The Spies of Zurich

by Richard Wake

  Did I dare? I scanned the room. There would be nothing unusual at all about a lone traveler grabbing a file folder from his briefcase for a quick peek. I was seated against the wall -- at least I had gotten that part right -- so no one could see over my shoulder. The big plant to my right -- which really could stand to be watered a bit more regularly, given the price of the Manhattan -- would shield me from that direction. So why not?

  With the file folder as close to my chest as I could manage while still opening it, I riffled through the photos. About halfway through, I found my man. Now I needed to see that name written on the back, except I did not dare remove it entirely from the folder. So, instead, I kept my finger on the photo inside and flipped over the entire folder and then read what was on the back:

  Walter Sparberger

  Deputy Minister of Finance

  On the one hand, there were probably a dozen reasons why the German deputy minister of finance would be meeting with a vice president of the Swiss national bank. On the other hand, if there really was a gold laundering operation underway, who better to coordinate it than a pair of functionaries who were pretty high up in their respective organizations, but not so high as to dirty the hands of the truly important people.

  I was thinking all of this, and looking down one more time into the file folder, when a voice startled me.

  "Herr Kovacs, a pleasure to see you."

  It was Berner and Sparberger, standing at my table, standing above me and looking down at me and my file folder.

  I flinched and yanked my hand out of the file and placed it on my lap. Berner said, "I apologize. I have startled you. Working after hours?"

  He introduced me to Sparberger, offering his name and title. No secrets, then. I explained that I was just checking a contract for an error that, as it turns out, was not an error after all.

  "Alone?" Berner asked.

  "Stood up, it appears," I said, shrugging. The two of them offered weak smiles. I said, "I haven't given up yet, though -- not until I finish this drink, anyway."

  "Well, good luck," Berner said. He and Sparberger headed into the restaurant for dinner.

  16

  I stopped at my flat to change my clothes, then headed to Cafe Fessler. Manon was overnight in some godforsaken place at some godforsaken farm show. Or as she said, "Cutest goat contest, followed by judging the butter sculptures, followed by a half-hour of scraping the shit off of my shoes."

  The weather had turned cold and wet, which kept most of the fossils at home for the night. The last one left the cafe at about 10:15, at which point Gregory locked up and turned off the outside lights. I had already told him that we had a job this evening, and he motioned into the back room and then up the staircase that led to his flat.

  It was a massive space -- small kitchen and eating area, large living room and three bedrooms besides. Henry and Liesl had the same setup, two floors above. The level in-between could have been another apartment but was instead used as a storage space for tables and chairs and fixtures and such. This way, it gave them all a little more privacy.

  Only two of Gregory's bedrooms were furnished. The third was used for storage, a maze of half-filled boxes and mismatched furniture pieces. Only now, in the far corner, hidden behind the warren of shit, were a wooden folding chair and a small round table, upon which sat the radio that Gregory would use to transmit Alex's report of the meeting between Berner and Sparberger.

  "Let m turn it on," Gregory said. "It's going to take a little while to warm up."

  He flicked the switch, and the dial lit up, and I wondered for the tenth time exactly what I had done by allowing Gregory to get involved in all of this. Slowly, you could hear the tubes inside the radio begin to hum. Gregory actually put his hand on the radio, to feel the temperature rise. He did it lovingly if that was possible.

  It had started when Groucho insisted on the radio. He said, "If you're insisting on being a free agent, as you call it, then you will need it to communicate. The mails aren't quick enough except for the most routine messages."

  He gave me a handbook on Morse code, as well as a copy of the King James Bible, all 1,279 pages of it. The system we used would be simple enough. If we were sending a message on August 20th, we would go to page 821 of the bible -- always add one page. Then we would substitute letters on the page for numbers. If we wanted to transmit the letter T, we would count the number of letters on the page until we reached the first T, and that number would be sent. If was easy to execute and pretty much uncrackable. Even if someone found the book and figured out the date part, the extra page would likely confound them forever.

