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case be examined a second time, and passing over the revolver that was in it. ‘Do you think I am about to hold up your bank?’ he asked, and gave the major his most charming smile.
    Our escort was a tall colonel from St Louis, accompanied by two junior officers. The colonel asked if Dulles knew what he was looking for. Dulles produced a typed sheet of paper which he gave to the colonel, who studied it with a frown. ‘This could be in one of several rooms,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a ton of stuff coming in every day, and nobody to catalogue it. We’ve got the Hungarian crown jewels if you want.’ (I knew. I had helped put them there. Dulles winked at me.)
    The colonel proudly informed us that the internal security system was based on the one used in the U.S. Mint. Once we were locked inside the vaults, he insisted on a tour of the spoils, including a sealed chamber stacked floor to ceiling with gold bars. ‘Three deep, wall to wall,’ said the colonel. ‘Each bar weighs 25 pounds and is worth $15,000. How many of these are we going to earn in a lifetime?’ In Dulles’s case quite a few. He had been a successful Wall Street lawyer before the war and would return to his practice.
    â€˜Next door in one of those cages is the biggest gold nugget anyone has ever seen,’ the colonel went on. ‘Size of a grapefruit.’
    â€˜Any idea how much all this is worth?’ Dulles asked casually.
    â€˜Upwards of five hundred million dollars.’
    â€˜Take a good look, Joe,’ Dulles said. ‘You are witness here to one of history’s great failures.’
    Vault after vault of stashed gold became overwhelming in its pointlessness, in contrast to the destruction outside. This was underlined by a room where even Dulles moved on quickly. It was filled with suitcases of gold pellets. Perhaps he knew their provenance, too. There were forged English bank notes, stockrooms of gems, sculpture, and art. A van Gogh self-portrait had been left carelessly on the floor, his expression one of apparent disbelief. One vault was devoted entirely to alarm clocks in cardboard boxes, confiscated by the SS. Another contained nothing but fur coats.
    The colonel said, ‘We don’t have the security to carry out the valuations. We have teams working round the clock securing the old air raid shelters so they can be used for storage, and that take up all our guards. We caught a labourer yesterday trying to walk out with a bag of gold crowns, worth over six thousand dollars.’
    It was past midnight before Dulles got down to the purpose of his visit. He acted as though he had mislaid nothing more urgent than a term paper. When the colonel offered a team to help, Dulles declined, saying he couldn’t describe what he was looking for but would recognise it when he found it.
    He worked his way through several rooms of documents, mostly in filing cabinets, some lying unsorted on tables, while the rest of us stood around smoking. The colonel managed to order coffee from somewhere. One stack of memos was from I.G. Farben, the big German chemical company, manufacturer of the genocide gas used in concentration camps. According to the colonel, the Farben headquarters was the only other large building in Frankfurt to survive the bombing. ‘It makes you wonder. You would have thought the big bank and the big company headquarters would have been the first targets. Yet at the Farben place there was hardly a cracked pane of glass. What do you make of that?’
    â€˜Beats me,’ I said, proud of this recently acquired Americanism.
    â€˜Maybe they didn’t want to hit it. It’s now being used as Occupation Headquarters.’
    A couple of times the generators shut down, and we had to use candles until they came back on. The soft light cast giant shadows. Whatever Dulles was looking for was proving elusive. I wondered what could be so important that he had to look for it