The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (13 page)

I said nothing.

“Let me put the matter more clearly. You visited the Zentrale Stelle, which does only one sort of business. The question is not what is in the box. They are files, obviously.
Whose
files? You’re investigating someone.”

“I’m
not
an investigator.”

“Of course you aren’t. You’re an engineer. But that’s the name for people who go looking for information in obscure places and find it. Someone besides me is interested in you. Why?”

The examination room was tiny. Malet or Kempf or Laurent, whoever he was, sucked the air out of it. He was a bulky man, all legs and arms. One of him hardly fit in the room. With me, it was impossible. “Who are you really?” I demanded. “First, we meet at customs, in Hong Kong. You’re selling suits. Next, I see you at a ship-breaking yard, buying recycled steel. Now this. Do you import suits, broker steel, or both?”

He crossed and uncrossed his legs, his knees bumping the wooden viewing shelf. “Interpol,” he said again. “Kraus has installations around the world. I assume you heard about the disaster at their mine in Uganda? They’ve got another breaking yard in Bangladesh that’s as bad, or worse, than the one in Hong Kong. Kraus has been moving operations into the Third World to take advantage of cheap labor. He’s a pioneer in shipping Euro-manufacturing offshore, and you can believe that manufacturers in every sector are paying close attention. That’s why I’m hoping to make an example of him. It will serve as a warning.”

I volunteered nothing about Steinholz Precision Auto Parts.

“For the moment, I’m still collecting information. But I hope there will be an indictment. Did you see the condition of his workers?”

I nodded.

“What did you think?”

“A bit rough.”

“A bit? Kraus Steel charges them rent to sleep in those miserable huts, charges them for food, and if they injure themselves, charges them for medical care in a facility that would outrage anyone in the developed world. The company prepays their rent and food allowances, then garnishees their wages. It’s meant as a loan the workers pay off through labor.

“But the workers never pay it off, you see. It’s called debt slavery, and I’m in the process of building a dossier that will kick his ass. If I make a case, I’ll pass it to a prosecutor in The Hague.” He lit a Gauloise and left the pack and a silver lighter on the shelf.

“You can’t smoke in here.” I pointed to a sign.

He shrugged and leaned back in his chair.

“You don’t sell suits,” I said.

“In fact, I do.”

“You don’t.”

“One has to have a cover story. If you and I end up doing business, I’ll introduce you to a tailor I know. Your first suit’s on me, as a gesture of good faith. Call it an installment.”

“On what?”

He blew a plume of smoke at me. I may as well have been sucking the exhaust of a city bus. “I want to know about your relationship with the Kraus family.”

“No. I’m not talking to you.”

“How well do you know the family?”

“I don’t see—”

“Have you gotten close to Anselm? I would like a source on the inside.”

If Laurent was who he said he was, I had a great deal to tell him about the dangers of salvaging gold from electronic junk. But I said nothing. I had heard too much, too fast. “Anselm’s a good man.”

“Charming, I understand. By all accounts, devoted to his family.”

“We’ve met a total of three times. I’d hardly call it a friendship.”

“Have you formed an impression?”

I was forming one, yes. I said nothing.

“The customs officials in Hong Kong told me that Schmidt was bringing computers into the colony and had a visa for the People’s Republic. Would you know why?” Laurent jabbed at the wooden viewing shelf as he spoke. He was a hydraulic jackhammer dressed in linen, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the shelf exploded under the force of him.

“No,” I lied. “I don’t know why he’d bring computers to China.”

“Do you suppose they’re planning some sort of business, Henri? May I call you Henri?”

“No, you may not.”

“Perhaps you know Anselm and Schmidt well enough to appreciate their business model. If not, it goes something like this. They travel the wide world, looking for a good deal. They shit wherever they build a facility, then they bring the profits home to Munich. Remember that the next time you’re drinking their champagne.”