  "Okay, let me start on the message," Gregory said. I handed it over. It was simple enough: "Brenner met tonight with Sparberger." But seeing as how this would be our first real transmission -- we had performed one test -- we were both nervous.

  Groucho had said that the radio would be shipped to me by regular mail, but he said that he would not risk it being sent directly to my flat or to the bank. "Ruchti knows you're up to something, which means the Nazis in the legation might at least suspect," he said. "We just can't take the chance. We need a third party."

  My only third party was the Fesslers. So they had it shipped there. When it arrived, I would think of some explanation. And as it turned out, when it did arrive, Henry didn't even think twice. He signed for it and, when I came in for dinner, he said, "You had a package delivered here this morning. It's in the back. I'll get it for you in a few minutes." First, though, he was going upstairs to drop off his Manhattan and a glass of Riesling for Liesl. Then, by the bar, I heard Gregory tell him, "Don't bother, I'll get it for him." And then, a few minutes after that, Gregory brought me the package, about the size of a shoebox. It was apparent that he had opened it and rewrapped it.

  "So, explain," Gregory said. He sat down, and the look on his face was one part excitement and one part disdain.

  There seemed little point in lying. It's not as if I could argue that I was joining a shortwave radio club as a hobby. Gregory, Henry, and Liesl already knew about what I had done in Vienna, and the deal I had to make with Czech intelligence to get all of us to Zurich, and Leon to Paris. They knew I was running the bank as part of the arrangement. They had probably assumed that I was more involved than I was before somebody put a bullet in Michael Landers' head. So, well, what the hell. I told Gregory everything. The story about the Nazi gold really set him off.

  "Those goddamned--"

  "What ones? The Germans or the Swiss?" I said.

  "All of them. But especially the goddamned Swiss. You have to stop them. And you have to let me help."

  "Wait, wait, wait. No. This can't happen."

  "You just told me you're a free agent. So you're free to recruit some assistance. I'm your assistance."

  "No, damn it. No. Absolutely not. N-O. There's no way I can let you get involved in this."

  "I'm already involved in this." Gregory pointed to the box on the table.

  "No you're not, not really," I said. I think I spent the next five minutes babbling myriad variations of the phrase "no fucking way." All I could think about was Henry, and how much he loved the life where his father was just a normal father, not the guy who ran a protection racket, and how he would kill me if he found out.

  "Just listen to me," Gregory said. I had pretty much talked myself out, and he waited until I was done. "If it wasn't safe to mail the radio to your flat, then it's just as unsafe for you to transmit from your flat. We both know that the technology exists to detect the transmissions, which means the German likely have that capability here. For all we know, that's why the guy got shot through the head, because they caught him transmitting."

  "We don't know that," I said. I was weakening.

  "Alex, you have to let me do this. It will help you, and you know it even if you won't admit it, but I really need this. I need it for me. I'm dying of boredom here. I miss the game. I miss the action. And if I can't ever have that back, I can have this. And I
can do something for my country, for Austria. Alex, I need this. It might be my last chance."

  Twenty years earlier, Gregory had hired me for a summer job at the restaurant -- Henry's dad, our friendly neighborhood mobster. Now he was begging me, half pathetic but half defiant. So I agreed. He learned the Morse code in a couple of days. The practice transmission went off perfectly. And now, on our first real night, after I checked over the message, Gregory sent it with a steady, even cadence. He kept the Morse code cheat sheet at his side, but it he referred to it, I didn't notice.

  After sending, we waited in silence for an acknowledgment from London. The letter G would mean that Groucho received and understood the message. The letter R would mean that they needed a repeat. Silence for more than five minutes would mean they never received the message.

  Two minutes, three minutes, then:

  Dash, dash, dot.

  The letter G.

