Iron Gustav

  However, what will fall most will be the mark. What was the dollar that day? Forty-two thousand marks! And it was going to be quoted at forty-two millions, at forty-two milliards, till the bottom dropped out of it. The only thing that mattered now was to know when this stage was going to be reached so that the bears should cover. ‘I’ll wire you, Erich – you’ll see!’

  Three days later Erich travelled as special diplomatic courier to Brussels. It pleased him considerably that the Reich paid for his journey in pursuit of his further speculations. It was a drab February day when he arrived in Amsterdam; he disliked the town, thought it narrow, gloomy, overcrowded, noisy. The canals lay inert, stinking and foggy. And the offices of Roest the banker were three small, dirty rooms on a third floor. He had to go there several times before being received.

  Herr Roest was a pale, tall, restless man with gold-rimmed spectacles. Failing to ask his visitor to take a seat, he paced up and down, continually wiping his face with a big coloured handkerchief.

  ‘Who’s he sent me?’ he muttered. ‘Nothing but scroungers. I’ve no vacancy in my office. There are only scroungers left in Germany. God, I suppose you know that the Belgian franc stayed firm? Like iron! And I’m a bear for a million.’ Very depressed, Herr Roest looked at his visitor without seeing him and, wiping his face continually, expressed himself at length on the perfidy of the Belgian government which, while secretly supporting the franc, had led people to expect a fall in it. ‘They’re all criminals! A plague on them! And I’m a million down.’ At last he remembered that his visitor had come with a letter of introduction. ‘What d’you want?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘They all want something out of me. But who gives me anything?’ Having decided to read the letter, he grew more amiable. ‘So? You want to go to the Stock Exchange? Do a bit of foreign currency exchange? Then you’re on the right track, I’ll look after you like my own son, just like myself. But marks! Marks! What d’you want with marks? You’ll burn your fingers; no one knows what’ll become of the mark. Poincaré – he’ll ruin it. What does he gain? Nothing at all. All very well if he did – but things are just like that anyway. Isn’t that so? How much are you going to start off with?’

  Erich Hackendahl muttered something about fifty thousand dollars but he wanted to think it over first – get his bearings. He didn’t much like Herr Roest with his dirty, gnawed-at nails, his alternation of lament and aggression, his coloured handkerchief …

  ‘Go, young man, go and ask round. Ask about Roest – you’ll hear. And what’ll you hear? God, I was caught short, caught short for one million Brussels.’ He recovered himself and held out a damp and bony hand. ‘You’ll hear, you’ll come back.’ Lord, what a greenhorn to think that he could hang onto his money and make a fortune as well. He’ll see!

  Erich Hackendahl did see the city. He saw the city in turmoil. That is to say, he didn’t see the city at all. He had intended to go to the Rijksmuseum and see the Rembrandts. The landlubber wanted to see the harbour and the overseas traffic – he saw nothing of it. He sat about in the lounges of the luxury hotels, in bars, in the cafés frequented by the stockjobbers; he went to the brokers’ offices and sat with other clients staring feverishly at the glass panels which showed the quotations in illuminated figures, flashing off, flashing on again.

  Wherever he went he heard only talk of gold currencies, bear selling, offer and bid, arbitrage, guilders, francs, dollars, pounds – he heard nothing else. It was possible that the Dutch people in general were leading a different kind of life – sometimes, going back to his hotel at four in the morning, he met fishermen on their way to the harbour, saw their tanned, leathery faces and remarkably light eyes – and for a moment it would occur to him that these people went to work, to real manual work, for a single guilder while nearby on the Stock Exchange tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of guilders were won (and lost) every day of their lives. But such moments grew rarer. It was not his business anyway.

  He had been indignant with Roest for receiving him as though he were a beggar and a greenhorn, but he soon saw that he really was a greenhorn in this city riotous with millions. Roest in his three dirty little rooms had engagements to the extent of fifty million guilders in the money market.

