“That’s the Baltic Sea, the Lubeck Gulf of the Baltic Sea. Ships from the gulf go on to Kiel and take the Nord-Ostsee-Kanal through the peninsula to the North Sea and the Atlantic. And on to New York. Now, do you know anything about the people of Lubeck?”
“Nothing.”
“Once, during a siege, the people here ran out of flour. The army outside was trying to starve Lubeck to death. Instead of surrendering, though, the people ground up almonds and made bread out of almond powder. The almond bread is called marzipan, and today Lubeck is the marzipan capital of the world. They had some marzipan at the restaurant. Here.”
I gave her a piece. It was artfully shaped like a pig and colored pink. Miss Van Hazinga at AXE would have gobbled it up. Vera just looked at the candy sculpture with the eye of an art appreciator and returned it to me.
“A little sweet for me, thanks, Raki. I hadn’t realized before that you were such a walking almanac.”
“Not just a walking almanac. Over on the left in that street of red brick houses is the Hauffmann Obersee Gesellschaft. That’s me. I also export marzipan.”
Vera frowned and stared back and forth from the street I’d pointed at to me.
“Darling, I assumed that your little company here was the cover for the railway shipment of almond powder and that made the perfect camouflage for getting the opium here. That’s done. When are you going to tell me how you’ll get the opium to New York?”
I let her irritation mount for a few moments and then I answered.
“Vera, I just did.”
Eleven
The processing of opium to heroin is complicated and requires a laboratory. I had one ready-made in the candy factory of the red brick building belonging to Hauffmann Gesellschaft. It was evening and the regular employees had left for home. Dressed in overalls, I backed the truck I’d driven from the Lubeck rail terminal up to the factory door. Vera opened the factory door as I jumped out of the truck’s cab.
“Everything go well, Raki?”
I handed her the railway invoice for twenty inspected bags of almond powder. Then I started bringing each bag in. When they were all in and the door was shut and locked, I selected the $20 million bag and dragged it to the candy vats.
“I still don’t get it.” Vera was in overalls too with her blonde hair piled under a green wool cap. “I’ve never processed dope before, but I know that it comes out as white powder. How are you going to hide it?”
“We are going to hide it.” I checked my watch. “We have just fourteen hours until the workers return so we better get started.”
I handed her a rubber gas mask.
“The fumes will put you on the far side of the moon if you don’t use it,” I warned her.
She slipped the mask on as I did mine. Her cat eyes followed me with lingering doubt.
I removed the seals from the neck of the bag, pulled the band apart, and dumped the contents into the vat, shaking it so almost every expensive particle would fall.
“Take the bag to the incinerator chute and throw it in.”
Vera picked it up hesitantly.
“Won’t someone smell the burning opium?”
“The bag will be burned tomorrow with the rest of the bags. Nobody will smell anything but plastic.”
She shoved the bag down the incinerator chute. I poured acetone into the vat along with the opium.
“We’ll have to let that work by itself for a while,” I said and switched on the vat’s mixing paddles. “Don’t worry about the sound. This is a commercial street. It’s deserted now, and there’s still enough traffic on the streets to muffle what noise we make.”
“That’s all we have to worry about?”
“No. There are some real dangers. The mixture has to be heated. If you get it too hot, it blows up like a bomb. Then there are the problems of the amount of electricity you use and what to do with the waste water, tricky details if you’re trying to hide your laboratory in your home. But a candy factory uses a lot of electricity, and we have a commercial sluice for tainted water that flows right into Lubeck’s main sewer.”
“You’ve thought of everything, so far.”
After thirty minutes I opened up the temperature dials on the vat, usually used for melting almond powder and sugar, in this case for a different kind of taste delight. I set the heat at 100 degrees centigrade (212 Fahrenheit).
“The opium is really nothing more than a morphine base. The acetone will take out impurities.” Candy vats come equipped with vacuum pumps because impurities in confections are removed in much the same way as those in opium. I siphoned off the cleansing acetone, leaving the morphine base a rich brown color, the normal color of top grade opium. To change the purified dope back to white I added a bag of carbon black and started the vat’s paddles going again.
“We’re setting a world record tonight, Vera. The most opium any Marseilles lab ever processed at one time was less than twenty pounds. Were doing more than ten times that.”
Vera looked around the factory full of vats, ovens, and candy trays. On the walls were cheery scenes of children and cows, the two most wholesome symbols in the German imagination. Tomorrow at eight o’clock the room would be full of cheerful hefty fraus in white aprons, all working for the greater glory of Lubeck’s marzipan.
“I keep thinking you must be crazy,” she said, “and then I realize that you’re not, that you just simplify problems very effectively.... at least, so far,” she amended her praise slightly.
“What are you doing now?”
“Adding Chloric acid to neutralize the mixture. We’ll let that blend for a while, too.”
“And if a German policeman walked in now, even if he didn’t have a good reason, what would you do?”
“You still have your Beretta?”
She took it from her overall pocket.
“Good. Keep it out of sight, Vera. If anyone knocks at the door, we’re making candy. If he gets too suspicious we’ll even give him a taste. He’d get about one step before diving to the floor.”
“What if he won’t take a taste?”
“Then, we’ll let him come in to check, and, after about a minute of breathing this without a mask, he should forget what he came in for. But nobody’s going to bother us.”
“We’ve got only ten hours to go,” she checked her watch. “How much longer will this take?”
“You can get the candy molds now.”
Vera lost her breath for a second.
“Candy molds?”
“That’s right. I said we were making candy. The molding trays are on the shelves by the wall.”
“I take it back. You are crazy. You’ve lost your mind.”
I ignored her and went to the huge baking oven that took one whole quarter of the floor. Again, I set the dials at an explosion-proof level. When I returned to the vat, Vera was holding an armful of trays and shaking her head.
“Just hold one at a time. Set a bucket at your feet. Get a leveler in your hand. I’m going to open the vat taps. I’ll fill the molds, and you level the runover into the bucket. Got it?”
For all her doubts, Vera was an expert coworker. The opium, half-processed into heroin, was ready for pouring, and I threw open the vat’s smallest tap. A white cream flowed out over the tray. As Vera leveled it, she set each filled tray aside on a table and lifted another. There wasn’t time for questions or doubts anymore, there was only time for work. The entire 100 kilos had to be baked or thrown out before the day workers arrived in the morning. And it had to be boxed too, because I couldn’t afford to have a frau spaced out from nibbling on the company product.
There were trays with molds of pigs, fig leaves, cows, babies, the Holstentor, fish, apples, bananas, bread, pears, cupids, potatoes, grapes and grape vines, and peaches. When we had fifty trays in the oven, I rolled over a wagon carrying spray cans of vegetable coloring. After fifteen minutes, enough time for our “candy” to have an outer crust, I pulled the trays out.