by William Boyd
‘Notre mauvais centime,’ Fyfe-Miller translated for the French officer, making no attempt at an accent. He helped Lysander to his feet, grinning his wild grin. Lysander felt like kissing him.
‘Phase one completed,’ Fyfe-Miller said. ‘That was the easy bit.’
PART THREE
GENEVA, 1915
1. The Glockner Letters
The ferry from Thonon nosed into the quayside at Geneva, then its engines were thrown into reverse to bring its stern round and the whole little ship shuddered. Lysander – Abelard Schwimmer – almost lost his footing and held on tight to the wooden balustrade on the top deck as thick grey ropes were slung out on to the dock and seamen hitched them to bollards, making the ferry hold fast. The gangway was lowered and Lysander picked up his tartan suitcase and found a place in the disorderly queue of people hurrying to disembark – then it was time for him to move down the wooden incline and take his first steps on Swiss soil. Geneva lay in front of him in the morning sunshine – big apartment buildings fronting the lake, solid and prosperous – set on its alluvial plain, only the bulk of the cathedral rising above the level of the terracotta and grey rooftops, reminding him vaguely of Vienna, for some reason. Low hills and then the dazzling snows of the mountains beyond in the distance. He took a deep breath of Swiss air, settled his Homburg on his head and Abelard Schwimmer wandered off to look for his hotel.
After they had made their way from the front line to the rear, Lysander and Fyfe-Miller had been driven to Amiens, where a room had been booked for him in the Hôtel Riche et du Sport. He went straight to bed and slept all day until he was shaken awake by Fyfe-Miller in the evening and was informed that he had a train to catch to Paris and then on to Lyons. He changed into Abelard Schwimmer’s clothes – an ill-cut navy-blue serge suit (that already felt too hot), a soft-collared beige shirt with ready-knotted bow tie and clumpy brown shoes. If Fyfe-Miller had been planning to offend his dress sense, Lysander thought, then he had done a first rate job. He was given a red tartan cardboard suitcase – with some spare shirts and drawers in it – that also had, hidden behind the lining, a flat bundle of Swiss francs, enough to last him two weeks, Fyfe-Miller said, more than enough time to finish the job. The outfit was completed by a Lincoln-green raincoat and a Homburg hat.
‘Every inch the “homme moyen sensuel”,’ Fyfe-Miller said. ‘What a transformation.’
‘You’ve an appalling French accent, Fyfe-Miller,’ Lysander said. ‘The Hhhhom moyn senzyul – shocking.’ He repeated it in the Fyfe-Miller style and then as it should be correctly pronounced. ‘The “h” is silent, in French.’
Fyfe-Miller smiled, breezily.
‘Quel hhhhorreur. I can make myself understood,’ he said, unashamedly. ‘That’s all I need.’
They shook hands on the platform at Amiens.
‘Good luck,’ Fyfe-Miller said. ‘So far, so good. Don’t delay in Paris – you’ve forty minutes between trains. Massinger will meet you in Lyons.’
‘Where’s Munro?’
‘Good question . . . In London, I think.’
Lysander travelled to Paris, then to Lyons, overnight and first class – a railway engineer’s perk, he assumed. He shared a compartment with two French colonels who looked at him with overt contempt and never addressed a word to him. He didn’t care. He nodded off and dreamed of throwing his bombs into the sap – seeing the two startled faces of the signallers looking up at him before he switched his torch off. When he woke at dawn the colonels had gone.
Lyons station was crowded with French troops about to entrain for the front. Lysander was reminded that the front line was still not far away, extending down through Champagne and the Ardennes, curving in a meandering doodle from the North Sea to the Swiss border, almost five hundred miles, of which the British Army was responsible for about fifty. Massinger was waiting for him at the station buffet – drinking beer, Lysander noticed. They took the stopper train all the way to Lake Geneva, to Thonon on the south bank, and checked into the Hôtel de Thonon et Terminus, conveniently placed for the station in the lower town.