  Others, people whom formerly he wouldn’t have cared to sit next to in a café – so unkempt they looked – were engaged in even larger transactions. He was glad to sit beside them now, indeed seeking them out, and listening reverently when, peevishly stirring their coffee, they said: ‘I got a hunch. I dreamed of a black cat with white spots. I got a hunch the dollar will sag tomorrow.’ And he saw these creatures get into their luxurious English or Italian cars and race off at a hundred kilometres an hour to Scheveningen or Spa …

  Burning envy filled him. In Berlin, with well over half a million marks, he had considered himself a rich man; here he saw that that was nothing. There were people here – he spoke to them – who had lost twenty times that amount in half an hour, and who laughed about it. ‘I shan’t have to sell matches – I’ll get it all back,’ they boasted. And get it back they did.

  Erich Hackendahl both envied and despised them. He envied them their nose for the market, their nerve – the reckless courage with which almost hourly they risked their whole existence, all their goods and chattels – he even envied them their frivolous feelings. But he despised them profoundly for their inability to do anything with the money they had gained, for their inability to clear out once they were really rich, to flee the excitements of the money market and lead the kind of life which he personally desired.

  Vaguely it dawned on him that these people were different, that they were not in this game just to become rich, but for the sake of the game itself. Fundamentally they were gamblers – and like all gamblers they could never stop, not even to think – all they wanted was to go on gambling. He, however, wanted to become rich in order to live well. He wanted to buy beautiful things, to live with beautiful women, to travel. Throughout his youth he had breathed the air of a stable; he shuddered when he remembered it. One must never be poor again, he thought, one must never have to worry over money.

  He started cautiously. He deposited certain amounts as margin with two or three brokers and began to give buying and selling orders. He felt very uncertain, always conscious that the ground on which he trod was insecure. The banker Roest (whom he also visited as a client) had summed him up correctly in the first five minutes. He would have preferred to keep his money intact; he wanted to gamble without any risk.

  He would see, the nebbish! smiled Herr Roest to himself, and gave his customer careful and prudent advice. He knew that you first had to feed your birds before you could trap them in the net.

  That spring the mark was remarkably firm, even recovering by fifty per cent. Erich, who believed he knew more about the fluctuations of the mark than anyone else, did no business at all. Throughout the whole of March and April the telegrams said the same thing: ‘Dora’s condition unchanged. Father.’ This Cuno government continued unyieldingly to support the mark through all this; the bears either experienced miserable shipwreck or were simply stranded.

  Erich, getting impatient, once or twice speculated on the franc, which, however, proved incalculable. He gained a couple of thousand francs, did not sell out and eventually lost fifteen thousand. By the middle of May he was further from his object than he had been at the beginning of February. On the whole he had lost money, and living expenses in Amsterdam were exorbitant. By now his life differed in no way from that of any other habitué of the Stock Exchange. He used his hotel room only for a couple of hours in the morning; the rest of the day he hung about banks and offices, listening to the brokers’ jargon or waiting feverishly for the New York opening quotations (even if he was not involved). His nights were spent in cafés and bars – not having carried out his original intention of acquiring a permanent lady friend, he contented himself with the pleasures occasionally to be found in such places. He was now twenty-six years of age an
d had already noticed that women had lost much of their attractiveness for him – much more important was the best of food and wine, though not to excess. Rapidly he became fat and slothful.

  At heart, however, he was more restless than ever, obsessed by the thought of money; he wanted to get back what he had lost and multiply it twenty times over. And on this idea he would brood for hours, sitting over his coffee, a dead cigar between his lips. He made a thousand plans but even when one of them appeared reasonably safe he shrank at the last moment from the risk. Poverty scared him. He had had a taste of that once – of what he considered poverty – with his parents. Never again! He must hold onto his money. And as a last resource there was always his friend in Berlin. But maybe this friend was no longer a friend, although he had entrusted him with so considerable a sum of money. It might be a trap.

