If the furniture was as valuable as the substantial Hampstead house, which ran in total to some twenty-eight rooms, the man who owned it did not look the part of a Jewish millionaire. Careless about dress, Monty looked his usual scruffy self. For all his wealth he rarely polished his shoes or worried about the crumpled state of his clothing.
‘Our little beauty is in Prague, Callum, doing good work with refugees.’
The name of the Czech capital gave him pause, but Cal decided not to mention it as his destination for the moment. ‘How bad is it?’
‘As bad as it gets with that bastard Hitler breathing down people’s neck. Already they are moving away from the Sudetenland, and not just Jews, but those with eyes to see that the Nazis won’t stop at that. The Commies they will shoot and the socialists can expect a holiday in their concentration camps for some gentle education. Thousands are trying to get out, and if the Germans do invade you and I might have to do a bit of business again.’
It was Monty who had financed Cal’s work in Hamburg; the aforementioned Elsa had been part of the last family he had managed to extract — herself, her father, mother and her three brothers — and it had taken the assistance of a reluctant Peter Lanchester to actually get them to England.
Elsa Ephraim was indeed a beauty, so unlike her successor: young, lithe and inclined to have her employer cursing his age as well as what his wife would do to him if he so much as let one eye wander in her presence; Mrs Redfern would be more than happy with the replacement.
‘If she safe there, at her age?’
‘Hey, Callum, am I safe here when she is walking around with those legs of hers? And that figure and those eyes, my God!’ He looked to the heavens before adding, in a less jocular voice, ‘Elsa is eighteen now anyway and can get out when she wants. I spread a few shekels and got her a British passport. And if she does get into trouble I will blame you. If you had not been so busy with those damned Bolsheviks in Spain I might have asked you to go and do the job.’
‘They were anarchists.’
‘And that is supposed to make me feel better?’
‘I can’t imagine Papa Ephraim was happy about her going to Prague.’
‘He was not and neither was I, ’cause she was good at her job. But that girl has balls, I tell you, and can she argue.’ Monty raised his hands to the heavens and grinned, the wide mouth under that prominent nose spreading in mischief. ‘Hey, maybe she told her Papa he would be my father-in-law to get him to agree.’
‘Or your wife.’
‘You want I should have a stroke?’ Monty replied. ‘I don’t have to tell you who chose Marita.’
‘The lady who answered the door?’ Monty nodded, gravely.
The talk of her attractiveness and any hint of impropriety with Elsa was, of course, an act; Monty might like the fantasy but he was more of a father figure than an old lecher, a man who, while he had a huge and very profitable business to oversee, was too preoccupied anyway for such a game. He spent most of his time running his various charities, as well as harrying his fellow Jews, both in Britain and around the world, to provide money, sanctuary or both for those in peril from the Nazis.
‘And the Government is being as stingy as ever with visas, I suppose?’
Jewish immigration was a hot political potato, not aided by a residual and far-from-disguised anti-Semitism in the upper reaches of British society, peopled by the kind of dolts who admired Mussolini and Hitler for bringing order to their countries, while blithely shutting their minds to the measures used to achieve it.
No Jew fleeing persecution could get residence without someone to sponsor and promise to support them; they would not be allowed in if they were going to be a burden to the taxpayer. So Monty spent as much time lobbying for those permits as he did seeking the funds to support emigration.
‘It’s like drawing teeth, the crooks,’ Monty cried, ‘and the Americans are no better, bigger crooks than us even, with the space they have.’
Time to drop the bombshell. ‘It so happens that I am off to Prague, as well.’
Cal was thinking that Monty hid his surprise well, just as well as he managed to keep off of his face that his mind was working to see if there was some connection.
‘You can look Elsa up, maybe?’
‘Maybe not.’
‘So it is not open-door, this visit to Prague?’
‘No.’
‘Does old Monty get an explanation, maybe?’
‘I was going to ask you to lend me some money-’
‘Boy, do you know how to spoil an old Jew’s day,’ Monty scoffed, cutting across him.
‘-or at least make some available. Quite a lot, in fact.’
The reaction was typical, but Monty did not make the obvious comment, which was ‘why?’ He knew very well that Callum Jardine had his own private income, just as he knew where it came from, the profits of his father’s successful trading in both France and Germany before the Great War, both countries in which the family had taken up residence.
With a blood connection to one of the great trading dynasties of the world, Jardine pere had been in a position to make a great deal of money doing deals in a fluid market, buying and selling goods to ship between the Far East and Europe. His son could have done the same had he been so inclined and his cousins would have backed him; blood was blood to the Scots as much as it was to the Jews.
‘I can carry a certain amount of money and I will do so, but to conceal big sums is impossible, apart from being too risky. I did some business in Czechoslovakia recently…’
‘I won’t ask in what.’
‘The trouble I had in transfers, getting to Switzerland and back again, held everything up for weeks and that was before the Nazis marched into Austria. In what I am proposing to undertake, if I do need funds, and there is a chance I will not, I don’t think I will have the time to put the arrangements in place, and I am certainly disinclined to travel the way I did previously now that Hitler controls both the borders and the route.’
‘Makes sense,’ Monty replied.
‘You do trade in Czechoslovakia, don’t you?’
‘A bit,’ he shrugged, ‘but maybe not much longer.’
‘Even if you still do business in Germany?’
That got Cal a hard look. ‘So, shame me. I have mouths to feed.’
Monty’s business was chemicals; he had built up an international trading empire over several years and, being Jewish, he would seek opportunities and profits wherever they could be had. If that included Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy so be it, though he no doubt salved his conscience by the way he used the money he made to aid those he saw as being in ideological peril.
Cal was one of the few people to whom he had been open about that; he had been obliged to in order to fund Hamburg and he was not ashamed of it. He had started out as the child of immigrants selling bags of bicarbonate of soda door to door in the East End of London as a youth, for pennies. That was also something Monty never forgot: he knew where he came from and he was never going to risk going back.
What his international contacts gave him was an ability to shift large sums from country to country, even to the notoriously difficult Nazi Germany, without anyone taking too much notice, while it also allowed anyone purporting to act on his behalf to withdraw levels of cash in foreign banks that would not raise an eyebrow. At the same time, with a phone call, he could raise credit in another country in a way denied to mere mortals.
‘I need access to an amount of money that is too open-ended to calculate, as well as a letter of credit and documentation saying I am representing Redfern Chemicals, and I will guarantee redress when I come back home.’
‘Cal, I know you are not on your uppers, but that could be a lot of lolly. I would hate to see you needing my charity.’
‘The loan is not to me, Monty, it’s to the British Government.’
That narrowed the eyes. ‘I am not skint but I think they have more lolly to spread around than me. And why should I give those crooks a loan, already?’
‘Don’t worry, I intend to give details.’
