from the archives of the Swiss federal police declassified 1999
Office of the Chief
Communications Bureau “T”
Federal Office for Police
Central Telegraph Office
Bundesrain 20
3003 Bern
RE 40 40
RE 39 39
December 4 1925
a memorandum regarding the diplomatic telegrams of the Vatican
As instructed, in order to continue our work on the new Bolshevik ciphers, we recently exchanged certain decoded Vatican files on the confidential negotiations with the Polish authorities regarding the
This office continues to monitor the diplomatic telegraphic traffic of the Italian, Spanish, and Vatican representatives in Bern. The telegraphic correspondence is often cited in open letters to the cardinal secretary of state [see RK/98.156, attached] which were obtained Nov. 24. It is an elementary matter to compare the uncoded references to the encoded citations in the secret telegrams and to begin to decode the telegrams.
The Vatican diplomats continue to use local telegraph offices for their communications, which are routinely copied and sent to this office for analysis.
[signature]
Captain L.K. Deichmann
o/c Cryptanalysis section
VII
PARIS
DECEMBER 1926
A canopy of clear mid-morning sky shot with the irreproducible light of France: Eleanor was Paris-bound again. After stints at the London School of Economics and Radcliffe, she was now an economist, with a Harvard MA after her name, and a writer under contract, her Paris now an expatriate’s Paris, a hive of absinthe mirages and postwar poverty, its cafés full of foreign poseurs and idlers salted with the rare stray genius. “You might as well cross the Atlantic in a rowboat,” was Foster’s sour remark on hearing that Eleanor sought to research the French franc. But Harvard had paid her a stipend, then strong-armed a New York publisher into the promise of a microscopic print run of her analysis of the French currency, a first, actually—no one had ever thought to study a modern currency on the hoof before. Armed with a tight budget, Eleanor settled in.
For six months, long hours at the money ministries absorbed her days. She took a cheap if drafty room on rue Meuron, buttressed with her trove of finance files and papers, beneath the cobwebbed gables high above an art studio. She’d had barely a spare sou that first fall, before her parents cabled her a magnificent five hundred dollars and she could afford to thaw the space out with a coal egg in the grate first thing every morning. Before that windfall she’d lived on coffee and bread and Algerian oranges and prix fixe meals taken among the Sorbonne students. Rickety French governments came and went, interchangeable names in the big front-page stories; the franc went into free fall, as did the capital’s temperature. A bitter autumn only turned colder, then was blessed with a long week of timid sun before December creaked in, lacing the puddles with fine ice.
As winter gathered and the franc fell further against Eleanor’s hoard of dollars, her frugal meals at La Rotonde, a haven with its splendid square tables—ideal for a good spread of her work—left her with enough spare to take a real meal on occasion. On those rare evenings, a leavened Eleanor went dancing with one of a quartet of young expatriate Americans studying at the Cité Universitaire. But even fueled by the champagne and midnight dessert in the glossy restaurants of the rich sixteenth arrondissement, Eleanor always returned to her tiny hutch above the art studio alone.
Then, a fortnight before Christmas, her world shifted.
The door, caught for a moment by a ridge of slush, kicked, then slammed shut with a cascading of bells. The bookshop’s owner, a defrocked Jesuit, bone-thin and dusted with dandruff, dwelt in a silent cloud of cheroot smoke, and looked up from behind his big slab-sided rolltop desk, home to a hibernating cat. The proprietor was slowly, reluctantly liquidating his father’s library, reputed to be one of the best collections of political writings in Paris. Each sale cost him; he winced when paid. Knapp by name, his dour Teutonic presence irritated the neighbors. They didn’t take to Germans, of the French variety or not.
Eleanor had found the shop one day when she’d lost her way near St-Sulpice. Americans, Eleanor discovered, aroused a singular affection in the shopowner. In the last days of the war, an obscure American regiment had returned his hometown to la République. Knapp, if approached on a good day, would loan out a text for her research without charge. And Knapp liked his shop warm, no mean thing that winter. Eleanor worked there all she could.
