XPD (36 page)

‘There was nothing clever about it,’ said Breslow. ‘I have the same model of answering machine. Stein got it for me wholesale. I was able to get a whistle with the same musical tone as Stein’s machine.’

‘Well done,’ said Kleiber.

Breslow did not reply. He did not have Kleiber’s long experience of intelligence work; the business with the answering machine had left him feeling defiled and ashamed.

Perhaps Kleiber realized this. He said, ‘It was of immense help to us. Knowing what the message was meant I could get on the plane to London immediately. I didn’t have to wait to hear what this fellow Paul Bock wanted to tell Stein – we knew already.’ He smiled and patted Breslow’s arm in a congratulatory manner. Breslow flinched. He could never get used to such physical contacts. Masculine embraces might be
de rigueur
for restaurateurs, footballers and film stars, but not for old comrades.

‘Don’t underestimate Stein,’ Breslow warned him. ‘He may look like a slob, but under that gross and unattractive exterior there is a man of great physical strength and considerable intellectual resource.’

Kleiber waved his hand as if to waft away these praises of Stein. ‘By this time, Stein should be on his knees, begging for money.’

‘Well, he isn’t,’ said Breslow. He lifted the paper cup and drained the last dregs. The coffee was thin and tepid but the taste of the good German brandy was welcome. ‘He’s being very evasive.’

‘It was a good plan,’ said Kleiber. ‘We calculated that the failure of the bank would make them part with the documents within a few days. You’d think they’d want to get some money as soon as they could. You’d think their bank would be the first priority …’ Kleiber rubbed his face wearily. ‘Do you think Stein believed that story about the British trying to kill you on the freeway?’

‘I improvised it at short notice, Willi, and I was rather shaken by the accident … But, yes. I believe he did. My Mercedes was very badly damaged. It was only too easy to persuade him that it was deliberately done.’

‘It was lucky. It put Stein off the scent, and probably made him think the British were trying to kill you.’

‘Yes, I told him so.’

‘You did well, Max. When did you last see him?’

‘Charles Stein? The day before yesterday. Why?’

‘The truth is …’ began Kleiber. He yawned. It was a sign of anxiety as much as of loss of sleep. ‘The truth is that we’ve gone a little wrong in London. We’ve lost contact with the younger Stein.’

‘I’m certain he hasn’t returned here to Los Angeles.’

‘How can you be certain?’

‘Because he would be with my daughter Mary.’

‘Your daughter … Mary and the Stein boy?’

‘Better him,’ said Breslow, ‘than the Mexican gas station attendant who chased her everywhere last year. Finally I sent her to Europe for a month.’

‘The Stein boy has vanished,’ said Kleiber. ‘I had one of my very best men in charge of the London end. I can’t understand it; Stein left the hotel, paid his bill and took his baggage. And my people saw nothing of it.’

‘You think the British intelligence service is holding him?’

‘Yes, I do. I think they waited for Stein to go to the house, arrested him and are now interrogating him.’

‘What a mess,’ said Max Breslow. If anything happened to Billy Stein, his father might hold him responsible. Max Breslow was not of a nervous disposition, as his war record proved, but he knew that the wrath of Charles Stein would be terrible to behold. What if Stein took revenge upon Breslow’s daughter? He suppressed this terrifying idea. ‘What now?’

Kleiber stretched his arms and looked very smug. ‘We have had an amazing stroke of luck, Max.’ This, Breslow suspected, was the moment that Kleiber had been looking forward to. He was right. Kleiber said, ‘As I have just told you, we have a contact with the very top level of the British intelligence service – MI6 they call it – a good friend of mine is the liaison between London and our own BND in Bonn. They lunch together and talk of horticulture …’ Kleiber smiled at Max Breslow’s puzzled expression. ‘It is their mutual passion: cactus plants. This passion has proved a most wonderful advantage for us, Max.’

‘And yet you don’t know if the British are holding Stein?’

Kleiber did not miss the note of sarcasm in his friend’s question. He smiled. ‘I think we can safely assume that they have Billy Stein in custody, and that they have interrogated him very successfully.’ There was something in Kleiber’s face that told Breslow that this was his most important item of news. ‘What is our greatest problem, Max? Surely it is finding the whereabouts of the Hitler Minutes. Well, now we
do
know where they are. The British have discovered that the Hitler Minutes and all the rest of the documents are in the house of Colonel Pitman in Switzerland. We even know what sort of strong room protects them.’

