was as bleak and impersonal as its neighbour: plastic woven to look like carpet, plastic coloured to look like metal, and plastic veneered with wafers of richly coloured woods.
Sitting at a side table, in front of a small sophisticated cassette recorder and a pair of discarded headphones, a broad-shouldered man was waiting patiently. Willi Kleiber had close-cropped hair and a blunt moustache of the sort that British army officers used to favour, but no one would have mistaken Willi Kleiber for such. He had the wide head and high cheekbones that are so often the characteristics of Germanic people from the far side of the River Vistula. His nose was large, like the cutting edge of a broken hatchet, and his body was heavy and muscular. He had taken off his khaki golfing jacket and loosened his tie. His legs were stretched out so that his shiny, black high boots could be seen below his trousers.
‘What do you think, Willi?’ Max Breslow asked him.
Willi Kleiber pulled a face. ‘You did all right, Max,’ he said grudgingly.
‘What will happen next?’
Kleiber held the headphones together and wound the wires round them carefully as he considered his reply. ‘We’ve got rid of Lustig. You’ve let Stein know we can pay a lot of money for the documents, and soon he will discover that he’s lost a great deal of money. Then he will come back to us.’
‘How did you get Stein’s money?’
‘Not me; the Trust. When you have the active assistance of some of the most successful bankers in Germany, such swindles are easy to arrange.’
‘What did you mean … We’ve got rid of Lustig? You said you’d given him money for a vacation in Europe.’
Kleiber grinned. ‘You leave that side of things to me, Max. Don’t give Bernard Lustig another thought; the less you know about him, the better.’ He zipped up the front of his jacket to make a sudden noise.
‘I wish I’d never got into this,’ said Breslow. He could not muster the enthusiasm and energy that Kleiber brought to these crazy adventures, and wished he’d been able to stay out of this madness. Listening to Kleiber talking of such antics over coffee and cognac was amusing; but now he was involved, and he was frightened.
‘The Trust needed you,’ said Kleiber.
Breslow looked at him and nodded. Kleiber was simplistic, if not to say simple. Orders were orders and obeying them was an honoured role. Breslow had been the same when he was a young man. All that wonderful idealism, and the sense of purpose that is known only to the young, all squandered to the whims of Hitler and his fellow gangsters. What a tragic waste.
‘You were a Nazi, Max. Don’t ever forget it. And don’t count on anyone else forgetting it.’
‘That was a lifetime ago, Willi,’ said Breslow wearily.
Kleiber closed the lid of the tape recorder with a sound that was intentionally loud. ‘Remember last year, when the old woman recognized you in that coffee shop in Boston? She shouted “SS murderer” at you, didn’t she? She won’t forget, Max. You need the Trust. They’re not Nazis, either, Max, but they will help.’
‘That old woman in the coffee shop was mad,’ said Breslow.
‘You left your breakfast and rushed into the street, Max. You told me so yourself.’
Billy Stein was waiting in the shiny new Buick Riviera parked alongside the liquor store. He leaned across the passenger seat to open the door for his father, and had the engine started by the time his father climbed into the car. The warning buzzer sounded. ‘Can’t you do something about that buzzer? I hate these darned seat belts.’ Finally Stein senior got the safety belt round his enormous frame. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. He moved a canvas overnight bag on to the back seat.
The car bumped out of the car park and into the traffic. ‘Not exactly like Metro, is it? I guess he works out of that apartment to evade the city business tax.’ They drove past the liquor store with rusty bars on the windows and a new wire cage on the doors. ‘Melrose sounds like a good enough address for a movie company,’ said Billy, ‘until you see which end of it they’re located.’
‘Right,’ said his father. Charles Stein opened the glove compartment and found some cigars. He ripped the metal cap off one of them, and used the dashboard lighter to get it going. He puffed on it energetically before he spoke. ‘Seems like our Mr Bernie Lustig is not around any more.’ He worked his lips to get a fragment of tobacco leaf out of his mouth. ‘Seems like he’s gone to Europe for an unspecified duration.’
‘So who did you talk with?’
‘A gent who calls himself Max Breslow.’
‘German?’
‘Canadian,’ said Stein sarcastically. ‘It must be one of those Red Indian names.’
‘You don’t like him?’ said Billy.
‘He’s a Nazi, Billy. I can always recognize them.’
Billy nodded. He was used to such pronouncements about anyone with a German name who was not immediately identifiable as Jewish. ‘He says he was too young to be in the war.’
‘But you don’t believe him?’
‘He’s got very black hair,’ said Stein. ‘And when a guy’s hair suddenly goes black overnight, he’s old.’
Billy Stein laughed and his father chuckled too.
‘And he has a gun,’ added Charles Stein, realizing that his verdict on Max Breslow was not carrying much weight with his son.
‘Half the people I know in this town have a gun,’ said Billy. He shrugged. ‘At home we’ve got that damned great souvenir gun you brought home from the war.’
‘But I don’t go around with it stuck in my waistband,’ said Stein. Billy smiled. It would be hard to imagine such a large piece of ordnance anywhere but on the wall of Charles Stein’s study.
‘So you want to go straight to the airport?’
‘With just one stop at Jim Sampson’s law office. La Cienega, in the big Savings and Loan building – he’s expecting me. Then take me to the airport. We’ll go south to La Tijera. It’s a fast way. Right?’
If Billy had hoped that the meeting with his old army friend Jim Sampson would get his father into a better state of mind, his hopes were dashed by the sight of Charles Stein emerging from the Savings and Loan building on La Cienega. His father slumped into the passenger seat. ‘The airport.’ He searched in the glove compartment and found an airline timetable. ‘I knew I would have to go to Switzerland, Billy. I’m going to have to go right now.’
‘I don’t like to see you worried, dad. Is there anything I can do?’
‘There’s a direct flight … I don’t like what’s going on here, Billy. Colonel Pitman is going to have to hear about it, and I never like putting this kind of thing in writing.’ He pulled his nose. ‘And it’s risky talking on the phone these days.’
‘It will be good for you,’ said Billy. ‘A change of scene.’
While