As the door bells faded, Eleanor, in the wicker chair, kept her eyes on the Finance Ministry monographs Knapp had ordered for her, biting her lip in concentration, and didn’t look up. Bent on organizing the material from the clerks at the Paris stock exchange and her hours of interviewing at the ministry, she had spread her work out on the deep shelf in the front window alcove. A gust of cold wind curled around her shins and lifted her notes. She slapped them down, concentrating.
It was not every day that Knapp acknowledged the arrival of a customer, indisposed as he was to moving his inventory. He glanced at the man in greatcoat and homburg with his sack of books slung over his shoulder and shifted a pile of papers to make room for the spoils. The two exchanged a curt nod; Knapp licked a thumb and turned the page of Le Monde. The new arrival, short and squarish, with an intellectual’s soft clean-shaven face and unlined brow, wearing a collar and tie each a decade out of date, then disappeared into the literature stacks, his hands clasped behind him, a man strolling known ground.
Eleanor saw none of this. Over the past week she had begun to tease the threads of her theory into shape, that underpinning the dry numbers were living people, aspirations, fears, an emotional logic to the franc’s ebbs and flows, a reason to the tides of its value. Her pen began to dab the columns of numbers, arrows linking dates; she pillaged a nest of news clippings, paper-clipping them to her timeline. Her sense grew: she’d found what she’d come to Paris for. She tightened her sweater across her chest and glanced at Knapp’s old clock: she’d been working without a break for almost two hours. She capped her pen and rubbed the ink on her fingertip. The radio played Ravel, a piano piece, cresting, celebratory, pleasing even Knapp, to judge from his humming. It was time for a meal, a good one, to celebrate. She gathered her papers, stacking them. A half smile came as she filled her dowager’s handbag. It was worth it, every day of it, her Atlantic crossing in her rowboat. Foster be damned.
Knapp raised a pale hand as she left. The bookshop door slammed, the ecclesiastical bells tinkling behind her. The December fog gathered around her. She did not see the other customer’s face in the plate glass of Knapp’s establishment, framed by a circle of mist, his hand rubbing the windowpane, staring.
A coal cart, drawn by a steaming Percheron, its hooves flicking up sparks on the cobbles, pulled even with her, its driver staring down at her from above. She beamed at him; he doffed his beret and disappeared into the December mist. The gaslights glowed blue-green in the milkiness. Eleanor rejoiced in the Parisian murk: she’d done a fine morning’s work and had just decided on a lunch of bouillabaisse at the Norman restaurant off the square, the place the Sorbonne students went to celebrate or mourn an examination.
A voice from the mist: “Madame! Madame!”
Eleanor peered into the gray, waiting. A heavy figure emerged, his trousers snapping around his thick legs as he ran, his greatcoat open.
“Yes? Over here.”
Man, middle-aged, balding, a hat in his hand, pince-nez on Roman nose, a gentle face, Eleanor registered. He was smiling, embarrassed at his awkwardness. He had the paradoxical effect of growing shorter as he approached; perhaps it was the stoutness of his legs.
“Ah, you speak English. I should have known.” He was breathing hard. “You left your file at the bookshop. Knapp no
ticed.”
“Very kind of you, running like that for me in the fog. Thank you. Eleanor Dulles,” she said, offering her hand. “Watertown, New York, by way of Boston.”
“Aaron David Barenberg. I go by David. Baltimore born and bred. A pleasure, madame.” Barenberg placed his homburg on his head and began to button his greatcoat. “May I walk with you?”
“Certainly.” She looked at him as they walked, weighing him. “Baltimore. I know the harbor a little.”
“Madame is of the nautical métier?”
Eleanor nodded, giving nothing away. They had reached an intersection, but in the fog she couldn’t make out which. “Drat it, I’m lost. Where are we?”
“Just off the square. The métro is around the corner.”
Eleanor caught sight of the newsstand where she’d bought the International Herald Tribune when her neighborhood kiosk was sold out. “I recognize that tabac.” She turned to Barenberg. “Look, I’ve got something to celebrate, in my work.”
