The Zurich Numbers

by Bill Granger

  The second envelope was from American Express Company. He opened it and glanced at his bill—no charges—and at brochures advertising leather jackets. He read the brochures and put them down on the table. The third envelope contained a bill from Consolidated Edison Company of New York, along with a chatty newsletter explaining rate hikes.

  Devereaux opened the second manila envelope. Two more bills. He dropped them on the table. What did he expect? A letter from Rita Macklin? How are you, I am fine? She didn’t even know where he was. She’d never know about him again, after “reprocessing,” after the new existence was grafted onto his identity.

  He got up and went to the window and looked down on the darkened street. Three days earlier, it had snowed a little. The street was dirty with snow and ripped plastic bags of garbage at the curbs.

  Sometimes, at night, he walked alone down Broadway all the way to Columbus Circle and then south of the park to the shabby heart of midtown on the West Side. He would settle into a seedy Irish bar off Eighth Avenue, watch the hookers work the bright, shabby streets around the bar, and drink until numbness returned and he did not think of Rita Macklin with pain. In the morning, sometimes, he ran for miles along the winding paths in Central Park, around the reservoir, running without the pleasure of the earnest joggers with their Sony Walkmans glued to their ears. Running just to run until exhaustion silenced his mind. He always thought of her when he ran but the thought faded after a while. In a little while he would not think of her at all.

  Rita Macklin was a journalist. The first time he met her, in Florida, he had used her to pry a secret involving Soviets in Asia out of a half-mad old priest. He had used her and fallen for her and left her. But not the second time; the second time they had crossed paths by accident and he realized it really was a second chance. He had taken it. She had betrayed her life as a reporter for him, for what he had to do in Helsinki. And so someone on the Committee for State Security decided that he must die and so must the woman because she was certainly an agent as well.

  He had made the deal with Hanley first, then repeated it to the masters of “reprocessing” at NSA: Save her and he would be theirs. They wanted him back bad enough to accept.

  Rita Macklin returned to her job at the magazine in Washington after a leave and now moved through the world of journalism there with a ghostly cynicism that her colleagues mistook for normal skepticism. She knew what she had been, what she had agreed to, what she had become, all because of him, because she had loved him. The price for her safety was compromise, the same price exacted from him.

  The KGB watched her in Washington still, less because of her value than because she might lead them to the agent code-named November. That is what Hanley knew and did not tell Devereaux. She didn’t even know where he was. The KGB would grow tired of her in time; Hanley assumed they would tire of waiting for Devereaux as well.

  “You are a reluctant agent,” Hanley had said once.

  “Yes.” There was no need to lie.

  “But a reluctant November is still probably worth using.”

  All trace of his old life vanished. The General Services Administration, the government purchasing agency, bought his cabin and the land on the mountain outside Front Royal, Virginia, and gave Devereaux a certified check for it which was deposited in an account in the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, a Zurich bank. The land was turned over to the U.S. Developmental Research Office, a cover organization of R Section. Devereaux didn’t even know the morning when three yellow Caterpillar bulldozers rumbled up the single-track dirt road that led to the cabin and demolished it before lunchtime. That afternoon, Devereaux’s name was deleted inside Tinkertoy, the R Section computer. A new existence was created before evening. His only remaining link with what he had been was the mail, the bills, the catalogues that still trickled in to the Front Royal post office. They would stop after a time; in the meantime, they were permitted to continue along their way to him simply because there was no reason to stop them.

  Devereaux finished the glass of vodka and orange juice and considered another. But he put the cap back on the bottle of vodka and returned it to the refrigerator. He glanced at the alarm clock on the refrigerator: It was only six. The evening yawned in front of him.

  Goddammit. He stood next to the garbage can, reached into it, and took out the blue envelope and tore it open. It was dated three weeks before. He read it quickly the first time, to be rid of it; but it compelled a second reading.

  Dear Red,

  I am not well but I would not have bothered you about that. I don’t care what you are or what you do, as I told you that time, but now you are involving me and I don’t care for that at all. Besides, Red, you do have an obligation to visit a sick old lady.

