by Richard Wake
"Do you write this stuff?"
"A little. Enough so that serious people know I'm a serious journalist -- it helps sell the magazine, and my wife and I do need to eat. But I don't print enough to get us killed in our bed while we sleep."
"But have you been approached by anyone about getting more information?"
"Now who's being nosy?" he said.
I let it go, as we were both entering severe hangover territory and it wasn't even 9 p.m. For me, the decision was to leave now and have a chance for at least a somewhat productive day at the bank on Friday, or keep drinking and write off Friday as a sick day.
I decided to get up and leave -- because I did have things to do at the bank, and because I didn't trust myself anymore to keep the few secrets I had remaining from Herman. I stood up to reach for my coat from the rack next to the table, and he grabbed my arm.
"One more," he said.
"I can't."
"Then just listen. You might be interested. This is one I'm afraid to write -- partly because I don't have all of the facts nailed down, partly because I like living here."
He stopped and read what I assumed was the quizzical look on my face. I hoped that my quizzical face was appreciably different than my about-to-throw-up-in-the-gutter face. Apparently, it was.
"Just listen," he said. "I'm going to make a little speech here, so don't interrupt me."
I belched. Herman continued.
"We all know about the Swiss and their 'historical prerogative.' You know, their neutrality. They see it as some kind of divine fucking right or something, and, well, fine. They have their culture. They have their mountains to protect them. Fine. Even though there's a monster next door, fine.
"But what is neutral? What does that mean? They seem to think it means that you don't help either side and you keep doing business, at least a little bit of business, with both sides. Because they see that as their other divine fucking right -- keeping the cash register ringing, no matter what."
I was trying to follow what Herman was saying, but the fog had suddenly descended. He seemed to sense my predicament -- perhaps it was my mouth fixed wide open, or the permanent tilt of my head to the left -- and gave my arm a poke.
"I'm with you -- promise," I said.
Whatever. Herman talked faster.
"So the Swiss see it as their right to keep doing business with the Nazis," he said. "What does that mean? Well, Nestle sells chocolate to the Wehrmacht, so that the boys can have a little sweet before they lob a few more shells into Warsaw. Fine. It would be embarrassing if I wrote it, but only that. It would be a little more embarrassing if I wrote that Hitler was getting at least a few of his anti-aircraft guns from Oerlikon-Buhrle."
"A Swiss company? You sure about that?"
"Pretty sure. But that's not the real story. I can live with that. I think France and England could live with that. War brings out the greed in a lot of people, and it isn't that big of a deal -- I mean, if they didn't get it here, they'd just get the chocolate from someplace else."
I was more awake now. "So what are you talking about?" I said.
He leaned in and almost whispered.
"Gold," he said.
Again, my quizzical face, apparently.
"Look, you know Germany doesn't have sufficient resources," Herman said. "You know it first-hand -- you sold them that stuff to line their blast furnaces. They need iron, they need nickel, they need oil and food most of all -- you can't make war without them. Hitler needs money to pay for all of that. Most of the world won't deal with him. The neutral countries that will -- like, say, Portugal -- can't be seen as doing it. They can't take German gold, and they certainly can't take the gold the Nazis stole from Austria and Czechoslovakia.
"But you know what?" Herman said. "They can take Swiss gold."
Again, my face betrayed my ignorance.
"Don't you get it?" he said. "The Swiss are laundering the Nazis' gold for them -- maybe the national bank itself. And that is much bigger than some chocolate bars. And stopping it could be the difference between crushing this asshole or not."
11
I was pretty sure I wasn't stinking of alcohol when I arrived at the bank at 9:30 the next morning, but that was the only hint I wasn't offering of my consumption of the night before. I showered and did my best, but my face still appeared as if it had been spanked with a shovel, and there was no remedy but time.
