Red to Black (11 page)

‘And their own intelligence operations in the West,’ Finn interrupts.

‘Certainly, their own operations in the West, many of which concerned precisely the theft of technological secrets. And this theft was mainly from us, in West Germany. So, in the beginning, KoKo stole the valuables, sold them to West Germans and then used the money to bribe West Germans in particular for industrial secrets. But they also used
Raubgold,
this stolen wealth, to corrupt our bankers, politicians, even us in intelligence. A lot of money was available for bribing West Germans.’

‘Schmidtke told us that KoKo used a holding company as cover, to keep up appearances,’ Finn says, remembering. ‘Art and Antiquities GmbH it was called, if I remember rightly. It sounded very sound, very proper. Dealers in London did business with it all the time. The company, one removed from KoKo, enabled buyers to turn a blind eye.’

‘Oh yes,’ Dieter says. ‘The two Germanys proved that crime pays,’ he says. ‘To both sides.’

‘And Schmidtke was the great bureaucrat in charge.’

‘Schmidtke was the head of KoKo, he organised this
Raubgold.
And, in doing so, he learned many more valuable things. He learned how companies worked offshore, how the lawyers handle that side of things, which lawyers could be tempted on our side, how tax worked and was avoided, how to launder wealth, which banks were open to corruption. We were complicit here in the West, or at least many, many individuals in powerful positions were complicit. And all the time Schmidtke had the Stasi and the KGB to back him up with threats if anyone looked as if they might step out of line on our side. Some were willing, of course, but others were compromised with threats and blackmail. Politicians, bankers and businessmen were sexually compromised in KGB sting operations, for example. And Schmidtke had lawyers in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein and Geneva; he had bankers in all three countries, and he had politicians, too, here in Germany and elsewhere.’

Dieter sips from his glass as the soup bowls are removed and he lights a cigarette.

‘And this network of Schmidtke’s,’ Finn says. ‘You spent two years investigating it.’

‘Just over two years,’ Dieter replies, as if remembering a bad holiday. ‘But it was vast and complex, hidden behind wall after wall of trusts and false company names. Two years was what it took just to peel back the edge of the carpet on Schmidtke’s network in the West. And then? Then my government didn’t like what it saw appearing from under the carpet and covered it up again.’

‘So…’

‘So I was retired, along with some others, after a decent time lapse from the investigations. We were being wound up individually, just as the investigation was being wound up. They didn’t want
us around any more, with our knowledge, in the same room as them.’ Dieter sniffs. ‘And they were afraid of our indignation that the file was being closed. I finally left in 1992 and they rolled the carpet safely back over the rotting stench.’

Dieter looks at Finn. The handsome eyes in the lined, outdoor face sharpen.

‘But of course you are not interested in the robbery of German citizens,’ he says.

‘I’m interested in their persecutor who sits in Tegernsee with a government pension,’ Finn says. ‘I’m interested in why the investigation of Schmidtke’s network was wound up, and in the network itself. I’m interested in the unbroken line from those times to these.’

‘I’ve always thought you were honest, Finn.’ Dieter pushes aside a half finished plate of noodles. ‘I’ve met some of the victims and they are, sure, just victims of theft. They haven’t been murdered or put in camps, their relatives weren’t shot going over the Wall. But they lost out too.’

‘You did your job.’

‘And you? Are you doing your job, Finn?’

Finn doesn’t reply.

‘I think not,’ Dieter says. ‘Or you wouldn’t be talking to me, a retired intelligence officer, like this in private.’

They split the bill and walk to a car park across the bare concrete
platz
outside the restaurant. The wind creeps through the thread of Finn’s coat and into his bones.

‘So you want the unbroken line from the beginning to the present,’ Dieter says, demanding no reply. ‘You believe something remains of Schmidtke’s network. Of course,’ he says, and Finn isn’t sure what Dieter means.

They get into Dieter’s old blue BMW and turn out through the car park’s barrier and head west along the banks of the Saar.

‘Let me show you what I’ve bought with my retirement bonus, Finn. Or is it my hush money?’ Dieter adds. ‘I’m not as comfortable in retirement as Schmidtke, but I like it nevertheless.’

