The Zurich Numbers

by Bill Granger

  Felix Krueger stared at him, transfixed by horror.

  Devereaux crumpled the page in his hand. The paper was expensive, thick and stiff under his touch. He threw the crumpled ball into the fire.

  The flames leaped to the paper like devils greeting one of their own. Devereaux stared at the paper as it turned black beneath the flames, as parts of it broke off and floated up the chimney flue, light as angels.

  He glanced at Krueger.

  “Mein Gott in Himmel,” Krueger said slowly.

  “Yes,” Devereaux said and tore a second page along the binding. Again he crumpled the paper. Again he flung it into the fire. Another rush of flames, a burst of light.

  Krueger stood on unsteady legs. “That is valuable only to me. What do you do to me?” The accent had thickened, the syntax collapsed under the weight of stress.

  “When it’s done, it won’t be valuable to anyone,” Devereaux said and tore a third page quickly.

  “No.” Krueger charged blindly, his fists doubled, throwing his large body against Devereaux. The American took the weight of the charge, turned his body into it, felt a fist against his face. He pushed Krueger over, slamming his bulk against the bookcase, sending him crashing to the carpet. A splash of blood appeared on Krueger’s forehead.

  For a moment, the two men were fixed in a tableau before the footlights of the flames. Then Devereaux dropped the torn page into the fire.

  Tears welled in Felix Krueger’s eyes.

  “What do you want?” he said. A child’s tearful question.

  “Information.” Softly again but without gentleness now. “I want to know everything.”

  “I cannot. It is everything I—”

  “It is nothing now,” Devereaux said and tore a fourth page from the red book.

  “Bitte,” Krueger pleaded, stretching out his hand.

  “No. No tears, Herr Krueger, no pleas for mercy.

  They mean nothing. No more than Teresa Kolaki’s tears would move you.”

  “I meant her no harm.”

  “No, perhaps not. But she is harmed. And Mary Krakowski.”

  “It was an accident. The child. It was a stupid accident, and everything that has happened happened because of that—”

  “Act of fate.”

  “Yes. Stupid and senseless. Mein Gott.”

  “Tell me,” Devereaux said.

  “I meant them no harm.”

  “The gentle master. You only took away their years, their loved ones, gave them dreams that weren’t going to come true.”

  “Not all,” Krueger said.

  Silence. Then, “Tell me.”

  “Who are you? I must know this.”

  “The auditor,” Devereaux said.

  “If you destroy all those books, you harm your own side. Where does the accounting for one side end and another side begin? Tell me that.” Krueger rose, slowly and painfully, from the carpet.

  “There are no more sides,” Devereaux said.

  “Is this true?”

  “Yes. Now. Tonight. The sides are down.”

  Krueger stared at him a moment, turned, walked to the window, looked down on the darkened street. A man in an absurd homburg waited on the walk across the way. A stupid hat, a stupid senseless accident in Vienna and…

  He stared at the glass, stared at the clear night in Zurich, nestled in the ring of mountains that stretched all the way to Italy and France.

  “The Zurich Numbers,” he began as flatly as though he were reciting a poem again as a child. “The Numbers are the people inside who wish to be outside. I am the guarantor. I am neutral. I am a functionary, an insurance broker. I am the honest dealer. After they serve their old masters, they are free. Most of them. Some just acquire new masters.”

  Devereaux waited, holding the book tightly in his large fingers.

  “The new masters are you. The Americans. Who use them again against the old masters. Some even serve willingly.”

  “And others?”

  “Others must do as they are told. There are slaves in this world, yes. But you do not seem to understand that there are people who are not unwilling slaves. You do not seem to understand that. Take the dog without a leash who stays at the heel of its master. The horse who responds to the slightest touch of the reins. They are animals, they are trained to do this. And then there are people who long for the shackles, who long for the master’s reins on them. Slaves. All slavery exists only because slaves permit it.”

  “But that’s not everything.”

