Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  ‘They’re the stories of Sasha and Misha,’ Finn says. ‘Fairy stories, too, in their way. Two kids from the Caucasus. Children’s stories with a difference. They were written to turn children into good little communist citizens. We’ll use this book for code work. No phone calls, no e-mails. This address is my contact.’ He gives Dieter a box number address. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’ll send you a contact place,’ Dieter says. ‘I haven’t done this for a while.’

  Dieter closes the doors of the fire and clears the glasses and cups into a stone sink. They leave the house and walk around to the stone barns and talk as they go about how the coding is to work.

  In the car, Finn gives Dieter a sheet of paper denoting the code’s mechanism. The page numbers that Dieter is to refer to in the stories of Sasha and Misha are indicated by the names of fungi found in another book, The Oxford Book of Fungi. The fungus ‘Witches’ Butter’ is page sixty-eight of Sasha and Misha, for example. The letters of the words on each page in Sasha and Misha change according to the description in The Oxford Book of Fungi of each fungus that is date relevant. And the whole thing shifts after each communication from either of them. It is a crude, old-fashioned type of code, but they’ve both worked with such codes many times.

  14

  THE HEAT OF BODIES in the gasthaus at Tegernsee was by now causing steam to rise from the dance floor. The band broke their set and everyone returned to long tables. They were red in the face, these round, jolly people who looked slightly crazed in the eyes from the dance. Trays of beers were ordered and they sat, splayed legs and rolled-up sleeves, their conversation filling the echoing stone ceiling with amorphous noise.

  I tucked Finn’s notebook into my coat and finished the remains of the coffee that had gone cold. I wanted to be outside in the street, my bones warmed now against the snow, which still fell and melted on the window panes.

  I walked carefully back along the lake to Finn’s pink house, taking a roundabout route and watching from a distance for a cold half-hour before I approached. I walked around the outside, checking the windows and the front and back doors, before I entered. It was as I’d left it.

  I lit a fire in the ground-floor sitting room and poured myself a whisky. I was cold again but I realised it was now also the cold of loneliness.

  Dieter’s microfiches would be downstairs in the cellar somewhere and sometime I would have to find them. They seemed to carry the weight of some valuable artefact from a lost time, a missing link. But I needed something more immediate, something that would lead me to Finn.

  I went down into the cellar and picked out Finn’s second Book of Record. Deciding now that warmth had beaten caution I took it with me up the stairs to the chair by the fire.

  Dieter drove Finn back from his farm to the railway station in Saarbrucken and they parted as the early winter afternoon receded into darkness. Finn boarded the Frankfurt to Paris train, and left it at Metz in France just across the border from Germany. There he waited for an hour and took a local train north to Luxembourg. On the short journey he turned over Dieter’s story in his mind and wondered how reliable Dieter was after all these years. But he had the box with the microfiches and the man he was going to see in Luxembourg would know how authentic, how useful, these sheets of negatives really were.

  He sits on the electric train, full of Luxembourgers returning home from a day’s work in France, and as it meanders through the bare fields and woods towards the city, he ruminates on this city state he’s visited many times and which he thinks of as a modern fairy tale.

  ‘Luxembourg is that most modern of cities,’ he writes. ‘A discreet, hi-tech tax haven on a hill, but dressed in the pretty bows of its medieval past. Who would guess that the whole of the modern world’s economy hums and whirs through its ancient stones and chiselled cornices? Or that the vast rock-hewn tunnels and vaults dug deep into the hill on which it stands, and which once housed pitted iron ammunition deadly to men on horseback and in armour, now contain the secrets of all multinational companies? Or that alongside the hundreds of miles of carefully filed microfiches and documents detailing the transactions of these, the world’s banks and corporations, lie also the secrets of some less than savoury organisations- the mafias of arms and drug- as well as the secret accounts of intelligence services? Luxembourg is an iceberg. Four-fifths of this illusion exists beneath the surface. Luxembourg is so modern in its fine deceit. How old Europe does disguise the new world.’

