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Pitt looked up, disbelief etched on his face. “That’s impossible. No one on this earth could get that kind of an amount through a custom’s inspection.”
“No one, that is, except Bruno von Till.” The voice was a low murmur, and Pitt suddenly felt cold.
“It’s not his real name of course. That was lost somewhere in his past, long before he became an elusive smuggler, the most diabolic and crafty purveyor of human misery of all time.” Zac swung around and gazed unseeing out the window. “Captain Kidd, the blockade runners of the Confederacy and all the slave traders rolled into one couldn’t hold a candle to von Till’s setup.”
“You make him sound like the arch villain of the century.” Pitt ventured. ‘What did he do to deserve the honor?”
Zac flickered a glance at him, then looked again through the window.
“The numerous revolutionary bloodbaths suffered by Central and South America in the last twenty years would never have occurred without secret arms shipments from Europe. Do you recall the great Spanish gold theft of nineteen fifty-four? Spain’s already shaky economy nearly toppled after a large government gold reserve vanished from the secret vaults of the Ministry of Treasury. Shortly after, India’s black market was glutted with gold bars bearing the crest of Spain. How was a cargo that size smuggled seven thousand miles? It’s still a mystery. But we do know a Minerva Lines freighter left Barcelona the night of the theft and arrived in Bombay a day before the gold appeared.”
The swivel chair squeaked, and Zac refaced Pitt. The inspector’s melancholy eyes looked vague and lost in contemplation.
“Immediately prior to Germany’s surrender in World War II,” he continued, “eighty-five high ranking Nazis suddenly materialized in Buenos Aires on the same day. How did they get there? Again, the only ship arrival that morning was a Minerva Lines freighter. Again in the summer of nineteen fifty-four an entire bus load of teenage school girls disappeared on an outing in Naples. Four years later an Italian embassy aid discovered one of the missing girls wandering aimlessly through one of the back alleys of Casablanca.” Zac paused for nearly a minute, then went on very quietly. ‘She was completely insane. I saw photographs of her body. It was enough to make a grown man cry.”
“And her story?” Pitt prompted gently.
“She remembered being carried aboard a ship with a large ‘M’ painted on the funnel. That was the only thing she said that made any sense. The rest was insane babble.”
Pitt waited for more, but Zac had fallen silent, relighting his pipe and filling the room with a sweet aromatic odor.
“White slavery is a rotten business,” Pitt said! tersely.
Zac nodded. “Those are only four cases of hundred, that are indirectly connected to von Till. If I could quote word for word from the INTERPOL files we would be sitting here for a month, and then some.” “Do you think von Till masterminds the crimes?” “No, the old devil is much too smart to become involved in the actual deed. He merely supplies the transportation. Smuggling is his game, and on a grand scale at that.”
“Why In hell hasn’t the filthy bastard been stopped?” Pitt asked half angry, half confused.
“I wish I could answer that without a feeling of shame,” Zac shook his head sadly. “But I can’t. Nearly
every law enforcement agency in the works has tried to catch von Till with the goods,
so to speak, but he has eluded every trap, murdered every agent sent to infiltrate Minerva Lines. His ships have been searched and researched a thousand times, yet nothing illegal is ever found.”
Pitt idly watched the smoke curl from Zac’s pipe. “No one is that clever. If he’s human, he can be caught.”
“God knows we’ve tried. our combined law enforcement agencies have studied every inch of the Minerva ships, shadowed them day and night at sea, guarded them like hawks at the docks, and searched every bulkhead with electronic detection gear.
“I can rattle off the names of at least twenty investigators—damn good ones too—who have made von Till’s arrest their life’s work.”
Pitt lit a second cigarette and stared at Zac steadily. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because I think you might help us.”
Pitt sat silent, scratching the irritating chest bandage. Might as well nibble at the bait he thought.
“How?”
For the first time a flicker of devilishness showed in Zac’s eyes, then disappeared as quickly as it had come.
“I understand you’re quite friendly with von Till’s niece.”
“I’ve laid her if that’s what you mean.”
“How long have you known her?”
“We met for the first time on the beach yesterday.”
The surprise on Zac’s face slowly turned to a sly grin. “You’re either a very fast ‘worker or a very adept liar.”