  M.

  He read the letter a third time without expression. The blue paper, blue envelope; it never changed. Her name and address still imprinted on the top. Same address after all these years. She bought the paper each Christmas as a gift for herself in the main store of Marshall Field & Company on State Street in the Loop. The boy had accompanied her on these expeditions; each Christmastime, they ate luncheon under the great tree inside the store. Devereaux, the child, had hated the tradition, hated traipsing behind the old woman as she made her self-appointed rounds, hated the sentimentality of the season she tried to impart to him. He knew what he was, even as a child; he had no wish then to pretend to be something else.

  The neighborhood had turned black and mean. She lived at the edge of the ghetto. Melvina. Great-aunt Melvina. An old lady when she took him in; he had been her good deed. It was either accept it or spend life at the Audy Home for Delinquents or the farm at St. Charles while the state decided if it was worthwhile to try him for manslaughter. He had killed a child on the streets because the child had decided to kill him; the choice had seemed simple to Devereaux at the time.

  Melvina had taken him in and manipulated the law to have him, to possess him.

  “You don’t have a choice, do you?” Hanley had said.

  Damn her. He dropped the letter in the garbage can. He had no obligation to her. He did not want to see her.

  But now you are involving me.

  The chill of the commonplace words settled into him. He went back into the living room and looked out the window at the yellow-lit street. A wirehaired terrier pulled a reluctant owner along the curb across the way, straining casually at his leash. No others.

  What had involved her?

  Damn her. She was a person of vast silences, just as he was. A woman of enigmatic lapses into communication. What had involved her that she stated it so smugly?

  The terrier stopped and squatted. The owner—a man in gray coat and gray scarf and gray hat—moved behind the dog with a dustpan. Devereaux watched the man clean up behind his dog, which was already straining to investigate a plastic garbage bag.

  He should call Hanley. Why didn’t Hanley intercept the mail? Damn them all.

  Forty-five minutes later, he climbed into the back of a yellow cab snatched from the stream of yellow cabs surging north along Broadway. “LaGuardia,” he said and settled back into the greasy vinyl seat. A brown leather overnight bag rested on his lap. He wore a blue trenchcoat and black turtleneck sweater. In the bag were a few toiletry articles as well as a false-bottom case (made by NSA technicians and secure against airport X-ray devices) that contained the .357 Colt Python pistol.

  He hadn’t called Hanley after all.

  No one would know. He’d slip in and out. Just a few days before, everything had been wiped away, not only records but memory. Days to remind Devereaux of what he had once been so that he could endure the future being fashioned for him.

  “So where ya from? Ya from outta town?”

  Devereaux blinked but didn’t answer. The cab crossed 92nd Street, made the ascent up the East Side to the Triborough Bridge, and dashed across the somnolent grid of Queens to the airport.

  Where was he from that he could admit to anymore?

 
; He had not spoken to Melvina for a month after she had removed him from the Audy Home, after she had taken him to her house on Ellis Avenue, after she had given him a room of his own. Not for a month. Did he want more milk? Would he take a bath now? He obeyed silently.

  “You’ll outgrow that,” Melvina had warned him without impatience, her voice lazy with threat. “I can outwait you. I have more patience. You’ll break down before I do.”

  3

  ZURICH

  Gray Zurich, solemn as church, lay under the storm that had blown north from the mountains in the morning, picking up the damp winds from the Zürichsee south of the city. Bitter snow howled against the great clock tower of St. Peter’s on the half-frozen Limmat River, which straggled north through the heart of the old town. Blue streetcars in tandem came grinding around the Bahnhofplatz in front of the central train station, the Hauptbahnhof, and turned down the mall-like Bahnhofstrasse that paralleled the river and descended three-quarters of a mile down to the frozen harbor of the Zürichsee.