He raised his hat in salute. “Always a cause for celebration, an academic advance. I know how hard they are to come by.”
“Thank you. A stepping-stone, really. But I’d really rather celebrate with someone. Not to mention the fact I haven’t spoken English in days.”
Eleanor’s new acquaintance laughed. “Pity you don’t speak medieval French—then I could come. I never get a chance to speak medieval French.”
“No, no, no. I’m serious,” Eleanor said, an uncertainty rising in her: why doesn’t he just say yes? She straightened, her eyes level with his. “Care for lunch? Dutch treat at that seafood place on rue St-André-des-Arts? Maybe they have Baltimore crab cakes.”
Barenberg bowed from the waist, offering Eleanor the halo of hair atop his balding head. “I was taught never to refuse a lady—even without the crab cakes.”
Eleanor was charmed: no one had ever done that before. She shrugged her bag of books and papers onto her shoulder. “It’s an offer with a deadline. I have to be back to work at two.”
In the distance, an autobus Klaxon sounded.
“Then we have a civilized hour,” he said, a maître d’hôtel with the whole city in his charge. “I believe we might head back to the boulevard.”
“I don’t think so. If the tabac is down to my left—”
“I do believe we ought to try up, that way, toward the boulevard.”
“You’re sure?”
Barenberg nodded. “A gentleman never contradicts a lady—”
“But this time you’ll make an exception.” Eleanor waited.
He clasped his hands behind his back, stiffening. “Indeed.”
She took him in. “My brother and I, when we disagree, we often take up a wager.”
“A gentlemen’s wager?”
“Double or nothing for dinner, Mr. Barenberg.”
Her new friend blinked once, then again. “Yes, yes, of course.”
She turned on her heel. Men and directions: they never know anything.
They began to walk in silence toward the boulevard, Eleanor staring dead ahead into the fog and silence. Thirty or so paces up the narrow street and David looked back over his shoulder. Eleanor saw this but kept walking. Barenberg looked back again, hesitating.
“I think—”
Eleanor stopped. “Know what I think? I think you just bought bouillabaisse for two.”
Au Petit Trésor was a basement place, crowded with rough benches and scarred tables, owned by Madame Fortin, a fierce bretonne who stood immobile next to the till. Customers paid when they turned in their bowl, spoon, and napkin. Eleanor and David sat to one side of the stone fireplace, on a bench table of their own. Undergraduates crowded shoulder to shoulder on the other benches, arguing, liter mugs of beer clanking on the pine.
“So Knapp actually speaks with you? I’m impressed.” Eleanor dipped a chunk of Madame Fortin’s bread into the bouillabaisse and laughed.
“No. He endures me,” David admitted, “because I trade. I’m above cash, he thinks, like he is. That appeals to his vanity.”
“Knapp waves at me. Looks up once in a while, when he lights his cigar. He lets me work, though. That’s a blessing on a cold morning—a good chair and a good fire. And I like Polyphemus.”
“Oh, you read Greek?”
Eleanor stared at him for a moment. “No,” she said carefully. “Polyphemus is the cat.”
A strangled shout: at the next table a bearded young man stood, declaiming Nietzsche at the top of his voice and pulling at his sweater cuffs, possessed by either inspiration or the wine or both. Two girls pulled him down, one bored, the other laughing, very pretty and very drunk.
David winced as he spooned his soup, forcing a thin smile. “I take it you’re a mathematician.”
“Close. Economist.”
“The dismal—”
“I don’t find it so at all,” Eleanor shot back. “Sorry, that was a bit strong. I love it, it’s a constant puzzle, a human puzzle. And it’s not mathematical at all. Yet.”
He raised a finger hopefully. “Yet? It will be soon?”
“No, it won’t, not soon. I’m a realist. I have a lot more work to do. And what do you do to put bread on the table?”
“Three guesses.” He seemed bemused, likable now.
