Spook's Gold (22 page)

Graf laughed and replied scornfully, “But you wear the uniform, you serve the Reich and the Fuhrer; you, more than any of us in the revered and feared SS. Do you really believe that when we are beaten and being judged by a hostile and vengeful world, that you will be free to go back to your old life because you were just a ‘humble policeman’ doing your duty?”

Again Marner shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “I really don’t know how any of this will play out and I don’t influence the outcome, so I will ride with it and take the consequences.”  He now turned to look at Graf, watching the emotions alternating on his face, trying to discern where the man was going with this line of conversation. He decided to try a barb. “Anyway, by the time that it all takes place it won’t matter to you, will it?”

“Ha. Yes, you really are the efficient policeman aren’t you?  Do your duty today, one foot in front of the other, one task at a time and assume that someone will give you your next one tomorrow to plod your way through.”

But Marner would not be goaded. He resumed his scrutiny of the streaky finger marks on the glass in the door, letting his line play out, letting his quarry circle, knowing that he just had to remain calm. Graf threw up his hands causing his chains to clank and rattle and then turned away from Marner in resignation to stare out of the window.

After a further ten minutes of silence, Graf turned and asked for some water. Marner passed him the bottle and then had a moment of panic, realising that Graf could try to use the heavy glass bottle as a weapon, but he simply took a long swallow and passed it back.

“Are you sure that she speaks no German?”

Marner nodded his head, knew that he had his prey well and truly on the hook. He took a moment to note that Lemele was playing it very cool, pretending to doze, showing no awareness that she was listening and understanding.

Turning fully in his seat to address Marner, Graf dropped his voice and leaned in. “Look man, it is time to take care of yourself. When our enemies march into the Fatherland soon and carve it up, when the few of us left alive have been labelled as criminals, will your beloved superiors look out for you then?  Will anybody care that you were just an obedient and faithful servant of the state?  No!”

It was easy for Marner to don a look of interest, since he really was intrigued to discover what Graf was going to suggest. “So what do you think we should be doing then?”

“There are countries in the world where we will be welcome.” Graf beamed at him, as if he had revealed something incredibly profound.

Marner just looked blankly at him. “But how do you plan to get to this Nirvana, wherever it might be?  And what exactly will make us so ‘welcome’; us, the future pariahs of the civilised world, as you so crudely paint us?”

“What makes a man welcome anywhere? Money.”

“Let me guess! You have been stashing away your sailor’s pay and that’s going to make you a rich man in this new land?” chuckled Marner.

“Don’t play the fool with me. You know what this is all about. The gold.”

Marner nodded. “I have to admit that I am intrigued to know exactly how you are going to transport all of this loot from wherever you have hidden it to wherever you are going with it.”

“Where it is and how we are all getting there, that is the secret. I can cut you in on the deal. No problem about that. But I need you to get me out of this....”  Graf raised his wrists and shook the chains gently, not wanting to wake Lemele, “...this mess.”

Marner looked away at the soldiers in the corridor joking and sharing cigarettes, at Lemele who might or might not be pretending to sleep. He looked back past Graf and over his shoulder out of the window, as if weighing something. “If I did, what’s in it for me?”

“Passage to the promised land and a full cut of the booty.”

“Tell me more. Convince me that this isn’t some crock of bullshit.”

Graf looked at him hard. “Convince me that you really are interested.”

“Well, for the moment, we will just have to proceed with each other on trust, won’t we?”

When Graf continued to stare, wary and unconvinced, Marner reached into the inside pocket of his tunic and drew out a set of keys that he jingled on their ring. The keys to Graf’s shackles. “After all, I do hold the ace card.”

Graf pursed his lips and looked down. Whilst he clearly did not trust Marner, he really was not in any position to call the shots. Graf sighed, decision reached. “The missing gold was never offloaded from the subs. What we offloaded were the fakes. The real items remained aboard and still remain aboard the U-180 and U-195. So the transport is already arranged.”

Gaping open-mouthed in spite of himself, Marner had to repeat it to fully believe. “You mean it is still on them?  That they are sailing around with all the gold hidden by the crew?  What if they were sunk, or....”

