to live for his bank, seeking a release in his work from a stultifying home life. In point of fact, he was a closet gangster, utterly amoral, and with more than a dash of sadism in him. This aspect of his character had long been suppressed by his intelligence, his social standing and the eminence of the professional role he had inherited.
Only twice in his life had Cromer truly expressed himself. The first time was at school, at Eton. There, as fag and junior, he had borne the crushing humiliations imposed upon him by his seniors, knowing that he too would one day inherit their power. His resilience and forbearance were well rewarded. He became a games player of some eminence, playing scrum-half for the school and for Hereford Schoolboys with a legendary fearlessness. He also became Head of House. In this capacity he had cause, about once a week, to dispense discipline in the sternest public school traditions. Sometimes he would preside, with awful formality, over the ritual humiliation of some unfortunate junior who would be beaten in the prefects’ common room. Meanwhile the prefects themselves read idly, disdainfully refusing to acknowledge the presence of the abhorrent object of Cromer’s displeasure. Sometimes, for a lesser offence, the beating would be administered in his own study. Both occasions gave him joy.
It was at a House beating in his own study that he once allowed his nature to get the better of him. The boy concerned had dared question the validity of his decision. The insolence of the suggestion drove the eighteen-year-old Cromer into a cold and dedicated anger. The beating he then delivered, with the full weight of his body, drew blood beneath the younger boy’s trousers. When examined by a doctor, marks were even found on the victim’s groin, where the cane had whipped around the side of his buttock and hip.
The traditions of the school demanded complete stoicism. Even after such a caning, the boy would have been expected to shake hands with his persecutor, then continue life as normal. He might bear the stigmata for weeks, but he would say nothing, nor would anybody else.
This time, however, there was a comeback. The boy’s father was a Jewish textile manufacturer determined to buy the trappings of English culture for his offspring. The boy himself was less certain that he needed them. Cromer’s actions decided him: he telephoned his father, who appeared the following day, pulled his son out of school and obtained a doctor’s report. Copies of the report were passed to the headmaster, the housemaster, Cromer’s parents and his own solicitor. It was only with the greatest skill that a public scandal was averted. Cromer himself, who was amazed to find that he was considered to have done something amiss, was severely reprimanded. It changed his attitude not at all. But it did teach him that, if he wished to indulge in such activities, he would have to cloak them in a veneer of respectability.
The only other time that Cromer was able to let himself go was in Berlin immediately after the war. He had been too young to see any active service. The war was over just as he finished his training. As a newly commissioned second lieutenant, he flew into Tempelhof airport in Berlin in July 1945, the first time the victorious Russians had allowed the Western allies into the former German capital. Berlin was still a charnel house, a wilderness of buildings torn apart, squares and streets littered with rubble, a population half-starved. Cromer rapidly saw that he had been presented with a unique opportunity. The occupying troops were the élite, buying goods, labour and sex with money, cigarettes, food, luxury goods. Marks were worth nothing; sterling and dollars were like gold.
For the first year, when the Germans were still regarded as the enemy and the Russians as friends, Cromer was in his element. He transferred in his own cash and bought for derisory sums anything of value he could lay his hands on. It was amazing that so much had survived the war unscathed – Meissen china, Steinway and Bechstein grand pianos, hallmarked silver, exquisitely embroidered linen, nineteenth-century military paraphernalia by the ton, even a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. He hired a warehouse near Tempelhof and had it sealed off. For two years, he packed in his treasures. He was by no means the only one to take advantage of the Berliners in this way, though in the scale of his operations he was practically unique.
In early 1948 Cromer, now a captain, was given as administrative assistant a teenage second lieutenant, Richard Collins. For Cromer, this turned out to be a providential appointment. As well as fulfilling his normal duties, organizing patrols and the distribution of food, Collins was soon recruited after hours to supervise the stowing of Cromer’s latest acquisitions. It was not a demanding job – a couple of evenings a week at most – but it was regular, and he was promised a share of the proceeds.
One evening in May, when Collins was closing up for the night, a task he had been taught to do surreptitiously, he heard a crash around the corner. He ran to the side of the building and was in time to see a bottle, flaming at one end, sail through the newly made hole in one of the windows. A Molotov cocktail.
Collins knew it would be caught by the wire-mesh netting inside the window and guessed it would do little damage. Hardly pausing, he sprinted into the rubble-strewn shadows from which the bottle had come, in time to see a slight figure vanishing round the next street corner. Collins was young, fit and well fed, and the teenage fire-bug, weakened by years of malnutrition, had no chance of escape. Collins sprinted up from behind and pushed him hard in the shoulders. The German took off forwards into a heap of rubble, hit it head on and collapsed into the bricks like a sack of potatoes. Collins hauled him over, and found his head dreadfully gashed and his neck broken.
Collins heaved the body across the unlit street and into a bombed building. He then ran back to the warehouse, retrieved the guttering, still unbroken bottle of petrol from the wire grill, stamped out the cloth, poured the contents down a drain, slung the bottle away into the roadside rubble, listened to see if the crash and the noise of running feet would bring a patrol, and then, reassured, went off to find Cromer.
Cromer knew what he owed Collins. He used his own jeep to pick up the body, and by three o’clock in the morning the German had become just another unidentified corpse in a small canal.
There had been some mention of German resentment against profiteering, but this was the first direct evidence Cromer had had of it. He saw that the time had come to stop.
Within a couple of months, Berlin was blockaded by the Russians and the airlift was under way. Planes loaded with food and fuel from the West were landing at Tempelhof every three minutes and taking off again, empty. Except that some were not empty. It took Cromer only two weeks to organize the shipment of his complete stock in twin-engine Dakotas, first to Fassberg, then on to England, to a hangar on a Midlands service aerodrome. A year later, demobbed, Cromer organized two massive auctions that netted him £150,000. In Berlin his outlay had been just £17,000. Not bad for a twenty-four-year-old with no business experience and no more than a small allowance from the business he was destined to take over.
Now Cromer the racketeer was about to resurface.
After lunch Cromer returned temporarily to his hermit-like existence. His staff did not find his behaviour peculiar; there had been crises demanding his personal attention before. He made two telephone calls. The first was to Oswald Kupferbach in Zurich, to an office in the Crédit Suisse, 8 Paradeplatz – one of the few banks in Switzerland which have special telephone and telex lines solely for dealing in gold bullion.
‘Oswald? Wie geht’s dir?…Yes, a long time. We have to meet as soon as possible…I’m afraid so. Something has come up over here. It’s about Lion…Yes, it’s serious, but not over the phone. You have to be here…I can only say that it concerns all our futures very closely…Ideally, this weekend? Sunday evening for Monday morning? That would be perfect…You and Jerry…I’ll have a car for you and a hotel. I’ll telex the details.’
The next call was to New York, to a small bank off Wall Street that had specialities comparable to Cromer’s – though little gold, of course, and more stock-exchange dealings – and a relationship with the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company similar to Cromer’s with Rothschild’s. He spoke to Jerry Lodge.
‘Jerry? Charlie. It’s about Lion…’
The call had a similar pattern to the previous one – prevarication from the other end, further persuasion by Cromer, mention of mutual futures at stake and, finally, a meeting arranged for Monday morning.
In an