by Richard Wake
He didn't, which clinched it. That and the fact that, as we approached the border, a ribbon of red taillights greeted us. A long ribbon. Henry said, "We're more than a half-mile from the border. Maybe a mile. That could be 200 cars ahead of us. It'll take hours. This is why . . ."
He stopped and jerked a U-turn—which was really a three-point turn in the Tank—that sent us heading back toward Vienna. "The turnoff was up there, but I don't want anybody following us. We can get to it another way, from back here."
After about two minutes, Henry made a right turn at a forlorn-looking farmhouse, dark and maybe abandoned. No one followed us as he drove us into the black. The fields were still frozen, weeks from planting. That moon—less than full, more than half—bathed everything in a soft glow.
This was Henry's plan: Up ahead, after a couple of turns, we would pass another farm that belonged to the guy who had supplied the lamb to Fessler's for as long as Henry's father owned it. On the far side of his land was a little road—it was on all the maps—that led into Czechoslovakia. Before the war, when we were all one big happy Austria-Hungary, it didn't matter. After Versailles carved us up, though, this was suddenly a border crossing—this road that was about eight feet wide. So the Austrians and Czechs each dutifully built little guard shacks on either side of the imaginary line and then proceeded to forget about them. The farmer told Henry—and he’d checked with him again last week—that the Czechs staffed their side for about six months in 1919 before quitting, and that the Austrians had never even bothered. The shacks were barely standing, all of their glass broken. The roof of the hut on the Austrian side was gone completely—at least, that's what Henry said.
"The farmer told me that kids have been using it as a back road into Bratislava forever—it's cheap to drink there—and the farmers have been using it to avoid customs inspectors and do a little business on the side. It's like their own private pipeline."
So, for the second time in as many nights, I was going to be fleeing the Nazis by sneaking across a border on a darkened back road. The truth was, I was just being carried along at this point. The last decision I had made was to go into that alley in Cologne. Everything since then was just me clinging to a piece of driftwood in a rushing river.
As Henry snaked around the dark farm roads, Leon was getting worried. He was riding shotgun, with Liesl and me in the back. "Are you sure about this? Do you know where you are?"
"Calm down. That's our friendly farmer's house on the right—up there, with the flagpole and the Austrian flag. It's the next left."
The flag, red and white, hung limp as we passed. That's when it really hit me: He'd have to take it down tomorrow or deal with some officious Nazi in no time.
We made the left turn, and the road really was about eight feet wide. The tank came close to filling it. If somebody came in the other direction, one of us would be in a ditch. We drove for about two minutes, and the farmland gave way to forest, and then Henry warned us, "Hang on, there's a hairpin turn to the left, right before we get to the guard shacks."
When he turned, two spotlights suddenly flashed on, blinding us. Henry stopped. Quiet curses filled the car. There was no way to turn around. We were maybe 200 feet from the guard shack, and we were paralyzed.
Then, from a bullhorn, "Get out of the car, please, and approach the checkpoint."
We all looked at each other. To get out was to get sent back to Vienna. That wasn't an option, not now, not if they were suddenly guarding border crossings that had never been defended. They had seized the newspapers, and probably the telegraph and radio stations, and they had manned a border crossing on a cow path—all before the Germans even invaded. This was so over.
The silence in the car was almost scarier than that thought. Nobody knew what to do. Finally, I said, "Okay, here's what we do. Liesl, lay on the floor and don't get up. I'm going to open my door and get out. I'll just stand there for a second, shut my door, take a step. You two start to open your doors. Then I'll run for those woods."
I gestured to the left. It was maybe a hundred feet to the tree line.
"That will distract him. Then you just fucking floor it, straight ahead, right at him. First, he'll be looking at me, then you'll be going right at him—he'll just tumble out of the way. Just stay down as low as you can."
Henry and Leon were silent, and then they started to disagree, and then the bullhorn again: "Get out of the vehicle and approach the checkpoint. This is your last warning."
I opened the door, got out, yelled ahead, "Yes, sir, we're coming." I leaned back in through the window. "I'll take two steps forward and then run—that's when you gun it. Open your doors, just a little, and now I'm going to start to walk."
They opened their doors.
One step.
Second step.
I ran. The doors slammed, bang-bang, and the Love Tank accelerated with a roar. I heard the slams and the roar, and I heard my breath as I ran, and I heard some yelling—there must have been more than one man at the checkpoint—and I heard the gunshot. It was such a pure and clean sound, piercing the rest of the noise.
57
Café Milos was a Hungarian caricature plopped down in a Slovakian nightmare. Everything—carpet, tablecloths, napkins, curtains, wallpaper, everything—was red, or at least red-dominated. Everything on the menu tasted at least a little bit like goulash. But by the third night, Leon and Henry had taught Milos how to make a Manhattan, which was how they passed the time, drinking and trying to ignore Milos's accordion-playing daughter and wondering about Alex.