I'm pretty sure Anders could tell. He grunted a greeting when he unlocked the door to let me in, which wasn't unusual, but it was the way he grunted. As for Marta, well, she was less opaque. Within seconds of me sitting down at my desk, she arrived carrying a tray that held a cup of coffee, a tall glass of water and a bottle of paracetamol. She didn't say anything, but she didn't need to. Her's was not a motherly concern. She pretty much dropped the tray on the desk in disgust, and I'm still not sure how nothing spilled. As it was, I nearly knocked over the water as I grabbed it with a shaky hand.
My diary was carried closed and under her armpit. She opened it and said, "You have Herr Stern at 10, and then lunch at Veltlinerkeller with Herr Cronstadt at 12:30." With that, Marta was gone. If disdain left a stain, we were going to need to have the carpets cleaned.
Cronstadt was from Kreditanstalt. He was offering me a sliver of the financing work on a municipal road improvement bond that was being floated by the city of Schlieren, just outside of Zurich. It wasn't a pimple on Kreditanstalt's ass, but it was projects such as this, doled out piecemeal to the smaller banks, that kept everyone in line. The deal would be done to Cronstadt's specifications, and I would be happy to be included in the grand Swiss money-lending ecosystem -- because a pimple on their ass was a big hill to me and the other small private banks. Kreditanstalt and Bankverein would use these deals, granting them as rewards for good behavior or withholding them to make a point. And if they did it just right, they would keep everyone financially sated, planets happily revolving around these dual suns, nothing to challenge the stable profitability of their world.
The deal was already done -- not that I really cared, other than that it was essential for me to seem that I cared if people were to believe I was a real banker. The lunch was just a reaffirmative formality. And by 12:30, and with the accustomed glass of wine at lunch -- OK, maybe two -- the day would likely be brighter. But first, there was Stern at 10. He was another one of Kerner's "nephews," here to make his first withdrawal, the first since Michael Landers was murdered. And I could feel the dread of this one in my head, my stomach, down to my bowels -- first what Herman Stressel told me the night before, now this.
I could say that the stuff that Herman told me upset me so much that I couldn't sleep, but that would be a lie. I somehow got back to my flat, passed out on the couch in my clothes, and slept okay. My memory was a little fuzzy, though. I remembered that he had told me about the Swiss somehow laundering Nazi gold, but I didn't remember how or exactly why. I think he mentioned the national bank, but I wasn't sure. My overall sense was that it was something very big, though, if he could prove it. It was also something I should tell Groucho, although that would be my first unmistakeable step, and I just didn't want to get back into the game.
I kept trying to tell myself that, if I played it just right, I could maybe do this on my own terms. I could tell Groucho what I heard, but make up some shit about how it was all third-hand, and I didn't even know who I was talking to, and there was no way for me to contact the guy for more details or anything. What could he say to me at that point other than, "OK, thanks for the info, and if you hear anything else, let me know." So I would be in, and then I would be out, and there wouldn't be anything Groucho or his masters in London could do about it.
Over and over again in my head went variations on this strategy, and repetition seemed to make them more plausible. That made me feel a little better, that and the paracetamol and the coffee. I was approaching human status when Marta rang my phone to tell me that Herr Stern had arrived. I told her to walk him back
, which she did, closing the door behind her, leaving behind another stare of disdain.
I think it was for the customer, though, another of the trust fund kids for whom she had no time. And he was a kid. I remembered wondering about his age the night I met them all and distributed the credentials that would allow them to make withdrawals if I wasn't around.
"No offense," I said after we settled into facing wing chairs in my office sitting area, away from the imposing desk. "But how old are you."
"Nineteen," Stern said, with all of the arrogance he could muster.
"No offense, I repeat, but that's bullshit."
"Almost nineteen," he said, the arrogance giving way just a bit, the eye contact disengaged for a second before reconnecting.
This was another reason I wanted no part of getting back in. I was more than twice this kid's age. Besides the physical stuff that he could do that I could no longer do, if it came to that -- run, climb, whatever -- there was something else. He was too young to know what he was risking. He probably had nothing, so he had nothing to lose.
The door of the office was closed, and the leather padded walls were further protection against being overheard. Still, when we began to talk, I instinctively lowered my voice, just a bit, and Stern followed.
