The Elegant Lie

…

‘He has what?’ Wilby was sitting in a meat locker on the frozen carcass of a pig. More frozen pigs hung all around him, split in two and gaffed upon iron hooks whose metal was tinselled with frost.

The night before, Carter had left a message at the dead drop behind the train station. Choosing from the pre-arranged locations, he had selected the butcher shop on Jennerstrasse, whose owner was paid a regular wage to look the other way whenever strangers appeared out of nowhere in his freezer.

Outside the butcher shop, the cobblestoned street glistened red with blood and the piercing metallic reek of beef and pig carcasses hung over the place like a fog. The meat markets of Jennerstrasse catered to the wholesale trade. It was a crowded, chaotic place, echoing with the guttural sounds of men and women speaking Rhineland dialect, and punctuated with the soft thuds of cleavers hacking through bone. All this, and the fact that it was still early in the morning, the busiest time at the market, made the butcher shop an ideal place to meet.

They had made their way to the meat locker at the back of the shop and there, his breath condensing in that upside down forest of gore, Carter began to tell Wilby about the aeroplane he had seen the day before.

He had only been speaking for a few seconds before Wilby interruped. ‘What kind of plane?’ he demanded.

‘A Canadian C-54,’ said Carter, and he went on to explain how it had been stolen from the Bulltofta airfield in Sweden.

‘Please don’t tell me Dasch has started flying contraband around the country.’

‘Actually,’ said Carter, ‘he’s flying it out of the country.’

Wilby put his face in his hands. ‘Oh my God,’ he muttered.

‘Last night it took off with a cargo of whisky. I’m not sure exactly where it was going, but Dasch told me the buyers are Russian.’

Wilby rose to his feet and began to pace about between the carcasses, which twisted on their iron hooks as if some life was still left in them. ‘Where the hell did he get his hands on all that whisky?’

‘It wasn’t his,’ explained Carter. ‘He’s transporting it for a man named Garlinsky.’

‘And who’s he?’

‘I don’t know. He wasn’t there. I can tell you that Dasch seems very anxious not to get on the wrong side of him.’

‘What did I tell you about Dasch?’ Wilby threw up his hands. ‘The man’s a genius. Hell, I’d apply for a job with his company if all this was even half legal.’

‘You know,’ Carter said uneasily, ‘I’m not sure this guy is everything you say he is.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He has a lot of big ideas, for sure, but I’m not seeing signs of any huge operation. He has a few people working for him. His daughter does the books and this man Ritter keeps him safe. But I’ve heard no mention of any diplomats or law enforcement under Dasch’s control and, apart from what they loaded on the plane, which wasn’t even his, I haven’t seen a single piece of contraband since I set foot on his compound.’

‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It has to be. Just look at what he has accomplished. How many black marketeers can you point to who have their own damned air force?’

‘It’s just one plane,’ said Carter.

‘You’re missing the point, son. He has an aeroplane!’ He slumped back down on his dead pig bench. ‘As much as I want to see this guy rot in a prison cell for the rest of his life, I can’t deny I am impressed. But this is also troubling, Carter, deeply troubling. I don’t mind telling you that. So far, it’s just contraband he has been moving, but what if he turns his hand to something else? Something that could cause us even more problems?’

‘I’m afraid he already has,’ said Carter, ‘although he doesn’t even know it.’ As Carter spoke, he removed from his pocket the money he had retrieved from the crate.

Slowly, as if convinced his eyes were playing tricks on him, Wilby reached out and took the stack of roubles from Carter’s hand. The blood drained out of his face. He seemed completely overwhelmed.

‘Are you going to be all right?’ asked Carter. It worried him to see Wilby so rattled by this news.

But the question snapped him out of it. ‘Of course I am!’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’ He shook the wad of bills at Carter. ‘And what do you mean Dasch doesn’t know about this?’

‘I only found it because one of the whisky crates broke,’ said Carter. ‘Garlinsky didn’t tell Dasch about the money.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘Positive. When the crate broke, all he cared about was the whisky. What I don’t understand,’ said Carter, ‘is why Garlinsky would take the risk of hiding all that cash in something that was already illegal.’

‘That’s easy,’ said Wilby. ‘It’s because whisky is the kind of thing Dasch would be expecting. Since he deals in black market goods, it makes perfect sense that someone might approach him for help in transporting stolen or illegal merchandise out of the country. How else would they convince him to get involved? Whoever Garlinsky is, and whoever he’s working for, they’re obviously in a hurry to get that money to its destination, or else they’d never take such a risk.’ Wilby peeled one bill from the stack, held it up to his ear and crumpled it between his fingers. Then he scratched at it and studied the rim of his fingernail.

‘You think it might be fake?’ asked Carter.