He handed me a business card, then stood, bumping his head on the door frame. “I believe you could use a friend, Monsieur Poincaré. Really, it’s not my style to give advice. But don’t let your affections get the better of you. This is a criminal investigation, and if you help that man I won’t hesitate to take you down. Stay in touch.”

twenty

I
couldn’t stay away from the lab, despite my resolve to leave the circuit boards alone until I stopped coughing. When the ventilation hood arrived a day early and Anselm dispatched an electrician and carpenters to install it, curiosity got the better of me. By Thursday evening the lab was operational, and I began work mostly because I couldn’t
not
begin it. The problem of extracting pure gold from junk, as a problem, fascinated me. To the naked eye, the circuit boards contained nothing of value. But I knew better.

I would be the alchemist squeezing gold from slugs of lead. I would take a worthless board, crush it, bathe it in obscure solutions, and produce a glittering fortune. Never mind Kraus and the hellhole he would need to scale this process and make it profitable. The
problem itself
seduced me.

Liesel was due to arrive from Kampala late Saturday evening, and I had seventy-two hours to advance the cause before greeting her at the airport. The following day, we would visit Anselm for another family barbecue, and there he would press me for news. I would give him news, though at the same time would commit a rather large sin of omission: I’d say nothing of Interpol’s investigation, not to him or Liesel. Which meant that from this point forward, I would be lying every time I was in their presence.

My accident had given me a newfound respect for the trade-craft of chemistry. This time I wore a gas mask
and
worked beneath the ventilation hood as I ground and crushed two circuit boards, soaked them in aqua regia, and boiled a mixture that quickly turned to sludge. I had already used nitric acid, alone, to dissolve the silver and copper into solution as ions. Filtering the sludge a first time, I used sodium chloride to crash the silver from the decanting. This I collected and purified. I had salvaged my first noble metal—and heard Isaac at my shoulder, applauding.

Years before, at our park bench, he’d presented a piece of mica. I could hear him clearly.
When I was your age, my father let me walk with him behind the plow and hold the reins. One day, the blade turned the earth and I saw something shining. I picked it up and said, ‘Papa, look! It’s silver, like Mama’s candlesticks! We’re rich!’ My father laughed and laughed. ‘It’s mica,’ he said.
A
mineral. Look, pull it apart.’ So I held the mica and discovered that I could peel thin sheets off it. ‘It’s fool’s silver,’ my father told me. ‘don’t go thinking you’re rich. You’ll need to work harder than that!’

Isaac handed me a large mica flake that day, as long and wide as my hand. He must have seen his amazed younger self in my face. He laughed as I peeled thin, silvery sheets and held them to the light. I could see through them, each sheet glass-like but flexible. Twelve years later, at University, I chose in my geology course to use a powerful microscope to study the crystal structure of mica. I wrote Isaac long letters all about it and mailed him my final report. As a student, I could still scarcely believe this mineral came fully formed from the earth without humans having shaped it. My learning only deepened my wonder.

Nor could I believe, six years later, that I’d caused pure silver to drop out of a clear, watery solution. But there it was, silver, sitting in a flask before me, nothing foolish about it. Anselm Kraus and his money-making venture aside, I found the
chemistry
of my chemistry, the bonding and unbonding of materials at scales invisible to the naked eye, miraculous.

And to think I was getting paid for it.

I pushed on and found copper to be trickier. After considerable trial and error, having consulted several textbooks, I added sodium hydroxide to what remained of the decanting after harvesting silver. The copper crashed out of solution as copper hydroxide. I heated this, dissolved it in acid, and treated the solution with zinc metal to crash pure, solid copper—not a precious metal, but valuable nonetheless.

I was two for two.

Next came gold, and here I found myself as absorbed in the process as any prospector working the streams of California. Throughout my career I have found that work can impart a welcome form of amnesia. Standing at the lab bench, I forgot about Laurent and his threats to bury me should I side with Liesel and her brother. I forgot the dead eyes of laborers in the ship-breaking yard. I forgot my disgust at Schmidt’s saddling a child with the decision to kill and calling that a lesson in manhood. For a time, I even forgot the photographs at the Nazi archives. Work brought amnesia, if only a temporary reprieve, and I welcomed the break.

In search of gold, I added aqua regia to the ground-up boards already stripped of silver and copper. The next morning I filtered that solution, which contained gold ions—invisible, but present the way sugar is present after it dissolves into a cup of hot tea. I added sodium metabisulfite, and damn if pure gold didn’t crash out of the solution, sun-yellow gold falling like flecks in a snow globe. I let out a yelp. I collected it, melted it, and let it solidify into shiny pellets.