"What's your first name again?"
"Martin. Marty."
"Are you OK, Marty?"
"I'm a little shaken up -- we all are," he said.
"Do you have any theories about why Michael was shot?"
"That's the thing -- we don't. We have no idea. He wasn't into anything crazy, at least that we know of. And even if he was, it's almost like a gentleman's game here. Nobody gets arrested. Nobody gets deported. There's no fucking way anybody gets killed, but Michael did."
"What do you mean, a gentleman's game?"
"This doesn't go to my level or Michael's level," Marty said. "But the level above me, like Fritz Blum -- the spies all know each other. They all drink in the same place in Bern. I've been there -- German spies at one table, Czech spies at another table, French spies at another table, Swiss cops at another table. They don't talk to each other, not really, not much more than a hello, but they all nod to each other and acknowledge each other and buy each other drinks. It's not a big secret. It's not supposed to be dangerous. Like I said, just gentlemen shuffling paperwork in the paperwork capital of the world -- but then Michael ends up dead, and we have no idea why."
As it turned out, Marty had just finished up at the gymnasium. His parents wanted him to give university a try before taking over the family business, which was manufacturing nails in Winterthur. Or, as Marty said, "manufacturing fucking nails in fucking Winterthur," explaining that he convinced his parents to allow him to take a year off and live in Zurich. He found a job in a bookstore, where the ancient proprietor allowed him to live above the shop in a spare apartment. In exchange, he did all of the lifting and cleaning and watched the register while she napped after lunch. As it turned out, the bookstore was a place where the Czech spies passed messages. The proprietor was originally from Prague, and after he had figured out half of the story, she supplied him with the rest. He immediately wanted to join, and she was happy to have him.
"But why?" I said. "It's not your fight."
"Not yet," he said.
"The Swiss will never fight."
"The Swiss are fools if they think this doesn't affect them."
"All they care about is doing business."
"Well maybe that's the problem," Marty said.
The arrogance was back in his eyes. I walked over to the desk and made out his withdrawal slip. I went out to the small cash window, which was more of an artifice than anything -- we could have kept a cash box in Marta's bottom drawer just as easily -- and got the money. Marta eyed me up as I carried the pile back into my office.
I leaned over and told her, "Five thousand."
She shook her head. "Rich, wasteful fool."
"That's Herr Rich Wasteful Fool to you and me," I said.
She half-smiled.
12
After shuffling some paperwork for a while, the lunch with Cronstadt went as expected, and the two glasses of wine -- "Come, come, Herr Cronstadt, we must have a second glass to toast our agreement!" -- reestablished my equilibrium. I was actually feeling pretty good when I returned to the bank and was told by Marta that I had a last-minute appointment, a 4 p.m. at the office of Peter Ruchti, the police detective.
"Can you call him back and tell him I'm busy?"
"It wasn't a request," Marta said.
So. Coming so soon after Martin Stern's visit to my office, my nerves were naturally vibrating a bit. A shot of schnapps from the crystal decanter on my sideboard dulled them a bit. Then I sipped a second shot to maintain that level of anesthesia as I tried to figure out what Ruchti might know.
I kept coming back to the idea that he knew nothing. Michael Landers, he of the bullet in the eye, had been in my company precisely three times. Once was in Fritz Blum's home, when we were arranging the withdrawal credentials. His house was miles away from the center of the city, and no coincidence in the world would have had a witness place me there. For one thing, the meeting was at night.
A second time was an accidental meeting in a random bar, where we looked at each other and decided, what the hell, it's only one drink. There were only three people in the place, and we were two of them, so what were the odds anyone saw us? And it was over a mile away from the murder, so why would a cop go looking there to connect the two of us?
The third time was the most dangerous, the time I walked him into the bank on a Saturday afternoon to make a withdrawal. But thinking back on it, the day had been rainy, and we both were wearing hats and overcoats with our collars turned up -- and Lander was carrying an umbrella. Even if someone had occasioned to look out the window and see us, and even if they recognized me, there was no way they could have gotten a good look at Landers' face. No way.