“This is war! We don’t have complete control of all of the elements and we are obliged to take risks.”

“I don’t believe you! How on earth would you get two entire u-boat crews in on a scam like that and keep it under wraps?”

Motioning for Marner to reduce the volume of his voice, Graf smiled. “Not all of them. Just a few of us, on both the 180 and the 195. The boxes are hidden right under the crews’ noses; well, in fact it would be more correct to say under their feet, because they are hidden in the bilges.”  He went on to describe how the original trip in 1943 had been before the two submarines were fully converted for carrying heavy cargos. It had necessitated the careful distribution of the gold around the boat to ensure that it was correctly balanced and stable. They had decided to put the boxes in the bilges around the U-180, thus also keeping the weight low down.

“Boxes?  The gold is in boxes?”

“Yes. And not just any old boxes. Very nice carved hardwood, sealed with official wax stamps. At the beginning, a couple of us hit on the idea of taking one of the bars, but it would have been obvious that the box had been opened. Instead, when we got back to Bordeaux, we left one of the boxes hidden, thinking that it wouldn’t be missed, but no luck there; the Gestapo unit charged with the receipt of the load spotted the shortfall straight away. Quite a fuss too, until we did a search of the boat and the missing item was ‘discovered’. Fortunately your goons who came aboard to help with the search accepted that it was entirely feasible to lose one down there under the bilge plates.”

“But if that was how the gold was packaged, I still don’t understand how you managed it.”

“You are quite right, it was a challenge and it involved the need for some organisation and outside help. We needed craftsmen capable of making similar boxes and also forging the seals. One of our contacts came up with some expert help.”

“Carlingue?” interjected Marner.

“Precisely! A very talented bunch with access to just about anything and, in particular, any criminal skill or service that we needed. Especially forging.”

Also not forgetting murder, thought Marner, but he let Graf continue.

“So the U-180 went back to sea a few weeks later with several fake boxes holding painted bars of iron or lead; because we wanted to be sure that any casual opening of one of the boxes to verify the contents would pass. After that, each subsequent time that the boats docked they offloaded a number of the fake ones, and a number of the real ones remained aboard.”

“Both submarines?”

“Yes. That 1943 trip was my last. I was transferred to Paris, promoted and put in charge of logistics. With the conversion of the two subs into full-time cargo operation, they needed someone who knew them, especially their operational capabilities. To enable us to skim off both of them I simply greased the palm, sweetened by some floozies provided by our Carlingue chums in Paris, of the rostering officer for the fleet. He arranged for the exchange of some of our key personnel between the two subs, meaning that we had our human resources working on both. From then on everything went like clockwork.”

“Until Schull.”

Graf frowned. “Yes. But I am not stupid. We knew that it couldn’t last forever; the fakes would eventually be discovered, because eventually someone wants to use the gold for something.”

Graf fell silent, looking out of the window. He checked once again that Lemele was not paying them any attention. Here comes the big one, thought Marner.

“So now we are ready to cut and run. With or without the discovery of the deception, things are moving to a climax in Europe. Any competent gambler knows when it is time to cash in and take the profit that they have made. Don’t be greedy.”

“So...” prompted Marner when Graf fell silent.

“So we have a unique opportunity coming up. We always wondered whether we would only get away with what is held on one or other of the subs. Leaving aside loss in action, if we were discovered or the war situation imploded and we had to bolt and run, the probability of being able to gather all of us together on one or both boats with all of the takings?  That was unlikely. But now we have that opportunity.”

Graf explained that he had managed to organise a large and unique convoy, with both of the spook submarines plus at least one other, departing for the Far East at the same time. The key element lay in the fact that both submarines would be together in Bordeaux for at least a week, preparing and provisioning for the big trip. “With a couple of weeks of repairs and loading in the Bordeaux dock and all of the chaos that surrounds it, we will have the perfect moment to transfer the gold from the U-195 onto the U-180. We picked the U-180 because it already has the bulk of the bullion on board.”

And with that he sat back and beamed in smug self-congratulation at his own ingenuity. This contentedness began to turn sour as Marner continued to stare blank-faced at him. Mistaking this for reticence or refusal of Marner to agree, he exhorted, “Think about it! Not only am I offering you a way out of the lunacy that is going to tear up Europe in the next few weeks and months, but a new life on a new continent as a rich and free man.”

