by William Boyd
‘Don’t look so worried, Mountstuart. We’ve bought you a couple of tramp steamers. You’re a shipowner. Now we want you to go to Switzerland and buy a few more.’
Switzerland? I felt a warm rush of pleasure in my lower abdomen and for a horrible moment wondered if I’d wet myself in my relief. My bowels had indeed loosed but my dignity was preserved. Switzerland was neutral, I was saying to myself, safer even than the Bahamas. It seemed odd to go to a landlocked country to buy ships but that was none of my business.
And so ‘Operation Shipbroker’ was born. The job, as it was explained to me, seemed quite straightforward—only the actual getting into Switzerland was complicated. The strategy was that I was to pass myself off as a Uruguayan businessman looking for funding in Portugal, Spain and Switzerland to increase the size of my merchant fleet, two of which were currently moored in Montevideo harbour. I wondered if this was credible and was reminded that not the whole world was at war. Take South America for example. Citizens of neutral countries were free to come and go, providing they had the necessary documentation and visas. Swedes could travel to England, Mexicans to the USA, Spaniards to Australia, if they could get permission.
I was to visit certain banks in Geneva and Zurich and see if I could secure a loan to purchase my ships (all this would be detailed in a series of briefings over the next few days). ‘We don’t actually expect anyone to lend you money,’ Rushbrooke said, ‘we just want you to be out there trying.’ I asked why. Then Marion spoke. ‘You’ll be approached, covertly, by Germans, or by the representatives of important Germans. They will want to know how much it’ll cost for you to take them to South America on your boats.’ Why would they want to do this, I asked? Because the war is going to end soon and the rats are already preparing to leave the sinking ship, Marion said. These people will approach you and you will take down their details—such as they are—and try to identify them. A man called Ludwig will contact you and you will pass that information on to him. How will I know Ludwig? I asked. He’ll know you, don’t worry, Marion said. How do I get to Geneva? I asked. ‘Why do you think you learned to parachute?’ Vanderpoel said, with an unpleasant smile. I was told I’d learn all the rest in the coming briefings. I had one more question: how long would I be in Switzerland? Until allied troops reached the border—either from France or from Italy—probably, Rushbrooke glanced at Marion, some time in the summer.
Sunday, 9 January
I hinted to Freya about ‘Operation Shipbroker’—said the department had another job for me in Lisbon. This was Rushbrooke’s idea: he knew that a wife had to be told something. You’re not doing anything dangerous, are you? Freya asked. No, no, I said, it’s: not dangerous. Just a question of information gathering—some scheme dreamt up by NID. Which started me thinking: whose idea was this? And who was Colonel Marion? I have a week full of briefings ahead of me, largely to make my cover story complete. They asked me to choose a name for my papers and visas and I came up with Gonzago Peredes—a little bit of me; a mark of homage to Faustino. Cables are being sent from Montevideo to bankers in Zurich and Geneva requesting appointments for Sefior Peredes. A room has been booked for me at the Hotel du Commerce in Geneva. I have a file full of details of merchant ships for sale.
Sunday, 13 February
Tranquil domestic weekend with Freya and Stella. We bought a puppy, a black Labrador bitch, on Saturday for Stella. Stella said she wanted to call it Tommy, so Tommy she shall be. Tomorrow I begin the long journey out to Italy. KLM from Bristol to Lisbon. Then by boat to Tripoli. Then military plane to Cairo and on to Naples. Everything seems well organized in true NID fashion. I’ve told Freya I’ll be gone a month or so and that she can always receive news of me through Vanderpoel. She seems calm about it: she looks on it as a business trip, she says. And I was away for eight months in the Bahamas, of course, so the white lie seems quite tolerable. Last night I bought a bottle of Algerian wine, which we mulled with some sugar and some ancient cloves and spiked with rum. We lay in each other’s arms on the sofa and listened to Brahms’s second symphony on the gramophone, then we went to bed and made love with due and tender seriousness—two old hands who knew what they were doing. Today we will take Tommy for her first walk in Battersea Park.