Massinger’s mood was fractious and ill at ease. When Lysander started to tell him about his fraught night in no man’s land he seemed only to half-listen, as if his mind were on more pressing matters. ‘Yes, yes. Indeed. Most alarming.’ Lysander didn’t bother explaining in more detail, told him nothing about the bombing, about watching the dawn rise over the German lines as he crouched amongst the rushes of the drainage ditch.
They dined together but the atmosphere was still unnatural and forced. They were like vague acquaintances who – as ill luck would have it – found themselves as the only two Englishmen in a small French town. They were polite, they feigned conviviality, but there was no denying that, given the choice, they would far rather have dined alone.
Massinger at least had more information and instructions to give him about his mission. Once Lysander had arrived in Geneva and had settled in his hotel he was to go to a certain café everyday at 10.30 and again at 4.30 and stay for an hour. At some stage he would be approached by Agent Bonfire, they would exchange the double password and new instructions would be given, if Bonfire felt that the moment was opportune.
‘Bonfire seems to be calling all the shots,’ Lysander said, unthinkingly.
‘Bonfire is probably our key asset, currently, in our entire espionage war,’ Massinger said with real hostility, his raspy voice even harsher. ‘Bonfire reads all the correspondence going in and out of the German consulate in Geneva – how valuable do you think that is? Eh?’
‘Very valuable, I would imagine.’
‘Just make sure you’re at the Taverne des Anglais at those hours, morning and afternoon.’
‘Taverne des Anglais? Don’t you think that’s a bit obvious?’
‘It’s a nondescript brasserie. What’s its name got to do with anything?’
They ate on in silence. Lysander had ordered a fish, under a local name he didn’t recognize, and found it overcooked, bland and watery. Massinger had a veal chop that, judging by the effort he was deploying to cut it up, must be extremely tough.
‘There’s one thing that’s worrying me, Massinger.’
‘What’s that?’
‘When I come to bribe this official . . . What if he won’t accept my bribe?’
‘He will. I guarantee.’
‘Indulge me in the hypothesis.’
‘Then cut his fingers off, one by one. He’ll spill the beans.’
‘Most amusing.’
Massinger put his knife and fork down and stared at him, almost with dislike, Lysander thought, it was disturbing.
‘I’m deadly serious, Rief. You have to return from Geneva with the key to that cipher – don’t bother coming back if you haven’t got it.’
‘Look –’
‘Have you any idea what’s at stake here?’
‘Yes, of course. Traitor, high command, etcetera. I know.’
‘Then do your duty as a British soldier.’
After dinner, Lysander went for a calming stroll along the quayside and smoked a cigarette, looking across the vast lake – Lac Léman as it was known from this side – towards the shadowy mountains in Switzerland that he could still just make out in the gloaming. There was a strange light in the evening sky, the palest blue shading into grey – the Alpenglühen, he knew it was called, a unique admixture of twilit purple valleys combining with golden sunlit mountain tops. He felt excitement build in him – he would be off to Geneva on the first steamer tomorrow, more than happy to say farewell to Massinger with his tetchiness and insecurity. As Fyfe-Miller would have eagerly reminded him, phase two was waiting for him across the still black waters. He was ready for it.
As he strolled back to the hotel he found his thoughts returning to the Manchesters and the brief experience of trench warfare he’d undergone. He thought of the equally brief but intense acquaintances he’d made – Foley, Dodd, Wiley and Gorlice-Law. They were as familiar to him here,
as he walked the streets of Thonon, as old friends, his memories of them as vivid as members of his family. Would he ever see them again? Probably not. It was inevitable, he knew, this dislocation and sudden rupture in war – still, the fact that it was did not console. Back at the hotel a note from Massinger was handed to him with his room key, reminding him that his steamer left at 6.30, but that he, Massinger, would not be present for his embarkation as he was feeling unwell.
The Hôtel Touring de Genève was a disappointment. Almost two years of war in the rest of Europe had effectively killed off the trade of regular visitors – tourists, alpine climbers, invalids seeking medical cures – all the customers that this type of establishment relied on. The atmosphere in the lobby was defeatist – it seemed uncleaned, dusty, waste-paper baskets unemptied. Geraniums were dying unwatered in the planters on the small terrace and this was midsummer. The hotel had eighty rooms but only five were occupied. Even the surprise arrival of a new client for an unspecified length of stay raised no glad smile of welcome.
