Authors: Stanley Johnson
“Yes. I just came off the night-shift. I like to have breakfast before heading home.”
“You guys speak English pretty well.”
“We have to. Even if I didn’t work for SABENA, I’d probably still speak English. With the Walloons fighting the Flamands and vice-versa, English is a kind of neutral language.” He laughed.
“What kind of work do you do here?”
“I’m on the cargo side. I’d say half the business of this airport is cargo.” The Belgian looked out of the window towards the tarmac apron. “See that Air Zaire 747. That makes four flights a week to Kinshasha. Exclusively cargo.”
Kaplan felt his interest quicken.
“What kind of cargo?”
There was a momentary hesitation in the man’s reply.
“Oh, any number of things. Anything you can think of. Don’t forget the links between Belgium and Zaire are very close. The Zairian President still comes to Brussels every two months or so to pick up his instructions. He even keeps a house here, more of a palace really, in Uccle, which is one of the French-speaking quarters.”
Lowell Kaplan decided to play a hunch. He took out his card.
“Look, I wonder if you can help me. I’m from the U.S. Government. I’m with the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. My job is to track down exotic diseases at home and abroad, wherever such diseases can threaten the health of the people of the United States.”
The man seemed impressed. “I’ve heard of the Atlanta Center. You do a good job.” He offered Kaplan his hand. “By the way, my name is Jean Delgrave.”
Kaplan gave the man the necessary background. It took some time and Delgrave listened throughout with close attention.
“So you see,” Kaplan concluded, “we believe that the girl may have contracted the disease right here at Zaventem, and that the vector may have been an animal, probably a monkey imported for medical research purposes. Does any of this sound possible? Is there still trade in live animals through Zaventem? I know that under the Washington Convention, states undertake to prohibit the import into, or transit through, their territories of animals belonging to rare and endangered species. But I wondered . . .”
Delgrave laughed out loud, interrupting him. “My dear sir, you don’t really believe all that, do you?” He looked quickly around the bar and lowered his voice. “Don’t you know that this is a multi-million dollar business? You can’t stamp out the trade in wild animals just by signing a paper. I’ll tell you something.” He lowered his voice still further. “I see cargo transiting every day through Zaventem in flagrant breach of the Washington Convention. Some of the biggest names in Belgium are involved. Of course, I turn a blind eye. We all do.”
“Why don’t you protest?”
“I have a job. I don’t want to lose that job. If my superiors in the SABENA hierarchy don’t mind, why should I mind? Look at that plane,” he pointed out of the window to the Air Zaire aircraft. “She came in this morning. She hasn’t been unloaded yet. They park it on the apron there, off to one side and they wait till dark before they take the stuff off.”
“What stuff?”
“The livestock, the animals. There was a time when half of them would be dead. The conditions were terrible. Cooped up in cages for forty-eight hours and more with no food or water. And God knows how long they’d been held before that at the collecting camps in Zaire or other parts of Africa.”
“Are conditions better now?”
“Yes, they are. The people who run this trade realize it’s bad business letting the animals die. They lose money and they don’t like losing money.”
Jean Delgrave stood up abruptly. “I’ve said too much. It’s too dangerous. I shouldn’t be seen here talking to you.”
Kaplan took the point. He remembered the ambush he had nearly fallen into a couple of hours earlier. He wanted live witnesses, not dead ones.
“Look, Mr Delgrave. You’ve got to understand one thing. I am an epidemiologist. I’m only interested in the trade in live animals in so far as this trade proves to be the cause of infection that could have consequences for health in the United States. Enforcement of international treaties to which Belgium is signatory is your concern, not mine.”
“The big men behind the trade won’t see it like that. If you pursue your enquiries, whatever your motive, they’ll see you as a threat. And then — watch out.”
Kaplan pressed him: “Can you meet me later? Tonight? Somewhere we won’t be observed.”
“Why? What more can I tell you?”
“I want details of cargo movements in Zaventem at the beginning of June, especially June 5. I want to know, for example, if live monkeys from Africa were transiting through here at that time.”
Delgrave was incredulous. “There are no records of this trade.”