§
MEMORANDUM ON ‘OPERATION SHIPBROKER’ On Wednesday, 2.3 February 1944 I boarded a Liberator bomber at an airfield outside Naples. With me were two Frenchmen—whom I’d just met—who were going to be dropped in occupied France. Our Liberator, loaded with supplies for the French Resistance instead of bombs, was to form part of a bombing raid destined for southern Germany. During the raid we would divert from the main bomber group and fly over western Switzerland, at which point I would parachute out. I had no idea of the Frenchmen’s destination.
Under a zip-up overall I was wearing a grey flannel suit and tie. The label on the inside of the jacket was from a Montevideo tailor. I had with me a suitcase full of clothes and various documents of my trade—including a photograph of my wife and daughter back home in Uruguay. In my wallet I had a wad of Swiss francs and stamped visas and train tickets that recorded my journey from Lisbon to Madrid and on across occupied France to Geneva. I had letters of introduction to banks in Lisbon, Madrid, Geneva and Zurich. Everything about me said, with absolute authenticity, that I was a Uruguayan businessman in neutral Europe looking for a bank loan to buy ships.
I shook hands with the Frenchmen and my trepidation abated somewhat. They were dropping into occupied France; I, at least in theory, would land in a neutral country whose inhabitants would not regard me as the enemy. I kept telling myself that: I was not falling into the arms of my foes. The dropping-officer was an Englishman, Flight-Sgt Chew.
We took off at dusk. Our squadron of Liberators joining up with others from nearby bases gathering in a group above the Bay of Naples before heading north in formation, making for Bavaria. ‘Ball-bearing factory,’ Chew whispered confidentially. Chew was a talkative fellow (perhaps it was part of his brief) and he was glad to be dropping an Englishman for once (‘Keep themselves to themselves, the Frenchies do’). He kept asking questions to which he knew I wasn’t allowed to respond. ‘Been in London lately, sir?—Sorry, sorry.’
‘Miners still striking back home, are they? Sorry, sir, haven’t been back in months, you see.’
After about two hours I felt our bomber bank away from the bomber group and begin to descend. Chew told me to prepare myself, so I went and stood by the side door and attached the long webbing strap of my suitcase to my ankle and clicked my ripcord on to the roof cable. I dug a balaclava out of my pocket and put it on.
This was the moment my fear reached its purest form and I heard a voice inside my head screaming, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Mountstuart? You have a wife and a child. You don’t want to die. Why did you agree to this?’ I let it rant on, it was distracting, and in any case I had no answers. Chew looked out of a small porthole and said, ‘Nice dear night for it, sir.’ Then an American voice said ‘Five minutes’ and a red light came on above the doorway. The two Frenchmen gave me V for victory signs and muttered good luck.
Chew hauled the door open and the cold air whipped around us. Through the door I could see searchlights stiffly probing the sky. ‘Good old Swiss,’ Chew said. ‘Occasionally they throw up some ack-ack for form’s sake. Always switch on the lights, though, just so we can see where we are.’ Above the door the green bulb went on. Chew slapped me on the back and I picked up my suitcase, clutched it to my chest and stepped out into the night for my sixth parachute drop.
It was an icy wind that hit me and I heard the whumph as my parachute opened above me, as simultaneously my suitcase was snatched from my arms by the slipstream and, as it fell, it jerked painfully on my right leg. For one horrible moment I thought I had lost a shoe. It was most uncomfortable with the dangling suitcase tugging beneath me like some animate being attached to my ankle. I heard the noise of the Liberator’s engines surge as it climbed away to re
join the other bombers.
There was a half moon that night and scudding clouds. Beneath me I could see the fields in a uniform grey-blue light with larger, whiter patches of unmelted snow. In the distance I could see the flat sheet of Lake Geneva and the not very efficient blackout of the city itself. I seemed to be approximately in the right place.
I had a bad moment as I came in to land, just missing a small copse of trees, hit the ground awkwardly and was dragged along by my ‘chute for thirty yards or so. I caught my breath and methodically gathered in my parachute, slipping off the harness and my overalls. In my suitcase were an overcoat, a scarf and a Hornburg hat. I put them on: it was cold. I then spent half an hour looking for somewhere to hide my parachute and overalls and eventually ended up burying them in a drift of snow by a stone wall, patting down the disturbed snow as best I could, reasoning that by the time anyone discovered them I should be lost in the city.
