The Monte Cristo Cover-Up

by Johannes Mario Simmel

  "Then what are we going to do with the powder and the tommy-guns themselves?"

  "They'll be shipped from Hamburg," said Thomas. "And off Hamburg the water's deep. Need I say more?"

  In that August of 1947 the supply situation at Wiesbaden touched rock-bottom. The calorie figure dropped to 800. The shortage of potatoes grew worse and worse. They were distributed only to hospitals and camps. The population lived almost entirely on maize products, unpopular on account of their bitter taste. The fat ration had to be reduced from 200 to 150 grams. Sugar was doled out at the rate of half a pound of white and half a pound of yellow per head. Four additional eggs were allowed in compensation for "the worse imaginable yield of fruit and vegetables owing to the great drought." Milk supplies broke down altogether. Two thirds of the Wiesbaden adults received no milk at all. *

  It may be observed that a terrible war is never anything like finished after it has been lost.

  [7]

  The firm of Achazian began by selling to Pangalos and Ho Irawadi two thousand kilos each of the malaria specific ate-brin taking from stocks of the German Army. The packages were still stamped with the German eagle and swastika. That

  object had to be removed! Thomas and his partners took the atebrin to a pharmaceutical goods factory where the stuff was repacked. Then it could be shipped.

  This was comparative child's play. But in another case the problem appeared at first sight absolutely insoluble. Pangalos and Ho Irawadi wanted to buy tropical helmets. Each customer required thirty thousand. They were available. But the swastikas on the helmets were so deeply engraved that they couldn't be removed. In these circumstances the firm naturally felt obliged to renounce the idea of selling the helmets abroad.

  What on earth are we to do with the blasted things? Thomas wondered. He wondered for days on end. Then he had a brilliant inspiration. There were splendid sweat-absorber bands in the helmets, brand-new and of first-rate quality. Not a single scrap of hatband leather remained throughout the whole German hat industry.

  Thomas contacted its leading representatives. Suddenly the helmets began to sell like hot cakes. *

  The firm of Achazian made a far greater profit from the sale of those hatbands than it would have made by selling the helmets themselves. Moreover, Thomas had succeeded in gingering up the German postwar hat industry.

  But he had his worries, though they were not business ones. Thomas felt that Dunya was steadily encroaching upon his energies. She made scenes arising from her love or jealousy. She was both exciting and exhausting. Thomas quarreled with her and made it up again. It was the craziest period of his life.

  Bastian was also worried. "You can't go on like this, boy. You're ruining yourself with that lady."

  "What am I to do? I can't chuck her out And she won't go."

  "She'll go one of these days."

  "Yes, but to the police."

  "Damn it all," said Bastian. "You've got to consider the future a bit."

  "That's just what I keep on doing. In any case our business here won't prosper much longer. Then we shall have to get out, and quite suddenly, as you can imagine—too suddenly for Dunya ..."

  "Well, I don't know," said Bastian.

  Next they sold ball bearings to Greeks and Indo-Chinese, then trucks, jeeps, plows and other agricultural implements. "So that they can't start any trouble," said Thomas Lieven,

  staring out of the windows of his office at the desolate heaps of rubbish and ruins representing Wiesbaden.

  The town looked as if it never wanted to rise again. Before the war only rich people lived there. Now there were simply persons of scanty private means dwelling in piles of rubble. The entire rubble area was later officially stated to comprise six hundred thousand cubic meters. Until the currency reform the removal of rubbish and rubble had cost Wiesbaden 3.36 million marks. Laborers and "rubble women" toiled shoulder to shoulder with other citizens, working in shifts. Thomas Lieven, Bastian Fabre and Reuben Achazian also dug for days on end in the muck. They regarded it as a kind of sport to counter-balance their other activities.

  In the autumn of 1947 they suddenly realized that a pair of trousers could be made out of every American sleeping bag. They had forty thousand such bags. Clothing factories in South Germany still remember the flood of materials and orders which overwhelmed them in November 1947.