  Early in May, arriving at his hotel about five o’clock in the morning, he was informed that a gentleman had been waiting for him since the previous evening; from the night porter’s expression it could be gathered that this gentleman was of no great importance. And in truth the visitor, who had to be shaken out of a deep sleep in an armchair, did not look very impressive; he was a young fellow, poorly dressed and badly nourished, like all those now inundating Amsterdam from Germany. He stated that he came from the gentleman’s friend in Berlin and his message could be delivered only in private. Erich Hackendahl took the lad up to his room. Here, without further ado, the visitor slipped off his jacket and took out from its lining a slip of paper folded several times.

  Erich took it reluctantly and unfolded it. It was a typewritten message to the effect that within three or four days the Reichsbank would withdraw its support from the mark and that Erich should be a bear with all he possessed. ‘What I foretold is now about to come off.’

  Erich gave the lad a ten-guilder note and promised him a further hundred if the message brought him luck. He should come and enquire in a week’s time.

  He did not sleep that night, brooding over what he should do. Might this not be the moment his friend had chosen for his revenge? Nothing on the exchange had pointed to any such collapse. During the last four weeks the mark had slowly fallen but it was still higher than at the end of January. Supposing he did as instructed and speculated for a fall with all he possessed – supposing his friend was deceiving him and the mark remained firm? He shuddered.

  The expedient upon which he finally decided was characteristic of Erich. He himself would wait for a time but the money his friend had entrusted to him should be invested in conformity with the message. Roest urged him to desist. ‘The Germans are standing firm in the Ruhr. The mark is like iron.’ But Erich was also of iron, with his friend’s money.

  A fortnight later he was cursing himself. Support had been withdrawn and the mark had fallen; he had earned on his friend’s money fifty thousand marks, but he could easily have earned half a million. The friend had been a genuine friend and he a suspicious fool. Of little consolation was the studied respect paid him by Herr Roest. The greenhorn had known more than the whole Stock Exchange in Amsterdam – if he’d given me a hint I’d have gone in with him – and we’d be in clover now, I can tell you!

  And Herr Roest dried his sweating face on a silk handkerchief.

  From that day onwards Erich’s affairs became lively. Telegrams from Berlin announced a worsening of Dora’s condition; Erich no longer mistrusted them or his friend, but rather his own timidity – it was now a question of estimating how quickly the mark would fall. And on that point also messages came from Berlin, telegrams or sometimes by hand.

  Towards the end of July Erich was a millionaire. But a million was nothing – Roest was involved on the Stock Exchange to the extent of fifteen! In August, when the Cuno government fell and was replaced by a Cabinet under Dr Stresemann, when once again friendly tones were to be heard vis-à-vis France, when the dollar rose from one to ten million marks, Erich possessed over five millions in gold marks. But he had done it on his nerves, sleeping only with the help of drugs, avoiding all exercise, conversing unwillingly. He sat two hours over his lunch and could talk the jargon of the Stock Exchange to perfection; brokers greeted him respectfully, bankers asked in a friendly way for his opinion on the Norwegian currency. His hair was getting very thin …

  But all this was only a beginning – the riot hadn’t started yet. In September passive resistance in the Ruhr was given up and within three weeks the dollar had risen from twenty to one hundred and sixty million marks. Erich no longer knew how much he was worth. The greater part of his fortune was involved in various commitments, with quotations fluctuating continually. Sometimes he pulled himself together and tried to work it out, but he got confused; the endless columns of figures exhausted him and he gave it up.

  I’ll stop now, he swore to himself. Only once more …

  Erich Hackendahl had always been a bear; he had made his fortune on the collapse of the mark, on the collapse of the German currency. Never go back to Germany, he said often, and everyone agreed. But he knew that the mark must stop falling one day, and be stabilized somehow. Already there were rumours of a gold currency, even of one based on rye. Throughout the whole of October, while the mark plunged down into milliards, there was a noticeable uncertainty. When would it stop? Would it be possible to get out in time?

  Erich was preoccupied with these questions. He had known beforehand when the mark was no longer to be supported and had been a coward about it. This time he would get his tip, and this time he would risk everything. Risk? No risk at all. The friend was a real friend. Every tip of his had come straight from the horse’s mouth. Once only – just once – Erich wanted to be a bull, and then he would get out. He even intended to settle accounts honestly with his friend, who should have no cause for regret.

