For a moment longer, Carter hesitated. Then he muttered, ‘What the hell,’ and climbed into the passenger seat.
A cigarette smouldered in the ashtray. It was American tobacco, not the perfumy, cigar-like stuff the Germans liked to smoke.
Carter was staring at the cigarette.
The man followed his gaze. ‘Of course!’ he exclaimed, the cigarette wagging between his lips. ‘How rude of me.’ Reaching into his chest pocket, he produced a silver cigarette case, which he opened, revealing a neat row of smokes, like the ivories of a piano keyboard.
Carter took one and the stranger lit it for him with a gold Dunhill lighter.
As the leathery smoke swirled around him, Carter retreated into silence.
Ritter left him in peace.
The car pulled out into the flow of traffic heading east along the Bischofsgarten road towards the Rhine. After only a few minutes, they arrived at the Bleihof club, a famous landmark in post-war Cologne. Only a stone’s throw from where the river swirled past, grey and cold, the Bleihof was a tall, spindly and haunted-looking place, with red and white shuttered windows and a second storey which leaned out over the ground floor, making it seem as if the entire structure might, at any moment, stagger forward like a drunken man and pitch headlong into the river.
The hotel had once been the family home of a man who made his fortune selling bars of lead to barges moving up and down the river. The lead was used as ballast for empty ships and could be sold to other ships when the riverboats picked up their cargos downriver.
By the end of 1945, it had been transformed into the haunt of Allied soldiers, and the sad and beautiful women who kept them company in their long silk dresses and lips smeared red as arterial blood, laughing hollow-eyed at jokes they did not understand. Now that Germany had reclaimed its territory, the days of the Bleihof club were numbered. Each night, the drinking and the dancing took on a frenzied finality, as if the world itself were coming to an end.
Parked out in the street were British staff cars, as well as olive green US Army Packard sedans, Willys jeeps and Harley WLA motorcycles. Only a few of the vehicles were civilian and, unlike the military cars, these ones were all guarded by men like the stranger who had picked Carter up off the street, in their wide-lapel suits and shiny shoes with Mauser pistols tucked into the specially made leather-lined pockets in their trousers.
Ritter pulled up in front of the club and cut the engine. ‘Come, Mr Carter!’ he said. ‘My employer must not be kept waiting.’
Carter emerged from the car, dazed and squinting in the brassy sunlight.
The doorman of the Bleihof, in a long blue coat which came down to his ankles, immediately sized up Carter’s ill-fitting clothes, the hack-job prison haircut and the grey, half-starved complexion. Then he glanced at Ritter, as if to ask whether he really expected such a downtrodden wreck of a man to be allowed inside.
Ritter ignored this, if he even noticed it at all. The two men swept past the front entrance and made their way around to the back of the club to a small red door in between two curtained windows. From inside came the sound of a band playing ‘When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano’.
Ritter knocked on the door and then stepped back. He nodded and smiled at Carter. ‘My employer knows how to throw a party. You wait and see!’
‘Who’s the party for?’ asked Carter.
Ritter laughed. ‘Why, Mr Carter! It’s for you!’
The door opened and a man stuck his head out.
‘Come on!’ shouted Ritter. ‘Let us in!’
The man swung the door wide.
Ritter put one arm on Carter’s shoulder and guided him into the room.
The blare of the music struck Carter as if a ghost had shoved him in the chest. The darkened room was filled with smoke and voices. From the state some people were in, it looked as if the party had been going on all night.
Ritter steered him through the crowd, snatching up a champagne glass from a tray being carried past by a white-jacketed waiter. He drained the glass and handed it to the next man he came to.
Overwhelmed by the crush of bodies and the unfamiliar sound of women laughing, Carter stumbled along behind Ritter, who acted as a kind of battering ram through the maze of people in their way.
The low ceiling creaked and, in those moments when the music paused, he could hear different music playing upstairs, and the shuffling footsteps of people dancing in the room above.
At last, Ritter showed him into a second room, where a long table was crowded with plates of food. ‘I’ll wait for you outside,’ he said to Carter.
At the far end of the room, lounging in a leather wing-backed chair, sat a tall man with thinning hair and a round, boyish face.
On one side of him sat a much younger woman with deep cloudy blue eyes, like those of a newborn baby, which Carter had often seen in Rhineland girls. Her hair was black and very shiny and pulled back in a ponytail, which showed more practicality than any attention to fashion, since most of the women wore their hair steam-curled into waves and held back from their faces with a mass of bobby pins. Neither was she wearing the same scanty, sequined clothing as the women in the outer room. Instead, she had on trousers and a navy blue turtleneck sweater, and her fingertips were stained with ink, as if she had just emerged from writing an exam.
‘Mr Carter!’ exclaimed the boy-faced man, leaping to his feet and vigorously shaking Carter’s hand. ‘It is an honour to meet you. My name is Hanno Dasch, and I am a great admirer of your country.’
‘Including what they did to this city?’ asked the girl with the ink-stained hands.
Dasch shot her a glance. ‘That is in the past,’ he snapped, ‘and the fact is we should never have been enemies in the first place. As far as I’m concerned, everything you see outside we brought upon ourselves.’
‘Why pick me to tell all this?’ asked Carter. ‘I’m not the only American in Cologne.’
‘But none have resumes like yours,’ said Dasch, ‘or better prospects for the future.’
‘From the look on your new friend’s face,’ said the girl, ‘you might want to explain to him why a man in a second-hand suit who, I am guessing, cannot afford to shine his shoes, has suddenly found himself the guest of honour at a party thrown for him by someone he has never set eyes upon until today.’
‘I do have a meal ticket,’ said Carter.
The girl crumpled her lips in a vague, sarcastic smile.
‘May I introduce my daughter, Teresa,’ Dasch said with an exasperated sigh.
His daughter, thought Carter, as that piece of the puzzle fitted neatly into place.
‘The reason I have thrown this party in your honour,’ explained Dasch, resting his hand upon Carter’s shoulder as if they had known each other for years, ‘is that I am not only an admirer of your country, I am also a great admirer of your work, in particular.’
‘My work?’
‘Don’t be modest! Explain to Teresa how you managed to complete one of the most successful robberies in the history of the US Army.’
Carter shifted uneasily. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘I wouldn’t call it that.’
‘What he did,’ said Dasch, picking up the story, ‘was to send four trucks to the US Army’s warehouse on the outskirts of Wiesbaden, in the American occupation zone, with bills of lading for more than three million American cigarettes which had just arrived there and which were due to be distributed to commissaries at every Allied base on the continent of Europe. The guards at the warehouse had been told to expect the trucks at a certain hour of the morning and they arrived exactly on time. The bills of lading were checked and the cigarettes were loaded on board. The whole thing took less than one hour. Then the trucks departed and, half an hour later, four different trucks arrived with identical bills of lading for the three million cigarettes. Of course, they were immediately arrested. By the time it was determined that these men were, in fact, carrying the legitimate bills of lading and that those in the first trucks were fakes, the cigarettes had disappeared, along with the men who had been impersonating American military personnel. The trucks were found about an hour away from the city, all neatly parked and with the keys still in the ignition, but the cigarettes and the men who stole them were never found. This was a success beyond the wildest dreams of anyone who’s ever dared to contemplate such things.’