The Man from Lisbon, page 13
“Alves, what did the Bank of Portugal want with you? Did you really meet with the governors?”
“Of course I did. But I cannot disclose their plan yet. More meetings, one tomorrow as a matter of fact, at the bank. But I have a special job for you. Do you remember the German we met at Maria’s dinner party in Luanda that night, the man who set me thinking about coming back to Europe?”
“Hennies? That was it, wasn’t it? Adolf Hennies. … I thought he was supposed to be Swiss.”
“German or Swiss, the same.” They stopped in front of a small church. “I want you to find him. And build a dossier. You can investigate him, contact our legations, hire a detective if you must. I want to know what kind of man he is, a spy, a soldier of fortune. …”
Arnaldo nodded. “I can trace him easily enough. But what should I tell him?”
“Tell him that it is imperative that he meet us at the Palace Hotel in Biarritz one week from today. Tell him that I wouldn’t ask him to make the trip unless he’d realize a good profit. And if he doesn’t agree with me when we’ve talked, we’ll pick up all of his expenses. That ought to appeal to his German sense of efficiency.”
As they descended inside the cage Arnaldo began to chuckle behind a fist.
“Alves,” he whispered conspiratorially, “we could pay his expenses in Angolan money!”
“Ah, you’re a brilliant man, Arnaldo, a brilliant man.” Alves smiled and slapped his friend’s back.
As the wood-burning engine jostled its way northward, leaving Portugal and pushing on through Spain’s Basque country toward Biarritz, Arnaldo and José, their missions accomplished, played cards in the nearly empty coach. Alves, in a compartment of his own, lost himself in the dossiers the two had collected. The air was thick with heavy smoke, and he perspired freely in the dense, humid enclosure, his tie pulled loose and collar undone. Warm rain spattered the windows, smudged the countryside beyond.
Arnaldo had done well in his search for Hennies, turning to a detective in Munich and to a woman called Greta Nordlund, who was, after a dashing series of beaux, newly installed as Josh’s lady. Apparently José had met her in The Hague where he had dined, through Antonio’s diplomatic connections, at a dinner honoring her. A woman of the world, a rather famous actress, though Alves knew nothing of such matters, she had attracted José without half trying. His dandy’s good looks had been enough to interest her, and much to their mutual surprise a satisfying liaison had ensued. When Arnaldo had mentioned Herr Hennies, José replied that Alves should have asked him since his mistress had once been romantically involved with Herr Hennies, though she had said that their relationship had been short-lived. No, Antonio had never met the man, but José was sure that Greta would prove a font of information. Which, by cable and letter, was indeed the case. By combining her researches with those of the detective in Munich a broad yet remarkably clear picture of Hennies emerged—clearer, by far, than its subject might have wished.
Adolf Gustav Hennies, the entrepreneur who had urged Reis to consider that the real future lay in Europe rather than in an African backwater. Now, scouring the dossier, Alves wondered at fate’s intervention, placing Hennies before him as it had. Hennies … Neither Miss Nordlund nor the detective knew the man’s real name, which was precisely the way Hennies wanted it. He had gone to a great deal of trouble to bury his real name, and by the time he found himself in Senhor Reis’s courtyard in Luanda he was well into his third complete incarnation. He never talked about the first, which had been almost entirely unsatisfactory, and the second, though shed like a tree’s leaves in the autumn, was still fresh in his mind when he encountered Greta and a source of some pleasant if not rapturous reflection.
That second life had begun in 1909 when he was twenty-eight years old. For a raft of delicate personal reasons he had left Germany, changed his name and lit out for the New World. His formal, erect bearing made him much taller than his five feet eight inches, and his somber mien, his orderliness testified to his Germanic efficiency. He went to the famous Singer Sewing Machine Company in New York City and convinced them of his worthiness to acquire a small agency. Of course, the entire contents of his bank account helped persuade these knights of capitalism that he was indeed the man to carry their gospel to yet another outpost in the battle against handstitching. The outpost in Manaos, Brazil, was well up the Amazon and not a location for which they had a deluge of applicants. He felt reasonably certain that no one would come quite so far to find him.
