‘One of these days you must tell me what it is you get up to.’
‘One of these days, Snuffly, I will,’ Cal replied, which was as good as saying, ‘In your dreams.’
There was no temptation to ask where Snuffly got his passports, not that he would have got an answer any more than he was prepared to provide one himself, but it had to be the case that some of his contacts were ‘dips’ working the West End and beyond: the theatres, hotels and, further afield, the train stations.
Either that or they were housebreakers; it made no odds — the documents he had provided for Cal in the past were of top-notch quality and, since he also obviously had a forger on tap, quick as well.
‘Need a few stamps on them too, Snuffly, to make them look used.’
‘Will be done, Mr Jardine.’
Cal reached into his jacket to fetch out his wallet, only to feel an immediate hand on his arm, surprisingly firm in its grip from a man he never associated with physical strength. ‘No need for a down payment, guv, is there?’ Sniff. ‘Not for you.’ Sniff. ‘You can pay when you collect.’
Cal smiled and nodded, pleased because he suspected it was a lot harder to get an account with Snuffly than it was to get one at Coutts Bank, just down the road on the Strand. He exited to streets full of the detritus of the nearby market: abandoned boxes, discarded paper blown on the wind and the odd drunk — hardly surprising in an area where the public houses, to cater for the thousands who worked and came here to trade, opened at six in the morning.
The taxi driver smoked too, so that by the time it dropped him in West Heath Road, and once he had paid off the driver, looking across to the heath under its canopy of trees in full leaf he was tempted to go for a stroll to clear his lungs. That had to be put aside till later; the man with whom he had an appointment was ever busy, and even if he considered him a friend, it was not a good idea to keep Sir Monty Redfern waiting.
The first surprise was to find a strange female answering the door when he had his hat raised and a winning smile on his face to greet someone else entirely. Expecting a young lovely, what he was presented with was a rather dumpy woman in shapeless clothing, with untidy hair on her head and a great deal more of that on her face, none of it made more attractive by the guttural voice with which she enquired as to his reason for calling.
‘Where’s Elsa?’ he asked, once he had been shown into the large drawing room overlooking the garden that Monty used as an office.
If the furniture was as valuable as the substantial Hampstead house, which ran in total to some twenty-eight rooms, the man who owned it did not look the part of a Jewish millionaire. Careless about dress, Monty looked his usual scruffy self. For all his wealth he rarely polished his shoes or worried about the crumpled state of his clothing.
‘Our little beauty is in Prague, Callum, doing good work with refugees.’
The name of the Czech capital gave him pause, but Cal decided not to mention it as his destination for the moment. ‘How bad is it?’
‘As bad as it gets with that bastard Hitler breathing down people’s neck. Already they are moving away from the Sudetenland, and not just Jews, but those with eyes to see that the Nazis won’t stop at that. The Commies they will shoot and the socialists can expect a holiday in their concentration camps for some gentle education. Thousands are trying to get out, and if the Germans do invade you and I might have to do a bit of business again.’
It was Monty who had financed Cal’s work in Hamburg; the aforementioned Elsa had been part of the last family he had managed to extract — herself, her father, mother and her three brothers — and it had taken the assistance of a reluctant Peter Lanchester to actually get them to England.
Elsa Ephraim was indeed a beauty, so unlike her successor: young, lithe and inclined to have her employer cursing his age as well as what his wife would do to him if he so much as let one eye wander in her presence; Mrs Redfern would be more than happy with the replacement.
‘If she safe there, at her age?’
‘Hey, Callum, am I safe here when she is walking around with those legs of hers? And that figure and those eyes, my God!’ He looked to the heavens before adding, in a less jocular voice, ‘Elsa is eighteen now anyway and can get out when she wants. I spread a few shekels and got her a British passport. And if she does get into trouble I will blame you. If you had not been so busy with those damned Bolsheviks in Spain I might have asked you to go and do the job.’
‘They were anarchists.’
‘And that is supposed to make me feel better?’
‘I can’t imagine Papa Ephraim was happy about her going to Prague.’
‘He was not and neither was I, ’cause she was good at her job. But that girl has balls, I tell you, and can she argue.’ Monty raised his hands to the heavens and grinned, the wide mouth under that prominent nose spreading in mischief. ‘Hey, maybe she told her Papa he would be my father-in-law to get him to agree.’
‘Or your wife.’
‘You want I should have a stroke?’ Monty replied. ‘I don’t have to tell you who chose Marita.’
‘The lady who answered the door?’ Monty nodded, gravely.
The talk of her attractiveness and any hint of impropriety with Elsa was, of course, an act; Monty might like the fantasy but he was more of a father figure than an old lecher, a man who, while he had a huge and very profitable business to oversee, was too preoccupied anyway for such a game. He spent most of his time running his various charities, as well as harrying his fellow Jews, both in Britain and around the world, to provide money, sanctuary or both for those in peril from the Nazis.
‘And the Government is being as stingy as ever with visas, I suppose?’
Jewish immigration was a hot political potato, not aided by a residual and far-from-disguised anti-Semitism in the upper reaches of British society, peopled by the kind of dolts who admired Mussolini and Hitler for bringing order to their countries, while blithely shutting their minds to the measures used to achieve it.
No Jew fleeing persecution could get residence without someone to sponsor and promise to support them; they would not be allowed in if they were going to be a burden to the taxpayer. So Monty spent as much time lobbying for those permits as he did seeking the funds to support emigration.
‘It’s like drawing teeth, the crooks,’ Monty cried, ‘and the Americans are no better, bigger crooks than us even, with the space they have.’
Time to drop the bombshell. ‘It so happens that I am off to Prague, as well.’
Cal was thinking that Monty hid his surprise well, just as well as he managed to keep off of his face that his mind was working to see if there was some connection.
‘You can look Elsa up, maybe?’
‘Maybe not.’
‘So it is not open-door, this visit to Prague?’
‘No.’
‘Does old Monty get an explanation, maybe?’
‘I was going to ask you to lend me some money-’
‘Boy, do you know how to spoil an old Jew’s day,’ Monty scoffed, cutting across him.
‘-or at least make some available. Quite a lot, in fact.’
The reaction was typical, but Monty did not make the obvious comment, which was ‘why?’ He knew very well that Callum Jardine had his own private income, just as he knew where it came from, the profits of his father’s successful trading in both France and Germany before the Great War, both countries in which the family had taken up residence.
With a blood connection to one of the great trading dynasties of the world, Jardine pere had been in a position to make a great deal of money doing deals in a fluid market, buying and selling goods to ship between the Far East and Europe. His son could have done the same had he been so inclined and his cousins would have backed him; blood was blood to the Scots as much as it was to the Jews.