Double, Double, Oil and Trouble Read online

  “He even calls me.” Grimm laid down his napkin with care. “I do not blame him. He feels a sense of responsibility. He is bearing the double burden, both for Mr. Wylie’s welfare and for the Noss Head contract.”

  “Well, he has one consolation,” Thatcher said. “Apparently the British government is taking Wylie’s absence into consideration and not permitting it to turn into a windfall for the opposition.”

  Charlie snorted. “Come on. John. There’s only one kind of consideration that Macklin wants—and that’s a contract signed, sealed, and delivered.”

  This was too true to be argued. Displays of sympathy have never balanced a company’s books. Only sales do that.

  “All we can do is wait and see. Cramer has an outside chance of pulling it off. And,” Thatcher reminded Charlie, “we’ve financed a lot of long shots that ended up wearing roses.”

  “It is still possible that Mr. Wylie may be released in time to join the negotiations,” said Grimm hopefully. “Surely as long as his body has not been found, it is reasonable to think that he may be safe.”

  “Then why won’t Black Tuesday say what it wants? Volpe tells me Macklin expected a list of demands within a couple of days of the last note. Instead, there’s just silence, as if . . . Wait a minute.” Trinkam’s face was a study in thought. “You mean Black Tuesday wants Macklin to be really hurting before they sock them for the final installment? That the snatch was planned to coincide with the London talks?”

  Leopold Grimm was obviously startled at the bird flushed by his earnest optimism. “That is not what I meant at all,” he hastened to say. “The kidnapping was certainly timed, but with respect to what was happening in Zurich, not London.”

  Then he stopped abruptly, brought to his senses by the intense curiosity emanating from his guests.

  “I believe I have said too much,” he confessed.

  “Or perhaps not enough?” Thatcher suggested invitingly.

  The internal struggle, although severe, was brief. “I had not planned to speak of this subject.” Grimm examined adjacent tables for enemy ears. Then he leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You understand that this is in the strictest confidence?”

  “Oh, absolutely!” his guests chorused as one. They realized they were dealing with a man burning to talk.

  “You may remember that the kidnappers required a pledge that there should be no police surveillance when the ransom money was withdrawn. Naturally this pledge was scrupulously observed. A man’s life was at stake. However, nothing at all was said about bank surveillance, and I felt perfectly within my rights posting security personnel at strategic locations outside Union Suisse.”

  Herr Grimm glared at them defiantly as he produced this piece of casuistry.

  “Splendid,” said Thatcher with a thump. He had never believed in using Queensberry rules with terrorists.

  Relieved on this point, his host relapsed into a conversational tone. “Of course there was nothing my men could accomplish with Mr. Wylie held hostage. All they could do was watch. But,” Grimm concluded on a plaintive note rare among Swiss bankers, “I did want to know where that money was going.”

  “Very understandable, I’m sure,” Thatcher murmured.

  “And now I shall never know.”

  “Your boys muffed it, eh,” said Charlie easily.

  There was no immediate answer, but during the interval Leopold Grimm’s recollections were not pleasant. “Now that I have had time to consider, I must in all fairness admit that they were not entirely at fault,” he replied at length.

  Vaguely intent on commiseration, Thatcher said: “If they are anything like the security people we hire at the Sloan, they are expert at preventing bank robberies, not at trailing people through Europe.”

  “That is very true. But I am afraid they were misdirected from the start. The directors, and I include myself, had certain preconceptions about how the ransom money would be removed.”

  Thatcher and Charlie glanced at each other in silent communion. It must have been the rakedown of the century if Grimm were still placating his conscience.

  “But I ask you,” the Swiss continued in self-justification, “how would you expect kidnappers to behave on such an occasion?”

  Very few people had ever made a reasonable appeal to Charlie Trinkam in vain.

  “Let’s see. I’d expect them to send one man into the bank for the actual pickup,” he said obligingly, “while another one waited in a fast car. The first one would leave the bank with a stream of customers, enter the car, and then the two of them would get the hell out of the country as fast as they could, with or without dropping off the money someplace.”

