The Spies of Zurich

by Richard Wake

  "He was carrying the original plan, to get to France through Holland and Belgium. So Hitler demanded something different."

  Brodsky's was a more exciting tale, but the end result was identical to Ritter's, and that was the important thing. Without tipping off my source, I then leaned in and told Brodsky what Ritter had told me. He sat silently for a second. He looked kind of hurt.

  "What?" I said.

  "Why didn't you tell me before now?"

  The truth was, I had never thought about telling him because, well, I had never thought about it. Ritter was our guy, and he was too valuable to risk by sharing the info too widely, even though I wasn't sure exactly how it would be a risk.

  "I thought the deal was, I would share information that directly affected the Soviet Union," I said.

  "And this doesn't?"

  "No, not directly. Hitler can't try to screw you guys until after he's done with France and England. It's not like that's going to happen tomorrow. I wasn't given a solid date for the invasion, either, not that it would matter much to Stalin. Well, not unless he was planning to fuck Hitler while he was busy in France."

  "Ah, the pre-emptive fuck," Brodsky said. "It isn't a bad theory but, no, that isn't it. I just thought you would share it."

  "I couldn't risk the source," I said.

  We were quiet again, and in the silence was an agreement to disagree. The important thing was that we each had a second source for the German invasion plan -- and given Brodsky's background, and Ritter's connections, and the differing rationales in the two accounts, it seemed unlikely that the information originated with the same person. This was not a second parroting of the same information. No, this was confirmation.

  "I have to get out of here -- like I said, my liver," Brodsky said. "You have one more and then go." Which is what I did. I don't know what it said about me, but I felt more excited than depressed that I was now in possession of a re-affirmation that Hitler was about to try to overrun France.

  Luckily, the tram arrived within about five minutes, which meant I could still feel the tip of my nose when I got on, barely. I walked home and chose a route past Fessler's. It was nearly 10:30, and the door was locked. But a few lights were on, and I knocked softly on the glass.

  Gregory was just finishing up, an apron tied around his waist, a white towel tossed over his shoulder. He unlocked the door, and let me in, and immediately commented on how bad I smelled. He made me take off my coat and hang it out the back door of the cafe before allowing me up the stairs to his apartment. There, we sent the new information to London. The reply arrived almost immediately. Dash, dash, dot.

  33

  The postcard was waiting for me at work about a week later. On the one hand, I was thrilled that Groucho had finally acknowledged the information we had sent and was ready to involve me in whatever was coming next. On the other hand, the picture on the postcard was of cold-assed Uetliberg, again. Wednesday at 2:30.

  And so, as instructed, I took the train out to the mountain. Seeing as how Ruchti knew about our last meeting, and likely knew about this meeting, I didn't even bother much with the counter-surveillance rigamarole that I had begun to develop, like taking the tram one stop too far and walking back to the station. Besides, there wasn't another soul in my train car. On a Wednesday afternoon, in the first week in March, after a miserable winter that had yet to bless us with its final belch -- 34 degrees and light rain were on the day's menu -- who would even think about an outing to Uetliberg?

  And so, I clambered up the iced-over path to the top, thankful that the gravel embedded in the ice somehow saved me from a pratfall. I considered the fact that I never once landed on my ass to be one of the great athletic feats of my life, second only to the time in 1914 when, at school, I won a head-to-head race against Bruno Sensenbrenner, a 100-yard dash organized by the faculty, thus gifting those in my grade having last names beginning with A-to-M a week off from physical education class. I was a hero for the rest of the term. Students I barely knew were suddenly clapping me on the back in the school hallway. If only they could see me now, lurching from one patch of gravel to the next. Back then was mere speed. This was pure athletic grace.

  At the summit, it wasn't hard to find Groucho, mostly because there wasn't another person up there, not even the hot chocolate man. The first thing I said to him was, "Will you please get some different fucking postcards before you leave town this time?"