For five years he prospered as something like the sewing-machine god, building a fair amount of capital, particularly for Manaos, which was not, he admitted realistically, a financial hotbed.
Just as he had begun to grow restless in the land of the python and the poison dart, the Portuguese National Assembly declared their intention to join England and France in the war against Germany. Quite naturally he assumed that Brazil, since it was still essentially a Portuguese nation although official colonial status had been renounced almost a century before, might also leap into the war against his homeland. His name at the time wasn’t Hennies, but he was known to be a German, his second identity having been based on his first—that is, whoever the hell he claimed to be, he was a German in a country he believed to be on the verge of war with Germany. Time to fly.
As it happened, Brazil held off until 1917, but by then Hennies was long gone. He had scouted out an obliging crook in Rio de Janeiro who fitted him out with a lovely Swiss passport and a third persona—that of Adolf Hennies, an international trader of thirty-three with a Swiss father and a Brazilian mother. In November 1914 he sailed on the ancient S. S. Principessa Mafalda, made certain he didn’t give his nationality away by uttering even a word of German, and by January he’d made a useful contact in Berlin, secured a position as a member of the wartime German Purchasing Commission and was on his way to his new duties in Amsterdam.
While his position was an official one, Hennies dealt primarily in smuggling through Switzerland items prohibited by the Dutch and Danish governments for export to Germany. At the same time he ingratiated himself with Berlin by operating as an agent for the German Secret Service. Holland was an ideal place to be a spy, since secret agents from all combatant governments chummed about a good deal, lived very nicely on their expense vouchers and fed one another enough information to keep the entire international boondoggle going.
Hennies was wonderfully at home. His close-cropped black hair was already touched with gray, his eyes had a piercing, almost Latin quality, he dressed the part of an impeccable businessman. Due to the fact that he had been born with his right leg shorter than the left, he wore a prosthetic corrective shoe with a built-up sole and walked with a slight limp. At his best he was both extremely dignified and quite sinister. He was frequently at his best in those days, a man of the world, a realist.
By 1917 his realistic approach to life’s vagaries told him that Germany was bound to come out of the Great War the biggest loser. He wisely went to a Dutch businessman with whom he had had certain slightly irregular, highly profitable dealings and arranged to have his Deutsche marks converted into Dutch gulden—no less than one hundred thousand dollars’ worth.
In the shambles of postwar Europe, while Alves was dealing in phony jute bags and rusty German tractors, Herr Hennies was putting the remains of his Berlin connections into effect, getting himself appointed Abwicklungskommissar for East Prussia. It was an enviable post for an enterprising man; he was in charge of German reparations and arms deliveries to Poland, as provided in the Treaty of Versailles. What made the position so attractive was the fact that Poland was in the midst of struggling with Lithuania over the city of Vilna, with the Czechs over Teschen and with the Soviets in general. Hungry for weaponry, Poland had become, in the words of one sagacious observer, “the great arms sink of Europe.”
Hennies’ greed coincided wonderfully with that of the Poles. He pocketed bribes for hastening shipments of machine guns and grenades, for enlarging shipments and hiding the changes in the tide of paperwork; he arranged private deals with certain privately bankrolled Polish factions; he accepted trainloads of Polish-bound American Quaker relief foodstuffs in exchange for what he knew to be slightly substandard hand grenades. When the grenades turned out to lack the requisite fuses the Polish generals who had arranged the deal were trotted out and shot. Hennies made a profit of more than fifty thousand dollars when he sold the Quakers’ food to starving Germans on the black market.