  Finn arrives and takes a taxi immediately out of the city to the surrounding countryside and checks into a country inn, on the far bank of the Moselle River from Dieter’s little farm, a distance of just a mile or two as the crow flies. He takes this circuitous route because he has not told Dieter of his destination, but it is also his habit to go in circles. Finn carries the little box that Dieter has given up and that men would kill for.

  ‘Luxembourg is a city on a hill, the Jerusalem of the god of money, the capital of capital,’ he writes. ‘The tinpot duchy of Luxembourg with its chocolate-box name and its kitsch shops and its prim citizens is like a fairy tale that starts out nicely with an innocent picnic in sun-dappled middle-European woodland and ends with a wolf in the bedroom.

  ‘Today as I arrive in the main square there is an exhibition of life-size, brightly painted plastic cows that say to me, “If you believe this, you’ll believe anything.” The artistic endeavour of this travelling plastic cow show is a tribute to the withering of the human spirit, presiding over which is the god of the mountain- money- secret money.’ Finn does not like Luxembourg.

  He sits in a bedroom overlooking the Moselle River, with the bare vineyards on the far side, and feeds his dislike of Luxembourg-or at least of what the city represents to him. Looking out of the window of his room, across the dark waters of the river to the glowing embers of a vine-wood fire, he turns the ‘No Smoking’ sign to the wall and blows smoke through the window, and it re-enters at once with the breeze. Then he picks up his journal and his cigarettes and descends to the warm bar downstairs and begins to work up an anger that comes from somewhere he doesn’t understand.

  ‘Where did it all begin,’ he writes, ‘this new Luxembourg with its little duke? How did a small, near impregnable hilltop fortress in northern Europe become the smooth machine of international finance?

  ‘There is an unknown truth in the origins of this modern Luxembourg. One man began its transformation, back in the dark years of the 1930s; he was a banker, an arms dealer, a twisted visionary who wrote down his vision of post-war Europe in a little book of thoughts, under an assumed name. The only existing copy I know of lies in the library at the University of Texas. This man is, perhaps, the key figure of twentieth-century history, whom nobody has ever heard of. He is so obscure that to Google his name reveals a blank.

  ‘This man, this banker and arms dealer, first of all took over the management of the finances of Europe’s royal families from the Rothschilds. Then he set himself up as a guest of Luxembourg–the nightmare guest as it turns out. Before long he was powerful enough to declare publicly and in mockery of the duchy that he held the keys to its succession. “The Duke will marry whomever I tell him to marry.” And so he forged a marital alliance for the Duke with the daughter of a magnate, while he went on to sell arms to all sides in the Second World War. Another kingmaker.

  ‘And after the war was over and America laid out its new world order to protect the West against the Soviet threat–a threat that shortly developed its own usefulness–this man was America’s silent potentate of finance, and Luxembourg became the place of all transactions.

  ‘Modern Luxembourg began at the dawn of this new world order after 1945. It was a Switzerland, but a Switzerland created and controlled by the Americans. Like the military outposts of American power in Europe and around the world, Luxembourg was founded in its modern form as a financial outpost of American power. A discreet, secretive, “offshore” tax haven where the requirements of normal, commercial secr
ecy demanded by big business provided good cover for other secret operations, the movement of money to and from people and places that Western governments responsible to democratic electorates would rather their citizens remained ignorant about.

  ‘But Luxembourg also became the bank for the world’s mafias and intelligence services, totalitarian countries included. Like so many other efforts to combat the enemy, this one came back to bite the West. You arm the Taliban to fight the Russians, the Taliban returns and fights you with the weapons you gave it. It was the same with Luxembourg.

  ‘And when this financier and arms dealer died, like a king himself he appointed a successor to his arms and financial empire.

  ‘I have actually met his successor,’ Finn writes. ‘In a restaurant near the American consulate in Berne in 2003. So I know that I am not imagining all this. This successor is a man who America planned to be the ruler of Iraq in the latest war, but whose misdeeds caught up with him too soon.