  He responded by offering me a pull from his flask. I reached into my pocket and showed him my own, and we toasted the low cloud that hugged the mountaintop like a sweater. The drizzle had stopped but, looking out, you really couldn't see shit.

  "So?' I said, and Groucho began. His bottom line was that the British and the French didn't believe the German invasion would come through the Ardennes. I exploded with a "you've got to be fucking kidding me," and he told me to calm down and repeat everything I knew, which I did. It took me a few minutes to get through the story from Ritter about Hitler being unimpressed with the original plan, and Manstein supplying the new one, and then the story from Brodsky about the plane crash and the original plans falling into the possession of the Belgians. Groucho took it all in, nodding a few times in seeming recognition, surprised by other details and making me repeat them. Then he took a long pull from the flash, a few drops dribbling out of the side of his mouth. He wiped it with his sleeve.

  "Okay," he said. "The Manstein bit is new to us -- and that's from Ritter, yes?" I nodded.

  "This is what we have," Groucho said. "We believe the plane crash is the key element here. From the information that we have gathered, the plane crashed, and the officer tried to set fire to the plans before being captured. He was in some farm field, and a farmer even helped him with some matches, but they were captured before too much was burned up. Then they took them to a jail and left them alone with the plans for a few minutes, then the officer burned the shit out of his hands on a hot stove, trying to shovel the plans into the fire inside. They caught him, and the plans were pretty scorched, but they rescued enough of them to get the gist -- that they were coming through Holland and Belgium, very much like 1914."

  "But your best source, a fucking Abwehr general, says it isn't true anymore," I said. "And my Russian confirms it. Why won't they believe it."

  "Because they don't think it's possible."

  "Who exactly is they?"

  "The French and British general staffs," Groucho said. "The truth is, they don't tend to agree on shit, but they agree on this."

  "But why?" I was shouting at this point.

  "They just don't see the Ardennes as a possibility. They say, 'The terrain is prohibitive.' If you look at a map, it's hard to argue."

  I had looked at a map, but I also had looked Ritter in the eye. I couldn't believe they were dismissing his intelligence.

  "This is what they think happened," Groucho said. "They see the Holland and Belgium route as the only one that makes sense militarily, given the obstacle of the Maginot Line. When the plane crashed, and we got the plans, it just confirmed what is sound military thinking. We tried to let it leak that the officer managed to burn up the plans and that we didn't really get much information. It's hard to know what the Germans believe about that. But the French and British see this Ardennes plan as misinformation from the Germans, to throw us off from the only plan that makes sense."

  At which point, I completely exploded on Groucho.

  "He's your best fucking agent," I said.

  "Well, yes."

  "And now I have confirmation from the Russian."

  Groucho nodded.

  "What am I not getting here? He's as good a source as you've ever had. He's been right about so many things. He's been right about fucking everything. He was right about Poland -- and you ignored him then."

  "How do you know that?" Groucho said.

  "How do you think?"

  I stood there, cocooned in cloud on the top of Uetliberg, seething. I had agreed to do this, to run this
risk, and now my information was being ignored. I mean, what was the point?

  "Look," Groucho said. "I shouldn't tell you this, but we are a little concerned about Ritter?"

  "Concerned how?"

  "Not what you're thinking, not that he's turned on us. But we're worried that the Germans might have discovered that he has been working for us and are using him to send us false information."

  "But why?"

  "Because the Ardennes just doesn't make any sense -- how many times can I tell you? The people in charge of knowing about such things just don't believe it's possible to move a mechanized army into France on those windy roads through the woods. They consider the whole idea 'foolish.' That's what one of the Frogs supposedly called it. 'Foolish.'"

  I was thinking about quitting on the spot -- the spying, the bank, all of it. I had enough money, and I had two passports, Czech and Swiss. I could go anywhere, as far away from this whole thing as I wanted to go. The truth was, I could steal a lot more from the bank than was in my account and be over the border before anyone knew. What were they going to do -- sue me?