  During the latter part of October, rumours and uncertainty about the mark increased. A Rentenbank had been established in Berlin. At what level would the mark be stabilized? Erich decided to send a messenger to his friend. He found a German waiter who, because he was homesick, wanted to go back to Germany (what a great idea!), paid him his travel money and sent him back to Berlin with a note.

  On 1 November he received through a messenger the information that the mark would be stabilized at a dollar parity of 420 milliards, the dollar then standing at 130. One day … another day … and Erich still hesitated. Then, on the third day, the dollar being quoted at 420 milliards, he made his decision, cursing his cowardice and putting everything he possessed on at 420. The bear for the first time became a bull.

  ‘God save you,’ exclaimed Roest. ‘You’re in for it! I shall hear you bellowing tomorrow.’

  Herr Roest was mistaken: 4 November came and went; the mark remained firm. Erich triumphed and trembled. On the 5th Herr Roest became doubtful. Was the greenhorn right after all? The fellow had been recommended from Berlin. Ought he himself to jump in now? There was still time … No, no, no, he wouldn’t, he put no faith in the Germans. Despairingly he wiped his face.

  On 6 November the mark was still like iron, standing at 420 milliards. Erich calculated his gains, his fortune. If he deducted half a million gold marks for his Berlin adviser, there remained about twenty-three million marks.

  I’ve brought it off, he thought, and fell asleep.

  But an hour or two later he was woken by the telephone. ‘Where are you? Why are you sleeping?’ exclaimed Herr Roest from the receiver. ‘The mark’s opened weak, the dollar has come in at 510, and the man’s asleep! You’re done for.’

  Very quietly Erich put the receiver back. He did not get up. He stayed in bed; there was no strength in his limbs. I’m beaten, he told himself. He’s taken me in.

  Yet he could not believe it. All those months of merciless hell – and to what end? The loss of everything! It was impossible. He rang up a broker. The dollar was quoted at 590.

  ‘Come and see, the mark’s done for. What a currency! Enough to make you sick.’

  But he didn’t go, he didn’t cu
t his losses. He lay in bed, trembling with fright. It was exactly the same fright as he had known in the trenches. If I’d gone with him into that café, he thought, I’d be well off now.

  Yesterday, even twelve hours ago, he had believed that success was his – twenty-three millions! And he recalled how he had had to cringe, cheat, deny himself to scrape together the first twenty thousand. I’ll never be able to do it again, he thought despairingly. And what then? For a man of his sort, who had become what he had become, it was impossible to return to nothingness, to poverty, to some petty job, for instance. Well?

  Twice he put through a trunk call to Berlin and each time cancelled it.

  Roest implored him to come and rescue all that could be rescued. Actually there was still something to save, even with the dollar quoted at 630 milliards. He could have retrieved part of his money.

  He dressed and left the hotel. No, he didn’t drive this time; he walked. He went to neither broker nor banker, he went to the Rijksmuseum. He wanted to see the Rembrandts.

  But 7 November, almost exactly the fifth anniversary of the armistice, was not his lucky day – the museum was closed. I’ll come again tomorrow, he thought. I would like to have seen the Rembrandts at least …

  On his way back to the hotel he had an inspiration, and slapped his forehead. It was quite clear: the German government was behind this fall in German currency. It wanted to buy back its marks cheaply, so as to stabilize at 420. A colossal deal at the expense of the world’s money markets!

  He spoke like his father. ‘I’m of iron. I’ll hang on till the mark goes to 420. Iron!’

  For six days, from 7 to 12 November, he held on, the dollar standing without fluctuations at 630 milliards; he still hoped for stabilization at 420, in accordance with his friend’s message. The brokers, since his deposits still covered his losses, left him in peace. Only the banker Roest said: ‘You’ve got to be as cast-iron as the mark is! You’re lost.’