  In the spring of 1948 they began, as a last undertaking, to do business in munitions. Hitherto they had given munitions the "preliminary treatment." Now they shipped the stuff in the same way as the chests filled with soft soap which were supposed to contain tommy-guns.

  The vessels carrying such cargoes for Greece and Indo-China put to sea. They would be a good while on the way, thought Thomas. He could proceed at his leisure to close his offices in Wiesbaden, at just about the same time as several film companies opened theirs in the city.

  The films shot in Wiesbaden all had the naively trivial, sadly gay or guaranteed harmless themes and titles of the German re-education period, such as When a Woman Loves, Wedding Night in Paradise, Akbar the Tiger or Fatal Dreams.

  "The time's gradually coming when we shall have to clear out, old lad," said Thomas to Bastian on May 14, 1948.

  "What do you think the Greeks and Indo-Chinese are likely to do when they find out what's happened?"

  "Kill us if they can catch us," said Thomas Lieven.

  But the purchasers of weapons did not catch Thomas and Bastian. Instead, foreign agents caught a few "genuine" dealers in armaments, as may be remembered, in the Federal Republic between the years 1948 and 1956. Time-bombs were placed in their cars or they were shot down in the open street.

  Thomas Lieven remarked philosophically on one of these

  macabre occasions: "He who delivers violence perishes by violence. We delivered soft soap. So we live."

  But this occasion, as stated above, came later. On May 14, 1948, Thomas believed for a short time, quite suddenly, that he might come to a violent end. Toward midday the front doorbell rang. Bastian answered it. He returned waxen-faced. "Two gentlemen from the Soviet Military Mission."

  "God Almighty," murmured Thomas. Then they were in the room, stern-featured and heavily built. In spite of the heat they still wore their leather overcoats. All of a sudden Thomas felt very hot, then, equally suddenly, very cold.

  It's all over, he was thinking. Finish. They've found me.

  "Good morning," said one of the Russians throatily.

  "Kherrr Khelllerrr?"

  "Yes."

  "We are looking for Frau Dunya Melanin. We are told she's with you."

  "Well—er—" Thomas pulled himself together. "The lady may be here."

  "Would you permit us, please, to speak with her? Alone?"

  "Certainly," said Thomas. He took the two men to another room, where Dunya was giving herself a manicure.

  Ten minutes later the gentlemen in the leather overcoats left as they had come, stern-featured and taciturn.

  Bastian and Thomas rushed at Dunya. "What was it about?"

  With a shriek of delight the blond beauty flung her arms around Thomas's neck, almost knocking him down. "This is the happiest day of my life!" She kissed him. "My beloved!" Another kiss. "My only one!" A third kiss. "We can marry!"

  Bastian's jaw dropped.

  Thomas stammered: "We ... can ... what?"

  "Marry!"

  "But you're married already, Dunya!"

  "Not now! Not for the last two minutes! Those men requested me to return home at once, to comply with the order of a Soviet divorce court petitioned by my husband, I refused. Then the men said: Tn that case your marriage is dissolved from this moment.' Look, here's the decree!"

  "I can't read Russian," Thomas murmured. The room seemed to be whirling around him. He stared first at the beaming Dunya, then at Bastian's waxen features.

  Well, let's hope we all enjoy ourselves, he was thinking.

  Those ships with the sawdust ammunition and the soft soap are on the high seas and— Hel
p!

  [8]

  The best thing I can do is to take a rope and shoot myself with it, Thomas reflected sadly. How shall I ever get out of this ghastly mess? For the next few days he crept about feeling thoroughly miserable. On the night of May 18, returning from a visit to Dunya's furnished room, he shuffled, groaning, into the bathroom and in his nervousness tore the little medicine cupboard off the wall. It fell to the floor with a thunderous crash.

  Bastian Fabre blundered out of his room half asleep. "What on earth's the matter, man?"

  "Bromide," wailed our friend. "I need bromide, I must calm myself..."

  "Have you been to see Dunya?"