  Felix Krueger turned, a little drunk, a little insane in that moment. His head throbbed with pain. “You wish to be God? Only God can know everything.”

  Devereaux waited, poised as delicately as a cat on a branch, waiting, not willing to upset the prey.

  “Of course they know everything.”

  Felix Krueger blinked. “Who knows everything?”

  “The Opposition,” Devereaux said.

  “Is that what they are to you? The Opposition? How amusing. They send spies to your country and you turn these spies into your own agents. They steal trash and send it back and sometimes you make certain the trash is exactly what you wish to have stolen. And then, when the time comes, when the slave is let out of his slavery, you lock the manacle on him again. You, Mr. American. You do this. And you come to me, Felix Krueger, and you ask me: How can I use this slave again inside? How can I place my own slaves inside the enemy? You have your slaves as well, Mr. American, if you didn’t know that. Criminals. Those whom you blackmail. They work for you unwillingly as Teresa Kolaki works unwillingly. All are slaves.”

  “We turn people and we create new slaves, too.”

  “Yes. Let us call it what it is. A slave trade. All right. I accept this.” Krueger walked around the room suddenly in a manic burst of energy. “I have numbers. Three young men from California who sold computer secrets to the Soviets. Arrested and tried and convicted. And after the horrors of life in prison, after only one year, they are willing to risk everything to be spies for your side as well. And I am the guarantor. I give them a written guarantee. I am the honest broker. Are you going to reveal this? To whom? This is for the good of your country.”

  Devereaux studied the large man for a moment and then put the book down, carefully, on the mantel. He had been telling the truth. All of it.

  Felix stopped and stared at him. “Now, who are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Devereaux said. “What matters is the child.”

  “Stefan Kolaki? One child balanced against all of this?” Felix Krueger shook his head. “I am amazed.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Look at me. What is dirty in this business is you and people like you, not me. It is Morgan and Rimsky and their masters, not me. I am Swiss. I choose to be a free man, not a slave. Let others do as they wish. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I give you honest counting, each side. In the Middle Ages the Jews were despised because they were money lenders, but why did they lend money at all? Because they were needed, because even men in Christendom needed a loan broker and because the Christians were forbidden to practice usury.”

  “This is not usury. This is slavery.”

  “You, Mr. American. Do you act for your own sake? Do you do as your own will commands or as others command?”

  “I make the choice.”

  “No. You are not free, I can see it in your eyes. You are nothing more than Teresa Kolaki with a different name. You have something to lose too, eh? You have a hostage, eh?”

  Devereaux did not speak for a moment because his voice could not be trusted. He saw Rita Macklin clearly in his mind’s eye and the words of Felix Krueger seemed to frame her.

  Krueger grinned. “I am right, American.”

  “Perhaps,” Devereaux said. “Perhaps the reason I ask you about Stefan Kolaki is that our plans have changed.”

  “I know nothing of your schemes. Cross and double-cross each other, that is not my concern.”

  “It is now,”
Devereaux said. “You told me nearly everything. Except about Stefan. Perhaps you don’t know, perhaps you are forbidden to tell me. In that case, it isn’t everything. So I’m going to end your life.” Gently, almost sadly.

  “You are insane.”

  Devereaux removed the pistol as effortlessly as a man glancing at his watch, one fluid movement of his wrist.

  Felix Krueger took a step back. He held out his hands. “They need Teresa back in Poland, they won’t harm her. They need her to keep the arrangements going—”

  “To recruit more numbers for your red accounting books,” Devereaux said.

  “Some of the numbers belong to your side.”

  “And you sell them, don’t you? Our side? You sell them to the Soviets after a while.”

  Krueger’s eyes widened in horror. It was the last answer, Devereaux thought. Krueger sold out both sides, again and again, until the slave had no more use to anyone. The honest broker, the guarantor. The trader in human beings.

  “Let me live,” Krueger said.

  “On my terms,” Devereaux replied.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about Stefan. And the Numbers, all of it.”