Secure in private business, he made trips abroad, including the journey to Angola, where he also did a couple of small jobs for the German Secret Service, which, undaunted, still had designs on the Portuguese colony. Back in Berlin in 1923, he found a way to beat the disastrous inflation that would find the meaningless paper replaced by new gold-backed Rentenmarks. While it would literally take a basketful of the paper marks to get a new gold one, the German Railway’s own gold notes already in circulation would be convertible on a one-to-one basis. Hennies’ railway pals cut him in on a deal worth more than a million dollars, a deal to exchange uncirculated, and therefore illegal in terms of their convertibility, Railway notes. He was given a diplomatic passport, always useful, and sent to London, where he converted the uncirculated notes into Swiss francs and pounds, a simple operation that netted him another hundred thousand. A sixth sense told him not to try it again a month later. In the event, the substitute courier was caught and the entire gang of more or less highly placed officials went to jail, where the ringleader, Postmaster General Dr. Anton Hofle, killed himself. Hennies was merely questioned and released, leaving only a small blot on his copy book.
Which brought Alves up to date. Hennies was perfect for Alves Reis’s plan. …
As he began to go through the second dossier, he stretched, arched his stiff back, took off his glasses, rubbed his bloodshot eyes. His neck ached with accumulated tension, worry that the next day’s meeting might not go well. He wondered at the coincidences that were leaping at him from the collected information. Greta Nordlund, for example. Out of the blue, she turns up not only as José’s “true love” but as the main source of information about Adolf Hennies, one of her previous conquests. She was an actress, of course, and that explained her deplorable lack of constancy. But was she a good omen for his scheme? Would there be trouble between José and Hennies? He was not overjoyed when José told him happily that Greta was coming to Biarritz from Paris to sneak a few days’ holiday with him. … Alves sighed, wishing he had a dossier on her.
Then there was the matter of the Dutchman José had come up with. Antonio Bandeira vouched for him in glowing terms, and José described him as just the man for any serious financial dealings, sober and experienced and extremely ambitious. While those were exactly the qualities required, Alves had his doubts. A prostitute in Paris—a friend of José’s—had been one of the major contributors to Karel Marang’s dossier, having quite recently given Marang aid and comfort following a particularly severe reversal. The man confided in a Parisian tart! Alves had been mortified at such behavior. José’s reassurances that the woman was an old friend of both men and the benchmark of discretion had only partially eased Alves’ doubts. …
Topping it all was the fact that Marang and Hennies were old business associates! Too many coincidences. It gave him an uneasy stomach. Either they would all work well together or there was too much inbreeding for anyone’s good health. … But which was it going to be? Replacing his spectacles, he returned to the second dossier.
While Adolf Hennies was privately congratulating himself that he hadn’t been caught with his hand in the national till on the Railway note matter and was at the same time restlessly casting about for new opportunities, his old Dutch colleague, Karel Marang, who had helped him change his marks into gulden, was concerned with a particularly intimate matter. Like a social disease, it could not be discussed with anyone, not even so liberal-minded a friend as José Bandeira, the younger brother of the Portuguese Minister to the Netherlands and a dashing fellow whom Marang knew to have been in and out of a scrape or two in his time. On the other hand, had he somehow contracted a social disease, José would have been the first person to whom Marang would have turned.
But the sober Dutchman, a reasonably good-looking man with a tidy little mustache and a tendency toward mousiness as well as a command of proper, academic French, had not come to Paris to sate himself at the Sphinx and other such bagnias de luxe, normally the haunts of Bandeira. He was newly arrived from The Hague in search of much headier stuff. Still, it was passion that brought him here, a passion that served as one of the obsessive engines of his life. He was calling on a baron. …
Marang’s greatest attribute was an advanced degree in practical survival and manipulation. So far as education went, he had but little and that ill-taught. His family background was the sort he chose not to acknowledge, but Antonio had dug it out. Born in 1884 in a tiny suburb of Amsterdam called Dordrecht, he was the son of a strong-arm debt collector. Forever trying to divorce himself from the crumminess of his birthright, he was quick to learn how to make money. Among other lessons he learned was one that La Rochefoucauld put into admirable words—“To establish oneself in the world, one does all one can to seem established there already.” It was a postulate that appealed to Alves’ own sense of striving.
