Berlin Game

‘In the evenings, you mean? Or would that be instead of working here?’

‘Every time I ask you questions, I find you asking me questions.’

‘I didn’t know I was being questioned,’ I said. ‘Am I being vetted?’

‘In this business it does no harm to flip the pages of someone’s bank account from time to time,’ said Rensselaer.

‘You’ll find only moths in mine,’ I said.

‘No family money?’

‘Family money? I was thirty years old before I got a nanny.’

‘People like you who’ve worked in the field always have money and securities stashed away. I’ll bet you’ve got numbered bank accounts in a dozen towns.’

‘What would I put into them, luncheon vouchers?’

‘Goodwill,’ he said ‘Goodwill. Until the time comes.’ He picked up the short memo I’d sent him about Werner Volkmann’s import-export business. So that was it. He was wondering if I was sharing the profit in Werner’s business.

‘Volkmann is not making enough dough to pay handsome kickbacks, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ I said.

‘But you want the Department to bankroll him?’ He was still standing behind his desk; he liked being on his feet, moving about like a boxer, shifting his weight and twisting his body as if avoiding imaginary blows.

‘You’d better get yourself some new bifocals,’ I said. ‘There’s no suggestion that the Department give him a penny.’

Bret smiled. When he got tired of playing the shy Mr Nice Guy, he’d suddenly go for confrontation, accusation and insult. But at least he was unlikely to go behind your back. ‘Maybe I read it hurriedly. What the hell is forfaiting anyway?’

Bret was like those High Court judges who lean over and ask what is a male chauvinist, or a mainframe computer. They know what they think these things are, but they want them defined by mutual agreement and written into the court record.

‘Volkmann raises cash for West German companies so they can be paid promptly after exporting goods to East Germany.’

‘How does he do that?’ said Bret, looking down and fiddling with some papers on his desk.

‘There’s a hell of a lot of complicated paperwork,’ I said. ‘But the essential part of it is that they send details of the shipment and the prices to an East German bank. They sign them and rubber-stamp them and agree that it’s all okay with the East German importers. They also agree on the dates of the payments. Volkmann goes to a bank, or a syndicate of banks, or any other source of cash in the West, and uses that “aval” to discount the cash that pays for the goods.’

‘It’s like factoring?’

‘It’s more complicated, because you’re dealing with a lot of people, most of them bureaucrats.’

‘And your pal Volkmann gets a margin on each deal. That’s sweet.’

‘It’s a tough business, Bret,’ I said. ‘There are a lot of people offering to cut a fraction of a percentage off the next one, to get the business.’

‘But Volkmann has no banking background. He’s a hustler.’

I breathed in slowly. ‘You don’t have to be a banker to get into it,’ I said patiently. ‘Werner Volkmann has been doing those forfaiting deals for several years now. He has good contacts in the East. He moves in and out of the Eastern Sector with minimum fuss. They like him because they know he tries to do tie-in deals with East German exports –’

Bret held up his hand. ‘What tie-in deals?’

‘A lot of the banks just want to handle cash. Werner is prepared to shop around for a customer in the West who’ll take some East German exports. In that way he can save them some hard currency or maybe even swing a deal where the export price equals the money due for the imports.’

‘Is that so?’ said Bret reflectively.

‘Volkmann could be very useful for us, Bret,’ I said.

‘How?’

‘Moving money, moving goods, moving people.’

‘We do that already.’

‘But how many people do we have who can go back and forth without question?’

‘So what’s Volkmann’s problem?’

‘You know what Frank Harrington is like. He doesn’t get along with Werner, and never has.’

‘And anyone Frank doesn’t like, Berlin never uses.’

‘Frank is Berlin,’ I said. ‘It’s a small staff there now, Bret. Frank has to approve every damned thing.’

‘And you want me to tell Frank how to run his Berlin office?’

‘Do you ever read anything I send you, Bret? It says there that I just want the Department to approve a rollover guarantee of funds from one of our own merchant banks.’

‘And that’s money,’ said Bret triumphantly.

‘We’re simply talking about one of our own banking outfits, using their own expertise to give Werner normal facilities at current bank rates.’

‘So why can’t he get that already?’

‘Because the sort of banks which best back these forfaiting deals want to know who Werner Volkmann is. And this Department has an old-fashioned rule that onetime field agents shouldn’t go around giving the D-G as a reference, or saying that the way they got to learn about the forfaiting business was by running agents across the Wall since they were eighteen years old.’

‘So tell me how Volkmann has stayed in business.’

‘By going outside the regular banking network, by raising money from the money market. But that means trimming his agent’s fee. It’s making life tough for him. If he gives up the forfaiting business, we’ll lose a good opportunity and a useful contact.’

‘Suppose he fouls up on one of these deals and the bank doesn’t get its money.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Bret. The boys in the bank are big enough to change their own nappies.’

‘And they’ll squeal bloody murder.’

‘What do we have those lousy banks for, unless it’s for this kind of job?’

‘What kind of dough are we talking about?’

‘A million Deutschemark rolling over would be about right.’