  For a minute—no less than that—neither man spoke. They both could hear the logs crackling stories. Only one man listened, though. In the end, he began his own story, above the words of the burning logs.

  “He is in America,” Felix Krueger said.

  30

  LOS ANGELES

  It was raining. Frankfurter’s face was swollen so Gleason did most of the talking.

  Levy Solomon sat as calmly as a plaster Buddha in the only comfortable chair in the living room of his condo in the Century City complex in Beverly Hills. Gleason and Frankfurter were on the sofa, which was too soft to support their weight. Solomon smiled because he knew the sofa was too soft.

  Frankfurter spread his hands in a gesture of openness so patently false that even Gleason winced, not with pain, but with embarrassment. Rain in L.A. Just their luck. Nothing was going right on this whole rotten assignment.

  “We’ll make it fast,” Frankfurter said. There was a nasty snarl to his voice. He was tired, tired of the job, tired of chasing that fucking broad and then pulling back to clean up behind her. He’d fix Rita Macklin. Someday, somewhere, on his own time. He’d fix that little tit good.

  “You’re Solomon, worked in Poland, retired. You stashed Teresa Kolaki and Rita Macklin here for a few days. Now, where’s the tapes?”

  Levy Solomon blinked, smiled, and said, “Where’s the beef?”

  “Jesus Christ, you think this is a fucking joke?” Gleason said.

  “You have oral surgery?” Solomon asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I feel for you, I really do. It’s the worst.”

  “The guy caused it has it worse. Your buddy.”

  “Who’s my buddy?”

  “Devereaux.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Cut the shit. We got a plane to catch at midnight back to Chicago.”

  “You live in Chicago?”

  “No.”

  “I had a brother lived there once, ran a haberdashery. On the South Side. I—”

  “Cut it, will you? We’re all pros.”

  “Is that right?” asked Levy Solomon.

  “Look. What I like to do and what I’m gonna do is two different things. Personally, what I’d like to do is dangle you by your ankles out the window and maybe forget myself and let go.”

  “Is that right?” Levy Solomon stared at Frankfurter.

  “What I’m gonna do is tell you to call your special number.”

  “My special number?”

  “What is this guy, an echo chamber?”

  “What number is that?”

  Gleason spoke the number. It was right. Levy Solomon sighed, staring from face to face. “What’s it about?”

  “Devereaux is blown away by KGB. In Zurich. We want the tapes that Little Miss Reporter made with Teresa Kolaki.”

  “You can search the place. You got a search warrant?”

  “You’re tiring me out, you know that? Fuck search warrants. I can give you dozens. What I want is no more shit. I want you to call up that special number, which I know that you know, and I want you to talk to your main man and he’s going to tell you to do just what I told you to do.”

  Levy Solomon shrugged. It was amusing, playing with these two. Even if they were a bit slow. He stood up. “I’ll call in the other room.”

  He went to the kitchen, dialed the number of the house in Arlington that patched through to the special number.

  Hanley said, “Hello.”

  “All right, it’s me,” Solomon said.

  “Go ahead. Give it to them.”

  “Is he really dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right.”

  That was all. He replaced the receiver. Too bad. He had known Devereaux in Berlin—a little business ten or twelve years before. Devereaux had been a cold fish, all right, but he knew his stuff. He had let Levy Solomon direct the operation; he had held up his end with the East Germans. Too bad.

  He walked into the living room again. “Locker at the airport.”

  “We figured that.”

  “Should be five tapes. Nothing was transcribed. No time. A few documents. Teresa gave Devereaux some stuff.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Frankfurter said. “He can keep it now.” He laughed.

  “Give it to the fishes,” Gleason said. “Dirty prick.”

  “Devereaux was a good man,” Levy Solomon said as though he should say something like that. He didn’t like these guys.

  “He was a prick,” Gleason snarled.

  Levy studied him. “He hurt your mouth, huh?”

  “Fuck you, too.”