By 1914 he had put aside enough money to become a war profiteer, selling such items as Dutch chocolate, ham, wheat and oils to the Germans, who were, in his view, sure to win the war. Since Holland was neutral and since the Netherlands Overseas Trust made sure that businessmen sent nothing to the Germans that was on the Allies’ prohibited list, Marang came face to face with the world of bribery, crooked customs officials and German agents. He found that he was at home in such improvisational interactions. And his foremost contact with the German Purchasing Commission was, of course, that helpful Swiss with the Brazilian mother, Adolf Hennies, who did well out of their business relationship, receiving a 10 percent rake-off on the gross value of all Marang’s shipments to Germany.
But in 1917 the 50 percent profits he’d grown accustomed to were reduced to a maximum of 5 percent by the Netherlands Export Company, which regulated all imports and exports. Until the United States entered the war Marang had been doing a huge business in shipping American coal to Holland and then on to Germany, a scheme that came to grief with the arrival of the American Expeditionary Force and the new profit laws.
By 1920 he was prospering again, supplying coffee to Persia and the Middle East and African vegetable oils to Germany. By 1922 he bought out his partner, used the first floor of his four-story home in The Hague for offices and kept the top three floors as living quarters for his family—a wife and two sons—and several servants.
By 1924, when Alves was verging on his trip to the Oporto jail, the wheel had turned again: Marang had come upon hard times once more. The price of coffee had fallen sharply. He was substantially overextended. The day before he went to Paris, where José had reached him, his bookkeeper told him that, in baldest terms, he was more than a hundred thousand dollars in the hole and the banks holding his notes were growing restless.
His mission was not entirely unrelated to his economic future. For one thing it made him feel good just to stand outside the elegant apartment of Baron Rudolf August Louis Lehman, Minister Plenipotentiary of Liberia to the Third French Republic on the Bois de Boulogne, the most fashionable address in Paris, with a pair of Rothschild mansions nearby.
On the face of it, Marang’s errand was simple: he wanted his Liberian diplomatic passport, ten years out of date, renewed. But beneath that simple application lay a tangled, desperate mass of motivations that struck directly to the heart of the man’s life. Status, titles, money: an inseparable triumvirate composing all that made his life worth living. In the present instance, having little money, he counted on status—whether in the form of a diplomatic passport or a title or both—to confer that appearance of being well off, which could then lead to the fact itself.
Marang had come by the diplomatic passport in 1914, having paid Count Matzenauer de Matzenau, a Serbian who happened at the time to be Liberian Minister to Imperial Russia, eleven hundred dollars for it. Even then its value was much in doubt, since the count himself had been fired by the Liberian government the year before for abuses of his diplomatic privileges. The mere fact that a Serbian count held a Liberian diplomatic post reflected the confusing nature of international relations carried out in the period by marginally significant and almost always impoverished nations. Liberia, for example, qualified on both these counts. Even by 1923 Liberia’s entire annual budget, derived solely from customs duties, totaled three hundred and eighty thousand dollars.
But human nature being what it was, there were always those who would gladly pay their own expenses as a Liberian diplomat in, say, Paris, in return for membership in the international community. The privileges were mainly social, but the quick thinker could also turn them into ready cash. Smuggling was a common activity, and so was discreet spying, as was the selling of various nonexistent diplomatic posts to whoever might pay for them—and thereby receive such privileges, on a small scale of course, for himself.
Marang had bought such a nonexistent position, which carried with it the legally useless document naming him representative to a government that Liberia did not even recognize—the Soviet Union. Still, the passport was occasionally useful, and, in any case, the count was supposed to carry out another chore included in the price—that is, he had guaranteed Marang that he would get Marang’s name into the Almanach de Gotha, the standard and acknowledged listing of nobility.
It was all terribly complicated. In 1915 Marang had gone so far as to buy the title of the Manor of d’Ysselveere-les-Krimpen, which entitled him to call himself Karel Marang van Ysselveere if he thought it would do him any good. Which he not infrequently did; his Dutch passport, however, was still made out to plain old Karel Marang. The Liberian diplomatic passport was to be renewed with the noble van Ysselveere appended, exactly as it was written on his other somewhat unusual diplomatic documents, none of which included a passport—he was, oddly, the Consul General of the Central American republic of San Salvador and Consul General of Persia to The Hague.
