The Spies of Zurich

by Richard Wake

  I did that math in my head after we hung up. Half of the country in a reasonable state of mind, a quarter Fascist, a quarter Communist. Even if the numbers were a little bit off, it didn't add up to French success under normal circumstances, and it especially didn't add up to success if the thinking of the military leadership was cemented in 1918.

  I had placed the call without Marta's assistance, which annoyed her. A few minutes after the call, she marched into the office with the diary pressed to her bosom. Her style of walking always told me what I was in for, and there really were only two possibilities. A whistling sashay meant I had screwed up something and she was there to fix it. Marching meant annoyed. Those were my two choices, and this was marching.

  "How was your call?" she said.

  "Fine, thanks." I was offering no details, and she couldn't leave the office without having regained the upper hand in our relationship, so she put down the diary and began paging for something or other that I had messed up. I stopped her.

  "Tomorrow, that thing with Greitzinger, you're going to have to reschedule it."

  "It's not a thing. It's the closing of that Bierman deal. You remember -- big building, nice profit for the bank."

  "It's not that big, and the profit isn't that nice," I said. We were providing something like 1/64th of the financing of a seven-story office building a couple of blocks off of Bahnhofstrasse.

  "There are attorneys involved. They'll be quite angry."

  "They'll get over it. We can do it next week. You pick the time."

  "Why do you have to cancel?"

  "Meeting in Bern," I said.

  "A new client?"

  "A big new client," I said. She was pulling out her pen and preparing to write a new entry in the diary.

  "Very big? Name of?"

  "Sorry, that's confidential," I said.

  "Confidential? This isn't Bankverein, for God's sake. It's you and me. I see everything. What does confidential even mean?"

  "It means that this is a private bank, and that it's my job to find the clients, and that this client is seeking the utmost discretion as he considers our services, and that until he's ready to sign the papers and back up an armored car full of his money, it's confidential."

  There was nothing Marta could say in reply.

  "Confidential means just me and him." I was enjoying this thoroughly.

  She stood up, snatched the diary off of my desk, and marched out. I almost never got the pleasure of seeing the reverse-march, which meant that she was still pissed and had not, in fact, regained the upper hand. It was a glorious sight. I stared at her walking out as if she possessed a backside worth staring at, which she did not. At least, you couldn't tell, given the gray flannel tents that Marta favored for office wear.

  I shouted, "Don't worry, I'll make the train reservation myself," and received not so much as a growl in reply. What a day.

  Then I thought about Sophie's backside -- you're not responsible for where your mind goes, you know. And then I wondered about what I would find the next night in Bern, where Sophie had told me that her boss and the big Nazi were meeting again.

  36

  It was just past 5 p.m. when Marta marched in again, this time wearing her overcoat and hat. She carried a stack of mail, the afternoon post. She usually had it on my desk by 3, and I couldn't resist.

  "Was the postman late today?" I said.

  She dropped the pile on my desk, literally dropped it from about a foot. The letters scattered but didn't spill off of the side. But the one on top did flip over. It was sealed with a circle of red wax that had been melted on the flap, which was beyond formal and archaic. The last time I had received a letter sealed with wax, it was back in Vienna, an invitation to a fancy wedding where the reception was held in the old Royal Apartments.

  Marta snatched up the envelope as if her real purpose was straightening the stack. She handed it to me and said, "Well, aren't we special. 'Personal and confidential.' Well, well."

  That's what it said on the front, in the bottom right corner, 'Personal and confidential.' But that wasn't what got the majority of my attention. Neither was it the decidedly feminine writing, nor the faint whiff of perfume that hung in the air. There was no doubt that the wax, and the writing, and especially the smell, were what grabbed Marta's attention.

  The first thing that stood out for me was the postmark. It was severely smudged, but it looked like Liechtenstein. I don't know if Marta saw that or not -- you really could barely read it. I wasn't 100 percent sure where it was from, to be truthful. But what I really couldn't stop staring at was the return address, preprinted on the envelope. The letter had been written on hotel stationery. The hotel was the Torbrau in Munich.