‘I have no idea,’ replied Wilby, ‘but we’re going to someone who does.’

‘Now?’

‘Immediately! This kind of thing can’t wait. This is big, Carter. This is really big. It’s one thing to be moving food around. A man can get rich doing that. But money! And Russian money! This is exactly what I was afraid might happen.’

‘But if it’s counterfeit—’ Carter began.

Wilby didn’t let him finish. ‘That’s what we’re going to find out.’ Once more, he climbed to his feet. ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Get up!’

Wilby’s confusion was gone, replaced by a nervous, almost frantic energy that worried Carter even more.

‘Wait two minutes,’ ordered Wilby, ‘then follow me out. Make sure you keep twenty paces back.’ And then he was gone.

For a few seconds after Wilby had departed, Carter stood alone in the meat locker. He felt like one of those bell-helmeted deep-sea divers plodding around with lead-weighted shoes on the ocean floor, depending on a single hose connecting him to his air supply up on the surface. The only thing that stood between Carter, the agent with an invented criminal past, and Carter the actual ex-convict, now working for one of the biggest black marketeers in the country, was a man who had just appeared to be on the verge of losing control.

Carter stepped out of the freezer and the warm, early summer air wrapped itself around him like damp towels. He emerged from the butcher shop just as Wilby was turning the corner from Jennerstrasse onto the main road, leaving a trail of bloody footprints for Carter to follow.

Wilby’s path meandered over into the Nippes district; a warren of little streets and alleyways in which, if he had not kept his eyes on Wilby, Carter would soon have become lost.

Carter tried to memorise the names of the streets◦– Cranach, Steinberger, Wilhelm◦– but he soon gave up since Wilby was not moving in a direct line, as if he feared that he was being followed by somebody other than Carter.

They arrived, eventually, at a small antique bookshop on Erzbergerplatz. It was wedged between two closed storefronts, their windows whitewashed blind and doorways clogged with dead leaves and scraps of old newspaper. Above the dusty window of the bookshop, painted in dull red letters outlined in gold, was a single word◦– Thesinger. Behind the window, placed on fragile-looking stands, were even more fragile-looking volumes whose gilded Sütterlin script was indecipherable to Carter. Between the cloth-wrapped bindings, their once-bright colours rubbed away to the white canvas threads beneath, their crumbled pages looked ready to disintegrate even at the slightest touch. Carter found himself marvelling at the fact that something so delicate could have survived the storm of war when everything else around here, even the mighty cathedral that might once have protected these books, looked as if it had been picked up by a giant and shaken apart before being dropped to the ground in a heap.

Ahead of them, just entering the shop, was a thin man with a tattered-looking suitcase and a brown trench coat which sagged so far off his shoulders that he had been forced to roll up the sleeves.

As Carter and Wilby walked into Thesinger’s bookshop, a little bell tied to the doorframe jangled to announce their arrival. They passed by the man with the suitcase, who was now sitting in a tired but comfortable-looking chair in front of a little round table, on which rested an ashtray crammed with the charred twigs of burned-out matches. Two other men, almost as gaunt and dishevelled as their companion, sat around the table, lounging in mismatched furniture. The tattered man was in the process of rolling himself a cigarette with a shred of newspaper. Open on his knee was a battered little tin, from which the man plucked shreds of tobacco mixed with what appeared to be strands of dried corn silk.

The others at the table watched him patiently, their eyes softened with pity. Their friend had obviously fallen on hard times, and Carter wondered if that suitcase contained books he had come to sell to Thesinger, or whether it was everything he owned.

Wilby was talking to a short, heavyset man with thin, curly white hair resting on his head like a cloud. He wore a wool cardigan with leather patches running from the cuff all the way to the elbow and a pipe stem sticking from one of the pockets.

‘This is Mr Thesinger,’ said Wilby. He made no attempt to introduce Carter and the man with the white hair didn’t ask about his name.

‘I hear you have brought me a treasure,’ said Thesinger.

‘It might be,’ replied Carter, ‘and it might not.’

‘We shall see.’ Thesinger motioned for them to follow him into a back room, where books were stacked waist deep in every corner. In the centre of this crowded space stood a drafting table. Bolted to one end was a long-stemmed lamp which stooped over the table like a heron. On the table itself lay a large magnifying glass, of the kind Carter’s father had used for tying fishing flies.

Wilby removed one of the Russian notes from his pocket and laid it on the table. ‘What do you think of that?’ he asked.

Other than a slight narrowing of his eyes, Thesinger betrayed no emotion. He turned on the lamp. Then he fished a pair of glasses from one pocket of his cardigan and put them on. He manoeuvred the magnifying glass until the bill seemed to rise up into the air, a jumbled mass of colour and words. For a long time, Thesinger hunched over the table staring at the bill, his breath blooming and fading and blooming again on the lens.

