The scale of this enterprise stunned me. I was prepared to congratulate Schmidt on his achievement, but as we drew closer, a second impression colored the first. A haze had settled over this beach, and what few trees I saw looked singed and dead. The offshore breeze carried a bitter smell.
“What are those?” I asked Doud, pointing. I’d been studying the shoreline with binoculars. Some seventy meters off the sand, I spotted two bare poles rising from the water.
“Guideposts,” he said. “At low tide this morning, we drove these tree trunks into the sand. If we can steer the Maiden between them, she will sit on the beach where we want.”
The captain took his bearings and consulted the tide tables a final time. He took the wheel. He adjusted course and sounded the ship’s horn. Aligned on the trees, he ordered the ship’s engine full ahead.
I could feel the Maiden’s speed. The guideposts approached, followed by a sight sure to panic anyone who earned a living from the sea: the rapid onrush of land. No one needed to translate as the captain sounded the horn moments before impact.
We braced ourselves as the Maiden hit the beach at twenty knots in a last kamikaze run. At impact, the binoculars flew from the chart table and struck a metal pillar. Windows shattered. On any other bridge in any other body of water a captain would have been mad to push the engine as this man did, grinding his ship harder onto the beach. He backed off, then rammed forward, back and forward, rocking the Maiden to death.
And then it was over.
thirteen
The Kraus ship-breaking facility was a boneyard, a charnel house. To our right lay a ship, gone but for its huge aft section. To look inside, through the hull, was to see the crosscut of a mechanical drawing in actual fact: raw trusses and holding tanks, crew’s quarters, half a bathroom, each sliced through, meant to be hidden and in their nakedness obscene. To the left lay the remains of another ship, rusted and half gone, its cables and pipes dangling like the guts of a freshly butchered animal.
Workers scrambled across the face of these behemoths like beetles over a carcass. Plumes of sparks rained onto the beach. The men below ignored the cascade. Many went bare-chested, their shoulders and backs scarred from burns and months of bearing heavy loads. They worked in open-toed flip-flops, one flimsy step from slicing their feet on sheared steel. No one wore hard hats or glasses, no one wore protective gloves. The air reeked of oil, acetylene fumes, diesel, and whatever fertilizers and solvents had been pumped onto the open cesspit of beach.
It was an ecosystem as complete and merciless as any in Nature. These men, sinew and bone wrapped in rags against the heat, cut and carried steel until the hulls disappeared and nothing remained but greasy sand and petroleum stink.
I could scarcely believe my eyes as a winch operator gunned an engine and pulled one ship higher onto the beach with steel cables threaded through holes cut into the bow. A tremendous belch of smoke rose from the engine. A marine winch turned, cables snapping tight, and the bow of a ship larger than the Maiden lifted and moved, millimeter by groaning millimeter, up the inclined beach.
Schmidt turned to me, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Every fourteen or eighteen months, seven hundred oceangoing ships are retired and new ones take their place. Anselm and I buy as many wrecks as we can. We’ve got a sister facility in Bangladesh and are building another in Cambodia.”
He turned a circle, pleased with his creation. “It takes one month to cut a forty-five-meter ship to nothing. I’m amazed myself, frankly. We use every part of the ship. The oil and gas, the pipes and wires, bolts, even the furniture from the crew’s quarters and the lifeboats. It’s where the steel for your dive platform came from,” he said. “We cut it to your specs from an old container ship.”
Schmidt was pleased to explain that producing a million tons of steel from raw materials costs twenty times more than recycling steel from ships like the Eagle Maiden. For every ton of finished steel, Kraus and Schmidt had to feed their blast furnaces nearly five tons of iron ore, coal, and other materials, and 30,000 tons of furnace oil.
“Now do you see it?” he said, pressing me. “Do you understand why we break ships down? Anselm wants you to get a good look because he wants you to understand business done at scale. The world’s a large place, Henri. The need for steel is great, and we’ve scaled our operations accordingly. Think of all the people on earth. They need shoes, don’t they? If you want to compete, you must make shoes by the millions. It’s the same with steel. Small-scale production is for small-scaled minds. It’s fine, if you want to run a mom-and-pop store. But to be a global player requires a global mind. You must think large, Henri! You impressed Anselm with your dive platform. I believe he may have some work for you in Munich. But you must enlarge your thinking first. Watch closely.”
