by Richard Wake
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."
"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 c
ountries 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--"