observed that rule. Children born on the wrong side of the blanket – and there were a few of those! – were supported, educated and offered jobs in the company. But marriage, never! Which reminds me, I’ve taken the liberty of arranging a lunch at my home. You will meet a few of the people with whom you’ll be working in Bangkok. I suggest we walk. It’s quicker on foot than in a taxi.’
My office was two blocks off the Ginza. The building was owned by Tanaka, so I got the lease at a discount rate, which would still have sent me broke in London or Manhattan. However, I did have space and light and an airy stretch of studio wher
e my designers and layout people could work in comfort. The surrounding area abounded in small restaurants, sushi joints and clubbish bars. The Ginza was its weekday self: a throng and press of earnest people – the genus salary-man and his dutiful handmaidens – busy as ants about company business. Among them we blue-eyed, long-nosed foreigners stood out like a pair of sore thumbs.
As we jostled our way through the surge of bodies, I wondered what strange stew would be cooked out of the exotic ingredients of the Bangkok conference. Leibig, Tanaka and myself were already an odd enough combination. I was a man from Australia, the last continent before the penguins at the South Pole, a vast emptiness with a population of only seventeen million people, an unstable blend of European migrant tribes, Asians and a remnant of aboriginal peoples. We were avid tourists and hustling carpetbaggers, sitting on enormous untapped mineral wealth and piles of unsold grain and wool, while above us the teeming millions of South-East Asia sweated out subsistence and their traders bargained hard for a larger and larger foothold on our shores.
The history of our aboriginal people was shrouded in the mists of time – forty, fifty thousand years at least. It was recorded only in the memories of those tribal elders who were called the Keepers of the Dreaming. They could not, would not, share it with us, the latecomers, the spoilers, the genocides.
Our own history on the continent was pitiably short. For the oldest families, it was a bare two hundred years. For the newest, the post-war Europeans, the boat people from Vietnam and Cambodia, the refugee students from China, it was shorter yet. They were alien seed, putting down fragile roots in a darkling, hostile forest. Their psychic existence was a daily crisis.
I was lucky because my father had endowed me with a talisman that made nonsense of time and frontiers. On the other hand Carl Leibig was a European, born during the age of Aquarius in the resurgent Germany. For him the ruffian triumphs of the thousand-year Reich, the horrors of the Holocaust, the ruinous twilight of defeat, were tribal histories he refused to share. He had not been born then. He did not believe in guilt by inheritance. The only tradition he embraced wholeheartedly was that of the old traders, who lived in the kontor on foreign soil, leaving the paladins to make war at home. Even so he discovered very early that, while he could happily abdicate the unshared past, his rivals in commerce were always ready to remind him of it.
This was Tanaka’s dilemma too. His country and his family had survived the ignominy of defeat and occupation. In a swift reversal of history they had colonised their conquerors and turned them into economic allies or financial vassals. Yet they had still not succeeded in laying the ghosts of Nanking and Manchuria and the Burma railway and the Bataan death-march. The ‘soft, moist people’ of popular Japanese fiction were still remembered abroad as the heartless warriors who walked the way of the samurai, glorifying death in life.
Now, we three were called to be midwives at the birth of a prodigy – a capitalist economy wrenched from the worn-out womb of Russia’s socialist revolution. Like all midwives, we were summoned for our skills; but we could give no guarantees on what we might deliver: a stillbirth, a monster, a wonder-child. Whatever the outcome, we would demand to be paid. It was perhaps too much to hope that we might earn a blessing as well.
Leibig’s house was a surprise. The entrance was at street level: a heavy wooden door between a bookstore and a small hotel of the kind frequented by salary-men who spent their working days in Tokyo and returned to their families only at weekends. The door was lined with steel plate and fitted with an electric dead-lock, opened by a push-button code.
Behind the door was a narrow alley which opened on to a classic Japanese garden, contrived with rocks and waterfalls, dwarf trees and flowering shrubs. The greenery almost concealed a large traditional Japanese house, which had been cunningly modernised, with air-conditioning, central heating and fire protection. The interior was a careful combination of European comfort and Japanese decorative economy.
The only visible help was a young and very spruce German manservant, who served us drinks and informed us that we had about twenty minutes before the other guests arrived. It was clear that Leibig wanted as much private time with me as he could get; I, too, needed to inform myself a little more about the self-possessed Lübecker. I asked him how all this protected space could exist in modern Tokyo, where land values were an astronomical madness. He explained with obvious satisfaction.
This place and the blocks which front the street were a grant, made to my family during the Meiji period in recognition of our contribution to Japan’s industrial development. After the war, we were put under great pressure by one of the big banking houses to sell or to develop. We declined for a long time. Then, the usual pattern, we began to be harassed by a local Yakuza group. Finally, we compromised. We retained title to the land. We reserved this rear portion, with the existing dwelling, for ourselves; and we sold a seventy-five year development lease to the bankers. We have the best of the bargain, of course. This place is an oasis of sanity in an urban madhouse. However, since nobody sees us anymore, nobody gets jealous. Very Japanese, wouldn’t you say?’