  “Son, it’s amazing the riffraff they let in NSA these days.”

  “We didn’t tell you we were in—”

  “You didn’t have to,” said Solomon. “You smelled up the room the minute you walked in.” He took a keychain from his pocket and walked to the wall switch and opened it with a screwdriver on the chain.

  “Simple stuff,” said Frankfurter.

  Levy Solomon turned, gave a vague smile again. “Okay, Einstein, find it yourself.”

  Frankfurter pulled off the plate, turned it over, found nothing. He looked in the electrical box and found nothing.

  Solomon stared at the pair of them. “I ought to make you sweat your flight some more but I can’t stand to have the apartment fumigated with the stink from you guys.”

  Frankfurter said nothing.

  Solomon took the plate and pried it apart. It was really two parts, sealed so tight that it appeared one. The key fit in a shallow hollow between the two plates. He gave it to them and turned his back to replace the wall plate. He spoke very softly.

  “When I turn around I don’t want to see you guys here. Or you’ll both be picking teeth out of your palates.”

  He screwed in the wall plate, humming to himself.

  When he turned, they were gone.

  31

  CHICAGO

  A reporter from the Chicago Tribune was told that he could not interview Wojo the Clown because the star of the Warsaw Circus was a bit ill and needed rest for the performance that night. In fact, Wojo was blind drunk.

  In two days, they would all return to Poland.

  The circus cars were on a siding in northwest suburban Rosemont, near O’Hare International. The railroad siding was next to the Rosemont Horizon, a stadium that attracted basketball games, circuses, and rock shows.

  The strange little European circus had not been as successful as the American entrepreneurs who imported it had hoped. Poland, however, had been pleased. The money for the circus had been paid at the beginning of the tour. In hard Western dollars.

  “Too European,” the promoters had been told after disappointing box offices in half a dozen cities across the United States.

  Most disap
pointing of all had been Wojo, the midget clown with the largest following in Europe. Or so the Polish government had claimed. Wojo had been drunk for most of the tour, even during performances, despite the best efforts of three Polish Security Police agents to keep him sober.

  The reason was simple. He had been frustrated at the beginning of the tour because of his separation from Monika, the midget woman clown who was quite beautiful and quite afraid of Wojo and who had run away from the circus in Poland before the tour began.

  He had been frustrated in the last few days of the tour because of Stefan Kolaki.

  Wojo wanted the boy. He wanted to dress him and pet him. He wanted to play with his mouth. To give him lipstick. To humiliate him and make him pretty.

  Jan Tomczek, a member of the Polish Security Police, had decided Wojo was insane. Jan, by his own lights, was a decent man. He had reddish hair and hazel eyes and a blunt manner. The circus—the world it made on this train, in this strange country—seemed like a nightmare to him. And then two days ago he had been told of the plan to seduce Teresa Kolaki, to force her to return to Poland. He had been told by Korsoff, a Soviet agent in Chicago, and by Vishinsky, a KGB from Washington.

  “Guard him well,” Vishinsky had said, not understanding about Wojo.

  Jan Tomczek was a part of the atheist state but a man of strong convictions, a man of innate conservatism, a man who understood the rightness of things. And what was wrong.

  “The boy is a boy. A child. Regardless if you are a homosexual.” So he had begun one night to explain to Wojo when the midget clown had not been drinking too heavily.

  “You bet I’m a man.” The voice was raspy, deep, from beneath the throat, even the diaphragm; a voice that expressed far more contempt and hatred than Jan thought could pour from such a small vessel. “More of a man than you are, you state stooge. I’m not afraid of you. I can get it up all day long if I want. You ever done that? I fucked ten women one night and one of them almost died because it was so big in her. I was too big for Monika, that’s why she ran away. Made her bleed, the little cunt—”

  Jan Tomczek endured this, did not speak, felt the burden of the state. In another time or place, he would gladly have killed the midget.

  “He is a child,” Jan Tomczek said patiently.