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 secrecy 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
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.