‘It all fits together neatly,’ said Breslow. ‘They
must
have got this information from young Billy.’

‘The Englishman was carrying catalogues from Schiff, the well-known Swiss locksmiths, and he actually asked my old friend for some assistance in translating the German language. We know the make, the model and the year.’

‘You are not thinking of raiding the house?’ Breslow asked.

‘A burglar will not have enough time, or the sort of equipment, to open the door of a strong room such as this,’ replied Kleiber.

‘I beg you to reconsider, Willi,’ said Breslow. ‘A burglary is one thing, an armed raid is going too far. You can cut anything open with an oxyacetylene flame, or one of the new thermic lances. Get a really good safecracker and let him do the job in the way that professional thieves do it.’

‘Is that what you have learned from your movie scriptwriters?’ Willi Kleiber made a noise of disparagement. ‘You are years out of date, my friend. The oxyacetylene flames and the thermic lances generate too much heat. Thieves find cinders and ashes inside a safe they’ve cut open by those methods. I fit such safes for my clients, Max. I know what can be done to make a door impregnable. There is an inner cube of glass; heat it and a complex of bolts are sprung, and the door locks so solid that even the makers take two or three days to cut it open.’ Willi Kleiber chuckled and rubbed his hands. ‘I don’t even know where I could find a thermic lance expert these days – in retirement in the Italian sunshine perhaps. Safe-crackers are extinct, Max. They’ve been replaced by men who carry shotguns and automatic weapons and take a bank by assault.’

‘How terrible,’ said Max Breslow.

‘Terrible?’ said Kleiber. ‘Wonderful, you mean. How do you think I could have got my security company to its present turnover without the dedicated gunmen? The improvement in safes, which gave the armed bandits their chance, gave me my chance too, Max.’ He laughed.

‘Aren’t you worried in case Colonel Pitman’s safe is wired to alarm the local police station?’

‘Yes, I am, Max. That’s why I must not plan this project in the style of a thief. We have to get into the house and talk to Pitman. We have to convince him that it’s in his interest to open the safe.’

Max Breslow picked up his empty coffee cup in an automatic gesture of alarm and dismay. He knew exactly what methods Willi Kleiber would use to ‘convince’ Colonel Pitman to open the safe. He shuddered.

‘What’s the matter with you, Max?’

‘It was filthy coffee,’ said Breslow.

‘Come along, Max. It will be wonderful. It will be just like old times.’

‘You’re mad, Willi,’ said Breslow, but his voice lacked conviction. ‘You’ll get yourself killed.’

No comment could have been more encouraging to Kleiber. He swelled with pride. ‘I’m not afraid to die,’ he said. ‘We lost some good comrades in the war. It would not be so terrible to join them once again.’

Max Breslow was saddened by the answer but he smiled. It was as much a nervous reaction as anything.

‘Why are you smiling, Max? Have I said something funny?’

‘No, my friend. I am smiling because only last week I heard Stein express the same idea, in virtually the same words.’

‘You’ll have to be in Switzerland too, Max.’

‘There is so much to do here.’

‘This is more important than your film,’ said Kleiber. ‘I want you with me.’ From his pocket he got a recent newspaper cutting. It was a Washington newspaper; the headline said, ‘US government allocates $2.3 million for Nazi-hunters.’ The piece continued, ‘After six years of lobbying, Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman of New York saw US Justice Department set up an Office of Special Investigation on Nazi war crimes.’ Breslow read it through and returned it folded to Kleiber.

‘You should have changed your name, Max,’ said Kleiber.

Max Breslow shook his head. ‘I didn’t want to meet old friends in Germany and have to explain why my US passport bore a different name.’ He sighed. ‘Surely someone else could go?’

‘Be ready to go early next week, Max. That’s an order from the Trust.’

‘Very well, Willi. I’ll be ready to go.’

‘The Trust has money, Max, and lawyers. The denaturalization and deportation proceedings take place in a civil court. Good lawyers and good advice – and a good word in the right place – can work wonders in this country.’

‘I said I’d go,’ said Max Breslow. He was angry and a little afraid.

