Читать книгу War Cry - Уилбур Смит, Wilbur Smith - Страница 7

Leon Courtney sank into the welcome embrace of a leather armchair that could have come straight from a gentleman’s club in Pall Mall, gratefully took the heavy crystal glass of single malt Scotch that the footman had presented to him on a silver tray and looked at Centaine. She had changed into a crystal-beaded evening dress and was cradling a freshly shaken martini.

‘So,’ he said, ‘tell me about that smile. It’s hardly left your face since we arrived here, and I don’t believe it’s entirely due to the pleasure of our company.’

‘Not entirely, no,’ Centaine agreed, ‘though it is very nice indeed to see you here.’

‘I’ll be honest: I was expecting to find you on your uppers. The word on the family grapevine was you’d called in the chaps from Sotheby’s and everything was up for grabs. But I never in my life saw anyone less on their uppers than you have looked today.’

‘The stories were true,’ Centaine said. She took a sip from her cocktail glass and placed it on a table beside her. ‘I was in real trouble. Who isn’t these days?’

‘Who indeed …’

‘But I had a stroke of good fortune on the stock market. I happened to be holding a great many shares in mining companies when the government took South Africa off the gold standard.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said Leon thoughtfully. ‘Clever you.’

For years, many of the world’s major currencies had been pegged to the gold standard, meaning that their worth had in theory been backed by gold. This had kept the price of currencies artificially high, so they were hugely overvalued when the Crash of 1929 was followed by economic depression across the western world. As countries came off the gold standard, their currencies were able to drop in value, making their exports much cheaper to foreign buyers and thus boosting their economies. South Africa had been one of the very last countries to remain tied to gold, sending the exchange rate of the South African pound far above that of British sterling and thus making South African gold, diamonds and wool so expensive that no one bought them any more. The decision to come off the gold standard and let the South African pound find its true value had been made only a matter of days earlier. The immediate effect had been to transform the country’s trading position. Shares in mining companies suddenly rocketed. Anyone who had bought at the bottom of the market stood to make an enormous profit.

‘I won’t ask how you pulled off your coup,’ Leon went on, though every commercial instinct he had told him she must have had inside information about the government’s decision. ‘I shall simply congratulate you on becoming a true Courtney. We’ve always found ways to make a killing. The first Courtneys got rich by looting Spanish treasure ships in the service of our King.’

‘Looting other people’s treasure – that’s the basis for the whole British Empire,’ Centaine said, with a wry smile.

‘That … and defeating the French.’

‘Touché!’ she laughed.

Just then the doors to the drawing room in which they were sitting were flung open and two hot, flushed adolescents, with dust-covered clothes and hair matted by sweat, burst into the room.

‘So, how did it go?’

‘I showed him!’ Saffron cried triumphantly. ‘I made him back off.’

‘Only because I let you,’ Shasa retorted.

‘Calm down, Shasa, and tell me what happened,’ Centaine commanded.

‘Well, Mater, we went down to the stables and I told her that I had two ponies, and one of them was Plum Pudding, who’s really steady and experienced, and the other one was Tiger Shark, who’s quicker and stronger, but wild and really hard to control. And I said she could choose which one she wanted to ride, and I thought she was bound to pick Plum Pudding …’

‘But I chose Tiger Shark!’ said Saffron.

‘Of course you did,’ said Leon, who had seen that one coming the moment he heard Shasa’s descriptions of the two beasts.

‘And we played for a bit, just knocking up and it was fun and Shasa was quite good …’

‘I’m better than “quite good”!’ Shasa protested, indignantly but also accurately.

‘And then the ball was in the middle of the field and we both went for it,’ Saffron said.

‘We went “down the throat”,’ Shasa said. ‘Just like I did with Max Theunissen in the final, do you remember, Mater?’

Centaine’s face suddenly whitened. ‘Going down the throat’ was the polo expression for a full frontal charge between two players, riding directly at one another, head-on, and Shasa had pulled off the very same trick to win his polo tournament. It had been one of the most terrifying moments of Centaine’s life, seeing a berserker madness seize her son as he’d hurled Tiger Shark at the Theunissen boy and his pony. If the two horses had collided at full gallop they would certainly have had to be put down and both their riders could have been seriously injured or even killed. At the very last instant, Theunissen’s nerve had cracked, he had pulled away and Shasa had smashed the ball past him and into the goal.