  "Yes. Just imagine, she's already arranged for publication of the banns. You're to be one of the witnesses. The show is to come off in a month's time. And she wants children! Five! And as soon as possible! Bastian, I shall be done for if something doesn't happen at once—at once, do you hear?"

  "I heard you. Well, take a sip of that stuff first. I've got an idea which may work. But you'll have to give me two or three days' leave to see about it."

  'Take your time, old lad," said Thomas Lieven. Bastian took it. When he returned six days later he was unusually silent.

  "For goodness sake say something!" the desperate future bridegroom urged him. "Did you get anywhere?"

  "We shall see," Bastian replied.

  That was on May 25. That day Thomas heard nothing from Dunya. Nor did he on the next. When he called on her in the evening she was not at home.

  On May 27, at a quarter past six in the evening, the telephone bell rang in his apartment. When he lifted the receiver all he could hear at first was a deafening uproar of voices and combustion engines.

  Then suddenly he heard Dunya's despairing accents, choked by tears. "My beloved—my darling . . ."

  "Dunya!" he cried. "Where are you?"

  "At the airport in Frankfurt—at the military police station ..."

  "The military police station?"

  A fresh outburst of sobbing reached him in Frankfurt. Then he heard her gasp: "I'm flying to America, dearest..."

  Thomas dropped into a chair. "You— what!"

  "We start in ten minutes ... oh, I'm so terribly unhappy ... but my life's in danger. I shall be killed if I stay here ..."

  "Killed—" Thomas repeated idiotically. Bastian entered the room humming to himself, went to a wall cabinet and helped himself to a small whisky. Meanwhile Thomas heard Dunya's voice say: "I received threatening letters—I was assaulted, almost strangled. They said they were going to kill me because I wouldn't go home—the Americans said that too—"

  "The Americans—too?"

  "Oh, not the way you mean!" cried the hysterical voice in Frankfurt. "The State Department has ordered me to be flown to America—for my own safety ... after all my husband was a Russian general, don't forget..."

  "Dunya,ivhy didn't you tell me all this before?"

  "I didn't want to endanger you. And they told me I wasn't to speak to anybody ..." She was talking very fast. Thomas felt giddy. Dunya spoke of love and a future meeting, of eternal fidelity and indissoluble bonds of union across the oceans. She ended: "I must stop, beloved. The aircraft's waiting ... good-bye ..."

  "Good-bye," said Thomas. Then he was cut off. He replaced the receiver.

  He stared at Bastian, moistening his lips. "Give me one too. And hurry up with it. I suppose you're responsible for this?"

  Bastian nodded. "Actually, it wasn't so very difficult," said he.

  It really hadn't been, after his discovery of a huge camp for foreigners, called the Valka, outside Nuremberg. The loyal Bastian paid it a visit.

  There were a great many drinking shops in the cheerless surroundings of that cheerless camp. On his third evening Bastian ran across two gentlemen who were willing, for a very reasonable fee, to compose certain threatening letters in Russian. They also agreed to come to Wiesbaden, break into a certain furnished room there, take a lady by the throat and give her a devil of a fright.

  "Reaction was immediate," Bastian reported to his friend, rubbing his hands gleefully.

  "Bastian!" Thomas shouted at him in a fury.

  "The strangling was guaranteed harmless. I warned that Ivan johnny that she mustn't be seriously hurt."

  "Get me another whisky, quick, and make it straight," groaned Thomas.

  "With pleasure. I admit it was rather a rough and ready scheme."

  "It was barbarous!"

  "But I was getting very worried about you, old lad. I kept on seeing you going about with five children ... can you forgive me?"

  Later that evening they discussed their future. Thomas mentioned a new project. "We've made quite a bit of money here. We ought to invest it now—and quickly."

  "Why so quickly?"

  "I've been hearing things . .. Believe me, we'll have to work fast. We're going to buy cars. American Pontiacs, Cadillacs and so on."

  Thomas warmed to his theme. A dollar, he explained, was worth at the moment about two hundred marks. Well, they had the money. But of course no German could obtain an import license for American cars. Never mind! Thomas knew a minor clerk in the Military Government who was just on the point of retirement. This man, Jackson Taylor, could obtain an import license.