There it was again: the sudden thrust of the probe, the unspoken assumption that I would somehow side with the Europeans against the Asians. However, this was not the time for confrontations. I smiled and shrugged. The game’s the same everywhere. Only the tactics change. The Americans try to bully you into a boiler-plate contract; the British have raised incoherence to a fine art; the Chinese make you walk ten miles to advance one. That’s what I’m paid to deal with.’
He gave me a sidelong quizzical look and said, Tou haven’t mentioned how we Germans do business.’
That’s because I’m waiting for you to instruct me. After all, you are one of my principals.’
‘Always the diplomat, eh, Gil?’
‘My father used to say that the best diplomat is the one who knows how to tell the truth – and who knows when the other fellow is lying.’
At that moment the first of his luncheon guests was announced: a big, untidy fellow in his mid-sixties, with a wide smile and shrewd, unblinking eyes. I recognised him instantly: Sir Pavel Laszlo, Hungarian by birth, Australian by nationality, principal shareholder of a national airline, and an international freight and transport group already solidly established in the United States and the Western and Eastern zones of Europe. I had worked with him twice before, the first time at a pan-Pacific tourist conference, the second at a seminar on airport safety in Jakarta. Our conversation was in German because, as he announced shamelessly, The Germans have never bothered to learn Hungarian and we mustn’t be rude to our host…’ Then he plunged straight into business: ‘How much briefing have they given you?’
‘I’ve had all the Japanese papers. Carl is giving me his original German copy. However, the outline plan is clear. I’d like to hear your end of it.’
‘It’s all summed up in one word – transport. This is a vast and ambitious plan to feed three hundred million people before they take to the streets in hunger riots. My job is to help to plan an adequate transportation system for the whole of the Soviet continent. The present network – road, rail and air – is obsolescent and quite inefficient. We have to reorganise existing resources and pump in new ones as fast as possible…The first job, as I see it, is to make a deal with the military so that their manpower, rolling stock and aircraft can be used for civilian needs. That’s a high policy matter. I’m trying to persuade Carl here that we should have an armed forces transport specialist with us in Bangkok. At the moment all he can think about is bankers.’
‘Because without money we can’t move.’ Leibig was suddenly defensive. ‘Even Tanaka is finding problems with his colleagues. They’ll let him risk his own funds. They’re very reluctant to commit theirs.’
‘So we’ll have to persuade them, won’t we?’ Sir Pavel Laszlo had the soul of a dreamer and the nerve of a riverboat gambler. ‘Have the Soviets announced their delegation yet?’
‘Th
ey have not. Nor will they, until we can assure them that the primary funds are in place.’
‘Nonsense!’ Sir Pavel waved away the objection like smoke. ‘They’ll make any deal that gets them moving. They need something they can dress up on a television screen so that it looks like Moses feeding the Israelites in the desert. And as far as your bankers are concerned Carl, they too have to learn the facts of life in Eastern Europe. The British and the Americans both missed the chance to finance the Bolshevik revolution and bring the Soviets into full communion with the West. Now they’ve got another chance. If they miss it, God help us all!’
‘It’s easy for you to talk.’ Carl Leibig was irritated. ‘We’re deep in recession. The Americans are up to their ears in debt…the money-men are scared out of their wits…’
‘And here is a whole retarded continent waiting to be brought up to scale in production of minerals, natural gas, oil, foodstuffs, tourism. God damn it, man! The bankers are paper men, always have been. We’re the ones who have to show them how to turn paper into real wealth.’
The contrast between the two men intrigued me. Laszlo was a Hungarian Jew who had fled the Holocaust to make a life and a future for himself in Australia. Leibig was old Prussian stock, conscious or unconscious heir to centuries of anti-semitism. Yet the lure of trade had made them stronger allies than any treaty could have done. They were still arguing volubly when the rest of the guests were announced, two men and a woman. Leibig presented them in his formal fashion.
‘Doctor Rudi Forster, from the Swiss Banking Union, engineer Mauno Leino from Leino Corporation, Chicago, Buenos Aires and Finland, Professor Marta Boysen late of the Food and Agriculture Organisation…Doctor Forster’s presence explains itself. He is here to set the Japanese and other Oriental elements of the banking syndicate. Engineer Leino has had twenty years experience in engineering design for all branches of the food processing industry in the United States, in the South Americas and in Europe. He has just completed an eight-month study of processing plants in the Republics of the Soviet Union. Moscow gave him full access, so he is able to report accurately on needs and problems. Professor Marta Boysen is a specialist in the history of geopolitics and its application to modern economics, a subject which, I hasten to add, is much more complex than it sounds, and of great importance to our plans…’