The idea that he had even considered pulling off the same trick on a guest, and, what’s more, a guest who was a relative, a girl and younger than him, appalled her.

‘You did what?’ Centaine gasped. The question was rhetorical. Before her son could answer she got to her feet, looked Shasa in the eye and rasped, ‘How dare you? How dare you? That is unforgivably bad-mannered, stupid, irresponsible, and dangerous behaviour. You’re lucky both of you aren’t on your way to hospital. Go to your room right now. Right now!’

Shasa looked mortified. He bit his bottom lip, trying to hold back his tears. Then Saffron piped up, ‘Excuse me, Cousin Centaine, but it wasn’t Shasa’s fault. I was the one who charged at him. And he got out of the way … And I know you weren’t being a scaredy-cat, Shasa, even though I said you were. You just didn’t want to hurt me.’

Silence fell upon the room. Leon hesitated for a moment, not wanting to take charge in someone else’s house, and with their child, but he realized he was the only person in the room not yet involved in the argument.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s sort this out, shall we? Saffron, you did very well to own up. But you shouldn’t have charged Shasa. You put both of you in danger and you and I both know that you only did it because you were being pig-headed about doing anything a boy could do and wanted to show Shasa up. Now you’ve got him into trouble and I think it’s a pretty poor show. You owe him an apology.’

Saffron screwed up her face, realized that she was in the wrong and said, ‘I’m sorry, Shasa. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘As for you, Shasa,’ Leon went on, ‘let this be a lesson. It’s both rude and extremely unwise to be ungentlemanly to a lady, particularly a Courtney lady, because believe me, my boy, they fight back. Honestly, if there is any young man on earth who ought to know what women are capable of, it’s you. Just think of your mother, for heaven’s sake, and all she’s achieved. Do you doubt her abilities, just because she’s a woman?’

‘No, sir.’

‘And are you sorry for doubting Saffron?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. That’s settled then, and no harm done. Now, Saffron, you’ve had a very long day. I think you should go and have that bath and perhaps, if you ask Cousin Centaine nicely, she’ll have some supper brought to your room. A bit of food and an early night is what you need, my girl.’

‘An excellent idea,’ said Centaine. ‘And I think you should do the same thing, Shasa. Bath, supper and bed … and then we can all have a fresh start in the morning.’

Shasa and Saffron walked upstairs together. When they got to the landing they paused before they went off to their rooms.

‘I wouldn’t have backed down, you know, when I went down the throat,’ Saffron said. ‘Even if you hadn’t got out of the way.’

‘I know,’ said Shasa. ‘And I wouldn’t have got out of the way, either, if it had been anyone else coming towards me.’

‘I know,’ she said.

With that they each satisfied their pride and went off to their baths with their honour and dignity intact, knowing that now they would be friends for life.

Saffron was sad to leave the haven of Weltevreden. As a motherless only child, she had loved having a relative her age to play with, and an older female role model to look up to. But after the blissful bucolic luxury of Centaine’s Cape Town estate, the size and noise and bustle of Johannesburg were an overwhelming assault to her. The city was five times as big as Nairobi, with more than a quarter of a million inhabitants, and they all seemed to move with a speed and urgency she had never experienced before, as if every single one of them had something urgent they simply had to achieve, right this very second.

‘That’s the Johannesburg Stock Exchange,’ Leon told her as they passed an ornate building, fronted by great marble columns, that covered an entire city block on Hollard Street. ‘The companies that control half the world’s gold and diamonds are traded there.’

‘It looks like a palace,’ Saffron said.

‘Well it is, in a way. It’s the palace of Mammon, the demon of money.’

Over lunch, Leon gave Saffron a quick explanation of how company shares and stock exchanges worked and was surprised by the speed with which she picked up the ideas he was presenting to her. So far, he felt, the day had gone well. He’d been perfectly happy purchasing Saffron’s tuck box, on which her name was even now being painted in elegant black capital letters. And having led countless groups of travellers and hunters across the wilds of British East Africa during his pre-War days as a safari guide he was completely at home debating the best possible trunks to buy to carry all Saffron’s increasingly vast amounts of baggage.

