Windfall

He dumped his bags, went to room 14, and knocked. A guarded voice said, 'Yeah; who is it?'

'Stafford.'

There was the snap of a lock and the door opened and swung wide. He went in and Hardin said, 'Where the hell have you been? I've been telephoning every two hours for the last two days and getting no answer. So I jump a plane and what do I find? No one.' He was aggrieved.

'Calm down, Ben,' Stafford said. 'We had to go away but it had good results.' He paused and examined that statement, then added, 'If I knew what they were.'

Hardin examined Stafford closely. 'Your face is scratched. Been with a dame?'

Stafford sat down. 'When you've stopped being funny we can carry on. You were sent back for a reason. Did you find anything?'

Hardin said, 'I've just ordered from room service. I didn't want to eat in public before I knew where Gunnarsson was. I'll cancel.'

'No, I'll join you,' said Stafford. 'Duplicate the order.'

'Okay.' Hardin telephoned the order before opening the refrigerator and taking out a couple of bottles of beer. 'Jan-Willem Hendrykxx – an old guy and a travelling man. I've been spending a lot of your money, Max; ran up a hell of a phone bill. And I had to go to Belgium.' He held up his hand. 'Don't worry; I flew economy.'

'I think the firm can stand it.'

Hardin gave Stafford an opened bottle and a glass. 'I've written a detailed report but I can give you the guts of it now. Okay?'

'Shoot.'

He sat down. 'Jan-Willem Hendrykxx born in 1899 in -believe it or not – Hoboken.'

Stafford looked up, startled. 'In the States!'

'It got me, too,' Hardin admitted. 'No, the original Hoboken is a little place just outside Antwerp in Belgium. Parents poor but honest, which is more than we can say of Jan-Willem. Reasonable education for those days but he ran away to sea when he was seventeen. Knocked about a bit, I expect, but ended up in South Africa in 1921 where he married Anna Vermuelen.'

He rubbed his jaw. 'There was a strike in Johannesburg in 1922, if that's what you can call it. Both sides had artillery and it sounds more like a civil war to me. Anyway, Jan-Willem disappeared leaving Anna to carry the can – the can being twin babies, Jan and Adriaan. Jan is the father of Dirk Hendriks, and Adriaan is the father of Hank Hendrix, the guy I picked up in Los Angeles. Follow me so far?'

'It's quite clear,' Stafford said.

'Jan-Willem jumped a freighter going to San Francisco, got to like the Californian climate, and decided to stay. Now, you must remember these were Prohibition days. Most people, when they think of Prohibition, think of Rum Row off Atlantic City, but there was just as much rum running on the West Coast, either from Canada or Mexico, and Hendrykxx got in on the act. By the time Repeal came he was well entrenched in the rackets.'

'You mean he was a genuine dyed-in-the-wool gangster?'

Hardin shrugged. 'You could put it that way. But he made a mistake – he never took out US citizenship. So when he put a foot wrong he wasn't jailed; he was deported back to his country of origin as an undesirable alien. He arrived back in Antwerp in April, 1940.'

Stafford said, 'You've been busy, Ben. How did you discover all this?'

'A hunch. What I found out in Belgium made Hendrykxx a crook. He was supposed to have been killed in Jo'burg in 1922 but we know he wasn't, so I wondered where he'd go, and being a crook he'd likely have a record. I have some good buddies in the FBI dating back to my CIA days. They looked up the files. There's a hell of a dossier on Hendrykxx. When he came to the attention of the FBI they checked him very thoroughly. That's where the phone bill came in; I spent about six hours talking long distance to the States.'

The room waiter came in with lunch and set it on the table. Hardin waited until he had gone before continuing. 'I don't know whether it was good or bad for Hendrykxx that he arrived in Antwerp when he did. Probably good. The German offensive began on May loth, Holland and Belgium fell like ninepins and France soon after. Antwerp was in German hands about two weeks after Hendrykxx got there. His wartime history is misty but from what I've picked up he was well into the Belgian rackets, the black market and all that. Of course, in those days it was patriotic but I believe Hendrykxx wasn't above doing deals with the Germans.'

'A collaborator?'

Hardin bit into a club sandwich and said, with his mouth full, 'Never proved. But he came out of the war in better financial shape than he went into it. Then he started import export corporations and when the EEC was organized he went to town in his own way which, naturally, was the illegal way. There was a whole slew of EEC regulations which could be bent. Bargeloads of butter going up the Rhine from Holland to Germany found themselves relabelled and back in Holland with Hendrykxx creaming off the subsidy. He could do that several times with the same bargeload until the damn stuff went rancid on him. He was into a lot of rackets like that.'