The Spies of Zurich

by Richard Wake

  "Maybe, maybe not," Manon said. "But let me try."

  She started the car, and we headed north. I slid as far to the right in the car seat as I could, leaning against the door. There were a good two feet between us.

  It was past 6 p.m. and dark, but Manon drove confidently and without a map. I had made the drive before. It was a little more than 60 miles, and it was actually pretty nice in the summer. In the winter, though, the fog was persistent, and you usually couldn't see shit. At night, you really couldn't see shit. We went through St. Ursanne, a little medieval town that I remembered as being very charming, and then up past a couple of viewing points along the road where people routinely pulled over in the summer so they could gawk. But we just drove, the dark road interrupted by the occasional hamlet, mostly in silence.

  What the hell was this all about? It was the question that kept circulating through my consciousness. I had been over Manon -- 90 percent over her. Well, maybe 75 percent. But I was getting there. The whole spying thing, when you think about it, is pretty damned dehumanizing. You're in the information-gathering business, and you use people to acquire the information, and then you dispose of the people because the information is paramount -- because the information is being gathered in service of The Cause, and The Cause is the most important thing of all, the reason you agreed to take the risks you're taking. The people are incidental.

  I knew that, but I never understood it, not deep down, not until Manon, not until she used me the way she did. I had begun to rationalize it, that I was going to have to learn sometime, and that I would be a better spy because of it -- a crappier person but a better spy. And, well, with Hitler, with everything, you couldn't convince me that anything else could be the most important thing.

  My mind raced. She broke the silence.

  "How have you been?" she said.

  "Splendid."

  "No, really."

  "Yes, really."

  Then silence, again. Soon, we were in Basel. If Bern was sleepy, Basel was its drowsy twin, about the same size but close enough to the German and French borders that you could smell them both. If Bern was mostly about the government, Basel was mostly about the university, which made it marginally more interesting. The nightlife in the few blocks right around the school undoubtedly was a bit more robust, but as we drove through the streets, all was buttoned up and closed down. It wasn't even 10 p.m.

  Manon maneuvered the car easily, again as if she were more than familiar with the route. For a while, it was as if she was taking evasive action, circling one particular part of the city and then going the wrong way down a one-way street. It was only about 200 feet, little wider than an alley, but the direction was clearly marked.

  "Are we being followed?" I said.

  "Just being careful."

  "So, no."

  "I don't think so," she said.

  Her tone was not entirely convincing. In a minute, though, she seemed satisfied enough that we parked in another alley. It was like we were in a tunnel, a dark tunnel. There were no overhead lights. We had a view of the back of some building. It looked like a loading dock of some kind, and it was well-lit. But it literally was the light at the end of the tunnel. She parked and turned off the car's lights, and we were likely invisible from either end of the 500-foot alley, about equidistant from the streets at either end.

  "Now what?" I said.

  "Now we wait," she said.

  She sighed, leaned her head back, closed her eyes.

  "If you fall asleep, what happens then?"

  "I won't. But if I do, you'll know when it happens."

  "When what happens?" I said.

  She reached into her handbag and handed me a small leather case. Inside was a set of binoculars, as tiny as I had ever seen.

  "Amuse yourself if you want," she said.

  "These are something," I said. I turned them over in my right hand. They weren't much bigger than the palm. "Swiss precision?"

  "Okay, they're good at binoculars. But that's all."

  She closed her eyes again, this time with another of her half-smiles. I continued to lean against the door on my right. The distance between us was still about two feet, as big as I could make it.

  Fiddling with the focus wheel between the eyepieces, I was quickly able to get a clear, sharp view of what was, indeed, a loading dock. I also was able to read the small sign on the wall to the right of the gate. From our lair in the alley, I was looking at the back of Basel's Swiss national bank building.