After leaving the restaurant where they had lunched, they arrived at the school outfitters. Suddenly talk turned to dresses, blouses, pinafores and other items of youthful female attire and Leon’s expertise gave way to bafflement. When the shop’s manageress, who’d had no need even to glance at the list to know what it contained, got on to the subject of gym knickers a look passed across her father’s face that Saffron had never in all her life seen before.

Oh my goodness, he’s blushing! she thought to herself, desperately trying to keep a straight face. He’s so embarrassed he doesn’t even know where to look.

‘Perhaps it would be best if Father took a seat and let Miss Courtney and I proceed by ourselves,’ the manageress said. ‘I take it, sir, that I have your permission to select the items that Miss will need for her time at Roedean?’

‘Yes, yes, absolutely, whatever she needs, excellent plan,’ Leon had blustered. Saffron couldn’t swear to it, but she was almost certain the manageress, who had seemed rather fearsome when they had first been introduced, actually winked at her as they walked away to deal with those mysterious aspects of female existence that were best kept hidden from the uncomprehending eyes of men.

Saffron had felt as though she was being initiated into some mysterious but exciting new world as the manageress, whose name was now revealed to be Miss Halfpenny, took an appraising look at her chest, said, ‘Someone should have bought you a brassiere by now, young lady.’ She sighed, ‘But that’s a mother’s job …’

‘I don’t have a mother,’ Saffron said. ‘She died when I was seven.’

‘I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I feared as much. When a girl walks in with her father …’ She left the sentence unfinished, but then gave a brisk sigh and said, ‘Never mind, best just get on with it, hadn’t we? Lots of children don’t have a mother, or a father, or even both, what with the war and the Spanish Flu and who knows what. But they find a way to manage and I’m sure you will too. Just let me help you and I’m sure we’ll sort you out with everything you need.’

Saffron had been hearing this kind of stiff-upper-lip encouragement for years, but she sensed a genuine kindness in Miss Halfpenny’s voice. As she rummaged in glass-fronted drawers for bras and knickers and stockings, occasionally holding up an item in front of Saffron’s coltish, long-limbed frame, checking it for size and either discarding it on one pile or placing it on another, much larger heap of things to be tried on, Miss Halfpenny chatted away about what Saffron could expect at Roedean, and what the teachers and girls were like.

‘Your father couldn’t have picked a better place. Roedean girls, in my experience, are bright, independent, thoroughly modern young ladies. Plenty of them go on to university, too. And they are all trained to be able to earn their own living.’

‘Daddy said I needed to know about more than cookery and needlework and flower arranging.’

Miss Halfpenny gave an approving nod. ‘Well said, that man. And I’m sure he’s thinking about your mother and what she would have wanted for you and he’s trying his very best to make her happy.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Saffron. But from the moment Miss Halfpenny said those words, her attitude to her new school changed. She resolved that she would do everything to make her mother happy, too, with the result that having turned up at Roedean in mid-January for the first day of the new academic year she plunged into school life with all the energy she possessed. Her naturally athletic physique and fiercely competitive nature made her a demon on the hockey pitch and netball court and her rapidly growing height saw her cast for many a male role in the school’s dramatic productions. It took her a term or two to learn how to adapt to boarding school life, which requires pupils to be able to get along with people with whom they share not only classrooms but also dormitories, bathrooms and every meal of the day. Saffron soon made friends, however, for her classmates knew that while her temper could be stormy she was neither malicious, nor deceitful: she said precisely what she thought, for better or for worse, and once decided on a course of action stuck to it, come hell or high water. If her ancestors were looking down from on high they must have smiled, for no Courtney had ever done anything else.

Soon after his return from South Africa, Leon had to go into Nairobi to carry out various administrative chores related to the Lusima estate. He took a room at the Muthaiga Country Club, a private, membership-only institution that was the social hub of the expatriate community in Kenya. For all its social cachet, the Muthaiga was not a particularly impressive piece of architecture, being little more than a greatly expanded bungalow, with pink pebbledash walls, painted metal window frames (for wooden frames soon rotted away in the subtropical climate) and a few classical columns by the entrance to provide a sense of colonial prestige. Inside, one walked over floors of highly polished wooden parquet, past walls painted in shades of cream and green. It looked, as Hugh Delamere had once remarked to Leon, ‘Like a cross between my old prep school and a suburban nursing home.’