I knew in which direction Geneva lay and followed the line of the fields’ edge until I came to a gate that gave on to a small lane. I walked along this until I reached a junction where there was an obliging signpost: GBNEVE,15 KMS. This was the most dangerous time for me, I knew, out alone in the countryside in the middle of the night—a businessman with a suitcase—if I were challenged I would have no way of explaining myself and what I was doing. I needed to reach the city as quickly as possible and blend anonymously with its denizens. I kept on walking: the roads were quite empty, free of traffic. After about an hour I came to the edge of a village. A signpost gave its name as Carouge. It was by now 4.00 in the morning.
I found an old wooden barn not far off the road and decided to wait there until it was light and the village began to stir, reasoning that with a few people about I might attract less notice. And perhaps there would be a railway station or a bus. I had a hip flask with me and a few biscuits—so I sat shivering in the angle of two walls, nibbling oatmeal and sipping whisky.
When it grew light I took some care cleaning myself up, wiping the mud off my shoes and trouser bottoms. Dirt is the great give-away when you’re trying to be unobtrusive. Then at about half past seven I strolled into the village, hoping I looked like someone who was going to catch a train. Luckily it was a sizeable place—there was a roadside inn and a post office and the cafes and the boulangeries were open: I wandered through without attracting any unusual glances. I joined a queue at a bus stop and asked a teenage boy if this bus would take me to Geneva. He said yes, my French seeming to pass muster.
The bus came, I boarded it, bought my ticket and took my seat. For the first time I relaxed slightly and I felt a small satisfying wash of justifiable pride course through me. Phase one complete. I looked out of the window as the suburbs of Geneva flashed by: the dangerous bit was over. Now I just had to get on with my job.
I left the bus in a small square in what seemed the centre of town and using my street map found my way to the Hotel du Commerce. By now I was just one of hundreds of coated, hatted office workers hurrying to start their day. I walked into the lobby of the Hotel du Commerce and walked right out again. Two policemen were talking to the receptionist.
It could have been purely routine, a coincidence, bad luck. Perhaps I should have just strolled up to the desk and announced myself but it seemed a foolish and unnecessary risk. I walked round the corner and saw a parked police van with half a dozen men in it, waiting. This looked more ominous. I moved on through the nearby streets searching for another suitable hotel—nothing too grand, nothing too shabby. Then I found one: the Hotel Cosmopolitan—I took it as a good omen.
I spent most of that day in my room, calming down, taking stock. I slept in the afternoon. When I woke I called the Hotel du Commerce and cancelled my booking, saying that I had been detained in Madrid.
In the evening I went to a restaurant and ate a veal chop with fried potatoes washed down with a glass of beer. It was unusual wandering the streets of Geneva. There was a blackout after 10.00 p.m. (the street lights were switched off), but it was instigated more, one felt, out of a sense of duty than necessity. Life was constrained—even the meal bore signs of that: the beer was watery and I had to leave half the potatoes as they were inedible—but there was, none the less, an atmosphere close to normality. The war was elsewhere, even though near at hand, and there was no sense of that latent stress amongst the populace, that constant nagging worry at the back of your mind that you were so aware of in London. I went back to my hotel and slept well.
In the morning I telephoned the Banque Feltri to confirm my appointment for Monday morning. ‘Ah, oui, Monsieur Peredes,’ the secretary said. ‘C’est note.’ So far so good.
I went down and strolled by the lakeside at lunch time and had a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie. I remember thinking how bizarre all this was, my being here in Geneva, pretending to be a Uruguayan shipowner. I felt a laugh rise in my throat and sensed for a moment—and maybe this is the allure the true spy feels—the element of sheer play underneath all the risk and the seriousness of intent, and how intoxicating it was. All things said and done, I w, as here playing a game of hide and seek.
Back at the hotel the girl at reception said there was a message for me. I unfolded the slip of paper: Cafe du Centre, midi demain. Ludvrig. I handed it back. ‘There must be some mistake,’ I said. ‘This is not for me.’ But he was here, she said, the man, only twenty minutes ago, he asked for you, Sefior Peredes. No, no, I said, trying to be calm. I asked her to make up my bill—I said I had to go to Zurich urgently.
I went upstairs to pack and when I opened the door to my room found four men waiting for me there: two uniformed policemen with sub-machine guns and two detectives. One of them showed me an identity card and said in Spanish, ‘Señor Peredes, you are under arrest.’
