Алистер Маклин - Bear Island

‘Be rather difficult to communicate with the Morning Rose’s transceiver lying in bits and pieces.’

‘How very true,’ I said. ‘And why is it in bits and pieces? Because on the bridge you started talking freely and at length about shouting for help over that self-same radio and whistling up the NATO Atlantic forces if need be, while all the time some clever-cuts was taking his ease out on the bridge wing drinking in every word you said. I know, there were fresh tracks in the snow – well, my tracks, but re-used, if you follow me. So, of course, our clever-cuts hies himself off and gets himself a heavy hammer.’

‘I could have been more circumspect at that, I suppose. You can have my apologies if you want them but I don’t see them being all that useful at this stage.’

‘I’m hardly in line myself for a citation for distinguished services, so we’ll leave the apologies be. Now that you’re here – well, I won’t have to watch my back so closely.’

‘So they’re on to you – whoever they are?’

‘Whoever they are are unquestionably on to me.’ I told him briefly all I knew, not all I thought I knew or suspected I knew, for I saw no point in making Smithy as confused as myself. I went on: ‘Just so we don’t act at cross-purposes, let me initiate any action that I – or we – may think may have to be taken. I need hardly say that that doesn’t deprive you of initiative if and when you find yourself or think you find yourself physically threatened. In that event, you have my advance permission to flatten anybody.’

‘That’s nice to know.’ Smithy smiled briefly for the first time. ‘It would be even nicer to know who it is that I’m likely to have to flatten. It would be even nicer still to know what you who are, I gather, a fairly senior Treasury official, and I, whom I know to be a junior one, are doing on this god-damned island anyway.’

‘The Treasury’s basic concern is money, always money, in one shape or other, and that’s why we’re here. Not our money, not British money, but what we call international dirty money, and all the members of the Central Banks co-operate very closely on this issue.’

‘When you’re as poor as I am,’ Smithy said, ‘there’s no such thing as dirty money.’

‘Even an underpaid civil servant like yourself wouldn’t touch this lot. This is all ill-gotten gains, illegal loot from the days of World War II. This money has all been earned in blood and what has been recovered of it – and that’s only a fraction of the total – has almost invariably been recovered in blood. Even as late as the spring of 1945 Germany was still a land of priceless treasures: by the summer of that year the cupboard was almost entirely bare. Both the victors and the vanquished laid their sticky fingers on every imaginable object of value they could clap eyes on – gold, precious stones, old masters, securities – German bank securities issued forty years ago are still perfectly valid – and took off in every conceivable direction. I need hardly say that none of those involved saw fit to declare their latest acquisitions to the proper authorities.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Your worried friends are scouring Bear Island for you – or a very small part of it, anyway. A half-hour search. I’ll have to bring in your unconscious form in about fifteen minutes.’

‘It all sounds pretty dull to me,’ Smith said. ‘All this loot, I mean. Was there much of it?’

‘It all depends what you call much. It’s estimated that the Allies – and when I say “Allies” I mean Britain and America as well as the much-maligned Russians – managed to get hold of about two-thirds of the total. That left the Nazis and their sympathizers with about a paltry one-third, and the conservative estimate of that one-third – conservative, Smithy – is that it amounts to approximately £350 million. Pounds sterling, you understand.’

‘A thousand million all told?’

‘Give or take a hundred million.’

‘That childish remark about this being a dull subject. Strike it off the record.’

‘Granted. Now this loot has found its way into some very odd places indeed. Some of it, inevitably, lies in secret numbered bank-accounts. Some of it – there is no question about this – lies in the form of specie in some of the very deepest Austrian Alpine lakes and has so far proved irrecoverable. I know of two Raphaels in the cellar gallery of a Buenos Aires millionaire, a Michelangelo in Rio, several Halses and Rubenses in the same illegal collection in New York, and a Rembrandt in London. Their owners are either people who have been in, were in, or are closely connected to the governments or armed forces of the countries concerned: there’s nothing the governments concerned can do about it and there are no signs that they’re particularly keen to do anything about it anyway, they themselves might be the ultimate beneficiaries. As lately as the end of 1970 an international cartel went on to the market with £30 millions’ worth of perfectly valid German securities issued in the thirties, approaching in turn the London, New York and Zürich markets, but the Federal Bank of Germany refused to cash those until proper owner identification was established: the point is that it’s an open secret that those securities were taken from the vaults of the Reichsbank in 1945 by a special Red Army unit who were constituted as the only legalized military burglars in history.

‘But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak; the vast bulk of this immense fortune is hidden because the war is still too recent and people – the illegal owners – still too scared to convert their treasures into currency. There’s a special Italian Government Recovery Office that deals exclusively with this matter, and its boss, one Professor Siviero, estimates that there are at least seven hundred old masters, many of them virtually priceless, still untraced, while another expert, a Simon Wiesenthal of the Austrian Jewish Documentation Service, says virtually the same thing – he, incidentally, maintains that there are countless highly-wanted characters, such as top-ranking officers in the SS, who are living in great comfort from hundreds of numbered bank accounts scattered throughout Europe.

‘Siviero and Wiesenthal are the acknowledged legal experts in this form of recovery. Unfortunately, there are known to be a handful of people – they amount to certainly not more than three or four – who are possessed of an equal or even greater expertise in this matter, but who unfortunately are lacking in the high principles of their colleagues, if that is the word, who operate on the right side of the law. Their names are known but they are untouchable because they have never committed any known crimes, not even fraudulent conversion of stocks, because the stocks are always good, the claimants always proven. They are, nevertheless, criminals operating on an international level. We have the most skilful and successful of the lot with us here on Bear Island. His name is Johann Heissman.’

‘Heissman!’

‘None other. He’s a very gifted lad is our Johann.’

‘But Heissman! How can that be? Heissman? What kind of sense can that make? Why it’s only two years–’

‘I know. It’s only two years since Heissman made his spectacular escape from Siberia and arrived in London to the accompaniment of lots of noise and TV cameras and yards of newspaper space and enough red carpet to go from Tilbury to Tomsk, since which time he has occupied himself exclusively with his old love of film-making, so how can it possibly be Heissman?

‘Well, it can be Heissman and it is Heissman for our Johann is a very downy bird indeed. We have checked, in fact, that he was a movie studio partner of Otto in Vienna just before the war and that they did, in fact, attend the same gymnasium in St Polten, which is not all that far away. We do know that Heissman ran the wrong way while Otto ran the right way at the time of the Anschluss , and we do know that Heissman, because of his then Communist sympathies, was a very welcome guest of the Third Reich. What followed was one of those incredibly involved double and treble dealing spy switches that occurred so frequently in central Europe during the war. Heissman was apparently allowed to escape to Russia, where his sympathies were well known, and then sent back to Germany where he was ordered to transmit all possible misleading but still acceptable military information back to the Russians.’