Arriving back at the club one evening, after a long day of meetings with lawyers and accountants, Leon sank into one of the chintz-covered armchairs that dotted the members’ lounge. A uniformed waiter immediately appeared and took his order for a gin and tonic. The drink appeared beside him only moments later and Leon signed for it on a coloured paper chit: nothing as grubby as money was ever seen to change hands within the club’s portals. Leon took a sip of the ice-cold drink, put the glass back on the side table and leaned back in his chair, eyes closed as he let the cares of the day slip away.

Then he heard a familiar voice: ‘Evening, Courtney, mind if I join you?’

‘By all means, Joss,’ Leon replied.

Over the past few years a lot had changed in Josslyn Hay’s life. For one thing, he was now the twenty-second Earl of Erroll, having inherited the title on his father’s death, along with the honorary post of Lord High Constable of Scotland. He had not, however, inherited any money, for his father had not been a wealthy man, and the lack of cash had led to the breakdown of his marriage to Lady Idina. His second wife, Molly, was, like Idina, a wealthy divorcée and, once again, Joss saw no reason whatsoever why his marriage vows should apply to him. He still looked as he always had done: his hair swept back and blond, his head slightly turned, so that his half-closed blue eyes looked slightly sideways at anyone he was talking to. And one look was still enough to land the great majority of women who happened to catch his fancy.

So far as Leon was concerned, Joss Erroll, as he now liked to be known, was an unprincipled rogue, no matter how elevated his title might be, and if he ever so much as glanced at Saffron he’d horsewhip him all the way to the Mombasa docks and throw him onto the first outbound steamer he could find. But until that time, Leon was perfectly happy to enjoy Joss’s company. It was certainly more agreeable than that of a great many other expats he could think of.

‘Have you heard about this business at the Oxford Union?’ Joss asked, once he had been served a drink of his own.

‘What business is that?’ Leon replied.

‘A bloody rum one, I can tell you.’ Joss took a cigarette from a slim silver case, tapped it against the table, lit it and sat back, savouring the first inhalation. ‘They had a debate with the motion, “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and Country.”’

‘Bloody Hellfire! I trust the motion was soundly defeated.’

‘’Fraid not, old boy, it was carried by almost three hundred votes to one hundred and fifty. A two-to-one majority.’

Leon looked aghast. ‘Are you seriously telling me that the flower of young English manhood, the fellows who are supposed to be the brightest and best of their generation, have declared that they will never fight for their country?’

‘Apparently so,’ Joss replied. ‘The Huns, or the commies, or even the damn French can pitch up on our shores, march across the country, rape our womenfolk and pitchfork our babies, and the brightest brains in the kingdom will simply say, “By all means, feel free.”’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Leon. ‘Of course the last war was bloody. And I know people say it was the war to end all wars. But this lily-livered pacifism is nothing but cowardice and treachery. There are times when the nation simply has to be defended and a man has to answer the call.’

‘Couldn’t agree with you more, Courtney. But then again, you and I are simple, straightforward chaps. We’re not like these intellectual Oxbridge types.’

‘Well, I grant you,’ said Leon, ‘there is no one on earth as dangerous as a really clever fool. But even so, how in God’s name were the audience at the Union persuaded to support the motion?’

Joss took a long lazy drag on his cigarette as a sly smile played across his lips. ‘Oh, you’ll love this … the chap proposing the motion, Digby I believe was his name, said that we should all follow the example of Soviet Russia, which was the only country fighting for the cause of peace … a rather interesting paradox, that, I thought: fighting for peace.’

‘Perhaps that’s what the Reds were doing when they seized power in a bloody revolution and murdered the Tsar and his family,’ Leon observed.