  The rich shop windows along the Bahnhofstrasse displayed Swiss watches and jewels and furs and leather goods; the windows were warm with lights, strung like jewels in the half-light of the stormy morning. Along the mall, the Zurichers strolled as though it might be summer, considering this window and that, this trinket and that, their faces bloated and gray, their eyes watering in the wind, their thick bodies wrapped in heavy wool against the cold. Few bent their heads to the heel of the wind.

  No winter intruded inside the elegant, old-fashioned first-class-passenger restaurant on the east side of the Hauptbahnhof. Beyond the dining room, the train station concourse was bustling and gay with travelers and shoppers emerging from the underground shopping center beneath the Bahnhofplatz. The electrified Swiss trains pulled in and out of the station with the precision of Japanese clockworks. All was as it had been, and it had always been as it was: Five hundred years of peace, centuries of smug old-fashioned liberalism that saw the city provide sanctuary for capitalist and communist, conspired to make it seem that the ancient city was not so much a work of man as a monument of God’s.

  This was a sentiment that Felix Krueger had thought to share from time to time with those who were not as awed by Zurich as he was. But then perhaps they would not understand that Felix Krueger meant no blasphemy.

  It was nine minutes to twelve by the clocks of the train station (which were always exact) and nine minutes to twelve by the hands of the glittering gold Rolex strapped by golden bands to Felix Krueger’s freckled left wrist.

  Felix Krueger, as massive and peaceful beneath the storm as the city, sat in his accustomed booth in the balcony above the first-class dining room and contemplated his plate of sausages and potatoes. Though the balcony was intended merely as a small cocktail lounge, an exception had long been made for Herr Felix Krueger. He was a man accustomed to acts of exception.

  The thick-waisted waitress poured him a second glass of Züricher Löwenbräu beer—he had consumed the first waiting for the meal—and he took a sip of the amber beverage a moment before tasting the food. He was a man of slow, deliberate actions, savoring the moments of his life as though each were prized equally.

  Felix Krueger was not a fat man but was heavy in the German-Swiss way. His body was large, his shoulders rounded and powerful, his belly slightly gone to paunch. His eyebrows were reddish brown and thick, his cheeks were heavy without being jowly. His small calm eyes were as blue as the Zürichsee in summer. He had very small hands for a large man and very small ears for such a large face. He combed the remains of his reddish brown hair flat and straight back from his long forehead, resigning himself proudly to approaching baldness. In winter and summer he was pale in appearance, despite a robust presence, and the dark blue suit he usually wore emphasized the fragile coloring of his skin. Freckles on the bridge of his nose attested to the fact that he sunburned too easily.

  Felix Krueger picked up his knife and fork and cut carefully into the thick, blood-red sausage on his plate and pushed a piece into a puddle of horseradish at the side of the potatoes; slowly, a priest making offering, he raised the sausage to his thick, liverish lips and swallowed it.

  Though he was a deliberate man in all things, he was more deliberate this morning because he was quite aware that his actions were being observed by a man he knew very well. They always played this game and Krueger never tired of it.

  The Soviet courier was watching him. The Soviet courier always waited before the meeting. Who would follow him, Felix Krueger, in his own city, in his own country? So Krueger had laughed once at Rimsky. But Rimsky had no humor. None of them did.

  Rimsky wore a dark leather coat trimmed with fox fur at the collar and a felt hat that emphasized his winter-red ears and ferret eyes. He had been sitting alone at a table in the first-class dining room since eleven thirty. No one had followed Herr Krueger, Rimsky had decided. Now he trudged up the stairs to the balcony and went to the booth and sat down across from the large reddish-haired man.

  “There are fourteen this time, Herr Krueger,” Rimsky began in precise, accented German.

  “Not good morning or good afternoon? No amenities, no civilities?” Herr Felix Krueger paused with a bit of sausage on his fork, his knife held in his right hand like a weapon, his blue eyes twinkling.

  “Meetings should be brief in public places,” Rimsky said. He pulled a small white envelope from the recesses of his leather coat and handed it across the table. He expected Krueger to take it. But Krueger popped the bit of sausage in his mouth and showed no inclination to drop knife or fork from his hands.