“You were in a bookshop. Something to do with words. But you’re an American.” She put her spoon down and leveled her gaze at him. “Oh, my. You’re not one of the lost sheep you see at the back tables at Le Dôme, are you? The talkers who haven’t written a word but they’re the next Flaubert?”
“That’s two down. Try again.” He smiled again. “Believe me, I don’t live on Daddy’s money.”
“I believe you, I saw the leather on your shoes. Let me think. You’re a French expert. I don’t speak well, myself. Enough to get by.”
“Oh, it’s worse than just French. Much worse. I look for the roots of obscure languages. Detective work. Rather like yours, I’d think.”
“That’s interesting. Which obscure languages?”
The next table was on to free love now, solemnly declaring itself in favor of promiscuity.
“I’m trying to work out the Jewish roots of the romance languages.”
“Ah. Maybe then I should be paying for dinner.” They laughed together.
“The Johns Hopkins French department,” he said, “hasn’t entirely lost its sense of humor. I have a stipend.”
“Harvard has a sense of humor too. I’m writing a book about the franc.”
It was Barenberg’s turn to think. “Do people write books about the franc?”
“I do.”
His gaze lingered on something. In the doorway, a couple were kissing while they waited for a table. Eleanor didn’t want to take Barenberg’s gaze personally. But she did. She held him to his bet and let him pay, and forty minutes later, just past two, she was feeding a coal egg into her grate, trying to think about exchange rates but remembering him.
A pneu arrived after lunch the next day, brought to her door by the apologetic young postman with the walleye. Eleanor opened it while standing in the open door, and read that David Barenberg would be waiting for her in a taxicab at the entrance to the Pigalle métro at four-fifteen sharp. Would she care to join him?
She arrived ten minutes early. It was too early for the poules in their heels and worn furs; they were still upstairs, readying themselves for their night’s work. She kept shrugging her big handbag back up onto her shoulder, her tic when waiting. A street photographer walked past, bowed under the weight of his big camera and tripod. There was no one else on the street but a sleeping clochard, snoring on the church steps behind her.
She’d been to Montmartre before, once before, for a dinner in an attic restaurant with one of Foster’s friends and his wife, a charity meal when she’d first arrived in Paris, up several flights of corkscrew staircase.
That memory was the closest she would come to a restaurant that night.
“Why did I invite you? You
’re lovely when you argue,” David dead-panned as the big hired maroon Renault 40 clattered down the side street behind the Opéra, operated by a silent gentleman with a handlebar mustache who oddly struck Eleanor as a White Russian general on his uppers.
Barenberg had brought blankets, a down duvet, and a picnic dinner, including a small bottle of champagne, to accompany their private circumnavigation of Paris in winter. He had waxed expansive as they crawled past the Panthéon; sparred with the Emperor Napoleon’s shade as they orbited the glowing dome of Les Invalides; and tracked the evening’s passage over the city as the commissionaires closed the gates of the Luxembourg Gardens. Eleanor shifted in her seat, uneasy, swimming upstream in Barenberg’s torrent of opinion. She was tucked under the duvet, a plate on her lap on which skated a confit of duck sandwich. This automotive dinner was his party piece—just for her?
“And this,” he continued, pointing a gloved hand out the brass-trimmed window, “is the entrance Napoleon III used to hide one mistress from the other. That one there.”
He had been a talking Paris guidebook for almost twenty minutes straight, a nice safe topic. Eleanor took a deep breath. “Have you actually been inside the opera house, for an opera, I mean?” she asked.
“Of course. I do like opera.” The personal question had stopped him, just as she thought it would. “Yourself?”
“Never. I do work rather a lot, I think.”
He seemed shocked. “And in London? Have you been to the theater?”
She shook her head. “I mostly went on long walks round Regent’s Park. I couldn’t afford much more on my LSE scholarship.”
His eyes shone, he leant forward. “Perhaps we could go to the opera together, then.”
She said she’d think about it, weighing something else altogether. “May I be very direct?”
The Witness Tree Page 7