“Don’t forget the wine,” Greg said, touching the waiter’s arm.
Rebecca shot me a glance.
“Now,” breathed Greg, reverting to the main topic of discussion, “always remember that the war is going against Germany, and that she shares a lengthy border with Switzerland. Britain, of course, is miles away. Which means British businessmen in Switzerland—because there are so few—draw attention to themselves. Why would they be here? It follows that the British side of this operation would want as few people here as possible, and that those who are here are undercover. We can’t be sure that Amery/Romford is the only one, after all. With Germany, it’s different. This part of Switzerland is German-speaking; it has long and intimate links—commercial, banking-wise, cultural, educational—with Germany.
“We don’t know that this whole operation isn’t organized centrally, just that on the surface it doesn’t look that way. And I can see why. If it was organized centrally and was blown at any point, the whole shooting match would have to be closed down. It is, after all, an abuse of Swiss neutrality in a major way. If all the operatives were here secretly and their cover was blown, it would be very embarrassing and ruin Germany’s access to raw materials at a stroke. But, run the way that it is, we have several—one might even say many—German businessmen coming here, under their own steam, so to speak, using their real names, ostensibly conducting transactions on an individual basis. Should any one of them be found to be contravening Swiss neutrality, he can be bundled out of the country but the operation overall isn’t exposed and closed down. The system goes on.”
The second bottle of wine arrived and, as Greg tried it, Rebecca and I sat in silence, digesting his argument. There was nothing to add; what he’d said made sense.
“So,” said Rebecca, after Greg had refilled our glasses, “first I get to know Romford, then I get myself invited back to his room. Then what? What am I looking for? Stacks of cash? Little Alps made of Swiss francs?”
“Yes,” I replied. “But what we need in order to move in is to observe the method of payment, how he is paid, not just how much.” I let a short silence extend between us. “You may not find out everything on a first visit.”
She nodded slowly. “I had worked that out for myself.”
Another silence. Then I asked, “Have you ever had sex with a man you didn’t love, or like?”
She stared at me. “Do you mind very much if I don’t answer that? This situation is unique, after all—no?”
“Well, it’s unusual, I grant you that,” interjected Greg. “But I wouldn’t like to bet on it never happening somewhere else in this goddamn war.”
The silence around the table this time was profound, and gloomy.
“All I ask,” said Rebecca at length, in a voice that was barely above a whisper, “is that you don’t broadcast our little scenario to all and sundry. Can’t we just keep it between us?” She looked intently at each of us men in turn.
Greg nodded.
I did too.
The next morning, early, Rebecca took me shopping. I’d told her I had a wife and son at home—I hadn’t gone into details—and that I needed to bring them both something special. She showed me the main shopping streets, and a back alley or two where there were some specialty shops, mainly selling Swiss chocolate. Just then, chocolate was an unheard-of luxury in Britain. Our tour of the back alleys of Zurich reminded me of that Saturday morning, long ago, in Stratford, when I had first fallen for Sam. But, stunning as Rebecca was, I didn’t fall for her. Walking the streets of Zurich, it became a habit of mine to look out for women wearing Alice bands.
As lunchtime approached, we decided that, since Romford knew me by sight, it was safer if I remained at the consulate, rather than keep hiding behind the pillar I had sat near on that first day. If I formed part of the team that kept Romford under visual surveillance, sooner or later he would spot me—and our plan would be in the soup. It wasn’t worth the risk.
Rebecca made the approach, as I had suggested, and Romford bit like a fish that hadn’t eaten for a month; according to Greg’s account later, he all but raped her right there in the Café Odeon. In view of his evident keenness, Rebecca—in my view quite rightly—played it cool and rebuffed his advances. She even had her own plan as to how to proceed. She thought it would be less suspicious if she didn’t turn up at the café on the following day, and did so only on the day after that with a friend of hers. This was another woman, a bit older than Rebecca and much slimmer, and darker, but still attractive in her own way. She was called Liesl, and was half Austrian and half Swiss. When Romford came across to their table in the Café Odeon, Rebecca was friendly in a polite sort of way but nothing more.
It was only on the third meeting between Rebecca and Romford, which happened two days later still, that she agreed to join him at his table and let him buy her a drink. The drink turned into lunch, and lunch turned into a dinner invitation two nights later. The fish had been well and truly hooked.
While we were waiting for the all-important dinner, Rebecca showed me more shops of Zurich, including one that I had been keeping an eye open for. There, I bought Will a very simple train set. It had a light at the front that lit up. I bought Sam a handbag and some perfume. Perfume was hard to get in London. And I bought two bags of sugar.
For dinner Romford entertained Rebecca at the main restaurant in the Bar au Lac, rightly calculating that she had never been there before. Added to that, it was just a short journey from the restaurant to his room upstairs. Romford behaved entirely in character throughout and shortly before midnight the couple walked into the lift. Greg watched from across the lobby. He came directly from the hotel to join me where I was waiting, in the Bar Venner in the narrow street that our office overlooked.
We sat in front of two whiskies like beavers at a dam.
“I hope Romford is content with straightforward sex,” said Greg softly.