This was not what was confusing Marner. “I know that the subs are modified to run with minimum crews, but what I don’t understand is how you expect to steal the U-180. I have seen the security around the dockyard. Do you really think that you are going to take it, drive it through the lock gates and up the estuary without anyone noticing or challenging you?”

Graf shook his head in amazement at Marner’s stupidity. “No. Of course we cannot just waltz it out of Bordeaux. We sail with the U-180 on the mission as planned. The transfers for the three crew members in our team from the 190 to the 180 are already signed by our pliable friend. When the boats sortie from Bordeaux the 180 will simply submerge and head off in an entirely different direction, unseen and undetected. Auf wiedersehn, au revoir and over and out.”  Graf spread his hands out palm-up as best he could with the restraints: simple.

Now it was Marner’s turn to shake his head in amazement at what he considered to be Graf’s stupidity. “But, but.... What about the rest of the crew, the thirty or so that
aren’t
in on the plan?”

“We have weapons on board.”

Marner’s eyes widened in alarm to Graf’s amusement, “Relax. We are not planning to do anything nasty. We will simply take control of the boat, lock the crew up in one of the compartments and then deposit them somewhere en route.”

“Mutiny?”

Graf guffawed with laughter. “If you want to be so melodramatic, yes.”

“You seem fairly assured that with what, seven or eight of you is it? – that this will go down smoothly and that you can take over an entire submarine. I am struggling to imagine that the Captain and others will just give up the boat without a fight.”

“If we do it carefully and at the right time, there should be no problem. I cannot say for certain that there will not be any unpleasant or unfortunate events. We hope that the crew will simply surrender and accept that for them the war is over. After all, we are only going to drop them off unharmed in some out of the way location. They are not in any danger, unless they resist.”

“And if they resist?”

Graf shook his head. “To repeat myself - this is war. I and others and you – yes you! – have been dumped in an unacceptable situation by the lunatics that led us into it. Desperate situations require desperate measures. I think that we have to accept that there may be some casualties or fall out from what we are planning.”

“Yes. I have noticed that you seem unconcerned with casualties and ‘fallout’.”

Graf sensed the accusation and tensed, hostility springing back into eyes. “You mean Schull.”

Marner saw how quickly he switched between the false, oily, ingratiating attempt at persuasion and charm and then back to his true nature. “Not forgetting the poor sap that you set up to look like Schull’s killer.”

“Yes, again you are right,” Graf sighed. “That was unfortunate. We needed at least a few more weeks to get all of the boats into Bordeaux, back from their current missions. And Schull was sniffing around and poking very hard. We needed to get rid of him, but still buy ourselves a few more weeks to get things sorted. If we had just killed Schull outright, then we would have alerted whoever sent him and ended up with ten more descending on us. So we staged the shooting to sew confusion; we really wanted to disassociate it from Schull’s mission. At minimum it would keep the focus up there in Paris and away from the boats.”

“Who is ‘We’?”

“Our Paris-based
collaborateurs
,” A thinly-disguised reference to the Carlingue. But Graf was not going to give up the names as well.

“So you murdered two people just to buy a couple of weeks of extra time for your grand escape plan?”

Once more Graf caught the note of incredulity bordering on accusatory disgust, this time responding with his own hostility, “Yes, you’ve got the picture. Well then. Are you with me or not?” he demanded, raising his shackled hands as an invitation to unlock them and start things in motion.

When Marner got up, Graf truly believed for a moment that he had succeeded, that Marner would take the few steps, produce the key and release him. Instead Marner simply stood looking down. “The only place that I will join you is in hell. But you will be arriving there much sooner than me.”  He then turned and left the carriage, going to stand outside in the corridor to take a breath of fresh air, to calm his nerves before he snapped and beat Graf to death himself. He heard the word ‘Fool!’ hissed at his departing back, kept the door open and Graf visible in the corner of his eye as he leaned against the glass. He was now instantly and incredibly weary, needing to reach Paris and be done with this.