Outside the town, when the decayed remnants of its mining past have disappeared from view and been replaced by the slow grey-green curves of the Moselle River as it meanders through wooded hills, they come to an unmade track that leads down to the river. Dieter drives the BMW carefully over the rough ground and pulls up the car in a courtyard of stone barns and outhouses, out on their own. They sit in the car with the engine switched off.

‘Do they know, in London, that you’re here?’ Dieter says.

‘No.’

Dieter seems to weigh the implications.

‘Good,’ he says at last. ‘We shouldn’t trust our masters too much, don’t you think?’ Then he snaps open the door and steps out on to the hard ground.

They walk away from the buildings and up the slope of a vineyard with a view down on to the river. It is bitterly cold on the top of the hill and the vines have been clipped down for the winter and protected with straw around their roots. A small fire made from old vine roots puts up a plume of smoke a few fields away.

‘I bought fifty hectares with my lump sum,’ Dieter says as they walk. ‘I sometimes wonder why I didn’t do it back then, back in the fifties, when I could have made my life as a farmer perhaps, with my own wine label.’

A long, slow barge creeps upriver against the current. On the other side, the forests of Luxembourg cloak the hills.

‘These things are better as dreams,’ Finn says.

‘Perhaps so, yes.’

Finn looks at Dieter but sees no resignation, no sense of failure, in the German’s face. He sees someone who has fought the long, slow battle of intelligence all his life, has seen his enemies rehabilitated, enriched even, while their victims either lie dead or are
impoverished. But he sees, too, a face which tells him that the battle has been worth fighting nevertheless.

They walk back down to the banks of the river, their shoes coated with heavy mud, and Dieter indicates that they should walk left up the bank and towards the outbuildings which are half a mile away now.

‘Germany was divided, yes,’ Dieter says, as if to himself, ‘but it was divided only for its ordinary citizens in the practice of their everyday lives. That much I saw when we investigated Schmidtke and long before, of course. The Wall was a metaphor as well as a physical thing. It was a political statement. It hit hardest at the ordinary people, not at those with the power and deceit to use it. For those with power and money, and the matchless amorality to exploit it, the Wall was in some ways convenient. For them, the division of Germany was not an obstacle, but a challenge. They didn’t try to physically overcome it, of course, like the many victims of the border guards, but in other ways, through banks and finance, with corrupt lawyers and secret trusts and secret contacts. The Wall sharpened the wits of these people. Over there,’ Dieter points across the river to Luxembourg, ‘and here in Germany and in Liechtenstein and Switzerland, the avenues of finance are always open, Wall or no Wall. In the battle between capitalism and totalitarian communism, capitalism ate its holes in this metaphorical Wall, like lice in the beams of an old house. Until the whole thing was rotten. Money- capital- is like water. It will always find its equilibrium. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from the East or West, it will come together, and it did. It is the ultimate power. It was our weakness in the West, this primitive accumulation of capital, as Marx put it. It opened our doors to every dictator, every brutal regime in the world.’

‘How did it come together, Dieter?’ Finn asks urgently. ‘East and West. What did you learn from Schmidtke?’

‘What did we start to learn.’ Dieter corrects him, and stops
walking and turns to look at the river. The barge is approaching level with them, its small bow wave sending thin lines of brown water out from behind it.

‘I can give you three things, Finn,’ Dieter says at last. ‘I can give you a man, a bank and a company. These are just a brief glimpse, a dirty peephole into a large network that is more complex, more closely bound than the guts of a golf ball. Some would say this network is inextricable. As my masters eventually decided,’ he adds drily.

‘But not you, Dieter.’

‘Everything is possible,’ Dieter says. ‘Our enemies knew that and we should be proud enough to know it too.’

They walk back from the field towards the buildings and Finn realises they’ve made the detour so that Dieter can establish who he is now, a retired agent, a viticulturalist. Dieter is making a statement about his present life.

They reach the first of the outbuildings where the car is parked and then Finn sees that there is a small house hidden from the track between them and the river. He is cold and sees Dieter is too. The German fumbles with numbed hands for a key and opens the door to the house and they enter. It is too cold to take off their coats even in the small, low kitchen, and Dieter switches on the central heating and puts logs into a wood burner and lights it while the heating grumbles into action. He puts a pot on the stove and makes coffee and pours two glasses of good Napoleon cognac and, by that time, the wood stove is kicking out a good heat and they remove their coats.