“Oh, it will be straightforward,” I replied. “And probably over very quickly, in the first instance, at least. Romford doesn’t have much experience.”
We drank our whiskies.
“If Romford is doing what we think he’s doing, and we manage to prove it to our satisfaction, what then?”
He leaned toward me, so that I could smell the alcohol on his breath. “As I said before, my dear Hal, you, Rebecca, or me is going to have to shoot him. Dead.”
Dear Hal,
Your letter did arrive, this morning. It was short, yes, as you say, but I was amazed to receive it at all, and of course delighted. Will has been looking up on a map. He was very quiet for the first few days after you left. Of course, he doesn’t yet have an adult conception of time, and so he doesn’t really know what weeks and months are. You are just out of his life and he’s perplexed as to why you have gone and no longer want to be with him, with us. It’s entirely natural but it doesn’t make it easy.
Lottie is missing you too. She likes a man about the house, she says, and, worse, she’s having to clean her own shoes! (I mustn’t get like Izzy with the exclamation marks.)
And of course I’m missing you. in which case we would never have known. Our last night together, which you mentioned… it’s no one else’s business, so I won’t go into it. But it was unsettling and wonderful all at the same time. I had no idea … I’m going to censor the rest myself.
We had another zeppelin near miss the other day, and school was closed for two days. You know, when the idea of zeppelin raids was first announced, I was frightened, and so were a lot of people. The very thought of explosives from the sky was too horrible to contemplate. Yet, now that they have arrived, though they are hardly pleasant, we have all adjusted. Remember our day at Speakers’ Corner, and that man who said we are living in a new kind of war? Well, perhaps we are, but I don’t think the zeppelin raids on London are anywhere near as frightening as being in the trenches is frightening. We civilians just don’t have the bombardment, day in, day out, that people undergo at the Front. I don’t
think people are being made mad by zeppelins, the way some people are made mad at the Front. The psychology is different. (With you away, I’ve been reading a lot in bed in the evenings. I like reading about psychology and the unconscious—it explains a lot, I think.)
I have to finish now. The man who delivered your letter said he’d come back for mine about now and I don’t want to keep him waiting. It’s a bit like having our own private postal service. Be careful, Hal, and
All my love,
Sam (and from Lottie, Will, and Whisky, who is also confused about where you’ve gone)
It was half past eleven the next morning before Rebecca showed up at the consulate.
“I had to shower,” she said. “I had to get his smell off me.”
“How bad was it?” I asked as gently as I could.
“Someday,” she said, “someday, if you get me very drunk, I’ll tell you. But not now, not now or for a very long time. It was bad—don’t make me relive it.”
“You have to relive some of it, Becky.” Greg was insistent. “We need to know what happened. Coffee?”
“Don’t call me Becky—don’t ever call me Becky. I hate it.” She shook her head, as if to free something caught up in her hair. “I’d love some coffee.”
Greg went off to make it. I didn’t speak for a moment. When I did, it was to say, “War gives us the most terrible experiences, which become the most terrible memories. Is that what worries you—that you will never be able to expunge this memory, that it will spoil you for every other man who will be in your life?”
She looked at me.
“Is that another question you don’t want to answer?”
A slight nod, so I let it go.
Greg came back in with the coffee. “Here we are. I’ve added a little whisky from my own private stash. Medicinal purposes.” He smiled.
Rebecca sipped the coffee, then gulped it. “That’s better,” she murmured.
She leaned against a metal filing cabinet.
“Now, Hal here was right. Romford was fascinated by my background—by my family, I mean. How far back we go, which ancestors did what—generals, politicians, diplomats, bishops, Oxford dons. He couldn’t get enough. I did most of the talking at dinner—we talked in English and in German. I made a few elementary mistakes from time to time, and he was quick to correct me, anxious to show off how good his German is. He asked me about my writing of course, my political views, how I got on with my father. I asked him about himself but he kept brushing that aside until I insisted—which I thought was only natural of me. To be interested in him, I mean. He gave himself away quite early in the meal—”
“What?” cried Greg.
“Not in the sense you mean, silly. I mean he rushed our dinner. He ate quickly, drank quickly, asked his questions in a rush—at times it was more like an interview than a conversation.”
“So?” Greg looked mystified.
Rebecca looked at me. “Tell him, Hal.”
“He wanted dinner to be over, so he could ask you back to his room.”
“Exactly,” whispered Rebecca. “Exactly.”
“And… ? Go on … What happened… ?”
But Rebecca wouldn’t be rushed. She drank more coffee.
“He had champagne in his room. We had a glass. Then he pounced on me. You don’t need to know what happened, or how I handled him. Just that I did handle him. He was obviously not very experienced with women, but that meant I could lead him, teach him, reassure him when he needed to be reassured—as most lovers do.” A sardonic smile crossed her lips. “All you need to know is that I satisfied him… in fact, I bloody well exhausted him.”
She finished her coffee. “That was my plan. After we had finished having sex, at whatever time it was, he fell asleep—though ‘passed out’ would be a better description after what we did and the drink he’d had. That meant it was safe for me to look around his room.”