  Grimm beamed. “Exactly as we reasoned. We had cars posted at every corner, ready for pursuit. And instead ...” He gulped. “Instead, she came in.”

  Charlie Trinkam’s ears pricked up. “She?”

  “This girl,” said Grimm, suppressing some common epithets for undesirable young women. “She had voluminous long blond hair that was obviously a wig, she was wearing blue jeans and boots. And do you know what I had to pack the money into?” Words momentarily failed him. “A rucksack!” he finally exploded.

  “A rucksack?” Thatcher stared. “But we needed four large briefcases. It wouldn’t fit.”

  “No doubt I am using the wrong term. You must forgive me if I am not familiar with all these expressions.” Grimm was heavily ironic. “It is what your American students strap onto themselves when traveling.”

  Thatcher thought he saw daylight. “Ah, you mean a large multi-compartmented pack mounted on a lightweight metal frame. Yes, that would just about do it.”

  “I do not know what you call it. But when she clumped out of my office in her mountain boots, she had money stacked on her back from her neck to her crotch.”

  Bankers like to see money handled with a certain respect. It was impossible for Herr Grimm to have emerged from the ransom payoff without a minimal amount of dissatisfaction. But his irritation would not have been quite so exacerbated if the dollars had left neatly packed in pigskin attaché cases.

  Charlie continued his good offices as the mug who falls into every hole. “Granted, it wasn’t what you expected. Though, now I come to think of it, all these Palestinian outfits seem to have a couple of girls in fatigues. But why did that make it harder to follow her to the car? She must have stuck out like a sore thumb.”

  “Because there was no car,” Herr Grimm growled. “She did not even bother to look around. She went out the front door to the Bahnofstrasse, turned right, and tramped three blocks to the Bahnhof, which she entered.”

  Grimm ended his recital on a note of high drama that left his audience in complete bafflement. He surveyed them reproachfully.

  “So soon,” he sighed, “and already you have forgotten Ziegelbrucke.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” said Charlie somewhat resentfully. “It was one of those godawful rock festivals, wasn’t it?”

  But Thatcher was recalling the relationship of events to each other. “Good heavens, Charlie, it was Ziegelbrucke that pushed us off the front page. The hordes were already at the airport when Paul Volpe flew in.”

  In fact, the Ziegelbrucke Festival, featuring a galaxy of rock stars, had made headlines throughout the Western world. There were moments when it threatened to overtake and surpass Woodstock. Fortunately, Swiss prudence had prevented a debacle. The authorities had selected a site approximately 40 kilometers outside Zurich. There, a large institution, unoccupied during the summer, provided space for sleeping bags, running water, and sanitary facilities. But the inevitable had occurred. Instead of the 30,000 anticipated by the sponsors, over a 120,000 zealots had appeared. The subsequent scene had provided a photographer’s delight for three whole days.

  “And just how do you get to Ziegelbrucke?” Thatcher asked in dawning suspicion.

  “By train from Zurich Bahnhof,” Grimm admitted sadly. “The opening concert was the evening of the day we paid over the ran
som.”

  Thatcher was familiar enough with the terrain to visualize the situation. On one side of the station, airport buses arrive and depart continuously. On the other side, the municipal transit system deposits a steady stream of commuters and joyriders. Inside there are connections to every other European capital. And on that particular day, added to the base movement of a busy railroad junction, there would have been over a 100,000 rock enthusiasts coming by plane, by train, and by foot to converge on the local to Ziegelbrucke.

  “Beautiful!” Charlie breathed reverently. “And I suppose every damned one of them was in jeans, long hair, and a backpack?”

  “Don’t forget the wig,” Thatcher cautioned.

  “Very true,” agreed Grimm. “She had only to elude my men for two seconds, whip off her blond hair, and emerge as a coal-black brunette.”

  “Or she may even be titian-haired,” said Charlie sentimentally. “Tell me, was she pretty?”

  There were realms, however, into which few bankers could follow Charlie.