That first evening he was the only diner in the dining room. The waiter spoke to him in clumsy German (asking him some question about Zürich that Lysander deflected) but he saw the logic in Munro’s choice for his identity – as a germanophone Swiss railway engineer in francophone Switzerland, and in a mid-level establishment like the Touring, Abelard Schwimmer was entirely unremarkable, run of the mill – almost invisible.
The Hôtel Touring was on the Left Bank, two blocks back from the lake front, in a street with a tram-line and some sizeable shops. On his first morning Lysander bought himself a pair of black shoes, some white shirts and a couple of silk ties and replaced his Homburg with a Panama. He changed clothes and felt more like himself – a well-dressed Englishman abroad – until he remembered that was exactly whom he wasn’t meant to be. He put the brown shoes back on and the Homburg but he refused categorically to wear a ready-knotted bow tie.
He went to the Taverne des Anglais at 10.30 and drank two glasses of Munich lager as he waited the hour out. Nobody came, and nobody came at 4.30, either. That evening he went to a cinema and watched, unsmiling, a comedic film about a botched bank robbery. He reminded himself that when the day came for him to return to his old profession he really must follow up some more cinema-acting opportunities – it looked ridiculously easy.
During lunchtime the next day (the 10.30 rendezvous was also not kept) he bought himself a sandwich and hired a rowing boat at the Promenade du Lac and rowed a mile or so along the length of the right bank. It was a sunny day and the white and pink stucco façades of the apartment blocks, with their steep roofs, cupolas and domes, their curious splayed tin chimney pots, the quayside promenades and the Kursaal theatre with its cafés and restaurants spoke only of a world of prosperity and peace. As he rowed he could see beyond the city and the low bluffs that surrounded it to the almost searing-white peaks of Mont Blanc and its chain of mountains to the west. He came to a halt for a minute or two in front of the tall façade of the Grand Hôtel du Beau-Rivage – or the Beau-Espionage, as Massinger referred to it. ‘Keep out of it at all costs. Very dubious women of all nationalities, swarming with agents and informers, everybody with some story that they’ll try to sell you for a few francs – from the manager to the laundry maids. It’s a sink.’ Children were screaming and splashing in the big swimming bath by the Jetée des Paquis and for a moment Lysander wondered if he should buy a swimming costume and join them – the sun was hot on his back and he felt like cooling off. He thought of rowing on to the Parc Mon Repos – he could see its woods and lawns beyond the jetée but he looked at his watch and realized that 4.30 was not far away. He’d better return to the Taverne des Anglais and make do with a cold beer.
It turned out to be another non-encounter, so he had an early meal in a grill-room and went to hear an organ concert at the cathedral with music by Joseph Stalder and Hans Huber, neither of whom he’d ever heard of. He changed rooms in the Touring, asking to be moved to the back where it was quieter as the trams woke him early. He noticed he was beginning to sleep badly – he kept dreaming about throwing his bombs into the sap below the tomb. Sometimes he saw the starkly lit faces of the fair boy and the moustachioed man – sometimes it was Foley and Gorlice-Law. It wasn’t sleep that he was being denied, so much as that he didn’t welcome the dreams that sleep brought – the idea of sleeping and therefore dreaming was off-putting and disturbing. He decided to start delaying going to bed; he would walk the streets until late, stopping in cafés for hot drinks or a brandy, until boredom drove him back to his room in the hotel. Perhaps he might sleep better then.
The next morning, after another fruitless hour in the Taverne (he was being welcomed as a regular by the staff), he went to a pharmacy to buy a sleeping draught. As he wrapped the powder of chloral hydrate, the chemist recommended that he visit a health resort – but one that was above 2,000 metres. Insomnia could only be cured at that altitude, he insisted. He suggested the Hôtel Jungfrau-Eggishorn high on the Rhône Glacier – very popular with the English before the war, the man said with a knowing smile. Lysander realized he was unthinkingly letting his disguise drop – he had to concentrate on being Abelard Schwimmer and speak French with a German accent.