Chapter 33

Willi Kleiber’s ‘amazing stroke of luck’ had its origins on the afternoon of Friday, 27 July, following Sir Sydney Ryden’s difficult meeting with the Prime Minister. The DG went back to his office, poured himself a large gin and tonic and looked again at the tiny black notebook filled with cryptic initials and hieroglyphics which were meaningless to anyone but himself. Sometimes he needed this when answering the Prime Minister’s questions. Never had he needed it more than this afternoon when she had subjected him and his department to some particularly telling criticisms. When he’d finished his drink he went to the window to look at his cactus collection, prodding the dry earth and using his tweezers to manicure the plants. For a moment his hands were still. He stared out of the window to Westminster Bridge, over which came streams of men and women, hurrying through the rain to Waterloo Station and the suburban train services. Soon the streams would become torrents and finally, as the rush hour reached its peak, hordes of these dark-suited figures would be filling the pavements and spilling over into the roadways and clogging the motor traffic.

Suddenly the DG’s hands moved once more, touching the plants with brisk deftness – the sort of displacement activity that often marked the end of a difficult working day. The Prime Minister was right, Sir Sydney regretfully concluded: his department had produced no tangible results since his last report to her. It was no use reminding her that nothing disastrous had occurred, that Stein and Co. had not published the Hitler Minutes and created an international scandal. While Secret Intelligence Services thought that staving off disaster was a considerable feat, politicians always wanted tangible results. Politicians were not interested in the status quo, they wanted results: files closed, fears eliminated and accounts rendered. She had virtually said as much, and Sir Sydney knew that she was right to do so. He touched the most fragile of his new plants. It was tempting to give it just a trace of water but he resisted the temptation – better that it was forced to adjust to its new environment. Too much care and attention could ruin it – it was a characteristic that cacti shared with agents in the field.

‘There has obviously been a leak, Sir Sydney,’ the PM had told him. His first reaction was one of anger, but he had learnt to hide his emotions. He had learnt that during his first few weeks at prep school. The bullies had soon taught him to cry inside without permitting any sign of it to show. Stick it out, his father had written in those letters from Simla in the Indian hills, and Sydney had stuck it out. For years his only visitor at school had been his dear old nanny. It was not her fault that one year she had let him down by weeping when she said goodbye. How cruel children were to each other; the other boys had never permitted him to forget the old woman with the working-class accent who had shamed him with her tears. His only consolation then, as now, was hard work.

‘A leak, obviously.’ The PM’s shrewd deduction could not have been based upon the scanty facts he had provided, so was it that famous intuition of hers? Or was it no more than the natural hostility that all politicians show to the civil service, in order to keep them on the defensive?

The DG picked up another plant. It was not in good condition. For weeks he had been trying to persuade himself that it would recover its strength, but there was little chance that it would. A pity, for it had been a fine specimen once, one of his favourites. Actually, he knew exactly how the PM had concluded that there was a leak from his department, and that it had led to the King’s Cross murders. The truth was that the PM had stated what she saw clearly reflected in Sir Sydney Ryden’s own troubled face. If he searched deeply into his innermost thoughts, he would have to admit to some unease about that lunch he had given to the chap from the BND. Now, every time he fussed and fiddled with the potted plants, he recalled the conversation. Had it been one of his subordinates, Sir Sydney would have described it as indiscreet, if not insecure.

He looked at the clock. It was almost time to go downstairs. His car had been ordered and the driver was always a little early. He was dining with the German BND official tonight. He had carefully rehearsed exactly what he intended to say but now, at the last moment, he was having second thoughts. Sydney Ryden had never worked as a field agent. There was nothing unusual about this, hardly any of the senior officials of the department had ever spied upon anything more secret than their colleagues’ expense accounts. Like them, Sydney Ryden was a desk man, skilled in administration, but ignorant of all the rigmarole of spying. He was well aware of his limitations, and it was quite obvious that good men’s lives were at stake if he handled this evening badly. If, on the other hand, he could get this German to believe that the Hitler Minutes were at the Pitman house in Geneva, he might be able to make up for some of the harm already done. And given a little additional luck he might be able to put this man Kleiber into the bag, despite the ‘hands-off’ assurance he had given the Americans. He picked up the phone and dialled Operations. ‘Hello. Director here. Anything new on the Stein business?’