  "I don't know if I've ever told you this," Groucho said, "but it's dangerous to get too attached to any agent, even someone like Ritter. You need to know that. And besides, why are you defending him so strongly? I thought you believed he fucked you."

  I had thought about this. I had thought about this a lot -- how Ritter had set me up in order to neutralize the Gestapo captain who suspected him of being a Czech agent, set me up and then rescued me. I had thought about it and come to terms with it. When I answered Groucho, I wasn't yelling anymore.

  "I don't think he fucked me," I said. "But he did use me. But the more I have thought about it, I believe he used me for the right reasons. And I think he did intend to protect me if it went wrong. And in the end, he did protect me. In a rotten fucking business, that isn't a terrible set of facts."

  We parted without a handshake or a plan to meet again. Groucho left first. I stared off into the gauze, emptying my flask. Then it was down the path for me, the descent even harder than the climb. About halfway down, I fell. The gravel tore through my pants and my drawers and ripped the skin of my ass. I felt through the hole in the cloth and then looked at my fingers. I was bleeding.

  34

  The next night was First Thursday. Marc Wegens had become a regular no-show, which further led me to believe that Hitler was going to be in the neighborhood sooner rather than later and that Marc was running around under orders, from unit to unit, attempting to maximize the abilities of Switzerland's pop-gun army in any way he could. I wouldn't have minded talking to him about the Swiss theory of the case -- whether they really thought Hitler might invade their mountain-protected, enchanted land of chocolate and hard currency -- but he might have seen that as a bit intrusive, seeing as how Herman kind of believed that Marc knew I was a spy.

  Whatever, he wasn't there. But Herman and Brodsky were, and getting shitfaced seemed to be on all three of our schedules for the evening. Dark did not begin to describe my mood, after what Groucho had told me. And after I told Herman and Brodsky that nobody believed what we had been told, it was a suitably morose threesome.

  "So let me get this straight," Herman said. "You have information about the Ardennes being the invasion point from an excellent source with an impeccable history. And Brodsky has information from a source of his that confirms what your source told you. And they still don't believe it?"

  "That's about the size of it," I said.

  "Are they idiots? I mean, truly mentally deficient?"

  "That's not it." Brodsky had been quiet, and he was still quiet, barely audible above the cheery background music, some big band I didn't recognize, lots of happy clarinets.

  "They're not idiots," he said. "They're just so married to what they know that they can't accept that they might be wrong, that the thing they believed in for so long might not be true after all."

  "But there's evidence," Herman said. "There's more than one piece of evidence. They each confirm the other."

  Brodsky shook his head. "It's the curse of old men. They stop listening at some point. They stop learning. It's like they never opened a book after 1918. If it made sense then, it makes sense now. If it was smart then, it's still smart now."

  "But it didn't fucking work the first time," I said. "Why do they think the Germans will try it the same way again?"

  "It almost worked," Herman said. "Close enough to give it another go."

  "But the sources? The information?"

  "You're not listening -- the book is closed. The old men will not open it. How old is Gamelin? Sixty-what?"

  "Sixty-seven -- I read it in the paper the other day," I said. "The story was all about the wisdom of the French high command, and listed all of his postings through the years."

  "Sixty-seven, there you go," Brodsky said. "He probably made up his mind about things somewhere along the Somme, and he will never change."

  "And the evidence be damned," Herman said.

  "Experience becomes blinding," Brodsky said. "The three most dangerous words in any language, especially for a soldier, are 'I remember when...'"

  In an effort to join Gamelin in his blindness, we rotated through rounds of each of our cocktails, first my Manhattans, then Herman's rye and ginger ales, and then Brodsky's vodka shots. The waiter just brought the bottle, and we emptied it by the end of the night.