  39

  "There's movement," I said. It must have been an hour later. The night was still quiet, but an outer gate was being opened in the back of the bank, and an inner barrier was being lifted. Two guards carrying rifles watched the other two work out the mechanics. They all wore blue blazers and gray slacks.

  I reached over, nudged Manon awake, and then resumed my distance. She barely stirred.

  "Tell me what you see," she said, and I did.

  "Tell me if you recognize anybody," she said, and I didn't.

  If she opened her eyes, I didn't catch it. I followed up with a spare narration of what I was seeing. Gates open, the four blazers stood and chatted, apparently waiting for something. After about five minutes, it arrived -- an armored car, not enormous but big enough. It sat low to the ground, no doubt straining the shock absorbers. It just looked heavy more than anything. And from the front right fender, a small German flag sat limply on a short pole.

  "Nazis in the house," Manon said. "Showtime."

  She was awake now, but there was still an exhaustion about her. She seemed beaten somehow. She caught me looking at her and pointed toward the front windshield, and the bank beyond it.

  "Keep looking," she said. "And you haven't seen anybody that you recognize yet?"

  I had not. The armored car was just sitting there. Then, out of the passenger side door came a man in a business suit. I couldn't tell who it was until he turned and appeared as if he were looking directly at our car in the alley, and at me. It was Matthias Steiner, the big Nazi.

  As if he were waiting for Steiner to show himself first, a door of the bank opened, and the blue blazers were joined by a suit of their own. It was Jan Tanner, a.k.a. Big Ears.

  "Fuck," I said. "Is this what I think it is?"

  "It is," Manon said. "This is how it works. This is how the fucking Swiss are going to win Hitler the war."

  It was nothing special, just a mechanical process, but I was transfixed. Back when, I had unloaded delivery trucks as part of a summer job I had at Gregory's restaurant in Vienna, and there was nothing particularly exciting about it -- produce in the kitchen, liquor in the storage room behind the bar, and hurry the hell up, will you? But this was gold, and this was the banality of evil, and I had to watch.

  Steiner handed Tanner some paperwork, keeping one sheet. In turn, after peeling off a sheet for himself, Tanner gave the rest of the paper to one of the blazers. And then the process began, just a simple transfer of small, obviously heavy boxes that two blazers wrestled onto a wheeled dolly that they struggled to push up a small ramp and then into the bank.

  I didn't know how much gold was in each box, and I didn't bother counting the boxes, but there were several dozen. Tanner and Steiner counted, though. Steiner used a pencil to make tick marks on his copy of the paperwork. The whole thing didn't take 15 minutes and, when the last of the gold was inside, Tanner and Steiner each signed the paperwork -- first Steiner's copy, then Tanner's copy, then the blazer's copy.

  After watching all of this in silence, I turned to look at Manon. The exhaustion I had sensed earlier had turned into something else. I caught her just as she was wiping away a tear.

  "Goddamn it," she said, reaching into her purse and beginning to rifle through it. I reached into my pocket and started to hand her my clean handkerchief, but she looked at it as if it were covered in fresh snot.

  "No," she said. "No, damn it." Inside the purse, she found the sheet of paper she had been looking for and handed it
to me.

  It was written on the national bank's letterhead, addressed to Steiner, signed by Tanner. It contained the terms of the transaction.

  "How'd you get this?" I said.

  "I didn't have to sleep with anybody if that's what you're asking," she said. "Let's just say that Herr Tanner isn't always very careful with his trash."

  It was all right there, the figures in neat columns.

  To unload: 0.03 pro mille

  To place on deposit: 0.015 pro mille

  To dispatch: 0.9 pro mille

  "They get paid coming and going," Manon said. "They get paid to accept it, to hold onto it, and to ship it. Bastards don't miss a fucking trick."

  The tears had given way to anger now.

  "Goddamn it." She knew better than to yell, and so her whisper seemed unusually harsh, bitter.

  "You know how this works, right?" she said.

  "I have some idea."

