Garlinsky breathed out slowly. ‘Please, Mr Carter, don’t let it come to that.’
There was a car waiting outside. Carter and Garlinsky sat in the back. The driver glanced at Carter in the rear-view mirror and then did not look at him again.
‘How did you know I wasn’t armed?’ asked Carter.
‘I didn’t,’ replied Garlinsky.
‘Then you were taking a hell of a risk.’
Garlinsky looked at him and laughed. ‘Not for the first time,’ he replied.
They drove around the edge of the city, along the Eifelwall, the Zülpicherwall and the Venloerwall, heading north past the Gereon rail yard and into the Nippes district.
By now, the windows had grown a silvery sheen of condensation and when the car pulled up outside a building, Carter wiped away the moisture to see where they were.
It was Thesinger’s bookshop.
Carter turned and stared in confusion at Garlinsky.
But Garlinsky said nothing. He just got out, came around to the other side and opened Carter’s door.
The lights in the shop were off.
Garlinsky used a key to let them in and Carter followed him to the back room, where he and Wilby had met the owner of the shop.
Thesinger was there, sitting on a stool and wearing the same heavy cardigan. His hair was precisely as dishevelled as it had been the time before. The room was lit by the single bulb of the lamp perched on his work table, where he had examined the counterfeit roubles shown to him by Wilby.
‘Garlinsky works for you?’ asked Carter.
‘I prefer to think it is more of a co-operative arrangement.’
‘Why have you brought me here?’
‘To express my admiration for your work.’
‘Somebody else once told me that,’ said Carter, ‘and no good came of it.’
‘I imagine that person might have been Hanno Dasch.’
Carter did not reply.
Thesinger gave a slight wave of his hand to show that no answer was required. ‘The difference,’ he said, ‘is that Mr Dasch was aware only of the illusion that you created. My admiration, Mr Carter, is for the creation of the illusion itself. A subtle difference perhaps, but a fundamental one nonetheless.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Believe me, Mr Carter, I know what I’m talking about. You see, like you, I am also a maker of illusions, so complex that they can sometimes be revealed only by those who have created them.’ He reached into his pocket and removed something, which he hid in his palm. And then, between his hands, he unfurled the tiny banner of a twenty-five-rouble note. ‘This illusion, for example.’
‘Wilby didn’t let you keep any of that money,’ said Carter.
‘He didn’t have to,’ answered Thesinger. ‘I have more than enough of my own.’
It took a moment for the truth to sink in. ‘You’re the counterfeiter?’
‘Not just me,’ explained Thesinger. ‘There are others◦– Mr Garlinsky for example, and those men you might have seen gathered around the table just inside the front door of this shop the last time you were here.’
Carter remembered the thin man with the suitcase and the clothes that were too big for him.
‘We are the survivors of an experiment,’ continued Thesinger, ‘conjured into life by the Nazis, and by one in particular, a man named Bernhard Krüger. In the autumn of 1942, I was an inmate at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. One day, when I had just begun my work breaking stones with a sledgehammer, I was summoned to appear before the commandant. I dropped the sledgehammer and ran to the commandant’s office. There, I found myself in the presence of an SS officer named Krüger, who asked me many questions about my previous employment at the Reichsbank. I had worked there for more than a decade as an engraver of the copper plates that were used for printing German currency. Krüger offered me the chance to take part in a special programme, which would make use of my particular training. In exchange for my full co-operation, I would be given proper clothes, not the grey and blue striped sackcloth worn by regular inmates, as well as three meals a day, a shower once a week and an actual bed, as opposed to the wooden-slatted bunk in which I currently slept. I agreed at once. I did not need to be told what this work might be for. Anything was better than breaking rocks, for which an inmate’s life expectancy was less than six months.’
Carter had seen pictures of those death quarries, and of stone staircases that prisoners were forced to climb, carrying heavy loads, day after day, until they inevitably collapsed.
‘I was taken to a barracks known as Block 19,’ said Thesinger. ‘Until that day, I had not even known of its existence. Even though it was within the grounds of Sachsenhausen, it was completely cut off from the rest of the camp by barbed wire and tall wooden fences. No one outside Block 19 could even see into our barracks. In Block 19, I was introduced to a group of men who would become my friends, and my only companions, for the next two and a half years. Each of them had special skills, much like my own. There were engravers, jewellers, graphic artists, photographers and collotypers. It was explained to me by Krüger that I was now part of Operation Bernhard, which was a plan to destroy the British economy by flooding it with counterfeit currency. Although with considerable difficulty◦– especially with the production of the correct paper and also a seal that could be found in the upper left hand corner of each note, depicting Britannia◦– we eventually managed to produce millions of notes of such high quality that, as I mentioned to you at our first meeting, even the Bank of England certified them as genuine.’
‘The only part of the story you left out,’ said Carter, ‘was that you were the one who had made them.’
‘You weren’t ready for the truth, any more than I was ready to tell you.’
‘I’m surprised the Nazis let you live after taking part in something like that,’ remarked Carter.
‘It was never their intention for us to survive,’ replied Thesinger. ‘Those of us who worked for Krüger had been under no illusion that, once this operation had been completed, we would be murdered and all trace of Block 19 obliterated. So we always knew that we were playing for time, and we would often create delays in production, just to stretch out the process a little longer. In the end, with the Russian and American armies closing in, we and our equipment◦– which included some very valuable printing presses◦– were moved from Sachsenhausen to a smaller camp called Ebensee, near the site of a rocket-building facility in the Austrian Alps. By then, the war was almost over. Many of the guards who had accompanied us simply vanished into the mountains. In the end, there were not even enough of them left to execute us, as I am certain they had planned to do. Some, like me, were fortunate enough to be taken prisoner by the Americans. That is how Major Wilby came to know of my existence, since he was the one who debriefed me before I was released back into the world with the status of “displaced person”.’
‘What about the others?’ asked Carter.
‘Many were less lucky. They fell into the hands of the Russians as they tried to make their way back to their homes. In spite of the fact that they had been selected from among a population of concentration camp inmates, they were accused by the Soviets of collaborating with the Nazis. In one sense, of course, it was true. Technically, all of us had volunteered to work for Krüger. The fact that we would all have been dead if we did not was, to the Russian mind, irrelevant. Having only just emerged from years of captivity, my friends were now sent to a particularly notorious labour camp in Siberia known as Borodok, some of them with sentences of more than twenty years.
‘Could nothing be done to help them?’ asked Carter.
‘We weren’t sure,’ answered Thesinger, ‘but we knew we had to try. We decided to reincarnate Operation Bernhard, only this time we were working for ourselves and, instead of British currency, we would set our skills towards the forgery of Russian roubles. We traced the equipment we had been using at Block 19, including a top of the line Monopol Type IV flatbed press, to a warehouse outside Vienna, where it had been put into storage and forgotten. Posing as representatives of a German newspaper whose facility had been destroyed in the war, we purchased the equipment from the warehouse manager. Eventually, through several intermediaries, contact was established with the commandant of Borodok and an offer was made to purchase the freedom of our friends.’