Len Deighton - XPD

‘Losing one hundred million will wipe us out,’ said Stein.

‘Word of it will get around,’ said Colonel Pitman. ‘Maybe the bank could sustain the loss, but lost confidence will make it very difficult for us to continue trading, unless we find someone who will buy us out. There are the government guarantees and so on. So far, I haven’t taken advice about the legal implications because I don’t want to go spreading the story all round town.’

‘Say two million dollars from the cases of drugs in Zurich airport free zone,’ said Stein. ‘What else have we got in fixed-interest stocks and gold and stuff that we could sell?’

‘Maybe three-quarters of a million US dollars,’ said the colonel sadly. ‘I’ve been all through our assets time and time again. We’ve taken a terrible beating with the decline in value of the US dollar. We should have diversified much more. If I sold this house, maybe I could put another million into the pot.’

‘Nix on that, Colonel,’ said Stein. ‘None of the boys would want to put you on the street, or even in some lousy little apartment block downtown. By the time we’d shared it out, it wouldn’t be so much. We all shared in the benefits and we all have to share in the losses.’ He rubbed his nose. ‘I guess this is the end of the bank.’

‘My fault,’ said Colonel Pitman. ‘I take a nice fat salary for looking after everyone’s money. I can’t go on living in luxury after letting you down.’

‘Then maybe we should sell the documents to Breslow, or to the highest bidder,’ said Stein.

‘Let’s not jump out of the frying pan into the fire,’ said Colonel Pitman. ‘At present we are only short of money-and, let’s face it, none of the boys are paupers. If we put those old documents on the market, we might find ourselves facing fifteen years in Leavenworth. I’d want to get a lot of legal opinion before we let anyone know what we’ve got.’

‘Maybe you are right,’ said Stein.

‘You read all that stuff years and years ago,’ said Colonel Pitman. ‘I can remember you sitting upstairs, buried under it all. What’s in them?’

‘All kinds of junk,’ said Stein evasively. ‘My dad spoke fluent German. He always wanted me to learn, but you know how kids are. I have difficulty reading it, and that stuff we have is all written in the sort of bureaucratic double-talk that makes our own official documents just as baffling.’

‘I remember you showed me one lot of documents,’ said the colonel. ‘It was the minutes of a meeting. You were very excited by it at the time, you almost missed your lunch.’ The colonel grinned. ‘The pages were annotated and signed “Paul Schmidt” in pencil. You told me that he was Hitler’s interpreter.’

‘Schmidt was head of the secretariat and chief interpreter for Hitler and the Foreign Office in Berlin.’ He tasted the cigar, letting the smoke come gently through his nostrils. The last remaining shreds of light caught it, so that it glowed bright blue like some supernatural manifestation.

‘I remember it,’ said Pitman. He was speaking as if the effort of conversation was almost too much for him. ‘ Führer-kopie was rubber-stamped on each sheet. You said it was the minutes of some top-secret meeting.’

‘That’s right,’ said Stein softly. Outside in the hall the old long-case clock struck midnight; the chimes went on interminably and sounded much louder than they did in the daytime.

‘What did you do with those documents?’ said Colonel Pitman.

‘It’s better you don’t know,’ said Stein in the edgy voice of Corporal Stein, the orderly room clerk who never got anything wrong.

‘Perhaps it is,’ agreed Pitman. He went across to switch on extra lights, as if hoping that they would illuminate the conversation too He looked at the Persian carpet that was hanging on the wall It was a Shiraz-all that now remained of the treasures from the Kaiseroda mine. The carpet had been thrown from the truck when they first began to unload, a dirty stain on the canvas wrapping into which it had been sewn. The colonel still recalled the markings: Islamisches Abteilung, part of the Prussian state museum’s treasures, put into the salt mine to keep them safe from Allied bombs and Red Army artillery. In the hysterical atmosphere of that night, Jerry Delaney, who had driven the first truck right behind the colonel’s jeep had shouted, ‘A present for the colonel,’ and the soldiers had cheered. They were good boys. Colonel Pitman felt a tear welling in his eye as he remembered them. Now he touched the surface of the carpet to feel the tiny knotted pile and the tassels. They were fine men; he had been proud to lead them.

‘What must we do?’ said Colonel Pitman.

‘We’ll have to know more about these film people, Colonel. They could be very dangerous, but… ’ he fluttered his hand, ‘but maybe they can be handled. Let’s see what they’re after.’

Pitman turned to look at him and nodded.

Tin going to take a few other documents back to California with me,’ said Stein. ‘I’ll feed them some odds and ends to see how they react. Meanwhile you follow up this trouble we’ve got with the bank. Talk to the other banks, see if they’ll support us. Maybe it’s somehow connected to this Breslow guy.’

‘You know best, Corporal, you always have done,’ said Pitman.

All cops who regularly ride the cars have an ‘eating spot’. Doughnut shops are a favoured choice. Such places always have good coffee ready to drink and, if a radio call comes in during the break, a doughnut can be snatched up and taken along. Also, doughnut shops are usually situated near busy intersections and have conveniently large parking places for their customers. All in all, a doughnut shop is a good place to start looking for a cop.

The cars outside the Big O Donut Shop, where the Santa Monica Freeway passes over La Brea, were parked nose to the wall, except for the ‘black and white’. That was parked nose out, the way all police drivers leave their vehicles while taking a refreshment break. The two uniformed police officers could be seen inside the brightly lit windows. It was 11.34 p.m. on Saturday, June 2, when a local resident, an eighteen-year-old auto mechanic named William Dawson, went up to the table occupied by the police officers and said he wanted to report a crime. This public-spirited action was prompted by some difficulties Dawson was having at the time with the county Probation Department.

Dawson, whose interest in motor cars extended all the way from repairing them to stealing them and driving them while under the influence of drugs, had become curious about the presence on La Brea of a dented green Cadillac. It was a 1970 Fleetwood Eldorado, featuring the 8.2 litre engine-the biggest production car engine in the world. In his written statement, Dawson said that he was looking closely at the car with a view to finding its owner and purchasing it. He said he wanted to fit the engine into a hot rod he was building, although more than one officer in the detectives’ room expressed the opinion that Dawson was about to steal the car.

Accompanying Dawson to the parked Cadillac, the two officers were shown blood marks on the road surface under the car. Forcing open the capacious luggage space, they discovered the bound body of a man. His age was difficult to determine, for his head had been removed from his torso and was not anywhere in the vicinity. The smell-which had first prompted Dawson to go to the police-was enough to indicate that the victim had been dead for a week or so. One of the police officers vomited. For his assistance to the police, Dawson was given a letter stating the facts for the Los Angeles county superior court, to which he was responsible for the probation order.