A box full of D Marks.
One morning in early April 1994, I was alone at home in Cana Cavea when the phone rang.
“Hello, can I speak to Sandy, please?” asked the English caller.
“I’m sorry she’s not here at the moment, she’s showing a client some houses. I’m Bernie, her husband, can I help?”.
“No, I don’t think so” he replied. There was a pause, then he continued “Well, yes maybe you can. Sandy sold my house to a German client, we signed the contract the other day. I’m back in England now, but I think I might have left my wallet in the Notary’s office in Felanitx. It’s a large brown wallet, do you know if she found it?” he asked.
“She’s been trying to contact someone about it, that must be you”.
He gave me his name and asked if I could see if there was a cheque in the wallet. I opened the desk drawer, in the wallet were some credit cards, a few Spanish Peseta notes and a cheque for twelve thousand Deutsche Marks. I confirmed the contents and the amount on the cheque in his name.
“That’s great,” he said, “I’ll be back in Mallorca in a few weeks, could you look after it until then please?”
“No problem. I’ll tell Sandy you phoned” and I hung up.
The Mallorca property market was booming with Spain’s entry into the EU. There weren’t many official estate agents then, Sandy was working freelance registered as an Information Service. She was working hard every day with mainly German and UK buyers looking for old farmhouses to reform. She also had other clients who wanted something they could move straight into. When she wasn’t with buyers, she was with sellers, generally Mallorcans with old derelict farmhouses that were now like gold dust.
The man who’d lost his wallet owned a house on the island long before the boom. Recently he’d moved to something of a palace on the outskirts of Santanyi and Sandy had sold his old house to a German family. Before that, she’d shown it to me, but I’d never met the owner. It was situated on the road between Escarritxo and Calonge. The property comprised two beautiful old stone houses that were joined together as a single home. Part of the roof had been removed to form an enclosed courtyard between the houses. This space, open to the sky, had an open staircase to a gallery with a bedroom at each end and was filled with plants in large terracotta pots. The place was old and enchanting.
When Sandy came home late that evening, I told her about the call from her client. We thought that was the end of it until his return to the island.
The next morning Sandy was back selling houses, the kids were at school, and I was home alone again. The telephone rang, it was the man who’d lost his wallet.
“Hello, it’s Fred here from England, can I talk to Sandy please?”
“She’s not here, and I don’t know when she’ll be back. Can I help?”
There was a pause, then he continued as if we were old friends.
“I have a problem you may be able to help me with. I’ve left a package under the driver’s seat of my car in the garage at my house in Santanyi. The garage and car are unlocked, and I’d be grateful if you could get the package and keep it safe for me” he said.
“I could do that, but what’s in the package that’s so important?” I asked.
There was a pause, followed by,
“Er, eighty thousand Deutsche Marks in cash”.
“Fred!” I said, “You don’t even know me, and you want me to pick up that amount of cash”.
“But I know Sandy, she told me you were a very honest person”.
After giving it some thought, I replied.
“I’m flattered that you trust me that much, but can we just get this straight. You want me to drive to your house, go into your garage, rummage around in your car, retrieve eighty thousand Deutsche Marks in cash and bring them back to my house”.
“Exactly” he confirmed, “I would be most grateful if you could do that for me”.
“I could do that, but there’s just one consideration. I’m not known where you live. What if someone sees me go into your garage and when I come out with the cash the cops are there waiting for me. Isn’t there someone you know locally who could do it?”. There was a moment’s silence before he answered.
“I see your point,” he said, and paused for thought, “I tell you what, I’ll see if my friend the gardener can do it”.
I said goodbye with a sense of relief that I hadn’t accepted the task.
Three hours later, Fred was back on the phone.
“The gardener has picked up the money. I wonder if you could collect it from him at his home when he finishes work at eight this evening ?” he asked.
“But why can’t he look after it for you?” I replied
“Well.. The thing is, he has a bit of a gambling problem”.
To cut this story short, I agreed to pick up the money. When Sandy came home, she’d had enough running around for one day, so at seven-fifteen, I set off alone to the address I’d been given.
I found the house in Santanyi a little before eight. The gardener’s wife asked me into the living room, which was directly in from the front door. She said her husband would be home shortly, and went to the kitchen to prepare his dinner. She left me on the sofa with her two young children doing their homework while, at the same time, watching the television.
I started thinking, ‘This is surreal, it could only happen in Mallorca. I’m sitting here with two kids doing their homework watching Clint Eastwood in ‘ A Fistful of Dollars’ on the TV. And, I’m waiting for a stranger to give me eighty thousand Deutsche Marks in cash for someone I don’t know. If I didn’t know that this was the black money from a house sale, I might think I’d got myself involved in some drugs deal’.
At that moment the front door opened and my heart stopped. Two green uniformed Guardia Civil entered the room. ‘Oh, shit!’.
The two police officers looked at me, exchanged some words, and then one of them left. The other officer came over to me.
“Bernardo,” he said.
I nodded ‘God, they even know my name’.
After a brief silence, with me staring at him speechless, he continued.
“I’m Fred’s friend, I have a box for you”.
“Oh! Yes,” I stammered “You look after the garden for him”.
He left the room. When he returned, he handed me a large shoebox. I lifted the lid, the box was full of large denomination Deutsche Mark notes. It seemed he just wanted me to take it.
“Shouldn’t we count it first?” I asked. He gave a sort of – if you want to – shrug. We sat there and counted out the money into one thousand Deutsche Mark piles, which caused the children to lose interest in their homework and ‘A Fistful of Dollars’.
The money was all there, so I put it back into the box. I signed and handed over a receipt that I’d previously printed out on a daisy-wheel printer from my BBC Acorn Atom. I took the box, said goodbye, drove back to Cana Cavea, and put the money into a new safe, I’d fortunately recently installed in the house.
The next morning Fred rang up to see how I’d got on. I told him everything went well, and I had the cash.
“That’s great,” he said “I can’t thank you enough. I’ll be over in a few weeks to pick it up.”
“There’s just one thing I need to tell you though Fred,” I said seriously.
“What’s that?” he responded.
“Well, in the morning, I’m booked on a flight out to Acapulco”.
The line went quiet for some time, then Fred came back on and in an uncertain voice said.
“That’s a joke isn’t it” I let him stew for a while and then responded.
“Yes, Fred, that was a joke. You could have told me your friend the gardener was in the Guardia Civil”.
You may wonder about this strange behaviour with black money, but at that time, that’s how things were done in Spain. Everyone and I mean everyone, knew how the system operated. After entry into the EU, things got more legit. Later, when properties formerly bought at an undervalued registered price, were sold on, the Spanish tax authorities must have had a windfall in Capital Gains tax.
Before you look with disdain on the Spanish system, you might ask yourself ‘Where did all those Deutsche Marks, brought down from the north in suitcases come from?’.