The plan had gone exactly as Alex had predicted. The guards dived out of the way, and the car wasn't even scratched. But where was he? There was no way they could go back and look for him, but Henry did call the farmer, who had heard the gunshot. He drove his truck down to the border and innocently asked the guards if there had been an incident, and the two of them looked at each other and said that they had shot at a suspicious person but scared him away.
Whether that was true or not dominated the conversation among the three for about the next 36 hours. They debated back and forth and decided that, if the guards killed Alex, they would have boasted to the farmer about bagging an enemy of the German state. There was no reason to lie. The story they told made them seem kind of weak, to be honest. You wouldn't tell a lie that makes you look bad, so it must have been true.
So where was he?
The smart play would have been for Alex to go back to the farmhouse and hide—unless he decided that they would be searching for him, and hiding would just put the farmer in danger. So maybe he went through the woods and into Czechoslovakia that way—although who knew how hard it would be to make his way through a pathless forest in the dark. He could have easily gotten himself turned around. Hell, he could have wandered right back to the guard shack. And besides, if he did do that, and if he did make it through, why wasn't he here? Café Milos was only a couple of miles from the border, right on Michalska in the Old Town, and it was the only place they had talked about.
So where was he?
Saturday night, they drove right to Café Milos and waited, sleeping in the car after it closed. Sunday, they rented two rooms when they woke up and were back in the café by noon, listening to radio reports of the German arrival in Austria. Monday, the same thing, long silences between radio bulletins punctuated by a variation on the same conversation:
"Okay, so if he got through the woods by dawn . . ."
"If he hid out for the night, and then tried to get through . . ."
Over and over. By dinner on Monday night, Liesl said she couldn't take another night, especially when the lovely Zsofia and her accordion returned for her evening set. So Liesl headed back to the rooms—they were just across the square—and Henry and Leon kept drinking.
The radio was a nonstop Hitler travelogue—Braunau and then Linz on Saturday, right behind the army, to see the home folks. Then stops here and there on Sunday, then Vienna on Monday, crowds cheering the whole way.
There were a few other Austrians who came in and out of the café, mostly Jews, drinking and listening to the radio, shaking their heads and drinking.
At one point, Leon looked at Henry and said, "My God, it just hit me. We're refugees. We're fucking refugees. We don't have a home."
So they drank and sat. What else was there to do? Zsofia's repertoire, which wasn't that bad if you arrived without expectations, was mostly standards and folk songs—and just as all of the food kind of tasted like goulash, all of the songs kind of sounded like "Ochi Chernye." Which was fine.
But that night, she got a little daring, offering a sampling of American big band songs—which was, well, interesting. But you could tell what the song was after a couple of notes: first Tommy Dorsey, then Teddy Wilson, then the first few notes of Benny Goodman.
Which was when Henry and Leon heard someone behind them start to sing:
Wah-wah, the girls of Schottenfeld,
Wah-wah, they smell like . . .
The Spies of Zurich
Copyright © 2018 by Manor and State, LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Created with Vellum
To Rich and Casey,
Wonderful children, even better adults, you are an endless source of love and pride.
Part I
1
The heart of Zurich -- the heart and maybe the soul, too -- were at the Paradeplatz, a vast expanse just off of the Bahnhofstrasse where about 10 tram lines converged. The lake and all of its beauty, and Switzerland really is a beautiful country, was off to the right. The temples of conspicuous consumption and commerce that made this country go more than any place I had ever been, dotted the street to the left. That street led ultimately to the train station and the transportation links to still more commerce. But what held it all together was in the Paradeplatz, because that was where the banks were.
It was two banks, two substantial buildings, stone fortresses, staring at each other across the expanse. Kreditanstalt was on the north side, and Bankverein was on the west side. Those two ran everything. The truth was, they ran the country. There was plenty of money to be made by the minnows, the small private banks tucked into the side streets between the Paradeplatz and the Grossmunster -- different churches, yes -- thanks to the Swiss secrecy laws. But the whales on the Paradeplatz made the biggest decisions, funded the biggest developments, and controlled their smaller competitors by throwing them morsels of side work, or not.
That was the dynamic on a beautiful September day in 1939. It was still more than a month away from the sun's autumnal retreat, and three months away from the cold and miserable gray that descended upon the city every winter. It was bright and blue and much too nice to be inside, but the massive fourth-floor reception room in the Kreditanstalt building was filled that day with that great oxymoron, the smiling banker. One of the bank's directors, Gerhard Femmerling, a miserable prick even by Swiss bank director standards, was retiring, and we had all been summoned with engraved invitations to wish him well at a noontime reception. Looking around at the assembled dozens, grins plastered in place, I did a quick head count, and it appeared that everyone had RSVP'd in the affirmative. It was just business, after all. You had to retain your place in the queue for when it was morsel time again.