An excellent start. I had proofs of concept but nothing useful to report regarding a process that could liberate these metals at scale, when Anselm would be collecting tens of thousands and, one day, millions of circuit boards for salvage.

My more difficult challenge concerned palladium and platinum. To recover these precious metals, I had to dissolve circuitry from the boards once again in aqua regia—but this time boiling it! I used tongs to swirl the flask over a Bunsen burner. The solution threw off fumes, as before, though a manageable amount. In an abundance of caution, I had used compressed air to dry the flasks before mixing the acids. I switched the ventilation hood to its “high” position. My gas mask functioned properly—the lenses didn’t fog. So I had conquered the fumes.

Even so, if the flask cracked and splashed aqua regia onto an open flame, I risked a flash, if not an explosion. I arranged for a serviceman to install a second phone at the lab bench in the event I needed to make an emergency call.

All day Friday I worked at isolating palladium and platinum. I tried to crash the platinum out of solution first, using ammonium chloride. It wouldn’t go. I tried using different ratios of hydrochloric and nitric acids. I varied boil times and the intensity of the heat. I refreshed my chemical supplies, thinking my original batches might have been tainted. Nothing worked; so at the end of a long shift, I killed the flame and set the solution beneath the exhaust fan to cool.

It was seven o’clock. I pulled off the mask and was closing windows and shutting off lights when I heard a knock at the door and turned to find a visitor who’d taken the liberty of letting himself in.

“Permission to come aboard, Captain?”

“Viktor,” I said. “You’re always welcome.”

“Anselm told me I might find you here. A young man like you, alone in a lively city. Surely you have things to do tonight.” He looked at his watch. “Music. Bars.”

“I’ll share a secret. I’m boring. Please don’t tell Liesel.”

“Hah! I’d call it industrious. Seven o’clock on a Friday evening, still at your bench?” He rose on the balls of his feet and leaned my way. “Anselm mentioned your Argentina connections. Liesel must have told him. She’s very proud of you, too, you know. She was boasting. A second treasure ship—in Buenos Aires. Imagine that. It’s becoming something of a specialty of yours, hunting treasure.”

“Not by design. But we’ll take the work.” I removed my lab coat.

“Well, if you go to Argentina, you should meet my wife, Greta. If it’s possible, you should meet our friends, too. We gather every Friday afternoon at our home. We call ourselves the Edelweiss Society. We all moved after the war. Europe was such a depressing place. But I go so far back with Kraus Steel that I couldn’t give up my position here. I spend at least one week of every six in Buenos Aires. I’ll retire soon enough and move there permanently. It feels like home, this collection of friends. I miss them.”

I hadn’t a clue why he was visiting. “I may not go,” I said. This was the truth. It was a long trip, and I figured I could get everything accomplished using courier services. Plus, I could spare our client, the Argentine government, an expensive airfare.

“But another treasure hunt? How can you resist?” He joined me at the bench and held an empty beaker to a lamp, turning it in his hands. “It’s good to know people, Henri. Anselm and I do, here in Germany. My friends in Buenos Aires are well connected, and you should know them—if you go, that is.”

“Viktor, you’re very kind, but it’s been a long day.”

“All right, then. To the point.”

The warehouse was large enough to hold several modest-sized apartments. I had claimed a tiny corner by a bank of windows and a water supply—hard by one of the two doors, near a freight elevator. The second door was some forty meters distant. If I had a rock in my hand, I couldn’t have thrown it that far. But I could see that door plainly, and when it opened I saw a tall man with short hair like Schmidt’s, only blond. He wore a dark suit and closed the door behind him. He stood at attention, his hands clasped before him, and said nothing.

“Henri, you’ve visited the Zentrale Stelle and pulled a file on Otto von Kraus.”

I stared at him.

“How would you know, Viktor?”

“Any business that concerns a Kraus or this company, I know.”

I doubted that. I doubted he knew that an Interpol agent had been watching his little drama with the customs agent in Hong Kong. The bastard.