‘Ah, yes, that must have been it. How foolish we were not to spot their peaceful intentions. Anyway, when Master Digby had said his piece he was supported by a philosopher called Joad – can’t say I’ve ever heard of him but apparently he’s considered quite the coming man in philosophical circles – and he suggested that if Britain should ever be invaded there was no point fighting our enemies with weapons. We had to engage in a campaign of non-violent protest, like Mister Gandhi goes in for, in India.’

‘Good grief,’ gasped Leon. ‘Can you imagine it if these people get their way? Enemy planes will start bombing London and their tanks will roll down Whitehall, and all we’ll have to defend us will be Joad and a bunch of conscientious objectors from Oxford University sitting in the middle of the road, chanting for peace?’

‘Well, look on the bright side, Courtney. Most people don’t go to Oxford University.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s a reassuring thought. Care for another drink?’

The following evening, Leon wrote one of his regular letters to Saffron. He gave her a vivid account of the debate, as discussed by him and Erroll, and let her know in no uncertain terms of his extreme disapproval of its outcome and of the Oxford students who had voted for it. ‘I warn you now, my girl, if you should ever be courted by an Oxford man I will refuse to allow him into my house. I’m sure you will read these words and think, “Oh, the old boy’s just having his little joke,” and you may be right. But I am shocked to think that a supposedly great university should have become a nest of Reds, traitors and pacifists and I would disapprove most strongly of you having anything whatever to do with it.’

Saffron received the letter a week later in South Africa. She had never given much thought to any universities, let alone Oxford, but the idea of students being so provocative and so tremendously annoying to their elders pricked her curiosity. So she asked her form teacher, ‘Please, Miss, can girls go to Oxford University?’

‘Indeed they can, Saffron,’ her teacher replied. ‘None of our pupils has ever gone to Oxford, or not yet, at any rate. But our sister school in England regularly puts girls up for both the Oxford and Cambridge entrance examinations, with considerable success.’

‘So if I went to the other Roedean, I might be able to get into Oxford?’

The teacher laughed. ‘Well, I suppose so, Saffron. But you would have to work rather harder than you do presently. There are very few places for young women at England’s great universities, so competition to get in is very fierce indeed.’

To some teenage girls, those words might have been enough to put them off the very idea of university education. But Saffron was different. The thought of going halfway across the world to engage in a winner-takes-all contest filled her with excitement and enthusiasm.

‘Have I been any help to you, my dear?’ the teacher asked.

‘Oh yes, Miss,’ beamed Saffron. ‘You have been a very great help indeed!’

Of all the discoveries Saffron had made since arriving at her new school, the most surprising was that she enjoyed her lessons much more than she’d expected. She was hardly an intellectual, for whom thought was preferable to action, but she had a quick mind, grasped ideas easily and, because she enjoyed the feeling of getting things right, worked to make that happen as often as possible. Sadly, however, there were so many other things going on in her life that work was not always possible, or not in Saffron’s view at any rate, with the result that her school reports were filled with teachers’ pleas that if only Saffron could possibly give her studies her full concentration and effort, great things would surely follow. Now, however, she had a purpose, a goal at which to aim. And once she had her mind set on something, she pursued it with a determination a terrier would have envied.

In mid-January 1934, Saffron flew back down to Johannesburg with her father for the start of the new school year. She assured him that she was perfectly capable of handling the journey alone, for she had already flown unaccompanied from South Africa to Kenya and back again for her mid-year holidays, but he insisted. ‘What kind of a father would I be if I didn’t take my daughter all the way to school, at least once a year,’ he said. ‘Besides, who’s going to pay for all your shopping if I’m not there to do it?’

That was a point to which Saffron had no counter, for another expedition to the emporia of Johannesburg was required to replace everything that she had either broken, worn out or grown out of during her first year. When they went to the outfitters, Leon doffed his hat to Miss Halfpenny, gave her a winning smile as he said how charmed he was to see her again and obediently did as he was told when Miss Halfpenny said, ‘Father may leave us now. We ladies will manage quite nicely by ourselves.’

Leon felt an unexpected pang of disappointment at his dismissal. But there was something else, too, a bittersweet realization provoked by two little words: ‘We ladies.’ That was what Miss Halfpenny had said, and she was right. Saffron was becoming a young lady. She wasn’t just his little girl any more. And as much as Leon was proud at the woman he could see his daughter becoming, it saddened him, too, to say goodbye to his little girl.

