The clerk came back, looking bored, and said again, ‘Nada, Senor.’
Hawn thanked him and turned, unwilling to attract further attention. Anna said: ‘Ask him to look under “E”.’
‘“E”?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Mönch knows my name well enough.’
A pair of women behind them were growing impatient. Anna ignored them; instead, she asked the clerk herself to look under E. The man came back to her a moment later with a bulky envelope on which was written, THOMAS HAWN ESQUIRE, and marked PRIVADO.
Hawn kissed her with extravagance, then they walked quickly out, failing to notice that the man with the newspaper had not moved. When they were in the street he kissed her again, messily on the lips, setting her sunglasses askew on her nose, and squeezing both her buttocks. ‘Careful!’ she said: ‘In Franco’s time we’d have been arrested.’
A drunk was watching them, propped against the wall and trying to light a cigarette. Hawn, on an impulse, gave him a box of matches. Mönch’s letter made an uncomfortable bulge in his inside pocket.
‘I want to go back and screw you,’ he said happily.
‘But first, let’s go and get a drink and see what’s inside that envelope.’
It was a stout manila envelope, well-sealed and reinforced with Sellotape. Inside were eleven sheets of quarto bank paper, each covered with single-spaced typing on what had obviously been a cheap and badly maintained machine. It was entirely in German, with a great many errors and corrections — crossings-out, letters elided and words clumsily inserted above others. It was clear that whoever had written it had not been a professional typist, and that this was almost certainly a first and only draft. Whether the author had kept a carbon was another matter.
Hawn looked warily round the cafe and bar. It was still too early for the pre-lunch crowds, and their table was reasonably isolated.
Anna said, ‘Is your German up to it?’
‘It’ll have to be. I’m not going round to the German Consulate to get it translated.’
The first two pages were highly technical and contained a number of commercial names, of which I G Farben and Fischer-Tropsch Werke GmbH featured most prominently. The word ‘Braunkohle’ cropped up several times: ‘brown coal’, which confused him, until Anna guessed that it meant ‘lignite’, the main substance used in the production of synthetic fuel.
The gist of the first few pages was not sensational: by the end of 1943 the fuel crisis had become critical and Himmler had established a secret department within the Ministry of War Production with the sole purpose of producing two million tonnes of crude oil a week.
When he had read this out to her, Anna said: ‘But that’s impossible! I’ve seen the figures myself — they were down to 1.7 million tonnes.’
‘Were those official statistics? German statistics?’
‘No — American. At least, Anglo-American. Post-war figures that were brought out by the Allied Commission — I looked them up in the Petroleum Library.’
A waiter had turned on a television set behind the bar, and a few people in the cafe had moved over to watch it. One was a smartly dressed man in dark glasses, carrying a bull fighting gazette rolled up under his arm.
Hawn said, ‘Of course, Mönch doesn’t say here that they were actually producing two million a week, just that they were aiming at that as a “provisional target”.’
‘Well, unless Mönch is lying, they were being crazily optimistic. I won’t bore you now with comparative figures, but that sort of production and consumption — even for a highly industrialized state at war — is colossal. What date does Mönch say it was?’
Hawn referred back through the notes. ‘End of 1943. Then it seems they had what Mönch calls a “highly secret meeting”, in somewhere called Neustrelitz, near the Polish border. Here it becomes very confused. Mönch starts talking about someone or something called Bettina.’
Anna was looking at the TV screen which was showing a rerun of a bullfight parade. She said, ‘All I know about Bettina is that she was Beethoven’s mistress.’
‘That would figure. Very sentimental people, the Germans — very musical. They had a full-time orchestra playing Strauss and Mozart at the gates of Auschwitz, twelve hours a day.’ He drank some beer and read on. ‘Yes, I thought so. Bettina’s a code word.’ He turned the page, where the typing had become faded, as though the ribbon had come to an end.
Hawn persevered, slowly deciphering the cumbersome German phrases and convoluted sentences, rendered more difficult by Mönch’s pedantic style. He turned a page and there was a roar of excitement from behind the bar. A bull had appeared on the screen, dodging, lurching about, while the first toreadors taunted him with little skipping pirouettes. The man in dark glasses had unfolded his gazette and was watching intently.
Hawn said, ‘Now we’re getting somewhere! Salak. Imin Salak. Bettina’s operations move into the Turkish Strategic Zone — Salak is recruited by Bettina’s agents, totally apart from the Abwehr or the RSHA, the Political Police, which included the Gestapo.’
Anna stopped him. ‘You’re going too fast for me. What’s the particular significance?’
There was another roar, followed by a chorus of whistles and boos as the picadors lumbered on to the screen, astride their wretched horses, watched by