“Of course I did. But I cannot disclose their plan yet. More meetings, one tomorrow as a matter of fact, at the bank. But I have a special job for you. Do you remember the German we met at Maria’s dinner party in Luanda that night, the man who set me thinking about coming back to Europe?”
“Hennies? That was it, wasn’t it? Adolf Hennies. … I thought he was supposed to be Swiss.”
“German or Swiss, the same.” They stopped in front of a small church. “I want you to find him. And build a dossier. You can investigate him, contact our legations, hire a detective if you must. I want to know what kind of man he is, a spy, a soldier of fortune. …”
Arnaldo nodded. “I can trace him easily enough. But what should I tell him?”
“Tell him that it is imperative that he meet us at the Palace Hotel in Biarritz one week from today. Tell him that I wouldn’t ask him to make the trip unless he’d realize a good profit. And if he doesn’t agree with me when we’ve talked, we’ll pick up all of his expenses. That ought to appeal to his German sense of efficiency.”
As they descended inside the cage Arnaldo began to chuckle behind a fist.
“Alves,” he whispered conspiratorially, “we could pay his expenses in Angolan money!”
“Ah, you’re a brilliant man, Arnaldo, a brilliant man.” Alves smiled and slapped his friend’s back.
As the wood-burning engine jostled its way northward, leaving Portugal and pushing on through Spain’s Basque country toward Biarritz, Arnaldo and José, their missions accomplished, played cards in the nearly empty coach. Alves, in a compartment of his own, lost himself in the dossiers the two had collected. The air was thick with heavy smoke, and he perspired freely in the dense, humid enclosure, his tie pulled loose and collar undone. Warm rain spattered the windows, smudged the countryside beyond.
Arnaldo had done well in his search for Hennies, turning to a detective in Munich and to a woman called Greta Nordlund, who was, after a dashing series of beaux, newly installed as Josh’s lady. Apparently José had met her in The Hague where he had dined, through Antonio’s diplomatic connections, at a dinner honoring her. A woman of the world, a rather famous actress, though Alves knew nothing of such matters, she had attracted José without half trying. His dandy’s good looks had been enough to interest her, and much to their mutual surprise a satisfying liaison had ensued. When Arnaldo had mentioned Herr Hennies, José replied that Alves should have asked him since his mistress had once been romantically involved with Herr Hennies, though she had said that their relationship had been short-lived. No, Antonio had never met the man, but José was sure that Greta would prove a font of information. Which, by cable and letter, was indeed the case. By combining her researches with those of the detective in Munich a broad yet remarkably clear picture of Hennies emerged—clearer, by far, than its subject might have wished.
Adolf Gustav Hennies, the entrepreneur who had urged Reis to consider that the real future lay in Europe rather than in an African backwater. Now, scouring the dossier, Alves wondered at fate’s intervention, placing Hennies before him as it had. Hennies … Neither Miss Nordlund nor the detective knew the man’s real name, which was precisely the way Hennies wanted it. He had gone to a great deal of trouble to bury his real name, and by the time he found himself in Senhor Reis’s courtyard in Luanda he was well into his third complete incarnation. He never talked about the first, which had been almost entirely unsatisfactory, and the second, though shed like a tree’s leaves in the autumn, was still fresh in his mind when he encountered Greta and a source of some pleasant if not rapturous reflection.
That second life had begun in 1909 when he was twenty-eight years old. For a raft of delicate personal reasons he had left Germany, changed his name and lit out for the New World. His formal, erect bearing made him much taller than his five feet eight inches, and his somber mien, his orderliness testified to his Germanic efficiency. He went to the famous Singer Sewing Machine Company in New York City and convinced them of his worthiness to acquire a small agency. Of course, the entire contents of his bank account helped persuade these knights of capitalism that he was indeed the man to carry their gospel to yet another outpost in the battle against handstitching. The outpost in Manaos, Brazil, was well up the Amazon and not a location for which they had a deluge of applicants. He felt reasonably certain that no one would come quite so far to find him.
