Hawn paused. ‘I hear things aren’t too good with you, Norman?’
‘The rough with the smooth,’ French said, and went on to choose two of the most expensive dishes, with an appropriately good wine. Then he shifted his chair back and smiled: ‘Quite like the old days, Tom.’
‘Not quite. You’re rather difficult to get hold of, for a start. What happened?’
‘Broke. Flat, stony, on the sticks. I can’t even get credit at the newsagents.’
The wine waiter poured French’s glass a quarter full; French moistened his lips and nodded. ‘Very nice, Tom. Yes, it is like the old days.’
‘And like the old days you’re going to give me some help. Confidential information — that’s the way it used to be, right?’
Norman French sipped his wine. Hawn said: ‘I want some stuff on ABCO. Nothing current — but confidential. Old stuff going back to the end of the war. Do you know anything about ABCO’s operations at that time in the Caribbean?’
French put down his glass and showed his white teeth. ‘This information — how much does it pay?’
‘Depends on what it is. I want contacts — people I can talk to, names and facts I can check on. But I’ll give you two-fifty on the nail, and two-fifty if the information checks out.’
Norman French looked at him without expression. ‘What do you want to know?’
Hawn knew he would have to handle French with care.
The man was not only untrustworthy — he was shrewd, with a certain coarse cunning. The least artifice would only whet his curiosity. Hawn wanted his information cold. He decided on the direct approach.
‘Before the war ABCO had fairly close contacts with the German firm, I G Farben. They’re supposed to have broken all contact when the Roosevelt Administration brought pressure to bear in 1940. What do you know about ABCO’s interests in the Caribbean during the rest of the war?’
‘They sold oil.’
‘But they had a lot of interests in Central American government. And some of those governments, in one way or another, were pro-Nazi — or at least, pro-German.’
‘They were pro the US dollar,’ French said.
‘But if the US stayed neutral, or even lost, those regimes wouldn’t have been sorry to deal with the Reichsmark?’
A sly happy look had spread over Norman French’s hairless features. ‘I get the drift. You’re priming me, Tom, to say it wasn’t just the Latin American top class who had pro-German interests. You want me to say that ABCO did too?’
‘ABCO’s a big organization. It only needed a handful of people. Maybe just one person. Five hundred quid, Norman.’
French pretended to be concentrating on his food. He said at last, ‘Most of ABCO’s top people in the war are either dead or retired. But there are people around who had very sensitive jobs in those days. I’m not saying they were pro-Nazi.’
‘Norman, I’m pursuing a line of extremely tentative inquiry. It may lead nowhere. As you say, I’m probably wasting my time — and my money. I just want a lead. Someone I can interview who might know of an Anglo-Nazi connection within ABCO in the last years of the war.’
French put down his knife and fork. ‘If I tell you what I know Tom, you won’t have any way of confirming it. So I shall want that whole five hundred pounds now, as a full down payment.’
Hawn said, ‘There could be more to come, if you’re patient.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m not banking on anything in the future. I want the money now.’
‘All right. Let’s hear what you’ve got.’
Norman French took his time dissecting the last of his chicken Kiev. ‘As you know, I recently spent a year down in Central America — though I was based in Texas. It’s a small part of the world — even Texas. And oil men not only gossip — they’ve got long memories. Tom, you’ve got to have worked in the oil industry to know what it’s really like. Each company is a cut-throat fraternity where everyone’s trying to scramble to the top and steal the apples.’
‘You don’t seem to have climbed down with much to show for it.’
‘That was uncalled for.’
‘If you want to earn that first two-fifty, you’re going to have to come up with something hard. Perhaps I could start you off by jogging your memory. You’ve heard of Toby Shanklin?’
‘I have. Gets on wonderfully with Arabs. They say he still never travels anywhere without his jar of petroleum jelly.’ French laughed heartily at his little joke.
‘You know he was in the Caribbean in the last two years of the war?’ said Hawn.
Norman French took off his glasses and wiped them on a silk handkerchief. His naked eyes were small and lustreless. ‘What do you want to know about him?’
‘For a start, what he was doing out there — officially and unofficially. Then how he made his money. He came out of the war with a small fortune — which wasn’t unusual if you were in munitions, or even big-time black-market. What about oil?’
French’s face took on a closed look. ‘There was one thing I heard — when I was down in Vera Cruz, in Mexico. Alan Rice, I think the name was. I remember, because he was half English, with a German passport — Austrian on his mother’s side and had studied in Germany before the war. He was caught up there when war broke out, and soon became one of their top petro-chemical scientists. He appears to have been a bit of a mystery. He still had dual nationality when he turned up in Colombia in 1943, where the Germans still hoped they could sniff out some oil and get the concession.
‘The next thing I heard, he’d flown up to the States and asked for political asylum. He got it —