  “I found her singularly unattractive.” Grimm was at his most repressive. “But I am told that may not have been natural. We kept the photographs from the bank cameras in case she was a known terrorist. But Interpol said the pictures were virtually useless. Not only did the wig hide her ears and forehead, but also she was wearing cheek pads. I did notice that the timbre of her voice was most unusual.”

  “Well, disguised or not, she must have been a worried lady during those three blocks. Of course, once she ducked through the Bahnhof she had it made,” Charlie commented. “She could have gone anywhere.”

  Fundamentally, Herr Grimm was more interested in the money than in its custodian. “For all we know, she marched into a bank and opened another numbered account.”

  “Or she could have bought gold,” said Charlie, entering into the spirit of things. “Or another currency, or stocks on any exchange in the world. Zurich’s the perfect place.”

  Thatcher thought it was time to bring the other two back to earth. “Come, come,” he said briskly. “We all know what the probabilities are. Why do terrorists want money in the first place? She very likely handed the cash over to an arms dealer in payment for the next shipment.”

  “But if they got what they wanted, why haven’t they released Mr. Wylie?” demanded Grimm. “If he is alive, he must be a great embarrassment to them. The longer this situation extends itself, the more worried I become for his safety.”

  This same concern was voiced two hours later when the Sloan’s chairman of the board put in an overseas call to Zurich. Being the humanitarian he was, George Lancer offered the latest progress report on Davidson Wylie before proceeding to his main topic.

  “I’ve just been talking with Arthur Shute at Macklin, John. The Turkish police admit that they’re at a loss. They still insist that Wylie was not smuggled out of the Istanbul area, but all their searching hasn’t uncovered him.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “On the other hand they also haven’t found his body, which for some reason they regard as a good sign.”

  “I can understand that,” Thatcher said thoughtfully. “The odds are that Black Tuesday would take more pains hiding a victim who was alive. A body they would just dump. And there are still no further instructions from Black Tuesday?”

  “None,” said Lancer.

  “Odd,” said Thatcher, echoing a good many people in a good many places.

  “But that isn’t why I called,” said Lancer, modulating from man of compassion to man of business. “I do have some good news. At ten o’clock this morning Macklin got the Noss Head contract.”

  Thatcher produced sincere congratulations even as he began thinking of work schedules. “Then the Sloan will have to sit down with Macklin within the next couple of weeks.”

  “I know that you’ll want to iron out the broad outlines of the financial agreement in Houston before talking to the British,” Lancer continued.

  “That’s the way we always do it, George,” Thatcher said gently.

  “So I told Arthur Shute this could only be a courtesy visit. But as you said you’d be coming back in the next day or two, I thought you would not mind a stopover in London.”

  In other words, the hard-pressed Macklin team wanted someone to show the flag. And, by all accounts, they had earned a little recognition.

  “That’s all right, George. We tied up the last details today,” Thatcher admitted. “We can catch the breakfast flight tomorrow morning.”

  “I’m afraid it won’t be pleasant for you,” Lancer sounded apologetic. “They’re still having that heat wave over there.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it won’t be too bad. You can tell Shute we’ll be there before lunchtime.”

  It is always fatally easy to underrate someone else’s problems, as John Thatcher was shortly to discover.

  Chapter 6

  Depletion Allowance

  By common consent, Everett Gabler was primus inter pares at the Sloan Guaranty Trust when it came to fault-finding. Everybody else there could spot a misplaced decimal at twenty paces. Everett saw the invisible defects, as well.

  Charlie Trinkam’s universe was totally dissimilar. At his desk, he met the Sloan’s high standards of fiduciary prudence. Elsewhere, he took care to blanket life’s imperfections with wine, women, and song.

  Two days in London, however, had put him temporarily in Gabler’s league.

  “If Livermore tells me one more time how Americans must feel right at home, I’m going to punch him in the nose!” he grumbled.

  “If you want to resort to violence, I believe you’re going to have to wait your turn,” Thatcher replied. “From the looks of him, Hugo Cramer is itching” to start swinging. Ah, good morning, gentlemen . . .”