For five years he prospered as something like the sewing-machine god, building a fair amount of capital, particularly for Manaos, which was not, he admitted realistically, a financial hotbed.
Just as he had begun to grow restless in the land of the python and the poison dart, the Portuguese National Assembly declared their intention to join England and France in the war against Germany. Quite naturally he assumed that Brazil, since it was still essentially a Portuguese nation although official colonial status had been renounced almost a century before, might also leap into the war against his homeland. His name at the time wasn’t Hennies, but he was known to be a German, his second identity having been based on his first—that is, whoever the hell he claimed to be, he was a German in a country he believed to be on the verge of war with Germany. Time to fly.
As it happened, Brazil held off until 1917, but by then Hennies was long gone. He had scouted out an obliging crook in Rio de Janeiro who fitted him out with a lovely Swiss passport and a third persona—that of Adolf Hennies, an international trader of thirty-three with a Swiss father and a Brazilian mother. In November 1914 he sailed on the ancient S. S. Principessa Mafalda, made certain he didn’t give his nationality away by uttering even a word of German, and by January he’d made a useful contact in Berlin, secured a position as a member of the wartime German Purchasing Commission and was on his way to his new duties in Amsterdam.
While his position was an official one, Hennies dealt primarily in smuggling through Switzerland items prohibited by the Dutch and Danish governments for export to Germany. At the same time he ingratiated himself with Berlin by operating as an agent for the German Secret Service. Holland was an ideal place to be a spy, since secret agents from all combatant governments chummed about a good deal, lived very nicely on their expense vouchers and fed one another enough information to keep the entire international boondoggle going.
Hennies was wonderfully at home. His close-cropped black hair was already touched with gray, his eyes had a piercing, almost Latin quality, he dressed the part of an impeccable businessman. Due to the fact that he had been born with his right leg shorter than the left, he wore a prosthetic corrective shoe with a built-up sole and walked with a slight limp. At his best he was both extremely dignified and quite sinister. He was frequently at his best in those days, a man of the world, a realist.
By 1917 his realistic approach to life’s vagaries told him that Germany was bound to come out of the Great War the biggest loser. He wisely went to a Dutch businessman with whom he had had certain slightly irregular, highly profitable dealings and arranged to have his Deutsche marks converted into Dutch gulden—no less than one hundred thousand dollars’ worth.
In the shambles of postwar Europe, while Alves was dealing in phony jute bags and rusty German tractors, Herr Hennies was putting the remains of his Berlin connections into effect, getting himself appointed Abwicklungskommissar for East Prussia. It was an enviable post for an enterprising man; he was in charge of German reparations and arms deliveries to Poland, as provided in the Treaty of Versailles. What made the position so attractive was the fact that Poland was in the midst of struggling with Lithuania over the city of Vilna, with the Czechs over Teschen and with the Soviets in general. Hungry for weaponry, Poland had become, in the words of one sagacious observer, “the great arms sink of Europe.”
Hennies’ greed coincided wonderfully with that of the Poles. He pocketed bribes for hastening shipments of machine guns and grenades, for enlarging shipments and hiding the changes in the tide of paperwork; he arranged private deals with certain privately bankrolled Polish factions; he accepted trainloads of Polish-bound American Quaker relief foodstuffs in exchange for what he knew to be slightly substandard hand grenades. When the grenades turned out to lack the requisite fuses the Polish generals who had arranged the deal were trotted out and shot. Hennies made a profit of more than fifty thousand dollars when he sold the Quakers’ food to starving Germans on the black market.
