“He would resign before that,” said Odell.
“Yes,” said Walters soothingly. “On health grounds, with absolute justification, and with the sympathy and gratitude of the nation. We just might have to put it to him. That’s all.”
“Not yet, surely,” protested Stannard.
“Hear, hear. There is time,” said Reed. “The grief will pass, surely. He will recover. Become his old self.”
“And if not?” asked Walters. His unblinking stare went across the face of every man in the room. Michael Odell rose abruptly. He had been in some political fights in his time, but there was a coldness about Walters he had never liked. The man did not drink, and by the look of his wife he probably made love by the book.
“Okay, we’ll keep an eye on it,” he said. “Now, however, we’ll defer decision on that. Right, gentlemen?”
Everyone else nodded and rose. They would defer consideration of the Twenty-fifth. For now.
It was a combination of the rich wheat and barley lands of Lower Saxony and Westphalia to the north and east, plus the crystal-clear water trickling out of the nearby hills, that first made Dortmund a beer town. That was in 1293, when King Adolf of Nassau gave the citizens of the small town in the southern tip of Westphalia the right to brew.
Steel, insurance, banking, and trade came later, much later. Beer was the foundation, and for centuries the Dortmunders drank most of it themselves. The industrial revolution of the middle and late nineteenth century provided the third ingredient for the grain and the water-the thirsty workers of the factories that mushroomed along the valley of the Ruhr. At the head of the valley, with views southwest as far as the towering chimneys of Essen, Duisburg, and Düsseldorf, the city stood between the grain prairies and the customers. The city fathers took advantage; Dortmund became the beer capital of Europe.
Seven giant breweries ruled the trade: Brinkhoff, Kronen, DAB, Stifts, Ritter, Thier, and Moritz. Hans Moritz was head of the second-smallest brewery and head of the dynasty that went back eight generations. But he was the last individual to own and control his empire personally, and that made him very seriously rich. It was partly his wealth and partly the fame of his name that had caused the savages of the Baader-Meinhof gang to snatch his daughter Renata ten years before.
Quinn and Sam checked into the Roemischer Kaiser Hotel in the center of the city and Quinn tried the telephone directory with little hope. The home number, of course, was not listed. He wrote a personal letter on the hotel stationery, called a cab, and had it delivered to the brewery’s head office.
“Do you think your friend will still be here?” asked Sam.
“He’ll be here, all right,” said Quinn. “Unless he’s away abroad, or at any of his six homes.”
“He likes to move around a lot,” observed Sam.
“Yeah. He feels safer that way. The French Riviera, the Caribbean, the ski chalet, the yacht…”
He was right in supposing that the villa on Lake Constanz had long been sold; that was where the snatch had taken place.
He was also in luck. They were eating dinner when Quinn was called to the phone.
“Herr Quinn?”
He recognized the voice, deep and cultured. The man spoke four languages, could have been a concert pianist. Maybe should have been.
“Herr Moritz. Are you in town?”
“You remember my house? You should. You spent two weeks in it, once.”
“Yes, sir. I remember it. I didn’t know whether you still retained it.”
“Still the same. Renata loves it, wouldn’t let me change it. What can I do for you?”
“I’d like to see you.”
“Tomorrow morning. Coffee at ten-thirty.”
“I’ll be there.”
They drove out of Dortmund due south along the Ruhrwald Strasse until the industrial and commercial sprawl dropped away behind and they entered the outer suburb of Syburg. The hills began, rolling and forested, and the estates situated within the forests contained the homes of the wealthy.
The Moritz mansion was set in four acres of parkland down a lane off the Hohensyburg Strasse. Across the valley the Syburger monument stared down the Ruhr toward the spires of Sauerland.
The place was a fortress. Chain-link fencing surrounded the entire plot and the gates were high-tensile steel, remote-controlled and with a TV camera discreetly attached to a pine tree nearby. Someone watched Quinn climb out of the car and announce himself through the steel grille beside the gates. Two seconds later the gates swung open on electric motors. When the car passed through they closed again.
“Herr Moritz enjoys his privacy,” said Sam.
“He has reason to,” said Quinn.
He parked on the tan gravel in front of the white stucco house and a uniformed steward let them in. Hans Moritz received them in the elegant sitting room, where coffee waited in a sterling-silver pot. His hair was whiter than Quinn recalled, his face more lined, but the handshake was as firm and the smile as grave.
They had hardly sat down when the door opened and a young woman stood there hesitantly. Moritz’s face lit up. Quinn turned to look.
She was pretty in a vacuous sort of way, shy to the point of self-effacement. Both her little fingers ended in stumps. She must be twenty-five now, Quinn thought.
“Renata, kitten, this is Mr. Quinn. You remember Mr. Quinn? No, of course not.”
Moritz rose, crossed to his daughter, murmured a few words in her ear, kissed the top of her head. She turned and left. Moritz resumed his seat. His face was impassive, but the twisting of his fingers revealed his inner turmoil.
“She… um… never really recovered, you know. The therapy goes on. She prefers to stay inside, seldom goes out. She will not marry… after what those animals did…”
There was a photograph on the Steinbeck grand; of a laughing, mischievous fourteen-year-old on skis. That was a year before the kidnapping. A year afterward Moritz had found his wife in the garage, the exhaust gases pumping down the rubber tube into the closed car. Quinn had been told in London.
Moritz made an effort. “I’m sorry. What can I do for you?”
“I’m trying to find a man. One who came from Dortmund long ago. He may still be here, or in Germany, or dead, or abroad. I don’t know.”
“Well, there are agencies, specialists. Of course, I can engage…”
Quinn realized that Moritz thought he needed money to engage private investigators.
“Or you could ask through the Einwohnermeldeant.”
Quinn shook his head.
“I doubt if they would know. He almost certainly does not willingly cooperate with the authorities. But I believe the police might keep surveillance on him.”
Technically speaking, German citizens who move to a new home within the country are required by law to notify the Inhabitants Registration Office of changes of address, both where from and where to the move took place. Like most bureaucratic systems, this works better in theory than in practice. The ones the police and/or the income tax authorities would like to contact are often those who decline to oblige.
Quinn sketched in the background of the man Werner Bernhardt.
“If he is still in Germany, he would be of an age to be in employment,” said Quinn. “Unless he has changed his name, that will mean he has a social security card, pays income tax-or someone pays it for him. Because of his background he might have been in trouble with the law.”
Moritz thought it over.
“If he is a law-abiding citizen-and even a former mercenary might never have committed an offense inside Germany-he would not have a police record,” he said. “As for the income tax and social security people, they would regard this as privileged information, not to be divulged to an inquiry from you, or even me.”
“They would respond to a police inquiry,” said Quinn. “I thought you might perhaps have a friend or two in the city or state police.”