The two spectators remained almost motionless, as if afraid to break the spell under which the old man appeared to have fallen.

At last Thesinger straightened his back, removed his glasses and, with a gesture of fatigue, pinched his thumb and index finger into the corners of his eyes. ‘It’s counterfeit,’ he whispered.

Wilby and Carter breathed out simultaneously.

‘But it is a very good one,’ added Thesinger. ‘In fact, it is the best I’ve ever seen, and Soviet currency is notoriously difficult to fake.’

‘Why is that?’ asked Carter.

‘In the engraving of the plates from which the currency is printed,’ explained Thesinger, ‘they use a laborious process called “micro-intaglio”. The creation of the platens◦– the copper plates on which the design of the note is engraved◦– can take months and is extremely time-consuming. In micro-intaglio, ridges are made in the plate which are then filled with ink and pressed into the paper, rather than just resting upon the surface. The resulting grooves in the note are too slight to be detected by the human hand, but they give an overall appearance that is genuinely three-dimensional, even if the person looking at the bill can’t quite understand what gives it the look of authenticity. Some people mistake it for metallic compounds in the inks that give it a particular lustre, but in fact it is caused by the interplay of light upon the minutely recessed grooves in which the inks themselves are embedded. Another trick they use is borrowed from the makers of Persian carpets.’

‘Carpets?’ asked Wilby.

‘The Persians would always work a deliberate flaw into their design, in the belief that only God could achieve perfection. In a similar way, the plate engravers for Russian bank notes work in very slight faults: a minuscule break in a single line amongst hundreds of other lines which are cross-hatched together for the purpose of shading a number or a person’s face◦– a technique engravers call “guilloche”. A counterfeiter mistakes these details for printing errors and corrects them but, in doing so, creates an actual flaw in the design. The composition of the Russian paper is also highly unusual. They use rayon fibre mixed in with the cotton, which means that if you crumple one of the bills’◦– he picked up the twenty-five-rouble note and, holding it by his ear, folded it into his fist◦– ‘it has a characteristically softer sound than if you crumple an American dollar or a British pound.’

‘I wonder why they bother with all that,’ remarked Wilby, ‘seeing how little it can buy. The moneychangers in the west won’t even take it in exchange!’

‘Have you ever thought,’ asked Thesinger, ‘that this might be the way the Russians want it? By keeping the value of their currency so low, they discourage all those capitalists, whom they despise, from meddling in their economy. And as for the complexity of their printing methods, it is an acknowledgement of how much damage could be done if they lost control of their monetary system◦– a lesson the British very nearly learned the hard way during the war, when the Germans came up with a plan to flood Britain with counterfeit five-pound notes. If the plan had worked, it would have caused total chaos.’

‘Why didn’t it work?’ asked Carter. ‘Were the fakes not good enough?’

‘On the contrary,’ said Thesinger, ‘they were nearly perfect. When German agents travelled to Switzerland with some of the counterfeit money, they approached a bank in Zurich with concerns that the money might be fake.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Wilby. ‘They went to the bank with fake money and told them it was fake?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Thesinger. ‘What they did was actually very clever. They wanted the money to be examined by experts, to see if it would pass the test of authenticity, but the only way they could do that was to approach the bank as if they had their doubts.’

‘And what happened?’ asked Carter.

‘After examining the currency themselves, the Swiss bank then forwarded it to representatives of the Bank of England, who assured them that it was authentic. This was how the Germans knew that it had passed the ultimate test◦– to be approved by the very people whose job it was to safeguard the British monetary system.’

‘Then why didn’t they go ahead with it?’ asked Wilby.

‘In the end,’ replied Thesinger, ‘they were unable to distribute the money in a way that would have allowed the fake currency to mingle effectively with the real currency. The only plan they had was to throw it out of aeroplanes and let it rain down over the English countryside, in the hope that people would immediately gather it up and start spending it. The trouble with that plan was that the fraud would have become known immediately, and it relied on the dishonesty of anyone trying to spend it. Whatever damage it might have done would have been extremely short-lived. The only way it could have worked was to let the money trickle in slowly. The art of the counterfeiter is not simply in persuading someone to exchange something that is real for something that is not. It is, in fact, in making them believe in a lie, and the more elegantly that lie is told, the more likely it is that those who are being lied to, even when they realise it is a lie, will cling to it regardless, because they have invested themselves in the idea that it is the truth. It is not just their wealth that is at stake. It took the average British worker almost a month to earn five pounds. Trust in the authenticity of that money also represents their peace of mind. The only thing that prevents even real money from being just a pretty scrap of paper is an agreement between you and your government that this paper’◦– he waved the rouble note in the air◦– ‘is worth what they say it is. And once the counterfeit bills have found their way unnoticed into the arteries of commerce, even the innocent become complicit in the deception. When the fraud is eventually revealed and, more importantly, accepted as a fraud, the result is that nobody knows anymore what or whom to trust. The Russians have virtually perfected the art of misinformation in their dealings with other countries. It can be very effective in undermining the governments of their adversaries, but they use the same tactics just as vigorously on their own people, which leaves them open to the same vulnerabilities they exploit in others.’

