The Munich Legacy

MUNICH, GERMANY 1982

How do you hide seven billion dollars? That was the question I’d been asking myself all week. It wasn’t that Egon Von Rath had hidden the money, not like he had stuffed it in a mattress somewhere. The money was all there: Greek shipping lines, American distribution companies, European air carriers -- but tracing it back to Von Rath was almost impossible. And it wasn’t just the money that was hard to locate; Egon Von Rath himself seemed to be missing.

I’d been hired by the prestigious New York law firm of Danbury-Kline to do some backgrounding on the old man and to do it on the quiet. But when I started checking, it was as if the reclusive billionaire didn’t even exist. I could knock on the door, but no one was home.

Home in this case was Schloss Obersee, a baronial castle south of Munich, on a picture postcard lake, the Wandlesee, in the Bavarian Alps. Von Rath, like his American counterpart, Howard Hughes, was secretive to the point of paranoia. He guarded his privacy jealously. I hadn’t been able to get any closer to Schloss Obersee than a quarter of a mile. And, in the two weeks I’d been working on the case, I had yet to meet a single individual who had ever seen Egon Von Rath, let alone anyone who could tell me much about him.

That’s why Harry Ackhurst from Danbury-Kline had flown in on the Lufthansa red-eye special out of JFK. I had worked for Harry on three previous occasions and, while we didn’t much care for one another, we had at least gotten used to each other.

Harry was staying at the famous, five-star Four Seasons Hotel -- the Vierjahreszeiten -- while I was ensconced in the budget class Neumarkt, a small hotel across from the city market, which was run by a friend of mine from my army days in Munich.

Harry had asked me to meet him in the open air cafe that overlooked the formal gardens behind the ornate Wittlesbach Palace, not far from his hotel. I knew why he chose places like this: it gave him a full 360 degree view so no one could get the drop on him. I’d already gotten seated at a table from which I could see Harry coming across the graveled path through the Hofgarten.

I had to give Harry credit for stamina. He’d just arrived at Rheim Airport and yet he was still in full stride when most people would have been nursing jet-lag hangovers with their internal time clocks stuck over the Atlantic. Harry was as fresh as a starched, white napkin in a French restaurant.

I felt like a dishrag. In the past two weeks, I’d been back and forth across the Federal Republic with two trips into East Germany. I’d been in Berlin, Bonn, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Munich and half a dozen other cities, conducting personal interviews and visiting public records offices, newspaper morgues, library reading rooms. . . I was exhausted.

"Scott. Scott Chandler," Harry greeted me like a long-lost brother. We shook hands like gladiators testing one another’s strength. Then Harry pulled up a chair and quickly checked to make sure we were out of earshot of the other tables.

Harry was a big man with thick, fleshy features and a face as pock-marked as the Long Island thruway. He wore a perfectly tailored, blue, pin-striped suit and his nails were manicured and buffed to a high shine which gave him the look of a wrestler at high tea.

It was warm for October, so we ordered two steins of beer.

"Whatcha got on him?" Harry asked the second our waitress was out of sight.

"Here’s my preliminary report," I said, withdrawing the document from my scarred briefcase and sliding it across the table to Harry.

"Preliminary?" Harry attacked the word like a dog shaking a stuffed toy. "Preliminary?"