  Marta stood over me as I held the letter and considered. There was no way I was going to open it in her presence, though, a fact that she realized after about 10 seconds of me just staring at the envelope. For the second time, I was treated to the reverse-march.

  "Have a wonderful night," I called out, as sweetly as I could. She did not reply, never even breaking stride.

  The Torbrau in Munich. I had never stayed there. I had never seen it, I was pretty sure. I had only heard it mentioned one time. It was when Fritz Ritter was telling me the story of the time he and my Uncle Otto first met.

  It was in the 1920s, and both were middle-aged bachelors who happened to travel a lot for work, and who happened to find themselves one night sitting on adjacent bar stools at the Torbrau. One drink led to another, and the two of them decided to venture out into the night in search of whatever. In this case, whatever arrived in the personages of a pair of sisters. Back in the flat shared by said sisters, before anything really interesting happened, Ritter and my uncle and the girls found themselves on their knees, half-dressed, peeking out of the windows and observing the start of what would later come to be called the Beer Hall Putsch, the failed coup that nonetheless led to Adolf Hitler becoming a household name in Germany.

  So, there was no question who the letter was from, handwriting and perfume aside. Ritter had made that obvious, if only to me, which was the point, after all. I looked at it, held it, tapped its side on my desk blotter. At the front door, though, Anders was still at his post, bouncing on the balls of his feet, apparently waiting for me to leave. I walked out and sent him home, telling him I had some paperwork. He offered to stay. I insisted, and then I locked the door behind him.

  The letter, in the same feminine hand as the envelope -- I wonder who Ritter got to write it? -- was a mundane, it-was-wonderful-seeing-you-again kind of note. It was benign, dull even. It began with "Dearest Alex," and the signature was "Fondly, Clarice." It could have been written by an old maiden aunt.

  I left the letter on my desk and walked out to the lobby to jiggle the front door again. It was still locked. Returning to my office, I pulled down the window shades. In my bottom right drawer, there was a candle and some matches. Groucho had taught me what he called the "half-assed, quick-quick" version of revealing secret writing on a letter. As he said, "It wouldn't fool a professional, but 90 percent of the time, you don't have to. We have invisible inks that we use, and constantly update, that can only be revealed by a special reagent. We change them every month, probably. But this is quick-and-dirty."

  "Ninety percent, huh?" I said.

  "The other 10 percent of the time, they slit your throat," he said. "Kidding. Kidding. If the letter is mailed in Germany, you have to be more careful -- because the Gestapo reads everything they can. Outside, though, police and intelligence officers in other countries don't have the manpower or the urgency that the Krauts do. So this is good enough."

  What you did was light the candle and run the flame back and forth over the underside of the letter, close enough to scorch the paper but not to set the thing on fire. And if there were secret writing between the regular lines of the letter, it would be revealed if it had been written with water. I didn't believe it until Groucho showed me, but it did work. And there in my office
, as I passed the letter back and forth over the flame, words began to appear between the lines of the existing letter.

  The message:

  Vogl is back with the Gestapo. He was in Poland with them during the invasion. He is now part of a unit that is likely headed west. We both need to be careful.

  Suddenly, my wondrous day, with its two sexual encounters and two views of Marta reverse-marching out of my office, was over.

  Vogl. Shit.

  37

  I decided to drive to Bern. The roads were good, and so was the weather, finally. The 75 miles would take maybe two hours, and that was if I took my time. I needed to clear my head and, for some reason, the open road helped more than the train. It would help to have the car, too, in case I had to follow Big Ears and The Mole who-knows-where. Or maybe, if nothing were happening, I would just commute, and sleep in my own bed, and maybe hide underneath the covers.

  Vogl. Shit.