  Gregory and I hugged as if we had just bombed Berchtesgaden. He flipped off the radio and offered me a drink, but I declined. Turning to leave, I looked at him and nodded, and we both laughed as we repeated the one rule that both of us had agreed upon as inviolate:

  "Henry can't know."

  17

  Manon went home to Lyon for Christmas and New Year's. I asked her if she was going to tell her family about me. Her reply was a laugh. Not a giggle, not a smiling titter, but a brief explosion of a guffaw. Imagine your best friend's drunken belly-laugh when he recalls the story of the time when you drank beer for the first time, and he literally dropped you in a heap just inside the vestibule of your building. Now cut that in half. That was Manon's reaction.

  "Darling," she said. She must have seen the hurt on my face and was backtracking. "We are not children anymore. I do not practice writing 'Manon Kovacs' on the inside of my school copybooks. I do not gossip about you with my friends -- although Liesl does pry a few details out of me every once in a while, but that's more about her knowing you than anything else. Because I don't act like a schoolgirl doesn't mean I don't love you. Because I very much love you."

  In all, it was a decent salvage on her part. But I would close my eyes and hear that laugh for weeks afterward.

  The newspapers, all through that time, were full of talk of the "sitzkrieg" or the "phony war." The Poles didn't think it was so phony, of course. They had lasted about five weeks, give or take, before the Germans pushing from the west and the Russians pushing from the east strangled the breath out of a proud army that actually fought nobly, given everything. It was such a shame. When you talked to somebody about Poland, if one of you didn't use the term "poor bastards" to describe them, it was an upset. They had done nothing wrong. There was no good reason why they should be the volleyball of Central Europe, batted around strategically sometimes and simply smashed at other times. Their only offense was an accident of geography. Poor, poor bastards.

  But since then, nothing. The Christmas markets in Zurich were their usual charming selves, full of kitsch and crap and smiling families from the hinterlands, making a day of it. Christmas in my flat was typical -- no tree, no lights, no kitsch, no crap. Liesl tried to embarrass me into decorating, but I refused to be embarrassed. Christmas was for children. Period.

  Still, I bought a bracelet for Manon and received a necktie from her to go along with her belly-laugh. It seemed about right. I also bought small gifts for Henry, Liesl, and Gregory, because on Christmas Eve, the cafe would close at 2 p.m. and there would be a family celebration, and if they weren't my family -- along with Leon in Paris -- then I didn't have a family. My father and brother in Brno weren't speaking to me anymore after I chose a life of spying over a life of selling magnesite. But the truth was, they were jealous, seeing as how the Nazis had forced them to sell them the mine for about an 85 percent discount to what it was worth and to continue running it on a pittance of a salary. The root of their jealousy was that when they bought out my share in 1938 -- after I fought them just to give me a share -- they had not had such foresight and had only fucked me by about 50 percent.

  The last time I had heard from my father, it had been a telephone call to the bank where he asked me to give some of the money back. It was a long call, in three acts. In the first, he said a rebate from me was the "sporting" thing to do. In the second, he said it was the "gentlemanly" thing to do. And then, in the third and final act, the man who had always treated both his brother Otto and me as some peculiar species of irresponsible wastrels, insisted that I owed it, "as a matter of family honor." That's when I hung up.

  So, Merry Christmas. My spying activities had pretty much shut down for the holiday season, not because spies are particular fans of nativity scenes, except as places for a discreet brush pass of information or a quick conversation, but because the people I was spying on -- bankers, German ministers and the like -- all had families outside of their day jobs, and this was a family time. I was pretty much left with the newspapers, which speculated reasonably often about what might be next, but subtly. When it happened -- when Adolf's legions finally arrived -- it wouldn't be subtle, but for now, the talk was of unspecified "consultations in Berlin," and feature stories about the state-of-the-art technology contained within the Maginot Line, and friendly reaffirmations of Belgian neutrality, and the catch-all "awaiting events." Everybody was awaiting events.

