‘Young Stein will benefit,’ said Kleiber. ‘He’ll take the money and get married to Mary Breslow… that’s the final joke, eh?’
‘A lot of people will benefit,’ said Stuart, who knew that the final horrible joke was yet to come. ‘There’s Delaney, the night-club owner, an ex-gangster named Petrucci, Pitman’s nephew in Arkansas… They’ll all benefit but the real beneficiaries are the clients of the bank, they’re the people you swindled, Kleiber.’
‘Put away your violin,’ said Kleiber.
‘How did you hear that Lustig was making a film?’
‘I was having dinner with Max Breslow one evening in Frankfurt. He mentioned the film quite casually. He asked me if I thought it could prove dangerous to us. I told him it wouldn’t be dangerous if the production was in our hands. I told him I might be able to raise enough money to buy Lustig out.’
‘Did Breslow know the money came from Böttger?’
Kleiber settled back in his chair and sat in silence for a moment before replying. ‘Max Breslow was a war casualty. When he was a young soldier he had guts. Once, long ago, he was tough, Mr Stuart, in the way that you and I are tough.’
‘Do we have something in common?’
‘You don’t fool me with your soft voice and your fancy accent, your old school tie and your vague smiles and deferential manner; I recognize the killer in you, Mr Stuart. I’ve had too many like you on my payroll to make a mistake.’
‘And Max Breslow?’
‘He believed that propaganda shit that the Nazis fed us all. He couldn’t see that the penpushers writing all that stuff about Aryans, the historical destiny of the Fatherland and ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, were writing it because it paid better than doing translations of Karl Marx.’
‘But there came a time when doing translations of Karl Marx paid better?’
‘You play the music; I’ll sing the words, Mr Stuart. But poor old Max wasn’t so adaptable. When he realized that the Nazis were just another set of crooked politicians, it broke his spirit. He was never the same again. Now what is he-a nothing!’
‘But he took over the Lustig film when you asked him.’
Kleiber laughed. ‘You think he might have turned me down, eh? Max is finished; nearly bankrupt. Who’d invest money in one of Breslow’s shoddy little films? His house is mortgaged to the very limit, he’s got no money saved, and only put his daughter through college by selling off his wife’s jewellery piece by piece. Sure, he jumped at the chance of taking over the Lustig film with the finance guaranteed, and a standard producer’s fee. He couldn’t afford to do otherwise.’
‘And all the time you were reporting to Moscow?’
‘The Russians were threatening to release some phoney evidence about me being implicated in war crimes.’
Stuart allowed the word phoney to go unremarked. ‘And the KGB approved of your idea to involve Böttger and his Trust?’
‘The Trust provided perfect cover, and through them I got help from people who would never have helped the Russians. And what expertise! I could never have arranged that hundred million dollar coup against Pitman’s bank without having all the resources of the Trust behind me.’
‘What exactly did you tell Dr Böttger?’
‘They didn’t need much persuasion. Those fat businessmen could see the economic consequences of rewriting the history books to make Hitler into a hero. They didn’t want anyone saying that he’d been clever enough to make Winston Churchill come cringing.’
‘But Churchill changed his mind; Churchill turned down the peace terms.’
‘So Churchill becomes the warmonger who continued with the war that caused twenty million deaths. Any way you present the facts, Hitler comes out best.’
‘And that would have hurt the West German economy?’
‘Publicity and controversy leading on to speeches and demonstrations. Neo-Nazis fighting left-wingers in the streets. Once it started there is no telling where it might have ended.’
‘Especially with General Shumuk pulling the strings,’ said Stuart, but Kleiber had never heard of Shumuk and did not respond to this remark.
‘We Germans are like that,’ said Kleiber. ‘We’re always too anxious to please the people who conquer us. We flatter them and imitate them. Split down the centre, we now have two halves each trying slavishly to adopt the system, myth and methodology of our masters. But Böttger knew that West Germany needs the untarnished memory of Churchill and Roosevelt in a way that the other western countries don’t need them. Moscow Centre thought Böttger might be right and judging from the effort your people put into it, London did too.’ He smiled, and drank more whisky.
Stuart said, ‘They thought it might be a blow to the value of sterling on the international exchanges. It doesn’t need much to start a run. They worried about the psychological effect the idea of Churchill’s asking for peace would have on American public opinion. Here in the US, most anglophilia depends on Churchill’s wartime reputation as a man who never considered giving up the struggle. My people worried too about public opinion in those countries which Churchill was prepared to consign to the Nazi empire. Some of those countries now sell Britain oil and vital raw materials. There was plenty to worry about.’
At the sound of conversation outside, Kleiber got to his feet and went to the window. He looked across the pool to the units where two men in white coats were going to examine Grechko’s body. He watched them enter the door and then turned back to Stuart. ‘I was there,’ he said suddenly. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘I guessed,’ said Stuart. ‘I got your army service record. You were attached to the Führerhauptquartier for roughly the period of the Churchill visit. You were an intelligence officer: I guessed it was an attachment for security purposes, for the summit meeting.’
Kleiber looked at him. The British were like that. He never knew quite where he was with them, but they didn’t frighten him in the way the CIA men did.
‘I went out to the site with Dr Todt and the survey team. Before they even started on it.’
‘It was built specially for the Churchill meetings?’
‘Sure. It wasn’t much of a place. It’s still there. A couple of years ago I stopped off and had coffee at the hotel there. It’s not much changed: a church, a hotel and a few houses… a concrete bunker, plus a few wooden huts. Wolfschlucht, Hitler named it.’
‘So you were there before Churchill arrived?’
‘I helped arrange the new passes and the perimeter and so forth. It was a small party that arrived. No military attachés or war correspondents, no one in civilian clothing at all. It was obviously something very unusual. We were told only that it was to be a conference, and thought Mussolini was coming north. I suppose that’s what we were intended to think.’
‘But it was Churchill.’
‘He was the only one in civilian clothes. He wore a misshapen, grey rollbrim hat, a spotted bow-tie and a lumpy looking overcoat. His plane had no markings as I recall. We saw ten Messerschmitt fighters in loose formation above Churchill’s de Havilland when it arrived. They continued to circle while he landed at Le Gros Caillou, near Rocroi in France, about ten kilometres from us. They brought him up to Brûly in a Fiesler Storch communications aircraft. There was just room to land in the field behind the hotel.’
‘Churchill was alone?’
‘There was one person with him, a British colonel in civilian clothes. The Führer had a small guard of honour made up from the SS Begleit Kommando and the army’s FBB. Churchill was invited to inspect them but he waved the guard commander away. The two leaders went directly to the wooden hut where the secretaries and translators were waiting. The Führer greeted Churchill at the door of it; the two men did not shake hands. I got the idea that Churchill was making sure that there were no photographers there. He had stipulated that beforehand. We had special instructions to confiscate all cameras from everyone, and there were notices in the barrack huts threatening the death sentence for anyone not handing his camera over to the security service.’