“Tell him I want to see him after we are finished here.”
“Yes, sir,” the secretary replied.
She closed the door behind her, and Raeder turned his head to regard his guests. At the far end of the table sat Konrad Ebelhardt, the seventy-year-old chairman of the board. Next to him was Anna Kohl, the daughter and only living relative of the company’s founder, Volker Kohl, whose portrait stared down from behind Ebelhardt’s back. The others were of little consequence to Raeder. Certainly they were wealthy and powerful, but they took all of their cues from Konrad and Anna.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen. Good afternoon, Anna.”
“How are you, Klaus?” the elderly Anna Kohl asked. “How are Eva and the children?”
“She’s taken them to the lodge in Bavaria for the summer.” There was a twinge of loneliness in his voice. “The boys have been looking forward to it.”
“Will you be joining them?” she persisted.
“I’m planning on a weekend visit in a week or so.” He poured water from a carafe and took a long sip to discourage her from asking any more personal questions.
Raeder folded his hands in front of him, waiting while Anna asked the others about their lives. He wasn’t deluded by her interest. Anna Kohl was as tough as any of the men at the table with the possible exception of Raeder himself. She couldn’t care less about the board members. The spinster had nothing in the world except the company that bore her name.
“I saw the quarterly projections,” Konrad Ebelhardt said to end the idle chatter. He was broadly built with a heavy stomach and a blocky head. He spoke with the deliberation of a Prussian officer. “With our capital reserves as low as they are, I don’t like that we are so dependent on getting the Eurofighter’s avionics contract. If that deal falls through, we will be in a vulnerable position.”
“The announcement for who will be supplying the next-generation computers for the Eurofighter is still a month away, but we have been assured that Kohl’s electronics arm will be building them,” Raeder stated in such a way that Ebelhardt knew not to ask anything further. The board members wouldn’t want to know what their president had done to secure the multibillionmark contract.
“Does that mean we can forget about the French attempt to underbid us?” asked Reinhardt Wurmbach, Kohl AG’s chief legal counsel.
“Their bid is thirty percent higher than ours,” Raeder said. “I’m going to increase our own bid price to cut that gap to ten percent. We’ll still get the contract and squeeze another two hundred million marks from NATO.”
“Do we have Herr Rath and his trip to Paris to thank for this information?”
Raeder allowed a tight smile, knowing it was expected of him. “My special-projects director was instrumental in learning the amount of the French bid.”
“Nothing too illegal, I hope.” The lawyer tried to make light of industrial espionage.
The president of Kohl AG said nothing. In his devotion to the company’s fiscal strength, very little was beyond his scope, and he would not make jokes about his business practices. An uncomfortable silence stretched for ten seconds. Wurmbach stripped off his glasses to avoid Raeder’s stare but he could not hide his bitterness toward the man financial magazines called Uberkind. Superboy.
When Kohl’s previous president announced his retirement eighteen months ago, Reinhardt Wurmbach had worked tirelessly to become his replacement. It was to be his reward for twenty-seven years of loyalty. And yet Anna and Konrad had passed him over in favor of Raeder, an outsider who had amassed a personal fortune buying up marginal companies in the former East Germany and making them profitable in record time. The sting of reporting to this handsome forty-year-old interloper was something Wurmbach had not come to grips with. And yet he couldn’t fault the growth Kohl, one of the fifty largest companies in Europe, had enjoyed in Raeder’s brief tenure.
“You all know why I wanted to see you today,” Raeder said to cut the silence. The six members present represented the core of the board and sixty percent of the company’s stock. Collectively, they were Kohl AG. “You are all aware that we are the largest company in Germany yet to cooperate with the reconciliation commission seeking financial compensation for Holocaust survivors and their families. You also know that pressure to turn over documentation for the company’s wartime activities is mounting.
“By stalling for as long as we have, public opinion, which had been ambivalent, has shifted away from our company and our products. Our secrecy has had the unintended effect of severely damaging our reputation. Despite a fifty-percent increase in advertising and marketing, sales are down in nearly every division and most strongly in our heavy-construction business. No one is willing to use us until we are out from under the shadow of our legacy.”
“Not cooperating with the reconciliation commission was your idea,” Wurmbach said and others nodded. “Our losses are your fault.”
The outburst had no effect on Raeder. “And it is a decision I stand by. I would not expose Kohl to billions of marks’ worth of lawsuits until I was satisfied that I knew everything the company did before and during the war. For that, I needed the time to study the old records.”
“It’s inevitable we will have to pay something,” Wurmbach stated. “Before the war, Kohl was just a small ironworks company with less than a hundred employees. Our expansion was due entirely to military and government contracts from the Nazi regime. We profited from the bloodshed just like Seimens, I.G. Farben, Volkswagen, and all the others.”
“And after the war we were a collection of bombed-out factories and ruined equipment,” Raeder replied evenly. “What profits we gained during the war were effectively nullified. Despite evidence to the contrary, many believe that we are the same company now as we were before the war and must be held accountable. I needed to know the full amount of our culpability and thus our liability. Putting a few hundred million marks into the collective pot is a lot different than facing an endless number of individual lawsuits worth billions.” He looked down the table at Ebelhardt and Anna Kohl. “It is my risk-management skills that attracted you to me in the first place. You knew a day of reckoning was coming and you hired me to protect you.”
Anna didn’t deny it. “The question is, can you?”
“Yes.” Raeder saw Anna slump in relief. “For the past twelve months I’ve determined our strategy for minimizing the amount of money we will have to pay. I’ve estimated that a payout of two hundred million marks won’t interfere with our long-term growth while satisfying the commission that we are cooperating.”
A wave of murmurs and sighs washed across the table.
“I arrived at that number after a lot of exhaustive research,” Raeder cut through the dissenting voices. “It’s the very minimum we can get away with.”
“Have you prepared documents that we can give them that will lead them to this figure?” asked Konrad Ebelhardt.
“Everything’s ready now. I’ve had Gunther Rath and his staff gather one hundred thousand pages of correspondence, shipping orders, and the like. It’s all original material, carefully edited so that the commission will determine that we should be responsible for paying roughly a quarter billion marks in reparations.”
“You just said two hundred million.”
“We’ll negotiate down to that number after they have made their findings public. They would be suspicious if we didn’t.”
“How much of our wartime activity are we keeping from them?” Anna asked.
“Very little, actually. Kohl certainly did profit from the use of slave labor at a few factories, but the practice was not as widespread as in many other companies. If it weren’t for one project in particular, I would have felt comfortable disclosing everything to the commission.” Raeder noticed the quick glance between Konrad and Anna. He could even read her lips as she mouthed a single word. Pandora.