Krupp repeated his question. Hagen answered levelly, “I can’t say, Baron. They wouldn’t tell me that sort of thing. After all, I’m somewhat of a competitor since I work for Dillingham’s.”
The future cannon king allowed himself a laugh. He drew on the cigarette, stubbed it out, then decided to light another.
Momentarily that thin, aristocratic face appeared out of the darkness.
“Richard, listen to me. Whatever the Ministry of Industry needs from you this time for the national stockpile, I will personally see that the order is doubled. In fact, I have a special request. Der Firma is prepared to order a year’s supply of diamonds to fit all our own requirements.”
They weren’t just worried, they were scared. “Some types of tool diamonds are in short supply.”
Was this caution from a salesman? “Then get them for us. The Dresdener Bank in Berlin will issue you a line of credit. So, too, will the Deutsche Bank.”
Krupp’s impatience was all too clear. “It’s not just a question of having the diamonds, Herr von Bohlen. For specialties like drawing wire or making the cutting and shaping tools and the grinding wheels we have to employ highly skilled workmen. Dillingham’s has only a staff of eight in the cutting shop, another ten in the fabricating shop. I’d have to go outside the firm to fill the order.”
“Do so, but use discretion lest we force the prices up too high.”
He’d have to stall them somehow. A year’s supply must mean war. “I’ll have to talk to my supervisor, Baron. Can you give us a little time to get back to you with an answer?”
“Time? Why should you need time? The request is handsome. I would have thought—”
“The holidays are coming up. You know how the Belgians are. You and I would work right through but they won’t. There’s another thing. I’ll need payment in advance, in gold. I’m sorry, Herr von Bohlen, but the firm will insist on this.”
More caution! “To insist is to say you do not trust us.”
“Not at all. It’s merely a precaution against a run on prices should one develop. Our bankers don’t always advance against sales no matter how confirmed.”
In the face of such an order the salesman was being difficult. Krupp paused to draw on his cigarette. He thought to say, But I’ve already offered you lines of credit, then thought better of it since Hagen had patently ignored the offer. “Tell me, there is talk the traders in Antwerp and Amsterdam are nervous. Have you heard anything of a move to London?”
“They’re always nervous. Show me a dealer with a paper of Jagers in his pocket and I’ll show you a nervous man. Even his shadow frightens him.”
“Then you’ve heard nothing of this move?”
“Nothing, Baron. If I had, I’d be looking for another job.”
“And are you?”
“Perhaps, but I should tell you that I’ve a seat on the Diamond Exchange and am very well fixed where I am. Your order, if we do succeed in obtaining it, can only help to keep me there.”
“Good. Then it’s settled. Tomorrow you will come to the office where we will provide you with a list of our requirements.”
Hagen was out on the lawn, heading for the lights of the villa, when Krupp called after him. “Brazil. You did not mention Brazil as a source for us, nor did you say that at Mbuji-Mayi there are some tool diamonds.”
It was late when Hagen got back to the hotel. Taking one of the postcards from the desk, he sat down to draft out a message. With tons of mail to be checked, the odds were the thing would arrive in England. Another cable so soon after the last one would only arouse suspicion, but just to be on the safe side, he’d mail the card from Hanover.
The meeting with the Krupp had unsettled him. During the Great War of 1914–18 the British naval blockade had successfully cut off the Germans from the industrial diamonds they had so desperately needed. Vowing never to be caught again, they had developed tungsten carbide, a remarkably hard material that could do many of the jobs formerly done by diamond.
The problem was, of course, that the only thing that would cut and shape a tungsten carbide tool or true one of its grinding wheels was diamond.
The Germans could still be hamstrung and they knew it. But did the Krupp’s concern really mean war, or was it merely the astuteness of the industrialist in providing for all eventualities?
No matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise, Hagen knew the maelstrom was beginning.
To Mr. Frank Albert Winfield, 10B The Mews, Magpie Lane, Oxford, England.