I did, and what I saw unnerved me. The breaking yard lacked scaffolding, so the cutters hung from makeshift trapezes, eight, ten, even twelve stories off the sand. I watched a man twenty meters up banging a hammer against the hull until he got the attention of those below. The workers casually moved off. He relit his torch and made a final cut. A corner broke free and a steel plate half the weight of a car plummeted to the beach. Six men approached, their ribs visible, countable. They bent in unison; they jerked the plate onto their shoulders. One man’s knees buckled. Another rushed to take his place.
An old man with a wispy beard and bone-thin arms squatted on the sand over a hole he’d dug, pants dropped to his ankles. He stared out to the bay, relieving himself, as dozens of other workers flowed around him as if he didn’t exist. And in a way, he didn’t, not to the men who ignored him. Further up the beach, a camp of rickety lean-to’s housed crowds of off-duty workers in rags, squatting over their food. They slept on straw mats on the sand. On a hammock strung between two palms lay a teenager, inert, a bandage over one eye.
“What do you pay them, Viktor?”
“The going rate. They’re not educated, you know. They’re happy enough.”
A week earlier, I’d heard Anselm Kraus tell his dinner guests that, like his father, he believed that business was war conducted by other means. If business was war and war was hell, then the Kraus ship-breaking facility of Hong Kong lay very near its center. I, too, had come to do business in Asia for a client in search of cheap labor. I wanted no part of it if this was how the company in Stuttgart intended to use its workers.
THE ROAD into the breaking yard passed beneath a large metal arch with lettering I couldn’t make out from a distance. Trucks weighted down with metal plates passed beneath this arch; beyond it, I saw Schmidt’s driver in his black livery uniform, standing beside the limousine. We walked on, and just on this side of the arch I saw a knot of men: Chinese, plump and dressed well enough to confirm them as managers. I saw a taller man, too, a European dressed in white linen.
It couldn’t be, but it was: Renard Malet, laughing with these managers, speaking what sounded like serviceable Cantonese.
One of the men recognized Schmidt and waved, motioning us over. When Malet saw me, his expression froze for an instant, then relaxed. He wasn’t there to sell suits at a ship-breaking yard. At once I understood he didn’t want either of us to acknowledge our earlier meeting at the Customs Hall. He made the request without words, demanding that I choose sides.
The plump manager spoke enough German to offer a barely intelligible greeting. The others bowed and smiled. The first man pointed to Malet and said, in pidgin German, “Big customer, maybe. France.”
Schmidt shook Malet’s hand. After an equally inept greeting in French, he turned to me: “You’ve been drafted as translator. Introduce me, please, as a principal of Kraus Steel. Ask him his name and his business, and give him my card. S’il vous plaît!” He was all smiles.
I would have to betray one of them, a total stranger or Schmidt. I made my choice the way I might contemplate dashing across an intersection at a yellow light. I considered the data and figured the odds of a bloody collision.
My first
lie was the largest. I took Malet’s card, registered his new identity, and introduced him as Monsieur Roland Kempf, an independent steel broker from Paris. Schmidt clicked his heels and bowed.
“You’re not selling suits?” I asked Malet in French, which only the two of us could understand.
He smiled at Schmidt and the others. “What I will say right now is that if you take sides with that one, you’ll go straight to hell with him. I speak German and can understand every word you say. I’ll speak through you for the moment.”
“Why are you here?”
“Tell him—to buy steel.”
“And sell suits? Maybe you make steel suits? Do you have many customers asking for those?”
He laughed and nodded. We put on a regular show for the others. Malet told me to say that he represented a design-build team that was bidding on several large projects in Paris. “Monsieur Kempf needs a large amount of steel,” I said. “He’s come out here looking for a bargain.”