  Werner Vogl was the Gestapo captain who I tried to kill in 1938. He was responsible for my Uncle Otto's death, even if he wasn't the one who pushed him off of the bridge and into the Rhine. He used Otto in an attempt to gain information on Ritter, information that Otto did not have. But Vogl didn't care -- he tortured Otto in the basement of the Gestapo's headquarters building in Cologne, and then either he or his people shoved Otto's bruised body into the river. Vogl did that, and I might have been next, had I not decided to kill him instead, an absurd notion that would have worked. But then Ritter interceded, using me as a pawn in an elaborate scheme to frame Vogl as a traitor to the Reich before Vogl could prove the same thing about him.

  Ritter's plan worked, and Vogl was theoretically headed to Dachau, or worse. When I asked him if it wouldn't have been better just to let me kill him, Ritter said, "No, it wouldn't work. I mean, first off, we couldn't count on you following through -- and I was running out of time. We couldn't afford it if you chickened out. But more than that, killing Vogl wouldn't solve the problem -- it would just put it off. If he's dead, his replacement just picks up his old cases. But if he's disgraced, and found guilty of fabricating evidence against me to preserve his dirty secrets, the case is closed. Nobody's going near me now."

  Except something happened between then and now. Mostly, a war happened -- and, well, time heals all disgraces when the bullets start flying. Vogl was a smart guy, and organized, and ruthless -- all of the things a good Gestapo man should be. He also had been right about Ritter, and his suspicions about me hadn't been far off. He probably did a little time in a camp somewhere -- but a nice camp, or the nice part of a bad camp. Or, if he had a patron, maybe he just got stripped of his command of the station in Cologne and sent to shuffle paper in the file room in Berlin for a few months. And once the shooting started, well, who knows what evil stood watch in Himmler's heart, and how Vogl might have been a useful instrument.

  He should have just let me kill him -- which is easy enough for me to say now. I was ready to do it, in an alley behind a bar where Vogl played his weekly chess game. As the cops say in the movies, I had motive, means, and opportunity -- the means was going to be Otto's old knife, a cliche, but I didn't care. I had always been more of a thinker than a doer, and a bit of a physical coward besides, but I had worked out the details of the plan, and it was a sound plan, and I was literally seconds away from doing it when Ritter intervened. Now, a lot can happen in a few seconds, but I had whipped up a mental rage, a noise in my head, and I really didn't think I was going to back down. I was going to do it. I was. I might or might not have killed people during the war -- who knew, from hundreds of yards away? -- but this was going to be for real, and for Otto.

  But it didn't happen, and now Vogl was on the loose. And suddenly the shittiest thought crossed my mind -- that I was hoping the Germans' western invasion would arrive soon because Vogl-in-battle would not have the opportunity to be Vogl-the-investigator. He wouldn't have the chance to settle up his old accounts.

  That was pretty much all I thought about during the drive. I left at 12:30 and actually broke the ride in half, stopping for lunch at a half-timbered roadside inn -- sliced liverwurst, buttered pumpernickel, pickles, pilsner. It was kind of a dead time of day when I arrived in Bern, and I lucked into a parking spot on the street, almost right in front of the Bellevue Palace's front door. I walked around and window-shopped in town for a while, mostly to kill time but a little bit to see if I was being followed somehow. I stopped, reversed direction a couple of times, checked out the reflection in a few store windows, and nothing. If anybody gave a shit that I was in Bern, they were doing it from a very, very discreet distance.

  Right about 5, I entered the hotel and headed for the front desk. I asked if Herr Steiner was a guest because I wanted to leave him a note. If the answer was yes, I had an old business card ready to hand over, with the words "Call me, G" written on the back -- so old that its original bearer, Gerhard Gruen, had since taken a heart attack and retired to the great depositary vault in the sky. But as it turned out, the big Nazi was not registered at the hotel.