Secure in private business, he made trips abroad, including the journey to Angola, where he also did a couple of small jobs for the German Secret Service, which, undaunted, still had designs on the Portuguese colony. Back in Berlin in 1923, he found a way to beat the disastrous inflation that would find the meaningless paper replaced by new gold-backed Rentenmarks. While it would literally take a basketful of the paper marks to get a new gold one, the German Railway’s own gold notes already in circulation would be convertible on a one-to-one basis. Hennies’ railway pals cut him in on a deal worth more than a million dollars, a deal to exchange uncirculated, and therefore illegal in terms of their convertibility, Railway notes. He was given a diplomatic passport, always useful, and sent to London, where he converted the uncirculated notes into Swiss francs and pounds, a simple operation that netted him another hundred thousand. A sixth sense told him not to try it again a month later. In the event, the substitute courier was caught and the entire gang of more or less highly placed officials went to jail, where the ringleader, Postmaster General Dr. Anton Hofle, killed himself. Hennies was merely questioned and released, leaving only a small blot on his copy book.
Which brought Alves up to date. Hennies was perfect for Alves Reis’s plan. …
As he began to go through the second dossier, he stretched, arched his stiff back, took off his glasses, rubbed his bloodshot eyes. His neck ached with accumulated tension, worry that the next day’s meeting might not go well. He wondered at the coincidences that were leaping at him from the collected information. Greta Nordlund, for example. Out of the blue, she turns up not only as José’s “true love” but as the main source of information about Adolf Hennies, one of her previous conquests. She was an actress, of course, and that explained her deplorable lack of constancy. But was she a good omen for his scheme? Would there be trouble between José and Hennies? He was not overjoyed when José told him happily that Greta was coming to Biarritz from Paris to sneak a few days’ holiday with him. … Alves sighed, wishing he had a dossier on her.
Then there was the matter of the Dutchman José had come up with. Antonio Bandeira vouched for him in glowing terms, and José described him as just the man for any serious financial dealings, sober and experienced and extremely ambitious. While those were exactly the qualities required, Alves had his doubts. A prostitute in Paris—a friend of José’s—had been one of the major contributors to Karel Marang’s dossier, having quite recently given Marang aid and comfort following a particularly severe reversal. The man confided in a Parisian tart! Alves had been mortified at such behavior. José’s reassurances that the woman was an old friend of both men and the benchmark of discretion had only partially eased Alves’ doubts. …
Topping it all was the fact that Marang and Hennies were old business associates! Too many coincidences. It gave him an uneasy stomach. Either they would all work well together or there was too much inbreeding for anyone’s good health. … But which was it going to be? Replacing his spectacles, he returned to the second dossier.
While Adolf Hennies was privately congratulating himself that he hadn’t been caught with his hand in the national till on the Railway note matter and was at the same time restlessly casting about for new opportunities, his old Dutch colleague, Karel Marang, who had helped him change his marks into gulden, was concerned with a particularly intimate matter. Like a social disease, it could not be discussed with anyone, not even so liberal-minded a friend as José Bandeira, the younger brother of the Portuguese Minister to the Netherlands and a dashing fellow whom Marang knew to have been in and out of a scrape or two in his time. On the other hand, had he somehow contracted a social disease, José would have been the first person to whom Marang would have turned.
But the sober Dutchman, a reasonably good-looking man with a tidy little mustache and a tendency toward mousiness as well as a command of proper, academic French, had not come to Paris to sate himself at the Sphinx and other such bagnias de luxe, normally the haunts of Bandeira. He was newly arrived from The Hague in search of much headier stuff. Still, it was passion that brought him here, a passion that served as one of the obsessive engines of his life. He was calling on a baron. …
Marang’s greatest attribute was an advanced degree in practical survival and manipulation. So far as education went, he had but little and that ill-taught. His family background was the sort he chose not to acknowledge, but Antonio had dug it out. Born in 1884 in a tiny suburb of Amsterdam called Dordrecht, he was the son of a strong-arm debt collector. Forever trying to divorce himself from the crumminess of his birthright, he was quick to learn how to make money. Among other lessons he learned was one that La Rochefoucauld put into admirable words—“To establish oneself in the world, one does all one can to seem established there already.” It was a postulate that appealed to Alves’ own sense of striving.