Dear Frank, Thought you might like to admire the view from my window. So much of history is being made here, it seems a shame people like yourself don’t write it down. Still, I guess there isn’t anything tougher than the fourteenth century. I only hope that with events so much in the news, your students can listen all day to such stuff!
Cheers, Hagen
That would tick Frank off. Hagen knew his stepfather needed that now and then.
Except that Frank lived in Dorchester and he hadn’t had digs in Oxford for some time, though the porter still remembered him and Duncan … why, Duncan would collect Frank’s mail and take it down to him.
From “The Walrus and the Carpenter” poem in Through the Looking Glass he had taken “admire the view” and “it seems a shame”; from the Humpty Dumpty poem, “write it down.”
“Anything tougher than,” and “can listen all day to such stuff!” had come from the Father William poem in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
When decoded the message would read:
KRUPP PLACES DER FIRMA ORDER YEAR’S SUPPLY DIAMONDS / QUERIES CONGO AS SOURCE / MOVE TO TRANSFER ANTWERP STOCKS TO LONDON
Two
ARLETTE LIFTED HER EYES from the cabinet. The file had been in the right drawer, but out of place and tilted up at one end. The name tag had been broken off. Ah! What had happened?
She had come to steal a last look at Richard’s photograph, to read again the lines that said so much about him. “Mbuji-Mayi, Tshikapa in the Congo … the River Gbobara in Sierra Leone … Tanganyika … South-West Africa and the Coast of Namaqualand … Minas Gerais, the Mato Grosso in Brazil …” Where hadn’t he been?
“An expert in trace indicator minerals.”
De Heer Wunsch might have had the file out, but he wouldn’t have been so careless. No, this had been done in haste. Someone else had wanted to look at Richard’s file.
“Cause of accident: unknown but believed the result of illegal prospecting.
“Health: excellent except for infrequently recurring bouts of malaria.”
There was only she, de Heer Wunsch, Lev and the other men in the cutting shop. All the rest of the work—the sintering of the diamonds into grinding wheels, or mounting of them into cutting tools—was done at the fabricating shop down by the docks.
“Has ambitions of forming his own mining and prospecting company. Has made excellent connections to this end but still must overcome the stigma of his father …”
This morning the door to de Heer Wunsch’s office hadn’t been properly closed.
Had someone broken in?
“Enjoys the company of beautiful and intelligent women.” Nightclub owners like Cecile Verheyden! Women of experience.
What was she to do? Tell de Heer Wunsch that she had disobeyed all the rules and had gone into his desk for the key to the filing cabinet? Had done so time and again?
To see the photograph of the man she must leave.
Lev was sitting in the shade at the top of the fire escape. Timidly Arlette asked to speak with him.
“Me?” he said. “I should be so lucky. Here, please, sit down. Do you like herring? On toast? It is good, yes, but better if you—hey, listen and I’ll tell you what to do. You take a slice of rye bread—”
“Lev, I’m not getting married. I must talk to you, please?”
“So, I can see you’re not hungry. Is it Richard? Has a cable come through from him already?” Had Richard run into trouble?
She sho
ok her head but still couldn’t bring herself to tell him.
“Is it because you have decided to leave us? For … what was it now?”
“Another job. In … in the Browning Works at Liege, assembling …”
“Guns.”
“Yes, pistols and … and revolvers.”
She wrung her hands. Everyone was so upset with her and now … why now she must tell them all she was not as good as they had thought.
Lev unfolded the newspaper and held it before her. On the front page was a stark photograph, a grim reminder of the Spanish town of Guernica.
The buildings were in ruins, the streets filled with rubble.
“That child. Do you see that child?” he asked. “Dazed and frightened out of her wits. Terrified.”
She knew what he was implying. “Please, I cannot stay here. It would not be good for Richard. I must leave, Lev. You know I must.”