Five thousand miles from Johannesburg, at the Meerbach Motor Works, a sprawling citadel of industry that covered several square kilometres in the southeast corner of Bavaria, Oswald Paust, the Head of Personnel, was coming towards the end of his annual report to the company’s trustees. ‘After many months of hard work, the task of ridding the company of all Jewish employees, as well as other undesirable races, workers with any form of mental or physical deformity, no matter how minor, and sexual or political deviants is very nearly complete,’ he proudly asserted. ‘I can now confirm that Jews, who used to form some 4.2 per cent of the workforce, have entirely disappeared from all our factories, workshops, design studios, maintenance depots and offices …’

His next words were drowned out as the trustees banged the palms of their hands against the boardroom table around which they were gathered as a sign of approval.

‘As I was saying …’ Paust went on. ‘There are six remaining cases of so called “Mischlinge”, which is to say mongrels who have one Jewish parent, or one or more grandparents. I am presently in discussions with representatives from the SS Race and Settlement Main Office to determine whether the fact that none of them shows any signs of Jewish appearance, or practises any Jewish religious or domestic customs, entitles them to any special consideration. I am deeply indebted to Herr Sturmbannführer von Meerbach for his assistance in this regard.’

More palms were slapped against the great oak tabletop and the massive, brooding figure at the end of the table nodded his head in acknowledgement of the tribute.

‘The work has not, of course, been without difficulties,’ Paust said, in the tone of a man who has taken on a great burden, but borne it willingly. ‘It was relatively easy to weed out the communists, since we already knew who the troublemakers and strike leaders were. These people have never kept their affiliations quiet. Establishing the deviancy of suspected homosexuals, however, required considerable investigation, which proved expensive. Nevertheless, a little over one per cent of our workers were found to be practising homosexuals and lost their jobs as a consequence. It must be noted, unfortunately, that the loss to our workforce from these two groups was disproportionately skewed towards higher skill occupations, so that our legal, accounting, marketing, design and research departments have been quite severely affected and may take some months to recover from the loss of experienced and, if I may say so, talented personnel. Of course it is no surprise that the Jew, with his greedy, disputatious nature, should gravitate towards legal and financial work, while the effeminacy of homosexuals may give them a certain aesthetic flair in the design of advertising posters, for example, or even aircraft fuselages. But I feel sure that the trustees will accept that any short-term loss of company income will be more than outweighed by the benefits of knowing that our workers are all decent, healthy Aryan folk.’

This time the banging was markedly less hearty. As keen as the trustees were to ensure that they maintained the highest standards of racial, sexual and political purity, they were even more interested in maintaining the highest possible profit. SS-Sturmbannführer Konrad von Meerbach had dropped his aristocratic title in favour of his Nazi rank, but he remained chairman of the company that bore his name. Clearly irritated by the want of enthusiasm for Paust’s conclusions, he made a point of slamming his great lion’s paw of a hand, its back covered with a furry mat of ginger hair, so hard that all the pens and coffee cups sitting in front of the company trustees rattled with the impact.

‘Thank you, Paust,’ said von Meerbach, rising to his feet. He was still young, in his very early thirties, but his physical stature – for he had the massively muscled shoulders, thick chest, tree-trunk neck and glowering brow of a heavyweight boxer – and inborn air of dominance gave him the authority of a much older man. ‘I am deeply appreciative of your efforts and I am sure that all my fellow trustees would wish to join me in applauding your achievements.’ He gave half-a-dozen hearty claps, prompting six of the eight other attendees at this meeting of the Meerbach Family Trust to take the hint and join in with equal heartiness.

The only two whose applause seemed perfunctory at best were a thin, nervous-looking woman in her mid-sixties, whose fingers were otherwise occupied holding a long, black cigarette holder, and a young man sitting next to her. He was not clad in a formal business suit and stiff collar, as the other men present all were, but preferred a jacket cut from heathery grey-green tweed, a flannel shirt and a knitted tie over a pair of grey worsted trousers. He looked like an academic or some form of intellectual – neither of which was a remotely complimentary description in Germany any more – and the impression of nonconformity was reinforced by the sweep of dark blond hair that insisted on flopping down over his right eyebrow no matter how often he swept it back up to the side of his head. He could, however, afford to treat Konrad von Meerbach more casually than the others did for he was his younger brother, Gerhard, and the woman sitting next to him was their mother, the dowager Countess Athala.

