“And did you notice the strap?” Kappler smiled appreciatively. “Hand-sewn hide of crocodile.”
Dulles looked at Kappler. “I do not know what to say, except that you shouldn’t—”
“You must see something else,” Kappler interrupted, ignoring the comment and reaching into the box.
He pulled the wristwatch free of the black silk pillow, then turned it so that the back of the case was visible. A clear crystal there showed all the intricate movements therein—tiny golden gears turning and silver wheels spinning in an orchestrated fashion that was pure precision.
Dulles puffed on his pipe, then said, “I feel compelled to repeat myself: It is absolutely gorgeous. Truly a work of art.”
“Yes. And I knew that you would appreciate it. I understand that they make one with twenty complications—one dial showing the date of Easter, another a celestial chart with more than two thousand stars.”
Where is he going with all this? Dulles thought.
Dulles looked at Kappler as he replaced the watch on the tiny pillow, then put both into the box.
“Amazing,” Dulles said. “I cannot begin to imagine so many options. Nor, for that matter, what one would do with such a magnificent instrument. It must keep perfect time.”
“True. Magnificent, it is.” He met and held Dulles’s eyes. “And, as we all well know, my old friend, life is all about timing.”
Dulles, puffing his pipe, thought: Why do I suspect, Wolffy, my old friend, that that is a reference to something far larger than a fancy wristwatch?
Kappler went on: “I was pleased to be able to personally select your watch this afternoon, following a very lengthy meeting with Franz Messner and Ernst Schröder that I thought would never end.”
Dulles had dossiers thick with intelligence on the forty-seven-year-old Messner, an anti-Nazi who was the general director of Semperit, the century-old international rubber manufacturer based in Vienna, and on Schröder, a confidant of Hitler in his sixties who represented the Reichsbank in its transactions with the Switzerland National Bank.
“More gold laundering?” Dulles asked, but it was more of a statement.
The Allies were well aware—and extremely pissed—that SNB for at least a year had been buying at discount more than one hundred million francs’ worth of gold every three months from Germany. Lately it had been foreign-minted gold coins.
The Allies had applied diplomatic pressure, and Switzerland had made the appropriate responses that made it appear it would comply—accounts were closed, fines levied—yet the transactions, too lucrative to turn down, continued.
Kappler nodded. “Before arriving here yesterday, Messner and I spent two weeks in Lisbon arranging for new funds to be channeled as escudos through Banco de Portugal deposit accounts set up under Portuguese subsidiaries of Semperit and Kappler industries.”
Dulles grunted.
More money for buying raw materials for Germany’s war machine, he thought.
“You know that I am not proud of that,” Kappler said, as if reading his mind. “But we are being watched, and if I did not do that which is expected . . .”
Dulles thought he detected an odd tone in Kappler’s voice.
Dulles looked at his snifter, swirled the cognac, then took a big sip.
What the hell could that be about?
Well, one way to find out.
He looked back at Kappler and said, “Okay, Wolffy. We have, as you say, been friends a long time—”
“Absolutely,” he said, stone-faced.
“—long enough that you can tell me exactly what is on your mind.”
They locked eyes for a long moment. Kappler remained stone-faced. Then his eyes glistened, and he suddenly sighed, and his face turned soft.
He took a deep sip of his cognac, then replied, “Allen, I do not want to wind up like Fritz.”
“What do you mean? Wind up how?”