  ‘One day,’ Finn concludes, ‘I will write the story of his and Luxembourg’s creator, the most important man of the twentieth century whom nobody has ever heard of.’

  I shift in my seat in the pink house in Tegernsee. Will I visit this country inn one day to sleep in the bed where Finn slept that night? Just asking that question makes me realise how weak I have become in the past ten days since his disappearance. Am I already planning in my head for Finn never to return? In this journey to find him, there are so many such places that hold a trace of Finn. Perhaps I will be defeated by the sheer numbers.

  I get up from the armchair and put another log on the fire. A church clock chimes midnight. I’m thinking about how I never liked Luxembourg either, for all its medieval charm, and now I am beginning to understand why.

  In the bar of the inn, as Finn works up the kind of anger he always needs before a job, he stubs out another cigarette and orders another whisky and soda.

  ‘What is it that epitomises Luxembourg as the hub of the world’s financial dealings?’ he writes. ‘It is one bank. But this bank is not like any other bank. This one in Luxembourg goes by the name of Westbank and every day it does business that is worth around five hundred billion dollars. Every day, five hundred billion dollars’ worth of transactions pass through its system from all corners of the earth. If a company in South America wishes to buy an asset from another company in Malaysia, Westbank guarantees–or clears–the sum the purchaser must pay and the asset the seller is offering. For this reason, every bank of any importance in the world, and every international business, company or corporation must have an account at Westbank for its business to function.

  ‘The clearing bank can check that the buyer and seller can provide what they have agreed to provide by holding the accounts of each in Luxembourg.

  ‘According to the bank’s constitution and to the legal requirements of Luxembourg, however, no entity may keep a secret, unpublished account at Westbank, unless it also has a published account. This is important for reasons of transparency. It is a law that is intended to combat illegal money, a law against money-laundering, against fraud.

  ‘If a normal bank or company has a secret, unpublished account, it is for reasons of business confidentiality, but a trail still exists for the purpose of financial investigations, if need be, between its secret and its published accounts. If an entity could open only secret accounts, no such trail would exist.

  ‘Yet such an entity is Exodi. Exodi with a long “i”, as Dieter puts it. Exodi is a set of companies with only secret accounts. Exodi has no published accounts at all. Exodi breaks all the rules. How-with whose connivance-has it been enabled to do this?’

  And this is the reason that Finn has come to Luxembourg. He’s come to meet a man, an old contact, who has been investigating Westbank for many years.

  But Finn is blessed with another meeting that comes from this first meeting and that he hasn’t planned. Finn was always lucky. It is this other, unscheduled meeting that arises from the first which opened his eyes a little further to the Plan of Vladimir Putin.

  He meets his old contact at a café in the square. Frank is not a former spy, like Dieter, but a private investigator Finn has known, and used, many times before. Finn has known Frank for a very long time, fifteen…twenty years, maybe. Frank is another of Finn’s ferrets who hunts the enemies of the West through the warrens of their financial transactions.

  Frank Reisler is a short, plump man with a reddish-tinted beard, and with an impish, cheerful smile that belies his life of private investigation. ‘As my daughters say,’ Frank chuckles, ‘they never knew a time in their lives when I wasn’t deep into some secret affair or other.’

  In his youth Frank had been a computer programmer and had set up the computer system at Westbank. He knew the way that published and unpublished- or secret- accounts operated because he had worked them out in the first place.

  And then he had seen how his own system was manipulated, how certain customers were allowed to open secret accounts without possessing the published accounts that were a legal requirement. And his life changed.

  ‘Some potential clients,’ Frank tells Finn over a cappuccino and a bottle of water, ‘they went to Brussels up the road, to open secret accounts at the world’s other clearing bank. They were turned away. My contact at the Brussels bank told me that these people were deeply unsatisfactory. You wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole, he said. And so these would-be clients simply drove two hours down the road to Luxembourg, and were able to open secret accounts at Westbank without any problem at all. Against all the rules of Luxembourg and of Westbank, they opened these accounts.’