“Bombed by German fighter planes, Arlette. Seven thousand people lived in that town. There were also three thousand refugees. And when did the German Condor Legion choose to attack? At four-thirty in the afternoon on market day, no less. For sure it was on April 27, and only now has the Reich Ministry of Propaganda chosen to release this photograph so that our humble press can make us better aware of the atrocity. Annihilated, they say. Wantonly destroyed. All those people …”
“Lev, someone has been into the personnel files. I think they may have photographed Richard’s file.”
Bernard Wunsch was gray, with thinning, slicked-down hair, a heavy mustache and dark brown eyes. He had a rather rotund face, a comfortable paunch, bags under his sad, grave eyes and the pallor of too much dedication to his work.
Lighting yet another cigarette, he irritably puffed on it, letting the acrid smoke billow around him as he waved the match to extinguish it.
“How many times have you looked at that file?”
Arlette bowed her head in shame. “Ten … twelve—twenty! I’m not sure. Please, I … I meant no harm. I knew I shouldn’t do a thing like that. I knew the personnel files were not … not for my eyes.”
“And your decision to leave us is because you are infatuated with de Heer Hagen?”
Infatuated! “Yes. He … he does not feel this way toward me. I am sure of this. At least I … I do not think he does.”
“But in any case you’ve decided it’s best for you to leave us?”
“Yes.”
Wunsch glanced at Lev. It had taken courage for the girl to have come forward. Worry, too, over Richard.
Blast it! Had Hagen been messing around with the girl? “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“No! I …” Hurt more than if he had simply struck her, she bowed her head and wept.
“Bernard, go easy, eh? Arlette’s been an excellent receptionist. It’s just this … this sort of thing. It’s made her nervous.”
Lev laid the newspaper on the desk. Wunsch nodded grimly but went right back to the matter at hand. “He must have had keys to the front door and the offices.”
The diamond cutter nodded and reached to take the newspaper back, only to leave it. Sometimes Bernard needed to be reminded of things.
Wunsch telephoned Richard’s landlady, and when he got through, asked if she’d mind checking the apartment. “We need another set of keys, Madame Rogier. Richard usually leaves his in the bureau when he’s away on business. Yes, they should be in the top drawer.”
He covered the mouthpiece. “She will go and see if he has taken them with him to Germany. If so, then the Gestapo have stolen them and the rest is a foregone conclusion, unless he himself was into the file for some reason.”
Arlette flung up her tear-filled eyes. If ever there was a girl in love it was she.
“Richard has not done this. Please, the file, I … I looked at it yesterday. It … it was all right then.”
The girl was attractive. Richard might find her quite suitable. An anchor. Not the avant-garde, the demimonde, the artists and nightclub owners.
“Hello? Yes … Yes, Madame Rogier. I see. The keys are there. Good. I will be around later to pick them up. No, there has been no trouble.”
An uncomfortable silence settled over the office. Arlette hurriedly wiped her eyes but didn’t look up. It had been like the Inquisition. Pregnant … was she pregnant with Richard’s child? She, a girl who had never … “I wish I was, but I’m not! Now may I go, please?” She got up quickly.
Startled by her statement, by the obvious anger of it, both of them watched her leave the office. Not until the door had closed, did Wunsch speak. “Lev, you will notify the others in the building. See that all the double locks are changed and the alarm systems are checked—at our expense. I want no trouble with this. I will go to Madame Rogier’s and find out if perhaps someone hasn’t been in and borrowed Richard’s keys only to return them to allay suspicion. Have only three sets of keys cut for us. One for yourself, one for me and the other for Richard. From now on we must keep a better watch on things. The time for innocence has passed.”
“And the girl?”
“Try to persuade her to stay on with us. It’s understandable she is upset, but if it doesn’t affect her work, we could perhaps find the heart to make allowances.”
“Then you’d better tell her that yourself. I’m only a diamond cutter.” Muttering, “Guernica … just some pisspot little town,” Lev went to see about the locks.
Wunsch looked sadly at the front page of the newspaper. What manner of men could have done such a thing?