“Of course there are records.” Kaplan coaxed the man to his point of view. “There are always records. There will be false records for the international inspectors who exist only to be duped, and there will be true records for the men who run the business.”
A shifty look crossed the Belgian’s face.
“It may be expensive. I may have to bribe certain people.”
As soon as the man mentioned money, Kaplan knew that he had him where he wanted him.
“Funds will not be a problem. Believe me, when the United States wants some information, we are prepared to pay for it. And pay well.”
Jean Delgrave smiled. The scraggy ginger moustache turned up at the corners.
“I’ll do my best.”
Kaplan had one last request. “Delgrave, can you spare me your ID till this evening? You won’t need it until you come back on duty, will you? I’d like to have a look around.”
Jean Delgrave’s initial reluctance was overcome when Kaplan pressed ten thousand Belgian francs into his hand.
“That’s on account. For expenses. There will be more later.”
Kaplan pinned Delgrave’s plastic ID to his lapel. The faces weren’t very similar. Delgrave’s — at least in the photo — had a narrow pinched look which Kaplan didn’t much fancy. But no one ever looked at the photos — not in his experience anyway. Having the badge was what counted.
When Delgrave had left, Kaplan sat for a few minutes finishing his coffee. Then, looking quite plausibly like a SABENA official going home after night duty, he walked out of the building. Instead of making for the carpark, Kaplan turned left and made his way round to the perimeter gate. There was a guard on duty who showed absolutely no interest as Kaplan, wearing the badge and looking purposeful, strode on through.
There was no one standing near the Air Zaire plane, as Kaplan walked straight up the steps. Fifteen minutes later, he came down them again. He had never felt so shaken in his life.
Shortly after one p.m., Lowell Kaplan drove his rented Mercedes with the corn still stuck in the bumper and the bullet-holes still in the roof, inside the tall security gates of the U.S. embassy on Brussels’ Boulevard de la Régence. Seconds after that, he was checked through the security grill by the marines and escorted up to Tim Boswell’s office.
Boswell, number two in the U.S. mission, was a tall lanky man who was occasionally mistaken for John Kenneth Galbraith. His and Kaplan’s paths had crossed in Washington once or twice when Kaplan had been at N.I.H. and Boswell, who was a career diplomat, had one of his periodical domestic assignments at the State Department.
“Lowell, good to see ya” — the tall Bostonian drawled. “You seem to be in a bit of a scrape.”
Kaplan sat on a leather sofa facing the U.S. flag. Behind the desk, the gilded bald-eagle crest and signed portrait of the President indicated that Boswell was a ranking foreign service officer. The diplomat stretched out his long legs across the rug and lit his pipe.
“The cablegrams announcing your Marburg visit were copied to us,” he said. “But that was routine distribution within Europe. You had better bring us up to date.”
Kaplan did so. It took him some time. When he came to describe the duelling scene which he had witnessed in the fraternity house in Marburg, Boswell let out a long whistle.
“I knew that kind of thing still went on. I hadn’t realized it was the way you say.”
“Yeah, it was really incredible.”
“And Schmidtt was really the guy who was involved back in ’67?”
“So he said.”
Boswell shook his head. “That must have been kinda hard to live with.”
Kaplan pulled that morning’s edition of the
Herald Tribune
out of his pocket.
“Did you see this?” He pointed to the picture of Professor Schmidtt.
Boswell gave another whistle.
“I can’t believe our German friends would do that. Not to cover up an event that took place almost fifteen years ago. That’s going too far. Even for them.”
“Schmidtt was frightened. He didn’t want to talk. Who else could have got to him?”
Boswell was not convinced: “We may make some enquiries of our own.”
They left it there. There was nothing to be gained from speculation. If it really was a cover-up, then they could be sure that any police investigation into Professor Schmidtt’s death would come up with precisely nothing.
Kaplan turned to the events of the morning, giving a blow-by-blow account of his visit to Count Philippe Vincennes’ château, including his narrow escape from the ambush that had been prepared for him.
Once again, Boswell was shocked. “Now that’s really going too far. Vincennes gets away with a lot. But he really can’t go around trying to eliminate honoured guests from the U.S. Do you want to bring charges?”