By 1914 he had put aside enough money to become a war profiteer, selling such items as Dutch chocolate, ham, wheat and oils to the Germans, who were, in his view, sure to win the war. Since Holland was neutral and since the Netherlands Overseas Trust made sure that businessmen sent nothing to the Germans that was on the Allies’ prohibited list, Marang came face to face with the world of bribery, crooked customs officials and German agents. He found that he was at home in such improvisational interactions. And his foremost contact with the German Purchasing Commission was, of course, that helpful Swiss with the Brazilian mother, Adolf Hennies, who did well out of their business relationship, receiving a 10 percent rake-off on the gross value of all Marang’s shipments to Germany.
But in 1917 the 50 percent profits he’d grown accustomed to were reduced to a maximum of 5 percent by the Netherlands Export Company, which regulated all imports and exports. Until the United States entered the war Marang had been doing a huge business in shipping American coal to Holland and then on to Germany, a scheme that came to grief with the arrival of the American Expeditionary Force and the new profit laws.
By 1920 he was prospering again, supplying coffee to Persia and the Middle East and African vegetable oils to Germany. By 1922 he bought out his partner, used the first floor of his four-story home in The Hague for offices and kept the top three floors as living quarters for his family—a wife and two sons—and several servants.
By 1924, when Alves was verging on his trip to the Oporto jail, the wheel had turned again: Marang had come upon hard times once more. The price of coffee had fallen sharply. He was substantially overextended. The day before he went to Paris, where José had reached him, his bookkeeper told him that, in baldest terms, he was more than a hundred thousand dollars in the hole and the banks holding his notes were growing restless.
His mission was not entirely unrelated to his economic future. For one thing it made him feel good just to stand outside the elegant apartment of Baron Rudolf August Louis Lehman, Minister Plenipotentiary of Liberia to the Third French Republic on the Bois de Boulogne, the most fashionable address in Paris, with a pair of Rothschild mansions nearby.
On the face of it, Marang’s errand was simple: he wanted his Liberian diplomatic passport, ten years out of date, renewed. But beneath that simple application lay a tangled, desperate mass of motivations that struck directly to the heart of the man’s life. Status, titles, money: an inseparable triumvirate composing all that made his life worth living. In the present instance, having little money, he counted on status—whether in the form of a diplomatic passport or a title or both—to confer that appearance of being well off, which could then lead to the fact itself.
Marang had come by the diplomatic passport in 1914, having paid Count Matzenauer de Matzenau, a Serbian who happened at the time to be Liberian Minister to Imperial Russia, eleven hundred dollars for it. Even then its value was much in doubt, since the count himself had been fired by the Liberian government the year before for abuses of his diplomatic privileges. The mere fact that a Serbian count held a Liberian diplomatic post reflected the confusing nature of international relations carried out in the period by marginally significant and almost always impoverished nations. Liberia, for example, qualified on both these counts. Even by 1923 Liberia’s entire annual budget, derived solely from customs duties, totaled three hundred and eighty thousand dollars.
But human nature being what it was, there were always those who would gladly pay their own expenses as a Liberian diplomat in, say, Paris, in return for membership in the international community. The privileges were mainly social, but the quick thinker could also turn them into ready cash. Smuggling was a common activity, and so was discreet spying, as was the selling of various nonexistent diplomatic posts to whoever might pay for them—and thereby receive such privileges, on a small scale of course, for himself.
Marang had bought such a nonexistent position, which carried with it the legally useless document naming him representative to a government that Liberia did not even recognize—the Soviet Union. Still, the passport was occasionally useful, and, in any case, the count was supposed to carry out another chore included in the price—that is, he had guaranteed Marang that he would get Marang’s name into the Almanach de Gotha, the standard and acknowledged listing of nobility.
It was all terribly complicated. In 1915 Marang had gone so far as to buy the title of the Manor of d’Ysselveere-les-Krimpen, which entitled him to call himself Karel Marang van Ysselveere if he thought it would do him any good. Which he not infrequently did; his Dutch passport, however, was still made out to plain old Karel Marang. The Liberian diplomatic passport was to be renewed with the noble van Ysselveere appended, exactly as it was written on his other somewhat unusual diplomatic documents, none of which included a passport—he was, oddly, the Consul General of the Central American republic of San Salvador and Consul General of Persia to The Hague.