As he left the pharmacy his eye was held by the sign of another, nearby shop: ‘G.N.LOTHAR & CIE’ – and seeing this name, his son’s name, he felt the acid pang of this strange loss, the love-ache for someone he’d never seen, never known, who was present in his life only by virtue of the conferred familial role: this ‘son’ of his – this abstraction of a son – destined to be identified by inverted commas to distinguish his purely notional presence in his affections. Of course, new anger for Hettie returned – her callow ineptitude, her absolute thoughtlessness – but he quickly recognized this was fruitless, also. A waste.
However, sitting in the Taverne that afternoon, waiting for another hour go by uninterrupted, and thinking frustratedly about this child that he had and did not have, he began to think how foolish and absurd this process was, like some child’s game of espionage. He’d been for a row on the lake, watched a film in a cinema and attended a concert in the cathedral. Perhaps he might visit an art gallery, or enjoy a drink in the bar of the Beau-Rivage and fend off the ‘dubious’ women.
In fact there were two young, rather attractive women sitting in the window taking tea. One of them, he thought, kept glancing over at him as he sipped his beer. But no, that would be too risky, even for this child’s game –
Somebody sat down on the next table blocking the view. A widow in black crêpe, he saw, with a flat straw hat and a small half-veil. Lysander signalled a waiter – one more beer and he was off.
The widow turned to look at him.
‘Excuse me, are you Monsieur Dupetit?’ she asked in French.
‘Ah . . . No. My apologies.’
‘Then I think you must know Monsieur Dupetit.’
‘I know a Monsieur Lepetit.’
She came and sat at his table and folded up her veil. Lysander saw a woman in her thirties with a once handsome face now set in a cold mask of resignation. Hooded eyes and a curved Roman nose, two deep lines on either side of her thin-lipped mouth, like parentheses. He wondered if she ever smiled.
‘How do you do?’ she said and offered her black-lace-gloved hand. Lysander shook it. Her grip was firm.
‘Have you come to take me to him?’ he asked.
‘Who?’
He lowered his voice. ‘Bonfire.’
‘I am Bonfire.’
‘Right.’
‘Massinger didn’t tell you?’
‘He didn’t specify your gender.’
She looked around the room, seemingly exasperated, thereby offering Lysander a view of her profile. Her nose was small but perfectly curved, like a Roman emperor’s on a coin, or like some photographs he’d seen of a captured Red Indian chief.
‘I am Madame Duchesne,’ she said. ‘Your French is very good.’
‘Thank you.
May I offer you something to drink?’
‘A small Dubonnet. We’re quite safe to talk here.’
She wasted no time. She would meet him tomorrow at his hotel at 10.00 in the morning and would show him the apartment where the consular official lived. He was a bachelor, one Manfred Glockner. He usually left for the consulate around noon and returned home late in the evening. She had no idea what his official diplomatic role was, but to her eyes he seemed a, ‘smart, bourgeois, gentleman-type – something of an intellectual’. When he started to receive letters from England she became curious and decided to open them. She had missed the first three but she had opened the six subsequent ones. Nine letters in all over a period of eight months from October 1914 to June 1915.
‘Opened?’ Lysander asked. ‘Do you work in the consulate yourself?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘My brother is a senior postmaster here in Geneva, at the central sorting office. He brings me all the letters I ask for. I open them, I read them, I make copies if they’re interesting, then I close them again and they go to the recipient. Letters coming in, letters coming out.’
No wonder she was Massinger’s prize agent, Lysander thought.
‘How do you open them without people knowing?’
‘It’s my secret,’ she said. Here a normal person might have allowed themselves a smile of satisfaction but Madame Duchesne just raised her chin a little defiantly. ‘Let’s say it’s to do with the application of extremes of heat and coldness. Dry heat, dry cold. They just pop open after a few minutes. No steaming. When I’ve read them I stick them down again with glue. Impossible to tell they’ve been opened.’
She reached into her handbag and took out some sheets of paper.
‘Here are the six Glockner letters.’
Lysander took them and shuffled through them – six pages dense with columns of numbers like the one he’d seen in London. He folded them up and slipped them in his pocket, suddenly feeling unusual trepidation – the child’s game had become real.