I had two rules at these kinds of things. The first was to make sure to be seen by the person or people who needed to see me and to do it quickly. There was nothing worse than waiting your turn for an audience. So I took a direct line to old Femmerling as soon as I walked into the room, and barged in on the group surrounding him, and offered a random sampling of pleasant conversational nothings, and was done with the work of the day in five minutes. That allowed me to attend to my second rule, which was never to be out of direct contact with the bar.
This was a rarity, seeing as how Swiss bankers didn't drink at lunch, except for maybe a glass of wine -- one glass, and not drunk to the bottom. But it was a full bar this day, and the scotch was really from Scotland, and the bartender was pouring my second when I received a nudge in the ribs followed by, "Bonjour, Alex. I see that Zurich has not changed -- that there are almost no women in the banking business, and that they have never been seen in public without every button of their blouses buttoned all the way to their eyebrows."
Freddy Arpin had made the trip up from Geneva, where his family owned Banc Arpin, a little private joint whose principal customers, in Freddy's words, "were either French pseudo-Fascists or outright Fascists, hedging their bets." We had met at a conference in Basel and immediately hit it off, mostly because we were clearly oddballs in the banking business in that we didn't give a fuck. Or, as Freddy put it, "My father and brother are in the sharp pencil and green eyeshade business. I am in the cognac and silk stocking business." We got along fine.
"Long way to come for this, huh?"
"My father insisted," Freddy said. "It's OK, easy to kill the time on the train. There's plenty to read in the papers."
"Anything new?"
"No. Warsaw is still holding out, but --"
"Poor bastards," I said. "Any sign the French or the Brits are getting off their asses to help?"
"Nope."
"Useless fucks."
Some variation on this conversation was happening all over the room, no doubt. The Germans had invaded Poland two weeks earlier. The British and French had declared war on Germany a couple of days after that, but sat and watched as the Wehrmacht went about its business. The conversations -- and I had participated in my share as president of my own little bank, Bohemia Suisse -- were all about the sober calculation of the effects of war on European business in general and Swiss business in particular. I could do sober calculation if the social or business setting demanded it.
But this was a little more personal for me. My adopted home, Austria, had been seized by the Nazis in March of 1938. My real home, Czechoslovakia, had been gifted to them, bartered away a couple of months after that by Chamberlain and Daladier. So, yes, useless fucks.
I asked Freddy, "Are you guys seeing an increase in deposits?"
"You might say that. We actually had a guy show up last week from Lyon in his car, and he had the driver get out and carry in a picnic hamper stuffed with French francs. We sold him Swiss francs --"
"At an obscene markup --"
"That is getting more obscene by the day. Or, as my brother says, 'Add a point for every drop of piss you see dribbling down their legs.' So his deposit is in Swiss francs. Then we had a guy drive the French francs back to Paris and bought gold coins -- at a markup, yes, but not yet obscene. Then he brought the gold back, and it's in our vault."
"All in the same picnic basket?"
"The very same."
Freddy was saying that his father was calculating that they wouldn't be able to accept French francs at all in a couple of weeks, the way things were going -- unless, that is, the bank wanted to get into the business of using them to buy French real estate.
"If the little corporal keeps going, we could probably get houses in Paris at knockdown prices," Freddy said. "But that's a really long game. Maybe buying artwork is the way to go."
He stopped as if he were hearing himself for the first time, then said, "You think we're shitheads, don't you?"
I went to grab two more drinks and returned to find Freddy talking to the only woman in the room with her top button undone. Her name was Manon Friere, and she was a trade representative from the French consulate, and she was more than a pleasure to look at. In this room, her red lipstick was like a beacon in a gray flannel night. She apparently had been working out of the consulate in Geneva but now was stationed in Zurich.
I waved my arm toward the windows to point out the expanse of the Paradeplatz, lit by the sun. "So how do you like our fair city? Freddy hates it, but you probably already knew that."
"You mean Tightassville?" Freddy said.
"Freddy is a Parisian at heart, trapped in a Swiss hell," Manon said
"Hell?" I said. "All of it?"
She shrugged.
Hell it is, then.
"Are you a tiny banker, like Freddy?"
"No one is as tiny as Freddy."
"That's pretty much what I hear --"
"Your vengeance is unbecoming," Freddy said. He pointedly turned away from Manon and looked at me. "Here's the story. I was dating a friend of Manon's in the consulate. At the same time, I might have also made an attempt to date Manon. It was honestly a mistake."
"You're honestly a pig."
"And my penance is her indiscriminate use of the word 'tiny' in conversations such as these."