  I figured I would give it two hours in the lobby bar. I took the same table as the last time, ordered the same Manhattan, and settled in. The place was dead. I found myself staring up at the design on the glass dome above me, almost hypnotized by it. I barely noticed when Peter Ruchti joined me with the admonition, "Close your mouth, you look like a goddamned tourist."

  I wondered if he had been following me. Fuck it, I just asked him.

  "Don't flatter yourself," he said.

  "So, just a coincidence?"

  "You're the one who's in my bar, buddy. What coincidence?"

  "Your bar? I thought you couldn't afford to drink here."

  "I can't. That's why the banker with the salary out the ass is buying."

  A minute later, two more Manhattans arrived -- Ruchti must have signaled the waiter while my eyes were aloft. We drank in silence for a good while. There was only one other table occupied, an older couple having a cocktail before dinner, in all likelihood. The music coming from the lobby piano was the only ambient noise until the words just started to burst from Ruchti.

  "I don't know what you're playing at," he said.

  I just looked at him.

  "This isn't some fucking game."

  I did my best to appear bored.

  "Look -- you're up to something. You know it, I know it. I mean, come on -- you spend more time on Uetliberg than a champion yodeler. You get mysterious envelopes sealed in wax -- no, we didn't open it. You're not big enough for us to bother with, not yet. But we're not the only ones who have noticed."

  At this, my face must have betrayed something.

  "You're an amateur -- you know that, right?" Ruchti said. "We just had an amateur who ended up with a bullet through his eye, you might remember. When that happens, my boss gets up my ass. My entire job is to make sure nobody else ends up lying in a pool of blood on Rennweg. That's why they pay me the big money."

  "The big money?" I said. "So you're buying the next round."

  "You don't get it," he said. "How many times can I say this -- it isn't a game. Hitler's boys aren't kidding around. They don't want to make us uncomfortable here in the great neutral Switzerland, but they'll do what they deem necessary. And another thing. You might have sensed that I'm not a big fan of bankers."

  "Yeah, I got that."

  "Well, I can't prove this, but I sometimes believe that, shall we say, representatives of Swiss banking interests occasionally also drink in this bar, with me and the Germans and the French and the British and the Chinese and whoever else."

  "What?" This had never dawned on me as a possibility.

  "My job is to keep track of the players and do everything I can to make sure none of them ends up dead -- or at least not dead on Swiss soil. Because too many dead bodies could lead to diplomatic incidents with unexpected consequences. In case you haven't gotten it by now, the bankers here in Switzerland don't make money off of unexpected consequences. They're not looking for
the big score. They make money by rote, by taking a tiny piece of a million transactions, by grubby certainty covered up by a starched collar. My boss has a saying: 'We don't care if the game is dirty as long as the playing field remains clean.'"

  Ruchti got up to leave, and I suddenly needed to get out, too. I paid for the drinks and decided to drive home. He hadn't scared me, but Ruchti had widened my field of vision in a way that I hadn't expected. I needed to think some more. It was as if checkers had become chess.

  I got in the car. After only about a second, I realized that I smelled Manon even before she said my name from the floor of the back seat.

  38

  If Ruchti had been following me, I never saw him. If Manon had been following me, I never saw her. I really must have been an amateur.

  She got out of the back seat, opened the driver's side door and told me to move over.

  "Or else?" I attempted to adopt as much of an assholish tone as I could, and I think I did pretty well.

  "Just slide over," she said. Her tone was warmer.

  There were a dozen things I thought about saying. Part of me was furious. A smaller part of me was intrigued. A much smaller part of me saw the quick half-smile on her face as I slid my ass over the leather bench of the front seat and melted. What the fuck?

  Which is what I ended up saying. "What the fuck?"

  "We're going for a drive," she said. "And I'm driving."

  "Where?"

  "Basel?"

  "What's there?"

  "You'll see."

  "Why now?"

  "Has to be now," she said.

  "This is bullshit--"

  "Alex, please shut up. I'm trying to make this up to you."

  "That's not possible."