‘You may go now,’ said Konrad, and Paust scuttled from the room. Konrad remained standing. He looked from one side of the long, rectangular table to the other, scanning the faces pointing back at him.

‘I am shocked, gentlemen, truly shocked,’ he said, ‘at the idea that anyone here … any … single … one,’ he repeated, jabbing a finger onto the table with each word, ‘could possibly consider it more important to grab a few more Reichsmarks than to carry out the work to which the Führer has sacrificed his entire life, namely the purification of the Aryan race. Anyone would think that you were Jews, the way you place money first, above all else, when we all know that our first duty is to our Führer. I would give away these factories here, all the estates around them, even the schloss that bears my family name, all the great works of art and furniture within it, everything I own, in fact, before I parted with this …’

Konrad pointed to the Nazi badge on his jacket lapel: the black swastika on a white background surrounded by a red ring and outside that a gold wreath, running right around the badge. ‘The Führer himself pinned this golden badge, awarded for special services to the Party, on my chest, because he remembered me from the early days, this rich kid, not even twenty, who joined the march through Munich, November the ninth, 1923 …’

‘Oh God, here we go again …’ Gerhard sighed to himself

‘… who stood shoulder to shoulder with the others who were proud to call themselves National Socialists, who did not break ranks when the police fired on us. Oh yes, the Führer remembers those who stood by him then and who remain true to him now. That is why I combine my role as the head of this great company with the even greater honour of serving as personal assistant to SS-Gruppenführer Heydrich, and why I am privileged to enjoy the confidence of the most senior members of our Party and government. And this is where I come full circle, gentlemen – and Mother – for it is precisely because I put the Party first, and everyone knows it, that I am now able to tell you that the Meerbach Motor Works is about to enjoy the greatest prosperity we have ever known.’

He put his hands on his hips and looked around triumphantly as the room once more echoed to the sound of flesh and bone upon wood.

‘Over the next four to five years the Reich will embark upon a period of military expansion that will make its enemies quake in fear. German factories will build aircraft by the thousands and tanks by the tens of thousands. The days when our nation was forced to bow its head by the Allied Powers will be gone for good, just as the Jews whose betrayal undermined our country and led to its defeat will be gone. And all these fighter aeroplanes and bombers and transports – warplanes unlike any the world has ever seen before – will need engines. All these new tanks, with designs far, far superior to any other tanks on the face of this planet – for who can match Germany for engineering genius? – will require engines to power them, too. And who will supply these engines? Who else but a company cleansed of Jews and commies and perverts, a company whose loyalty to the Party is unquestioned, a company, in short, like the Meerbach Motor Works!’

Konrad bowed his head in modest appreciation of the applause his words had provoked, sat back down again and then, when order had been restored, said, ‘And so, let us proceed with the private element of the meeting. Herr Lange, perhaps you would give us your report on the state of the Meerbach Family Trust’s funds at the present time.’

A short, bespectacled man consulted the papers in front of him and proceeded to give a long and extremely detailed account of capital, income and expenditure, delivered in a flat, nasal monotone. His droning intonation, however, could not disguise one salient, inescapable fact. The Meerbach family was extraordinarily wealthy: not merely rich, but blessed with a fortune on a par with the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers and the Fords. The Meerbach estate stretched for more than thirty kilometres from one end to the other along the shores of the Bodensee. The bank deposits in Frankfurt, Zürich, London and New York matched the reserves of many a nation.

When the recital of facts and figures was complete, various other items on the meeting’s agenda were dealt with, before Konrad said, ‘Very well, I think we can now break for a very well-earned lunch. Unless there is any other business anyone wishes to raise?’

His tone very strongly suggested that there ought not to be and there was much shaking of heads from the men in suits. But then Gerhard von Meerbach raised his hand. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I do have a request to make.’

‘Oh really, what is that?’ Konrad snapped back, with no suggestion whatever of brotherly love.