  “Guten Morgen, Herr Rimsky,” Felix Krueger said elaborately, smiling broadly, his teeth still moving to tear apart the sausage as he spoke.

  Rimsky could not frown any deeper than the perpetual frown he wore for these meetings. He would not be made a fool by this man. “They are all from Poland this time.”

  Krueger chewed for a moment, swallowed, and then sighed. He put down the knife and fork and reached for the white envelope. “A mixed bag?”

  “Nine men, five women.”

  “The usual terms?”

  “Three years for the men, two for the women. Three are teachers. The women, I mean.”

  “Teachers do not frighten me,” Krueger said. “The greater their intelligence, the easier to explain the situation to them.”

  “You mean to intimidate them.”

  Krueger was surprised; his eyes widened; he smiled. “Yes. That’s one way to put it, Herr Rimsky. They see all the possibilities and realize they have no choice. The more intelligent they are, the more docile they become. The stupid ones, they can be problems. Like animals, some of them. The ferret, trapped, fights knowing it must die but knowing it must fight to death as well.”

  “You won’t have problems with these. They were carefully screened.”

  “Yes.” He weighed the envelope in one beefy hand. He slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit coat.

  “You don’t want to examine the list?”

  “You can tell me what I need to know,” Krueger said.

  “One of them is Wanda Wyczniewski. Only twenty-one.”

  “A teacher.”

  “Yes.”

  “A husband? Child?”

  “No. Unmarried.”

  Felix Krueger smiled. “Are you bringing me a virgin?”

  Rimsky did not speak for a moment.

  “A joke, Herr Rimsky.”

  “I see.”

  “You are so serious about this business. You never see the aspects of it that are… ludicrous.”

  “Do you think it is a joke?”

  For the first time, Felix Krueger frowned. Rimsky was a dull man. A man without perceptions, without humor, without horizons. He saw so little. It made him a good workhorse, Krueger presumed, but a dull table companion. Krueger picked up his knife and fork and cut into a small boiled potato.

  Because Krueger did not speak, Rimsky felt his rebuke had hit solidly. He went on: �
�Her father is forty-two, he was a professor at Warsaw University, he was disgraced. She wants to take him out of Poland. She will trade two years of her life for that. Frankly, the Polish government wants to be rid of her father more than she. He was one of the intellectual apologists for Solidarity.”

  “The father could be exported without—”

  “He won’t leave. The daughter understands. She will become… what would you say? Hostage. She will be hostage to us to force her father to leave. For his own sake.”

  “Interesting. There are so many motivations for them to… accept your conditions. I am fascinated by the variety of thought processes. Aren’t you, Herr Rimsky?”

  “No,” Rimsky said honestly.

  “No. I suppose not. You are as docile as a horse, do you know that?”

  Rimsky frowned.

  “A horse such as they had when I was a child, to plow the same row on the same mountain terrace spring after spring, without understanding anything of what he is part of, save that it is ritual.”

  “Are you speaking of philosophy now?”

  Felix Krueger sighed again, massively, at the stupidity around him. “They are numbers to you, Rimsky, more than they are to me.”

  “You give them the numbers.”

  “Yes. And the guarantees without which this arrangement could not work for you. For your masters. I am the honest broker in this but you think I am interested only in numbers.”

  “Yes,” Rimsky said. “The numbers in your accounts; the numbers in your bankbook.”

  “Numbers are order, Rimsky. I am a man of order. But don’t suppose an accountant has no soul because he lives in a world of numbers.”

  “Capital,” said Rimsky. “It is numbers because capitalism is a cold thing.”

  Felix Krueger had been in a good mood all morning. He had taken the funicular down to the square in front of the central train station. He had browsed among the shops beneath the Bahnhofplatz. He had even shared a glass of beer and a colorful story with the old drunks who stood around the beer bar on the train station concourse. He had felt the good feeling of approaching winter in his good gray native city and now the good feeling had trickled away with the dull, stupidly certain pronouncements of the Soviet courier. It was being replaced by irritation bordering on anger.