  "Well, here it is, exactly -- well, we think. The Swiss take the gold in here. You see how they're all still standing there? They're waiting for a briefcase to be brought out from inside. It's full of Swiss francs in large denominations -- you might not have seen it, but Steiner's guy went inside at the start to count it. It'll be a pretty big bag, enough to hold a couple of million francs."

  "This seems kind of, I don't know, small-time?" I said. "Shouldn't this be handled by wire transfers or something?"

  "Nope. It's just this. They show up with a truck full of gold, and they leave with a bag full of money."

  "Okay, then what?"

  "Here's how it works," she said. "Let's say Germany needs to buy wolfram from Portugal."

  "What the hell is wolfram?"

  "An industrial metal. They use it in armaments. Portugal is lousy with it. And because they're officially neutral, they'll sell it to anybody. But here's their problem: the gold. Nazi gold is no good to them because other countries won't take it for the stuff the Portuguese need to buy. Nazi gold, Austrian gold, Czech gold, and any other gold the Germans manage to steal from Poland or wherever -- Portugal doesn't want any of it."

  "Isn't gold just gold? How does anybody even know where it's from?"

  "The bars are marked. Stamped, with a mark from the country of origin and maybe some kind of serial number."

  "So?"

  "So," Manon said. She pointed at the bank. "That's where these assholes come in. They take the Nazi gold that nobody else will touch, and they give the Nazis Swiss francs in return. You've heard the phrase 'good as gold,' right? Well, that's the Swiss franc. So the Germans buy their wolfram, or whatever, from Portugal, and they pay them from the suitcase full of Swiss francs. And then the Portuguese turn right around and come to the Swiss national bank and trade in their Swiss francs for gold. And guess what?"

  I just stared at her.

  "That gold they brought in tonight? That Nazi gold? Based on what we've heard -- and I admit, the information is a little shaky -- the Swiss are going to melt it down and re-form it into new gold bars, with nice Swiss stamps and serial numbers on it. Or they're just going to use the same ones they have, because if you get it from Switzerland, whatever it is, it has the international seal of approval. And they're going to give those gold bars to the Portuguese in exchange for those same francs that they stuffed into that suitcase tonight. It's a neat trick."

  "And the Swiss take a cut of every transaction along the way," I said.

  "They always get their fucking cut," Manon said. "It should be their national slogan. It ought to be written on the back of their money."

  She was crying again.

  "And nobody fucking cares," she said. "My bosses? They couldn't be bothered. The French government knows this is happening and won't do anything about it. No strong arm, no formal diplomatic protest, nothing. It's like we're afraid of them. I get that we share a border and that we want to maybe be on good enough terms that they'll let us take a shortcut through Swiss territory on the way to Germany if we need to--"

  "But this is bigger than that," I said. "This is about Hitler's very ability to make war. Can't they see that?"

  "They can't see shit."

  The tears were flowing freely. Her chest was heaving, just a bit, and she was having trouble catching her breath. I had never seen Manon like this, even during our breakup fight.

  I leaned over, touched her face, and wiped away a tear. She looked at me, and I looked at her, and neither of us said anything. We ripped off each other's clothes and somehow maneuvered around the steering wheel. Once, then again, and then we fell asleep entwined, covered as best we could by our coats and clothing. Hours later, the rising sun woke us as it shone through the front windshield. It lit the alley.

  40

  We eventually did talk, Manon and I, but really not that much. I had accepted the start of our relationship for what it was and compartmentalized that part of it. The rest, I truly believed, was real. Beyond that, there really wasn't a lot to say.

  The night in the car bonded us in a new way, and not just the sex. We shared, well, not only a profession but a growing disgust with the people who ran that part of our lives. They sent us out, at significant risk, and would not listen or act on the information we brought them. They couldn't see the big picture or what was truly important. They clung to their old ways, and they cared most about preserving their patch of turf. Manon and I were on the road to disillusionment, but at least we were on it together again.