The only other potential problem would have been if Ruchti had gotten a look at my diary. But he hadn't, and without being asked, Marta had covered over Landers' name with a relatively-believable accidental ink spill that blotted out several of the entries from that day. She even blotted out another afternoon, three months previous, to make the spill seem less unusual.
So what did Ruchti know?
His office was right along the Limmat River, in the police station at Bahnofquai 3. It was a building already famous for being the best-decorated police station in the world because of the murals that the artist Augusto Giacometti had painted in the lobby. I had never seen them, so at least I would experience a little culture before dealing with Ruchti's inquisitiveness.
As I waited for him to come down, I spent a few minutes with the murals. The locals call the place Blüemlihalle because of all of the flowers in the murals, but they weren't actually flowers but floral shapes, eight petals in a circle around a center. There were flowers and crosses and a lot of orange and a lot of green, from floor to ceiling, forming roofs and arches and all kind of bordering around the main murals.
One featured a boy performing all manner of mathematical and geometry tasks, all angles and equations. In another, the theme was astronomy, with someone looking through a telescope at stars and a crescent moon. A third panel showed five stone masons building a wall, laying bricks, and troweling cement. One figure was of a man chipping away at a rock. And in the fourth mural, there were two carpenters. One of them was wielding a big saw. The first two murals were dated 1926. The last two, of the masons and the carpenters, were dated 1925.
Ruchti caught me in front of the carpenters. "Ah, Herr Kovacs. There you are, admiring a depiction of honest labor. Why would a banker be attracted to such a scene?"
This was the second crack about bankers that Ruchti had made. Yes, I was counting. I tried to keep things light as if that would matter.
"I'm surprised there is no mural of bankers," I said. "If this artwork is indeed a Swiss national treasure."<
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"Yes, how could a national treasure not contain a depiction of those in charge of the national treasure?"
"Perhaps because of the statutes prohibiting profanity?" I said.
Ruchti laughed. "Herr Kovacs, you are not like the typical Swiss banker. I find that intriguing. Perhaps you can tell me about your bank."
"Not much to tell. Small, wealthy clientele. Ties to Czechoslovakia. Some old Czech clients -- I think I can reveal that much without running afoul of the secrecy laws. But that is about it. You know as well as I do that I cannot say anything more. But there are several dozen banks in this city just like it."
He pointed past the reception desk and toward the front doors. We began to walk along the river. If he had planned to arrest me, I figured he would have done it while we were inside. So, what? Ruchti said nothing as we strolled. I had matched his silence before, back in my office, and I could do it out there, too. Absent somebody who had seen Landers and me together, the only way I could get into trouble was if I dragged myself into it with an unthinking remark. So, silence, for one block, then a second.
Finally: "I always enjoyed this view," Ruchti said, pointing ahead, the Grossmunster on the other side of the Limmat, the lake ahead. "I like it better than some of the views from the Uetliberg. What do you think? Have you been up there?"
The Uetliberg. It was, on the one hand, a celebrated Zurich vantage point. It was, on the other hand, a hell of a coincidence for him to bring it up about two weeks after I had met Groucho there. Unless it wasn't a coincidence.
"Funny you should mention it -- I was up there recently," I said, riffing with a bit of the truth. "It was a cloudy day, though. I didn't get the full experience."
"But I'm sure you were enlightened nonetheless," Ruchti said. Then, again, silence.
Uetliberg. "Enlightened." If Ruchti wasn't delivering a message, then I wasn't nearly pissing myself, which I was. But it didn't make sense. He was a cop investigating a murder. It was hard to believe that he had access to the kind of manpower it would take to follow me around all day for weeks at a time. And for what reason? I really hadn't given him one. The business card in Landers' pocket wasn't enough to make that kind of commitment. I had explained it away, and it really was true -- I did give out about 50 of my cards every month. It wouldn't have been hard for Ruchti to find that out. All he had to do was ask another banker because we all did the same thing.