‘The name of the man is Otto Roth,’ Dieter begins. ‘Or sometimes he’s Osvald Roth, or Rottheim, or any number of variations. What’s for certain is that none of these is his real name. Even he probably hasn’t used his real name for so long it’s meaningless. We’ll call him Otto Roth. Nor is his true nationality certain. Some say he
is originally a Russian-German, like Schmidtke, but born on this side of the divide. Some say he is Scandinavian, but that his parents were from Russia and worked in the thirties for the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. In this theory, Roth’s parents came to Western Europe before the war, maybe during the Spanish Civil War, and were placed as sleepers in the West, to be used some day in the cause of Russia. If so, it was their son who turned out to be the gold seam of Russian intelligence and the investment made in the thirties was perfect. So the Russians have always played a very long game, so long that Roth’s obscurity was assured.’

Dieter lights a cigarette and sips from the glass of cognac.

‘Roth was born in 1939, in Antwerp where his parents were passing through. At least that’s what it says on his birth certificate. We believe he has four brothers, younger than him, and an older sister. A brood of sleeping agents, perhaps? I don’t know for sure. If that is so, we don’t know with absolute certainty if any of them are alive, what happened to them in the war, virtually nothing, in fact. We do have our suspicions, however, which I will tell you in a while. They are suspicions which were nipped in the bud when our investigation of Schmidtke was terminated. At any rate, now Roth is a citizen of Switzerland and lives in considerable comfort in Cologny, a very wealthy suburb of Geneva. They say the lawns around his mansion are clipped with scissors,’ Dieter says. ‘But you know of Roth, of course, Finn, so what about him?’

Dieter answers his own question before Finn can speak. ‘At the beginning of the sixties he became a trader, mainly in sugar, and was based in London for a while. Then he disappears. When we next hear of him, he’s trading small arms. He’s in Africa, the Far East, Oman. And then it grows, this arms business of his, and Roth is connected to a shipment of artillery, then spares for warplanes, oil, armoured personnel carriers, you name it, but it all originates from East Germany, most of it with KoKo’s implicit stamp on it,
exported out of Rostock. Rostock was Schmidtke’s Stasi-controlled port. And Schmidtke had the goods stamped with false declarations and false destinations.’

Dieter looks hard at Finn. ‘How much do you know of Roth?’ he asks.

‘Go on,’ Finn says.

‘All right. Roth and Schmidtke are by now as close as brothers,’ Dieter says. ‘Roth travels back and forth to the Soviet Union under the cover of a Swiss sporting organisation. The usual cover. He gets himself on to an international committee of Olympic target shooting. Roth’s little joke. The cover is good for him, as it is for many others in the years of the Cold War.’

Dieter gets up from his chair and puts a pot on the stove for more coffee and pours two more nips of cognac, but now he continues his story without a break.

‘That’s Roth,’ he says. ‘We’ll come back to him in a while.’

Dieter sees that the coffee has run out and scrabbles in a cupboard for a jar of instant coffee that has, Finn sees, congealed with age and dampness around the rim.

‘And then there’s the bank,’ Dieter says. ‘It is called Jensbank and it was founded before the war in a little town in northern Bavaria called Fürth; the town where Henry Kissinger was born, as it happens. After the war, and after the Wall went up, Jensbank was one of very few that operated in both East and West Germany. Most people don’t know that there were banks operating on both sides of the Wall. Well, there were. As I say, the Wall was a metaphor, an abstract in many ways, certainly not as solid as people think.

‘Jensbank had more than three hundred branches, on both sides of the Wall. Many were concealed under different names, of course, but they were all Jensbank. And Jensbank dealt in very large funds indeed. Our investigations were stopped when they reached one of the world’s few clearing banks, across the water there in Luxembourg. Jensbank has over fifty secret accounts there, what they call
modestly in the banking world unpublished accounts. And there are trusts over there,’ Dieter waves vaguely across the river, ‘and there are trusts of Jensbank in Switzerland and Liechtenstein too, some of which we found our way into, most of which we didn’t. What we saw, however, were huge transactions in cash, before the shutters got pulled down on us.’