  For one thing, it got Liesl off of my back. Given her size, in the ninth month of her pregnancy, this was no small burden. She was so happy when we showed up together a couple of days later at the cafe, as were Gregory and Henry, and they stuck around the booth for too long. Eventually, though, they left us. We did have something to talk about.

  Or, as Manon said, once we were alone, "So exactly how much are we going to tell each other?"

  "I've thought about it a little bit," I said. I had different levels of secrets, as I assume she did. For instance, there was the question of Gregory's involvement. Could I tell her? Would Gregory view it as a betrayal if he found out that she knew? That might have been the trickiest one, but there were plenty of landmines along the way. Should I tell her about Brodsky and where I met him, or about Herman and First Thursdays? Or should I just pass along the information I gathered and remain secretive about, as they said in the trade, my sources and methods?

  "Here's what I've come to," I said. "If I'm out on bank business, I'll tell you that. If I'm on other business, I'll tell you that, too. And I'll share whatever information I get, anything I think might be of any value to you and to France. But contacts? Sources? The where and the when? I just don't think that's the way to go."

  The relief on Manon's face was plain.

  "Thank God," she said. "I've been thinking the same thing. No more lies about rug manufacturers in Geneva, or wherever the hell that was supposed to be. Oh, and remember that story about the rug manufacturer with the rug? It was true, just a couple of years old.

  "But giving up sources, I just don't think that's smart, and I'm glad you don't, either. I mean, we promise them discretion as part of the bargain, even if it's unspoken. They probably figure we're going to tell our superiors -- but even then, I have one guy who absolutely refused to deal with me unless I offered him total anonymity, even from my boss."

  "And to add another intelligence service, none of these people signed up for that," I said.

  "And God forbid something happened to one of my guys after I revealed his identity to you -- it could just create issues between us that we couldn't survive."

  "I'm glad we see it the same," I said. "But I am concerned about one thing. The very nature of some of the information I get, and that maybe you get, could naturally point the finger at the source. And the more people who know, the more potential fingers."

  "You're right," she said. "But I think that's always a risk. We just play that one by ear, case-to-case. The more important the information, the more risks we assume."
r />   "All right, I guess this is a plan," I said. "Maybe not perfect but close enough for spies in love."

  "When they make the movie about us, that's the title."

  "I was leaning more toward 'Sex Beneath the Gear Shift.'"

  "That can be the adult version," she said.

  "Well, since we now have an arrangement, I have something to tell you."

  "Let me use the ladies' and pick us up one more drink." Which is what she did.

  The night before, I had met up with Herman at Honold, the tea room on Rennweg. It wasn't an accident -- he said he had waited for me outside of the bank, hoping that I was in the mood for a second fruhstuck. He joined me in the line. Honold was a monument to the Swiss style of full employment. In the front of the restaurant, you had to pick your food from a glass case -- sandwiches and pastries and such -- where one of the two women working there reached under the glass to fill your plate. Then you paid your money to a third woman, sitting behind a cash register. Then you walked to the back of the tea room and sat down at an empty table, where a different waiter took your drink order. Then you paid him, for the second time. And if he refilled your coffee, you paid a third time. Whatever. The salami on white bread with pickle and tomato was an excellent second fruhstuck.

  "So, to what do I owe the pleasure?"

  "I heard something," Herman said.

  "What kind of something?"

  "Interesting something. Bad something."

  "From one of your old friends across the border?"

  Herman nodded. His news was a stunner. His source said that Hitler had decided to come west, but northwest -- he was going to invade Denmark and Norway on April 9th.

  "Excuse me," I said, grabbing a newspaper off of a neighboring chair. The woman at that table waved at me weakly. I just wanted to see the date. It was Monday, April 1st.

  "I guess I see what this couldn't wait till Thursday," I said, which was First Thursday at Cafe Tessinerplatz.

  "That would have been cutting it close."