The scratches kept showing up during the fifth stage of grinding. The surfaces would be perfect until this stage, then suddenly one stray particle of coarser grit would tear across the metal and ruin the whole thing.
Hagen held the flat, plate-sized ring under the tap and watched as the water beaded on the metal. The surface, some two inches across and very hard, had an almost mirror polish except for the scratch. Taking a clean chamois, he began to carefully dry the surface.
Outside the window the land was flat, but in the distance, along the shore of the Baltic Sea, there were moundlike dunes of light brown sand.
The laboratory was on the second floor, off in a separate wing from the rest of the giant Heinkel factory. For several days now they’d kept him busy among the production lines where rows and rows of Heinkel He-111 bombers were being assembled.
As yet they hadn’t told him what the part was for, only that the tolerance of the surface had to be better than one in ten thousand.
It had to be a bearing surface of some kind—for a new kind of bombsight perhaps. The main part of the instrument would rest on bearings that would, in turn, move over the ring in its housing.
“Walter, this isn’t happening all the time. Only once in a while. How’s the air-cleaning system?”
The assistant foreman, a taciturn Rhinelander of forty-five, was terse as always. “Excellent. Three times a shift we change the filters. All my men wear the special suits, just as we are doing now. It has to be in the grit.”
“But you didn’t buy it from us, did you?”
Rows of grinding and polishing machines endlessly worked on similar rings under the watchful eyes of several technicians. “It’s Herr Klausener, my supervisor, Herr Hagen. He has insisted we try making our own grades of powders.”
Hagen couldn’t quite hide his surprise. “By crushing and grinding boart?”
The foreman shook his head. “No. By buying the cheaper ungraded powder in bulk and making our own oil separations.”
The next step would be for them to import the boart and crush and grind it themselves.
Indicating the trouble they were having, he said, “You’re not saving any money, are you?”
Walter Fritsch gave a shrug. “Me, I only do what I’m told. I haven’t the wisdom of a director of engineering and guidance systems.”
Rockets perhaps? “Let me see the times of settling, Walter. For some reason every now and then a tiny bit of that number-four is getting over into the nu
mber-five.”
Precision grinding was done in stages, beginning with the coarsest grit, then progressing stage by stage through to the finer and finer grits, and finally to the polishing stages. The diamond powders were sized to very fine tolerances by settling in olive oil. After a thorough mixing, the ground diamond dust was then allowed to stand for ten minutes, after which the mixture above what had settled was decanted. All the finer sizes thus passed over into the next settling container and the remaining powder, after washing and drying, was classed as number-one.
Number-two took thirty minutes; number-three, one hour; number-four, two hours; number-five, ten hours; and number-six, until the oil above was absolutely clear.
By the use of the simple law of gravity the particles could be accurately sized.
Fritsch led him downstairs to a windowless, airless bunker where special rubber mats had been installed to prevent damaging vibrations. A lone technician, startled and blinking at the intrusion, cautioned silence as he decanted number one, then two, then four, timing these to a production schedule that had been chalked on a board.
“Martin, this is Herr Hagen, the diamond expert. He has suspicions that tiny bits of number-four are getting into the number-five.”
Hagen shook his head to put the technician at ease. “Not suspicions, Martin, just a thought. Why don’t you run through things for me? Walter, suppose I meet you back in the lab in about twenty minutes?”
Fritsch got the message and grumpily left the room. Everything appeared to be in order. Left alone with the technician, Hagen became his easygoing self. “They ever let you near that beach out there, Martin?”
“Sometimes. After work on Wednesdays and on Sundays. My wife and I take our little boy. He likes to play in the sand. It’s nice. No people. Not like the Workers’ Clubs.”
The “Strength through Joy” holidays. “I sure could use a bit of sun myself. What time do you get off on Wednesdays? The usual?”
“At six, yes, but I keep my bicycle right outside the building. In twenty minutes I’m home and we’re on our way.”
The Alice Factor Page 4