  With the arrival of latecomers, the gathering trooped from the stately anteroom of the Imperial Dominion Bank to the even statelier conference room. The second day of talks was coinciding with the eighth day of the cruelest heat wave in modern English history. In the countryside, reservoirs were running dry and fields were parched. In Wales, factories were closing and water was being rationed. In London, the populace struggled on without benefit of summerweight clothing, ice cubes, or air conditioning.

  The American contingent had just arrived from the Hilton, one of the few oases of comfort in the city. By native standards, they looked relatively healthy.

  Across the table from them sat the Department of Energy, H. M. Treasury, and British Petroleum. To a man, they had deposited bowlers and rolled umbrellas in the foyer. To a man, they had greeted their guests with impeccable courtesy. To a man, they sank into their chairs and stared dully into space.

  Chairing the meeting was Simon Livermore, who was disposing of the agenda with dogged tenacity. “We adjourned yesterday afternoon on the price-adjustment schedule, I believe. Mr. Carmichael, you wanted to discuss the appendix.”

  Carmichael was exhausted by the effort of finding the appendix. H. M. Treasury began doodling with desperate intensity. Livermore’s thoughts were so far away that he started when it was time to call on the next speaker.

  John Thatcher was old enough to remember New York before air conditioning. Even today, ice cream, swimming pools, and deodorants are not absolute necessities of life. What tried men’s souls, or at least Thatcher’s, was the crushing impact of weather on conversation. The standard banalities about rain, snow, heat, or cold, normally so useful in social intercourse, had been refined into a Chinese water torture.

  The lunch break was a case in point.

  “No thanks, Nicholas,” said Simon Livermore, automatically running a finger around his wilted shirt collar. “I’d better look in at the office before we go into the import licenses this afternoon.”

  Nicholas, who was the Imperial Dominion Bank, was offering Imperial Dominion’s renowned saddle of mutton. Yesterday it had been fine old sherry. He was not getting a second crack at Thatcher.

  “Cramer and I think we should take
the opportunity to consider Macklin’s subcontracting commitments,” Thatcher said briskly, omitting the locus of this discussion.

  But Nicholas’s sad smile reminded him that the temperature of the Hilton had become an obsession with most of London.

  “. . . used to it, no doubt,” Carmichael was saying, as he and Hugo Cramer came around the table to join them.

  “Heat doesn’t bother me much,” said Cramer, shortly. “Listen, Thatcher, I’ll join you and Charlie at the Hilton. First I want to stop by the office and get them to telex Houston for those footages.”

  “I suppose you become accustomed to it in Texas,” said Nicholas plaintively. “And you’ve worked throughout South America, too, haven’t you?”

  “Venezuela,” said Cramer, his eyes crinkling. Thatcher saw that he was amused by this equation of modern Houston with the tropics. But his brevity disconcerted the others, all except Livermore.

  “Odd how people differ,” he said, bridging the gap. “My wife feels the cold and the damp very much. As a matter of fact, she went off to Tangiers to get away from that rainy spell we had a few weeks ago. Now, she’s staying on to escape the heat. And she was born and bred in Flintshire, not Texas.”

  “Oh, but the heat is quite different in the Mediterranean ...”

  “Or even the desert. In Egypt ...”

  “. . . Antigua . . .”

  “As a matter of fact, when I called her last night, Jill told me that it was cooler at Rhamuli—that’s the resort she’s at—than it was in Surrey!”

  They had reached Hugo Cramer’s limit.

  “Three o’clock?” said Cramer, making for the door. “Thatcher, I’ll be with you in half an hour. I’ll look for you in the bar.”

  “You know,” said Charlie when he and Thatcher sedately followed suit, “I’m getting to like that guy.”

  Thatcher suspected that Cramer might be an acquired taste, and lunch proved him right. Cramer managed not to comment on the bar, which was a solid clot of relief-seeking humanity, or even on the steaming traffic along Piccadilly.

  “Well, what do you think?” he asked.