“You mean that you never saw her between the sinking of the Homburg and her marriage to Juaquin Schneider?”
“No. Oh, maybe I saw her. In Stanley. Who knows? Young girl, you know.”
“What was a Jewish girl doing on a Nazi cruiser?”
“God knows.”
“You never asked?”
“Asked? Why would I ask?”
“After you knew she was Schneider’s wife?”
Pope-Ginna’s face, which had been drawn and sickly, took on a frightened look. “You never asked questions about something that belonged to Jock. Things happened to people who — It wasn’t a good idea. Although God knows, my life would have been easier if I had asked some questions.” To Tarp’s astonishment he began to sob. Tarp looked at Repin and with a frown tried to ask if they should stop; Repin gave a slight shake to his head and made a pushing motion with one hand where Pope-Ginna could not see it.
“All right, cut that,” Tarp said cruelly. “Get back to your tale.”
“I’m trying, I’m trying.” He put his face in his hands. “Oh, this is awful.” He seemed unable to stop weeping. Tarp knew the state he was in and wanted to stop, but again Repin made the pushing motion.
“I said that’s enough! Go back to your story, damn you! After the war. What about after the war?”
Pope-Ginna wiped his eyes, wiped his hands on the sleeves of the alpaca overcoat. “I went into submarines,” he mumbled. “I thought it would help with the gold if I—”
“Skip that! I know all that.”
“I’m only trying to do it right,” the old man said, his eyes filling again.
“Go to the Argentine business.”
“Why are you asking me this if you already know?”
“Go to the Argentine business.”
Pope-Ginna was unable to look straight at Tarp’s eyes; his glance moved quickly past Tarp’s face, back to his shoulders, to his chin, down to the floor. It settled in the end on some featureless place near the ceiling, and the old man stared at it — his forehead wrinkled, his eyes screwed up — as if getting from the memory of Schneider’s wife to that slightly earlier time took great effort. “I retired from the navy in 1952,” he said slowly. He went on looking at the far wall. “It had been quite as I expected — no real chance at the top. They kept it all for themselves. All the ‘right’ people. Their clubs and all that. By then I knew how to get at the gold, though. I’d got that from the Royal Navy, in the end. If Homburg had stayed where I’d sunk her, I knew how to get the gold. Then I could bloody well buy a title if I wanted one. That’s how things are done, anyway.” His eyes snapped abruptly toward Repin. “That’s how things are done!”
Repin nodded as if something wise had been said.
“I had some money, of course. I wasn’t a fool about money, after all. A few investments. A couple of pals, you might as well know, who let me in on things in exchange for, you know, introductions and a good word here and there. And I’d turned that money ’round and invested it in the Argentine, see? Because I knew I’d have to go after the Homburg from the Argentine. It had to be done in secret and far from British eyes, so that ruled out the Falklands or South Georgia. Anyway, the Argentines love secrecy. They understand it. I’d invested money there — lots of British interests in the Argentine back then, lots. Visited three times before I retired. Looked about. Met some fellows. Saw how it could be done.
“Funny thing happened then. When I retired, chap from MI-six called on me, Captain Somebody-or-other, didn’t use his right name, I suppose, asked me what I was going to do. Go to the Argentine, I said, try to make a bundle. Oh, good, this fellow said, would you mind having a look ’round for us while you’re there? Just keep an eye on the navy down there. Right-o, I said. They provided some introductions to Argentine naval people, said it would get me started, and I said fine, right, absolutely. Loyal Briton glad to help the mother country.
“I was having a laugh, of course. There they were, helping me out. And there I was, keeping my secrets. Oh, well. These things happen. I mean, I did what they wanted. Actually, I did it as well as anybody could have. My little bit of spying.
“So I went to the Argentine. The navy contacts led to me being taken on as a consultant in submarines. All on the up-and-up, quite public, and so on. At the same time I got in with a few fellows in their navy who were looking for a good thing. And they introduced me to Jock.”
“Schneider?” Tarp said.
“Yes, of course, Jock Schneider.” Pope-Ginna sounded exasperated. “He’d just made his first bundle. Rapacious bloody kite, he was. Not rich the way he is now, but rich. The long and the short of it was we formed a company, about six of us. For marine research, we said. I’d told them enough so they knew what the stakes were. Jock put up the capital — there were some fairly high bribes to be paid. The navy supplied the manpower and the equipment, through my friends.” He merely glanced past Tarp and still would not look directly at him. “It was 1959 by now. Everything took so much longer than I thought.” He turned to Repin. “If you want to do things fast, you have to work alone. I couldn’t work alone. Not enough money. That’s the bad luck that’s haunted me all my life — not enough money.”
Tarp wondered at the man’s enduring resentments, which probably went back to his young manhood. They still seemed to drive him. “And you found the Homburg,” he said.
“Yes. After more years. The ice just wouldn’t open! It had been open in fifty-eight, but we weren’t ready. Then there were all these years when the open water just didn’t appear. It was maddening. Some of my friends thought I was diddling them. There were some bad scenes. Jock was pretty ugly about it. But it all worked out in sixty-three.”
“You found it.”
“Oh, yes.”
“And the gold.”
“Oh, yes.”
“How much?”
Pope-Ginna hesitated. “Enough for every body.”
“How much?”
“In dollars? In the dollars of those days — a quarter of a billion. Something like that. It took me three trips — three years, that means — and I lost five divers. But I got it. We divided it. I didn’t resent dividing it. Even though it was all mine. I mean, for sinking the Homburg.” His face darkened. “Jock took too much, though. The financier always does. Eh? He does nothing but put up the cash, and then he claims the lion’s share.” “What happened then?”
“I was rich. I invested mine, bought an estancia, my place in B.A. — the lot. I was rich.”
“And Maxudov?”
Silence. Pope-Ginna seemed disoriented again, as if these jumps from subject to subject and from period to period were too wide for him. “That’s another matter,” he said to Repin.
“Tell me,” Tarp said.
“I daren’t.”
“Tell me.”
“Please, no.” Pope-Ginna pulled the coat tight about him, his voice a whine.
“I’ll help you. You’ve made six or seven trips to the Soviet Union. You oversaw the refitting of a Soviet submarine for the Argentines. A man who calls himself Maxudov used you as the go-between in a deal that sent plutonium to the South Atlantic. The Soviets just gave you a medal. Now, tell me.”
Pope-Ginna opened his mouth and then closed it, doing this three times before tie finally found the words that he wanted to speak. “They eased me out of the company we’d formed. After I’d brought back all the gold. Jock was behind it, but I think his wife was even farther behind him. I mean, I think she pushed him to it. To get me out. I didn’t much care; it was over, as far as I was concerned. But they kept the company going, built it up on marine research and so on. I didn’t think much about it. You know. I heard some things — experimenting with undersea habitats, all that. I reported them to MI-six; I’d kept that contact. Made trips to England every year; I was spreading a little cash around over there, one eye on the Honors List. I have my vanity. Well, early in the seventies — it was nineteen seventy-one, actually — a man named Carlson came to see me. German. German-Argentine, I mean, family been there a couple of generations. It was a bad time down there, the death squads very active, a lot of political mess. And he said, “You’re going to do something for me and some friends of mine.” He called me Admiral. Very polite. But he threatened me. Really threatened me. I was to be the front for a political group that was pushing some navy officers into power. There was a lot of rigmarole-secret signals, meetings, plans. I always worked through this fellow Carlson. Got my orders from him, and so on. Go to Marseilles. Go to Murmansk. Do this, do that.”