  "He'll start a showroom in Hamburg where he'll sell the cars. But for us."

  "Who's he going to sell 'em to? No one has a bean in this country."

  "They soon will have."

  "Now many cars will you be buying, then?"

  "Oh, about a hundred."

  "Jesus! And have them brought over right away?"

  "Yes. No. I'll buy 'em and have 'em brought over. But perhaps not right away."

  "When, then?"

  "That depends on when my little show comes off."

  "What little show?"

  Thomas told him.

  [9] —

  On June 10, 1948, the Olivia left New York harbor. On May 17 the vessel, which carried a cargo of one hundred American

  cars, had reached the point 10 degrees 15 minutes longitude North and 48 degrees 30 minutes latitude West off the west coast of France. That day the captain received the following wireless message in code.

  north german radio—17 June 48—1543 hours—from schwertmann shipping office hamburg to captain hannes droge in name of cargo owner request you retain your present position till further notice and refrain from entering german territorial waters for the time being—maintain contact with us—further instructions follow—end

  The Olivia cruised for three days and nights within the area mentioned. The crew kept skeleton watches, played poker and tippled. They toasted the unknown cargo owner over and over again.

  On June 20 the following cable in code was taken down by a merry first wireless officer.

  north german radio—20 June 48—1123 hours—from schwertmann shipping office hamburg to captain hannes droge—-in name of cargo owner request you now proceed hamburg harbor immediately—end

  While the first wireless officer decoded the cable for his merry captain, the merry second wireless officer listened to the news from London. He removed his headphones and said: "A drastic currency reform has been announced today by our people in Germany. The old money is worthless. You only get forty marks to the dollar now."

  "Always bad news," grumbled the second wireless officer.

  "Good Lord, my savings," exclaimed the captain.

  "The man with goods is well off today," said the first wireless officer.

  The second wireless officer's jaw dropped. "That cargo owner of ours with his hundred cars!"

  The captain nodded gloomily. "Just like our people to do a thing like that. What a sly devil! I'd like to know who he is . . ."

  Well, Captain Hannes Droge, if by any chance you're reading these lines, now you know.

  In the spring of 1949 Thomas and Bastian were doing well in Zurich. Their favorite daily reading was the financial section of the Neue Zurcher Zeitung.

  Thomas had bough
t up large quantities of pre-reform German shares with the proceeds of his recent operations. These shares were negotiated after the war at extremely low prices, since no one knew at that time how completely the victorious powers would destroy the centers of German economic life.

  The most valuable plants were demolished. The biggest concerns were dissolved. In 1946-47 the shares of the United Steel Works were only negotiated to the extent of about fifteen per cent, General Electric thirty per cent and I. G. Farben not at all.

  People who had nevertheless bought these and other shares were now richly rewarded for their optimism. After the currency reform, when the German mark was substituted for the reichsmark, prices rose month by month. At least one gentleman who occupied a Zurich flat could not complain of the situation.

  But it changed on April 14, 1949. That day Thomas and Bastian visited the Scala Cinema at Zurich. They wanted to see the famous Italian film The Bicycle Thief. They saw the advertisements and the news pictures, including one of the Spring Derby at Hamburg.

  Fine horses, gentlemen in morning dress and fascinating women could be admired. The camera indulged in some large close-ups of eminent spectators, a stout gentleman, a bewitching lady, another bewitching lady and then another. The Economic Miracle had begun. Another illustrious gentleman appeared.

  Suddenly, in Box 5, a man yelled at the top of his voice: "Marlock!"

  Thomas Lieven gasped. For there on the screen, over life-size, stood his rascally partner, whom he had believed dead, the criminal who had annihilated his peaceable career and hurled him into the grinding mills of international secret service. There he stood, faultlessly clad, in morning dress, with binoculars dangling on his chest.

  "It's him ... Ill kill him, the bastard!" Thomas raged. "I thought he was stewing in hell ages ago—but he's alive ... now I'll settle accounts with him!"

  [10]