“Brilliant,” whispered Greg.
“Don’t interrupt. I want to get this over with.” She looked into her coffee cup but it was empty. “He has a suite—a bedroom, a bathroom, a sitting room, and a small hallway with a closet off it. I searched all the rooms, the chest of drawers, the drawers in the table in the sitting room, the closet, the bathroom, the wardrobe in the bedroom, the desk, his bags, under the sofas, behind the curtains, even behind the pictures on the walls.”
“And—?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. No money, no papers, no jewelry. A couple of train tickets, some restaurant receipts, a few cigars. But that’s it.”
“Shit!” hissed Greg.
A long silence elapsed in the room.
“While you were there, did anyone else come in?”
Rebecca looked at me. “Yes, room service. He ordered breakfast for both of us. As soon as he woke up he wanted to do it, so we did it. That made him ravenous, so he ordered breakfast. You press an electric button by the bed, the waiter comes to the room, you say what you want, and they bring it on a trolley. He wanted to do it again after that but I said I had to get on.”
Another long silence, which Greg eventually broke with “Now what? Where do we go from here?”
He looked at me and so did Rebecca.
“I hate what I’m going to say, but I can think of only one way forward. First, however, let me make some more coffee.”
I went to the kitchen and prepared three cups. Then I took them back to our office and closed the door. “We are pretty sure that Romford is the man these Germans pay. We know it must be cash, so the money must be brought to him. In that room. The fact that Rebecca could find nothing means that the paperwork is kept to a minimum— and somewhere else. More important, it means that the money doesn’t stay with Romford very long and not overnight.”
“And so … ?” Greg spoke, but both of them were looking at me.
“We have to convert Romford’s insatiable appetite for sex with Rebecca into an asset.”
“What do you mean?” said Greg.
“How do we do that?” cried Rebecca at the same time.
“This is the bit I hate saying most. Rebecca, you must have dinner with Romford again, go back to the hotel room with him again—”
“No!”
“—go back with him again and this time… this time… you must tell him that he is one of the greatest lovers you have ever had—”
“You’re joking—”
“—and the next morning you must say that you want to stay in bed and have him make love to you all day long. Say you are more experienced than he is—he will know that is true, somewhere inside him—but that he has this incredible effect on you. Put it down to the war, if you like, or your social differences, but say you’ve never known a man like him.”
“And the purpose of all this is what, precisely?” Rebecca was not pleased. I hadn’t imagined for a moment that she would be.
“You need to stay in his room for one whole day. See who comes, watch his routine, hope that it throws some light on what we want light thrown on.”
“No. I’ve done enough. Fuck him yourself.”
This sudden profanity surprised me but it wasn’t out of place.
I smiled. “If he were queer, I would have a go. But he’s not. He’s fallen for you, Rebecca. You are our best hope. We can’t change course now. You must see that. I know it’s hard but—”
“You have no idea how hard it is—either of you.” Suddenly she was close to tears.
I stepped forward but she held out her arm to stop me. “No, no … please. I’ll do as you say. But don’t ever say you understand. You don’t understand, even one little bit.”
Dear Sam,
How lovely to receive your letter, albeit censored in parts. (I’ll keep it and bring it home, so you can tell me what the censored bits originally said.) I’m sorry that even Whisky is missing me—I can’t tell you how much I am missing all of you (yes, even Lottie, you can tell her).
What I can say is that the reason I am here is approaching
its climax so, all being well, I shouldn’t have to be away for very much longer and can come home. I’ve done a bit of shopping, so I’ll have one or two surprises for everybody except Whisky.
The memory of our last night isn’t quite so vivid as it was, but still quite vivid enough and I hope that, on my return, we can re-create the mood of that time. I’ve seen quite a bit of the world, where I am now, and my days here have also given me a few ideas of my own, as regards what I would like to do after the war.
But first, I have to finish what I came here to do. This next bit might be censored but I can tell you that one of the people I have encountered was someone I last saw in that place where you and I had our first lunch together. How small a world we live in.
Masses of love to everyone.
Hal
Rebecca met Romford the next day, at lunchtime, and agreed to have dinner. This time they went to a club, the Astoria, and stayed late. Rebecca was clearly hoping that Romford would be too tired to make love that night. I never found out whether that was the case, but if so it made it slightly more plausible that she wanted to stay in bed all the following day. She must have said something like she was too tired the night before, but he was a wonderful lover, she wanted to make it up to him…
The way Rebecca told it, later, Romford didn’t need to be asked twice. His sexual awakening might have arrived late but he clearly intended to make up for lost time. They went their separate ways around six that evening and she came directly to us, propping up the bar at the Venner, behind the office.
She looked ravaged. She swallowed a whisky at one go but it didn’t seem to help.
“Would you like to take a bath?” I asked gently.
She shook her head, her body shuddering at the same time.
“No. No amount of soap and water could ever erase today.”
Neither Greg nor I spoke.
At length, when she had gathered her strength, she murmured, “It has to be related to room service.”
We looked at her.
Gifts of War Page 29