So I betrayed Viktor Schmidt, my host, for a total stranger. Behind his smiles, Malet suspected Schmidt of something, as did I. That was good enough.
At the end of the exchange we shook hands all around. We bowed, we shook again. Malet declined Schmidt’s dinner invitation.
And then Schmidt and I left for Hong Kong, but not before I glanced over my shoulder to find my countryman staring at me. If Schmidt found out that I’d lied to him, I expected to need a suit made of steel after all.
We passed beneath the arch in the perimeter fence, and I could see two words welded onto the doubled bar, separated by the Kraus logo: S T E E L and S T R E N G T H. I’d seen this arch, or one very much like it. We stepped into the limousine, and I dozed on the ride back to the city. It wasn’t until I closed my eyes that evening on the too-soft bed of a cheap hotel that I remembered another steel arch with other words: Arbeit Macht Frei.
Work sets you free.
fourteen
“Zeligman’s dead? How is this possible?”
“How is it possible? He fell from a courtyard window at his home in Bruges. What can I say? He was an old man, and old men die.”
“Papa, it can’t be. You saw how fit he was. Days ago. Days.”
My father could only repeat the news and advise me to calm down. “Zeligman must have had some sort of fit and fell from an open window. It’s sad, but there it is. Tell me, how did your trip go?”
I had called from Munich to share the good news that Alec and I had likely won our contract, pending final approval from the parent company. The Stuttgart plant would move its manufacturing to Hong Kong and save seventy percent on labor costs. P&C Consulting Engineers would play a crucial role. We were launched, but the news from Paris shocked me.
I called Freda and discovered that Zeligman had apparently staggered from his chair and fell three stories to his death. I didn’t much care for my reaction to the news—not at all, because I didn’t feel sad for Zeligman or his widow. I didn’t know them. My main concern was that without Zeligman, I had no direct route to Isaac. The search for my uncle had become that much more difficult.
MY OWN troubles preoccupied me when I called on Anselm Kraus at his estate. It was the first Sunday in June. Liesel hadn’t arrived yet, which in retrospect must have been by design. Anselm gave me a tour of the home, then led me to a living room dominated by a large fireplace on either side of which hung, if I was not mistaken, an original Holbein and El Greco. He watched as I studied them.
“The Holbein my father bought. The El Greco was my doing. Look at the scarlet robe against that sky. And the priest’s eyes. His backgrounds are always stormy, aren’t they? Unsettled. And the priest knows it. I swear this could have been painted yesterday by someone on drugs. I love this painting.”
He pointed to a desk on which sat two hard-shell plastic boxes, two keyboards, and a pair of portable television screens. Standing on the stamped and approved side of the customs line in Hong Kong, I hadn’t seen what lay in Schmidt’s cardboard boxes. But from that little drama, I gathered the contents looked very much like what sat before me.
“You’re looking at the future,” said Kraus.
The word Apple was stamped onto the side of one plastic shell. Commodore was stamped onto the other. On an adjacent table lay the electronic guts of a third machine, its plastic casing gone. “Personal computers, Henri. This is what they call the motherboard, this circuitry that makes the thing run. Look closely.” Using the tip of a pencil over which he positioned a magnifying glass, he pointed to a series of slender wires attached to a small chip. “Damn if it doesn’t look like an insect, like it couldn’t just skitter across the room! Do you see it, the sheen on these connectors?” he said. “It’s a thin layer of gold. These Apple people and the others use precious metals in their electronics because precious metals are the best conductors. And this here—” he pointed to another connector. “It’s platinum. Yesterday, the gold markets in New York closed at $180 US dollars per troy ounce. Platinum at $220. Palladium at $65. Plus there’s copper, glass, aluminum, and steel to strip from these machines. I’ve done my research. There’s more gold in one metric ton of electronic scrap than there is in seventeen tons of raw gold ore. You saw the breaking yard in Hong Kong?”
He knew I had.
“I’m going to pursue the same model, but this time a salvage business for electronics. It’s 1978, Henri. I’m willing to make a large bet that this market will grow, and as it does, people will want newer and faster computers. They’ll be throwing away old ones. When they do that, Kraus Steel will be there to reclaim the gold and platinum from their used computers. I know the salvage business. I’m good at it. This will work.”