  Finn and Frank are sitting in a café in the main square of the city. It is a cold, sunny day and the plastic cows gleam with the night’s dew that won’t go away. Shoppers are dressed well against the cold, the cafés are half full; it is morning, between breakfast and lunch.

  For exposing these illegal practices, Frank loses his job in the middle of the 1980s. And he finds that, even for a citizen, Luxembourg is a closed circle of interests protecting each other. He cannot find a job anywhere else until he eventually finds employment as a union official. But he keeps his contacts at Westbank well nurtured. He is obsessed. And to pursue his obsession he has taken the precaution of bringing with him out of Westbank thousands and thousands of microfiches that demonstrate the truth of his allegations- that some entities have opened secret accounts at the bank without having the normal, published ones.

  ‘They are my insurance, Finn, the microfiches,’ Frank says, and sips from his glass of water. ‘I have them safely locked away in an attorney’s office at a secret location in France. If anything untoward happens to me, they will be revealed.’

  ‘What kind of customers, clients, are we talking about?’ Finn asks.

  ‘People with dirty money from all kinds of places. Colombia, Uzbekistan, Russia, Afghanistan- all kinds of places where, shall we say, normal commerce is overlaid with the fruits of black money from ventures that are, to say the least, below the line.’

  ‘Very nicely put,’ Finn says.

  Frank chuckles and his whole face lights up with jolly amusement. He is a man made for his kind of work, Finn thinks, someone who isn’t ever going to descend into discouragement, let alone despair. He is an individual strengthened rather than weakened by the huge odds against him. Finn identifies with Frank a little, or tries to, as he does with all his closest contacts. But Frank is very special to Finn, like a father, a benevolent version of Adrian. Finn works best at the level of the personal and nobody is closer to him among his contacts than Frank.

  ‘I’m looking at a company here in Luxembourg and in other places. It’s called Exodi,’ Finn says.

  He lights another cigarette, of which Frank imperceptibly disapproves, and scrapes the froth from his cappuccino out of the cup with a spoon.

  ‘Exodi?’ Frank thinks and his eyes glitter at some memory from his vast archive. ‘Yes. I think I have heard of Exodi,’ he says afte
r a pause.

  ‘There are several companies called Exodi,’ Finn prompts him. ‘They’re all connected to one another. One or more of them have secret accounts at Westbank.’

  ‘I will have to look at my files, Finn. It will take time. But I have heard of Exodi, I think, in another context.’

  Frank frowns, looking cross at the unreliability of a memory that contains thousands of pieces of numeric and alphabetic information.

  ‘Ah yes!’ The frown disappears; he beams again. ‘There was a story I heard here, in Luxembourg…when? I don’t remember, but not long ago, a few weeks, maybe. Wait.’

  Frank takes a mobile phone from the pocket of his tatty blue woollen coat and makes a call. He speaks first in German and then is passed to someone else, to whom he speaks in French. He writes down a name and address on a scrap of paper. He ends the call with some small joke or other and replaces the phone in his pocket and looks at Finn with disappointment.

  ‘It’s nothing, I think. Just a kid, a twenty-two-year-old boy who worked here in Luxembourg for a company called Exodi. He serviced their computers or something, that’s all. But he was sacked a few weeks ago and told to say nothing about the company. That’s normal, I guess. But apparently they didn’t pay him his final pay cheque. He told a friend of a friend of a friend that Exodi doesn’t pay its employees’ insurance here either. That’s illegal, of course. It seems the company got to hear about his conversations on the subject. He was telephoned and warned to stop talking about Exodi.’

  ‘Telephoned by whom?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s more, Frank.’

  ‘Perhaps. If you are interested in this company, Finn, you must have a reason. Perhaps there is something to look into further. Here. Here’s the boy’s name and address.’ He handed the scrap of paper across the table. ‘Perhaps you’re right. My friend just said that the boy is scared of something.’