  Somewhere along the way, we began to debate whether or not it made sense for either Herman or Brodsky to publish what we knew about the German invasion, Herman in his magazine or Brodsky in the Finnish newspaper. We were talking more than thinking at that point, given our alcohol consumption, but even drunk, it seemed like a bad idea. Making the Ardennes possibility public would not be alerting any decision-makers to information that they didn't already possess -- the French and British already knew, and so did the Germans, obviously. All the publication would be doing was drawing attention to Herman and/or Brodsky, attention that would only make their further attempts at unearthing information more difficult.

  As Herman said, "The last thing I need is even more Nazis up my ass. They look at me warily now, and keep half an eye on me -- I know all the Zurich legation guys at this point. They don't even try to hide it when they're watching me. But it's only half an eye. I don't need both eyes."

  "I get that," I said. "And it's easy for me to say, seeing as how I'm not at risk if you publish. But if they're going to ignore the information we all get, what's the point? Don't we need to find a way to make a difference here?"

  "You're kidding yourself, by the way," Brodsky said. "About not being at risk on this one. Let's say the Germans are playing your source, even a little bit. If his information gets published, you will be a link in the chain. You don't think they'll find out, but you don't know. The Gestapo is pretty good at finding things out. For all we know, they're outside in a big black Daimler right now, waiting for us to leave so they can make a report to whoever about the strange coincidence of the three of us being here together, all of us already on their radar."

  I knew well about the Gestapo. I knew Brodsky was right. There was no such thing as not being at risk, not for me, not anymore. Not unless I bailed out and headed to Argentina, which had been on my mind all day after reading an article about it in the travel section of Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

  "So we do nothing?" I said.

  "We just keep doing what we're doing," Brodsky said. "And we hope that it matters in the end."

  On the way back from a trip to the toilet, I bumped into a slender brunette, maybe 30 years old. I literally knocked her off of her shoes, and she grabbed me to keep from falling. My profuse apologies were likely adorable, as she invited me to join her and her two friends at a table on the other side of the cafe. My charm somehow supplanted my intoxication, apparently, as the two friends grabbed their coats and said their goodbyes soon after. I was too drunk to catch the signals that my girl, Angela was her name, had sent to her friends t
o hasten their exit. Maybe they were telepathic.

  All I knew was that, as soon as the friends were out, I was in. It was about 1:30 a.m. when I got myself buttoned up and began the cold walk home from Angela's flat.

  35

  The next morning, I called Sophie Buhl from the office. Since the night we had spent together, we had missed each other a couple of times, partly because I felt so bad about Manon, partly because I had become sidetracked away from the Nazi gold business while collecting the Ardennes invasion information from Fritz Ritter, and then being ignored. But I didn't feel bad about Manon anymore, and the Nazi gold was all I had at the moment as far as a promising avenue of information gathering.

  When she said, "Come on over to the office at 2:30, I think I can find a towel to protect the couch in my boss's office," I was already 80 percent out of my hangover and confident of the rest of the distance. I did think about Manon, but just for a second. By 3:00, my second sex act with a second woman in a 15-hour period was complete. Walking back to the Bohemia Suisse, I decided to place a call to Paris to tell Leon, just so I could get it on record with someone who would appreciate the accomplishment. Predictably, he started by calling me an "amateur," and ended by saying, "My little boy, you're all grown up." It was good catching up, and I asked him what his newspaper and the rest were saying about war.

  "They're not writing it, but we're fucked," Leon said.

  "We? You've only been there a year."

  "I was born to be a Frog," he said. "It's, I don't know, freer than Vienna. I can't imagine how much looser it is than tight-assed Zurich. I don't know how you stand it there. Although, twice in 15 hours --"

  "What did you mean by fucked, though?"

  "They love their army," he said. "But if you talk to people on the street, just in the bars and cafes, half of the rich people are kind of rooting for the Nazis -- they won't lift a finger against Hitler. As for the rest, I'd say half of them would rather the country go to the Communists -- and they're never going to fight anybody. So, fucked."