‘So is that why somebody is smuggling counterfeit Russian currency back into Russia?’ asked Carter.

‘Maybe,’ answered Thesinger, ‘or it might be much simpler than that. Perhaps these counterfeiters simply want to buy something and don’t have the money to pay for it.’

‘Have you ever heard of a man named Garlinsky?’ asked Wilby.

At that moment, the little chime attached to the front door tinkled softly.

‘It seems I have a customer,’ said Thesinger.

‘But the name?’ Wilby persisted. ‘Do you know it?’

‘Unlike my door,’ replied Thesinger, ‘it does not ring a bell. Excuse me, gentlemen.’

Wilby reached into his pocket, pulled out a roll of American bills and handed it to Thesinger. ‘That’s the real stuff, by the way,’ he said.

‘If it wasn’t,’ answered the old man, folding the money away in his hand, ‘I would have been sure to let you know.’

Leaving the shop, Carter noticed that the three men were gone. The sound they had heard was them departing and not the arrival of a customer, after all. Out in the street it was raining and Carter felt sorry for the ragged man, scurrying along before his suitcase disintegrated in the downpour. But, these days, there were so many like that ragged man, wandering like tramps from town to town in search of food and shelter, that you could not feel sorry for them all and not go crazy in the process.

With the collars of their jackets held against their throats, Carter and Wilby walked south along the wide boulevard of Neusserstrasse, heading for the central station where Wilby would catch the train back to Bonn.

‘Who is Thesinger,’ asked Carter, ‘and how does he know what he knows?’

‘At the end of the war,’ replied Wilby, ‘he turned up in a refugee centre somewhere in Austria. Before that, he had been in a concentration camp. In the debriefing given to all refugees, he said he had been employed before the war as a technician at the Reichsbank. His specialty was what’s called “rotogravure”, which means engraving the copper plates used for printing currency. His story checked out and he was released from the refugee centre. He may be a book dealer now, but that old man used to work at the heart of the German banking system. The reason he knows what to look for in a counterfeit note is that he used to be in charge of making the real stuff.’

‘But why go to him?’ asked Carter. ‘Surely you have people in your organisation who could have told you what you needed to know.’

‘I told you I had concerns,’ replied Wilby.

‘But you answer to people at Bonn station, just like I answer to you. If this is as big as you say it is, surely you can’t keep it hidden from everybody.’

Wilby had been striding along, but suddenly he skidded to a halt. Beads of water dripped from the brim of his hat. ‘I can keep it hidden,’ he said, ‘and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’ He took hold of Carter’s arm and led him under the red and white awning of a bakery to get out of the downpour. The two men faced each other, rain thrashing down so hard around them that they almost had to shout to hear each other. Except for a tramcar sliding past, sparks trailing from where its overhead connector touched the wires, the streets were empty. The windows of the bakery were fogged with condensation. Dimly they could make out the shapes of people moving around inside.

‘Up to now,’ said Wilby, ‘even if Russian intelligence had known about your assignment with Dasch, it wouldn’t have been a major concern for them. They’re much more interested in stealing military secrets, or finding out which ones of theirs we’ve got our hands on. The currency you found has changed all that, since it poses a more serious threat than a whole battery of missiles. Your life, and Dasch’s too, won’t be worth much if they find out. That’s why we went to Thesinger. He’s one of my contacts, not one of the agency’s. I kept him off the books in case something like this ever happened.’

‘So what do I do now?’ asked Carter.

‘Stay close to Dasch,’ said Wilby. ‘The sooner you can get him to confide in you, the quicker you can find out what the hell is going on.’

Carter knew that learning secrets, on its own, was not enough. Every criminal organisation he had ever infiltrated required the perfection of three different lies. The first lie was to merge seamlessly into his surroundings. It was possible to be unknown, at least in the beginning, and yet still not be taken for a stranger. The art was to look and sound and move like he belonged. This lie formed the surface of his shape-shifting world. Beneath this lay the second lie◦– the earning of trust, which demanded only the relentless following of orders; or at least the appearance of it, since a man did not need to be liked in order to be trusted. The third lie was to become a friend, and this was the most difficult of all because it could not be cobbled into existence, like the armour of outward appearance, or engineered, as trust could be. It could only be given away. Once this had been achieved, the fate of his opponents was sealed.