I was taken to a police station in the suburbs and shown into a room. On a table were my parachute and overalls and I was asked ] to identify them as mine, hi French, I said I knew nothing of these things, I’d come from Spain on business. The detective who had spoken to me in Spanish complimented me on my French but said nothing more.
I was left in that room until nightfall. I was allowed to go to the lavatory and was served a mug of unsweetened black coffee. My mind was a rowdy, shouting confusion of ideas, suppositions, guesses and counter-suggestions. I tried hard not to come to conclusions—it was too early, perhaps they’d let me go? But one question kept coming back to nag at me: how did Ludwig know I was at the Hotel Cosmopolitan? The only person in Geneva, in Western Europe, in the world, who knew I’d checked in there was me.
In the evening I was taken from the room and led out of the rear of the police station. There I was helped into the back of a van and the door locked. There were no windows. The van moved off; after about three hours travelling we stopped and the engine was cut.
I climbed out to find myself under the porte cochere of a sizeable villa at whose front door two armed soldiers stood guard. The detectives then handed me over to bona fide prison officers, as far as I could tell. I was taken into a changing room and asked to remove my clothes and was given, to replace them, a set of underwear—drawers and a vest—a pair of black serge trousers, a collarless grey flannel shirt and a crude grey tunic that buttoned up to my neck. On my feet I wore some thick socks and, most curiously, a pair of heavy wooden clogs. I felt like a cross between a Dutch peasant and a komissar in revolutionary Russia.
Thus attired, I followed my gaoler along a corridor and up some stairs and was shown into a large, barely furnished room. There were some traces of its former decoration remaining—a curtain pole, a painted cornice—in stark contrast to the functionality of the furniture it contained. An iron bed (made up with blankets), a table and chair and a chamber pot. The one large window was heavily barred and against the wall was a central-heating radiator—warm.
§
As the guard left he said, ‘Buenas noches.’ He locked the door behind him.
This was to be my new home and I couldn’t help wonderin
g how long I would be staying here.
§
Life at the villa. From my window I had a fine view of the end of a lake and snowy mountains beyond. Lake Lucerne, I later discovered. Every morning a guard unlocked the door at seven and I was escorted to a washroom where I emptied my chamber pot and could shave and wash at a basin. Once a week I was allowed a shower, when I could wash my hair. I received a complete change of clothing once a fortnight. When I returned to my room, breakfast would be waiting: bread and cheese and an enamel mug of warm coffee, never hot. The next interruption was at noon—lunch: always some kind of vegetable soup with more bread. In the afternoon I was allowed into the interior courtyard of the villa, where there was a patchy lawn surrounded and quartered by gravel paths. Under the eyes of a guard I was allowed to stroll around or sit in a patch of sunshine if the day was clement. When I was ordered inside I would catch a glimpse of another inmate (dressed identically to me) emerging into the courtyard for his period of exercise. As time went by I concluded that there could be only half a dozen of us in the building and widely dispersed among its three floors—rarely did I hear the clattering clump of dogs along my passageway. Then it was back to the room and at seven the evening meal was served, a plate of stew or a chop, always with potatoes and more bread and cheese. The lights went out at nine. The guards seemed to change constantly and always attempted to speak to me in bad Spanish—‘Hola’, ‘Vamos’, ‘Esta bien?’—no matter in what language I addressed them—and they always called me Peredes.
It was a very simple, very efficient and very secure regime. Very Swiss, you might say, and at first my mood was strangely relieved. All bets were off: ‘Operation Shipbroker’ had foundered all too quickly. I had been caught and there was nothing more I could do—the game was over and they had won. The Swiss were neutral, after all: I wasn’t going to be tortured by the Gestapo, and it was surely only a matter of time before I was transferred to a proper internment camp (I knew there were about 12,000 Allied soldiers and airmen already interned in Switzerland). Somewhere, wheels would have been set in motion and the creaking bureaucracy that governed wartime prisoners would eventually seek me out and deal with me. But as the days and the weeks went by (the guards would always tell me the date) I began increasingly to worry. This routine seemed as if it could go on for ever and I was bored to insensibility: no books, no newspapers, no writing material. But I was exercised and well fed—in fact I was putting on weight what with all the bread and cheese I was scoffing daily.