I stared at him.
“In twenty years personal computers will be in every home and on every desktop of every business in the developed world. If I understood a damn thing about electronics, I’d get into the computer business myself. But I’m going to stick to what I know: how to make steel and how to strip value from other people’s junk.”
Anselm’s Munich estate opened onto a woodland fronted by a vast lawn on which his son and daughter were kicking a ball. Hermann and Albert, Schmidt’s Boerboels, ran and pranced with the children. Well to the left, in a formal garden, Theresa bent over rose bushes with pruning shears. She wore a broad-brimmed hat and gloves. When the ball flew and bounced into the rose patch, Hermann loped over and began to lick her face.
Hard to miss was a full-sized vintage airplane mounted on a steel post and buried in what must have been several tons of concrete. “A Stuka dive bomber?” I said.
“Very good. A beauty, isn’t she?”
“On Terschelling, Friedrich pretended to be piloting a Stuka.”
Kraus watched his son and daughter with obvious pride. “He learned to love the plane here. This was my father’s estate, and after he and Mother died we moved in. Otto had the plane moved here in the fifties. His steel from the Salzgitter mills went into that very one. He had the engine lifted, but the controls are intact, all the cables and the rudders. Friedrich doesn’t know it, but for his twelfth birthday I’m giving him flying lessons and for his sixteenth, a restored Stuka. I’ve got three in a hangar out by the airport, one in reasonable shape and the other two for parts. When he’s twelve, he and I and a mechanic will begin restoring the plane. By the time he’s ready to fly, he’ll know every bolt, gasket, and control switch. What do you think?”
“He’s certain to love it,” I said.
A father couldn’t have adored a son more. I liked this man. Rather, I wanted to like him despite everything I saw in Hong Kong. “What did you want to see me about?” I asked.
“Anselm!”
It was Schmidt, his voice booming from the entryway, around the corner.
“I want you to consult on a project,” said Kraus.
“Ah, there you are. And Henri! How did your meetings go in Hong Kong? I told Anselm all about our ride on the Eagle Maiden. Some fun, yes? But I tell you, it’s good to be back
among the civilized peoples of the world. Did you get the contract?”
I nodded.
“There’s a good man!” Schmidt looked at his son-in-law. “He’s on his way.”
I was explaining the work in Hong Kong, when Schmidt interrupted and asked if I had any progress to report on the dive platform. In fact, on my return I’d spoken with Alec, who’d informed me the weather had improved and they’d found a few coins with the proper dating. Kraus proved himself as knowledgeable as he’d boasted, asking if they were half guineas or spade guineas.
“They’d have to be dated somewhere between 1795 or so and 1600,” he said.
In fact, they were: one showed George the Second in profile, and the other, George the Third.
Schmidt was more interested in the drive shaft. He asked if we’d found any new junk from more recent ships. “You let me know, all right? And get me out to that platform! Tit for tat, remember?”
Friedrich and Magda exploded into the room, the dogs right behind them. Magda took a running leap into her grandfather’s arms. Friedrich, stopping before me, said, “You’re the one I shot down on the beach. I’ll give you another chance. Come outside.”
Hermann and Albert turned circles around me, sniffing.
“Not now,” said Kraus. “You two go along—upstairs. Get cleaned up for dinner.”
Schmidt raised his arm and said, “Hupt.” The children ran and the dogs followed.
We stood by the tables with the computers. Kraus picked up his magnifying glass once more and inspected the connectors on the circuit board. “Viktor, I was just explaining our plans for salvaging computers.”
“Well, I suffered enough for those damned things in Hong Kong. What do you think, Henri? It’s a good plan, don’t you think? The success of this project turns as much on an understanding of human nature as on the salvaging process. People will throw away their old computers for new ones. If they do, we’ll have an inexhaustible supply of valuable junk. Brilliant. Anselm is brilliant.”
The Tenth Witness Page 6