  Gregory opened a bottle of champagne on Christmas Eve, and we sat around and told the old Vienna stories. Gregory got misty when he brought up his wife, who died of breast cancer in 1930. I got misty when I told my Christmas story about Uncle Otto, the one from soon after the war when he bought me a new suit and handed me a train ticket and a list of hotel reservations, officially giving me my first three clients, saying, "God, you were born to do this. Sometimes I think you really are my kid."

  And then Henry and Liesl locked arms and announced she was pregnant. Gregory wept for about five minutes and then sat stunned as if clobbered by an especially mighty right hand. As best as the doctor could figure, she was due in late May.

  Walking home, picturing in my head the whole way just how happy Henry and Liesl and Gregory were, I wondered if I was close to that. Or was I kidding myself? Was a life with Manon just some invention of my imagination, one that she never considered a possibility? And if she did think it as a real possibility, would I be able to commit when the moment arrived? Or was I always destined to be Otto's nephew, continually holding life at arm's length?

  Questions. And then, beneath my front door, someone had stuffed a flyer. It read, "Unite Against Nazi Aggression!" It was advertising a rally for the following Sunday, New Year's Eve, at the end of Bahnhofstrasse, right in front of Lake Zurich. The sponsors of the rally were not identified, which seemed odd, and I wondered if it was a request for a meeting from Groucho or another of the Czech spies. But I looked outside and saw the same flyer sticking out of from under a half-dozen doors. I snatched one and compared it to mine, just to make sure.

  As it turned out, they were identical. It was just a flyer. Next week, I knew, there would be another one, not for a pro-Hitler rally -- that would just be crass -- but for "a celebration of German culture and heritage" or some such thing. In a neutral country, divided by German influence in the north and east and French influence in the south and west, this tugging in both directions was a near-constant.

  I grabbed the bottle of schnapps from the sideboard. And by the time I was finished comparing the two flyers, and wondering about what morsel of news the morning papers might bring, and considering when it was time to start trolling the hotel bars again, I wasn't thinking about Manon or babies or what-might-be anymore.

  18

  January 4th was the first Thursday of 1940. Cafe Tessinerplatz was even more crowded than it was for the typical Thursday promotion. It was filled with men, almost exclusively, men who likely had seen enough of their families recently. Or, as Albert the waiter said as he seated me, "You can overdo it with with the kith and kin, am I right, Herr Alex?"

  Marc Wege
ns, my army friend, was nowhere to be seen, though. I was two Manhattans deep, and he was still absent, which was unusual but not unheard of. Even during a phony war, as a major in a phony army, Marc likely was dealing with a lot of last-minute re-figuring of, well, everything an army figures. It was such a strange outfit, the Swiss military. They didn't have a general except when things started to get hot, and the legislature picked a guy to deal with the heat. The legislature just did that, and the papers said the guy's name was Guisan, and they called up a couple of hundred thousand people from the reserves. The whole thing sounded like a logistical nightmare. Hence, I figured, no Marc.

  I was about to call it a night when Herman Stressel, the German magazine editor, walked in with another man I had not met before. He caught my eye, and the two of them sat at my table.

  "Vlad Brodsky," the man said. He stuck out his hand and began talking before Herman had time to make the introductions. "And you are Alex Kovacs, who might or might not be doing a little undercover work for the Czechs. Am I right?"

  I looked at Herman. "Motherf--"

  "Calm yourself, my friend Alex," Brodsky said. He put his hand on my arm, as familiar as if we had known each other since kindergarten. "You must not blame Herman. I wheedled it out of him. I can be very persuasive."

  "He can help you," Herman said. He sat, half-smiled, half-shrugged. "I promise you, he can help."

  I didn't know what to say. They ordered drinks from Albert, and we sat in silence until they arrived. I don't know if it was the alcohol, but the rage I felt at the instant of hearing that Herman had blabbed to Brodsky ebbed almost instantly. Soon, I was calculating how this might help me, waiting for one of them to say something -- which Herman finally did.