Kaplan shook his head. “We couldn’t prove anything. He’s too clever for that. But I think you could make the wildlife thing stick.”
“What do you mean?” Boswell removed his pipe from his mouth and looked at the other man with interest.
“What wildlife thing?”
Kaplan fished in his briefcase and produced Diane Verusio’s report. He described the damning indictment the report contained of Belgium’s role in the illegal trade in wildlife and his own suspicions of the activities of men like Philippe Vincennes.
“What’s more,” he concluded. “I’m sure the Minister for Trade is in this too.”
“Willy van Broyck?”
“Yes. There has to be collusion by the authorities.”
“Can you prove it?”
“I think I can.”
Taking a deep breath, Kaplan told Boswell what he had seen when, a few hours earlier, he had gone aboard the Air Zaire 747 parked on the runway at Zaventem.
“Tim, you simply have to understand; it was horrendous. There were leopards and cheetahs in there, two giraffes who couldn’t even stand upright, half-a-dozen antelope of one kind or another and I’d say two hundred monkeys. I don’t know the details of the Washington Convention but I’m damn sure those monkeys were all protected.”
Kaplan gave the other man a full account and Boswell took it all in. From time to time he made notes. When Kaplan had finished, the diplomat rose to his feet and paced the rug in front of his desk.
“Lowell, I can’t tell how grateful I am that you’ve been able to file this report. We are all grateful. We’ve suspected for some time that Belgium was allowing the convention to be breached. I can tell you that the U.S., as a major signatory, is going to lean very hard indeed. I’ll have a word with the Ambassador and cable Washington straightaway.”
“What about Vincennes? Are you prepared to put him out of business?”
Boswell was emphatic. “We’ll certainly try to nail him. It may be difficult. We need hard evidence. As you know he has many friends in the Government. Besides, this animal trade is only a side-line for him. He’s got plenty of other irons in the fire. He doesn’t need this to survive; it’s gravy to him.” He looked at his watch. “Talking of gravy, it’s lunchtime. I’ll take you down to the Quai Sainte Catherine.”
“Quai? I didn’t know Brussels was on a river.”
“It isn’t any longer. They bricked it over.”
Even though the river had disappeared, the little fish restaurants along the Quai Sainte Catherine were still very much in business.
“The speciality is lobster or
moules
— mussels. The Bruxellois are very keen on mussels,” Boswell explained. “With chips of course.
Moules et frites.
”
“I’ll stick to lobster.”
Two hours later they were still at table and half way through their second bottle of wine.
“You know, Tim,” Kaplan wiped away some crumbs of fish from his mouth, “I rather fancy living in Europe for a time. I think I work too hard. People over here know how to relax.”
Boswell looked around the fashionable little restaurant. It was after three p.m., but the place was still half-full. “I’d say the Belgians certainly know how to eat. So do the French. You ought to make a quick trip to Paris before you go back.”
“I’d like to.” Kaplan had a quick mental image of the photograph he had seen of Stephanie Verusio. Hadn’t Dr Reuben mentioned that she lived in France? Perhaps they’d tracked her down by now.
Boswell folded his napkin and pushed back his chair.
“I’ve got to get back to the office. We’ll put Washington in the picture, Lowell. There are a whole number of angles to this thing. We have to have the right people looking at it.” As they left the restaurant and entered the long black bulletproof limousine waiting for them at the curb, Boswell added: “What about your meeting this evening with Delgrave? Can we help on that? This Marburg business is now a priority of the U.S. Government and that means it’s my priority too.”
Kaplan shook his head. “I think I’ll go alone. I don’t want to scare him off.”
“We’ll keep you covered anyway. You won’t necessarily see us. But we’ll be there.”
Kaplan felt reassured. He was not a hero, and had no wish to become one.
Later that day, Kaplan was once more to be found in a Brussels restaurant. It was a small dimly lit place in one of the little streets near the Grand Place.
Jean Delgrave was out of breath when he finally arrived ten minutes late for the appointment.
“I came the long way round. Through all the back streets. I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t followed.”
Kaplan handed back the ID. “Thanks. It was most useful. Did you have any luck?”
Delgrave was cautious. He patted his inside vest pocket to indicate that the papers were there.