Eleanor stole a glance as Kronthal was dismissed, and he left with the briefest of goodbyes—la Whyte took no prisoners, even in her straitened circumstances. Mrs. Whyte ordered lunch, calling to the maid to turn up the radio. “Glenda’s grandson is out there,” Mrs. Whyte proclaimed. “Terrible, terrible.”
The radio reporters tried to keep a running tally of the early casualties, vague, no real numbers; Eleanor reckoned the censors were already at work. She and Mrs. Whyte took cup after cup of tea in silence as the awful news rolled over them.
Mrs. Whyte reached a senator of her acquaintance to demand news on Glenda’s behalf. A hand over the mouthpiece, she repeated for Eleanor’s benefit his report, delivered from the State Department ticker tape room. No one knew anything; the President and the cabinet were meeting; sirens wailed and armed troops were on the move in the empty city, sporting the anachronistic puttees and flat tin helmets of 1918 vintage.
Meantime, Mr. and Mrs. Pattison, from the Pattison mansion next door, came over with a sleeping draft for Mrs. Whyte’s high-strung dogs and conveyed breathlessly that sandbags were appearing like mushrooms at the big intersections, their eyes shining with the thrill of it. Sophie had drifted off in Eleanor’s lap, her face pink with sleep. The cook prepared a curried stew stiff with beef and sweet potato and they all ate, listening to rumors of mounting casualties and the first horrified reports of the destruction wrought by the Japanese aircraft.
There are young Americans dying right now, Eleanor thought, sipping the pale red wine Mrs. Whyte hoarded in her cellar. Soon it will be that way everywhere. Her mind drifted to a memory of the Armistice celebrations in Paris, as President Wilson was feted. We’ll learn peace is such a fragile thing … all over again. The phone was ringing; the maid appeared, her pinched face overwhelmed by awkwardly penciled eyebrows, and announced: “Miss Dulles, your brother, ma’am.”
Mrs. Whyte had fallen into a deep moody silence and said nothing as Eleanor left for the great hall. The telephone hung in an alcove surmounted with an elk head. She had the strange sense the beast listened while she spoke to Allen, his voice thick with worry. He had, he said, tracked her down via Kronthal, footwork so fast that Eleanor reckoned Allen was very bothered indeed. They traded stories about the attack, then Allen asked, out of the blue: “That old address book of yours, the green leather one. I need a phone number in Berlin. Can I meet you at your place? Tonight, after seven?”
Eleanor could tell it was a government car: a black everyman’s Ford sedan and D.C. license plates. The driver was uniformed military and never moved as Allen left the car. Allen came to the door, hat in hand, and, unprecedentedly for him, refused a drink. Eleanor read a series of Berlin telephone numbers to him from her old green leather-bound address book and then followed him back to the black Ford. There in the back seat was James Kronthal.
“So you two work together?” Eleanor asked as Allen gave her a perfunctory kiss.
“Yes, in a manner of speaking,” Allen replied. Kronthal merely flashed one of his nervous smiles. All boys together, playing spy, Eleanor thought.
“What do you want the numbers for? Nothing dangerous, is it?”
“Research. On the German opposition to Hitler,” Allen said.
“Allen, these people trust me,” Eleanor warned. “Don’t—”
“I know, they’re socialists, lefties, enemies of the state,” Allen interrupted. “That’s why we need them.”
Allen rapped his goodbye on the Ford’s back window. “And who is ‘we,’ Allen?” Eleanor called out, but the Ford slid away, its tail-lights drifting into the first blackout of America’s new war. Eleanor held her arms close, thinking of the faces of the people she’d met in Germany, Austria, Prague: the Boltzmanns, the Kirsches, the kindly professor in Köln who lent her his typewriter to write her BIS book. Overhead in the darkness, fighter aircraft crisscrossed the capital, the drone of their engines like monks chanting. Sophie stared out of Eleanor’s front window; she waved, a sliver of sanity in a world turned upside down.
XXXIV
NEW YORK
DECEMBER 13, 1941
Foster didn’t smile: he knew his client and had a good read on all three hundred pounds of Hector Greer before the man dropped himself heavily into Foster’s best office chair. “Sit down, sit down, Hector. How are you?” he inquired, knowing the answer full well.
“Thanks for seeing me on a Saturday, Foster.”
“The least I can do for one of my oldest clients. What’s it been, eighteen years?”
Hector Greer nodded halfheartedly, his chubby baby face sagging, weighted down with defeat, his forehead sown with blebs of sweat.
“So. What’s all this about? You told me it was an emergency.”
“My plant. In Germany. My methanol plant in Erfurt, Foster. It’s gone.”
“War’s a terrible thing. A lot of people are going to die because of this war. I tried to keep us out. You know that. I tried.”
“I’m a chemist,” Greer began, his empty hands massaging the air. “I put every last ounce of engineering I know into that plant. My copper halide conversion unit made Erfurt, oh, yes, it did. It’s years ahead of anything here. There’s no better methanol plant around.”
“Hector,” Foster warned, offering a subarctic smile. “Look who you’re talking to: I helped you raise the money, the firm filed the patents for you. Look, I’ve lost dozens of clients on the other side this week, some of them friends I’ve known for twenty years. But war eats everything. Even methanol plants.”
“I’m in trouble, Foster.” Greer clutched his hands together as if he were afraid of losing his fingers too. A haze of gin wafted from the big man.
“You’re hardly on your uppers, Hec. Last annual report I read said you own everything in Cleveland that isn’t steel.”
“Foster, you don’t—look, this isn’t some kind of nostalgia. It’s war. And now I’m some kind of a Nazi-lover. I’ve been in the news lately … because of the plant. I’ve had phone calls.”
“Call the police, Hector. Threats are crimes.”
“The police … I never wanted to get mixed up in politics.” Greer’s hand had moved to his midsection, holding the great hemisphere of his belly in place.
“Here, hair of the dog,” said Foster, offering a double shot of his best sour mash. “Why don’t you go on up to that place of yours in Maine? That’s what I do: head up to duck country—get away for a while. Make more sense than half of Wall Street, your average mallard.”
Hector Greer missed this advice, the glass dead in his hand. “I don’t want to even pick up the phone,” he mourned, a slow amphibian’s blink crossing his features. “You must remember Cal Jorgensen, the guy with the oil contracts out of Spain? He was in and out of Berlin all the time. The Boston cops found him last week, in a car at the bottom of the Charles River.”
“I saw that. Drove right off the bridge.”
“Only he had a bullet in his head first,” Hector said, nodding, examining the carpet with great care. “That part didn’t make the papers. I know. I went to the funeral home, I saw what they had to do to Cal to clean him up. That was the end of November. Then there was that guy, I forget his name, always trying to corner the market in electrical parts? He was at your Christmas party last year, thin guy, liked the sauce.”
“Harvey Pendleton, electrical wholesaling business, up and down the east coast. Furlong and Haas, his father-in-law’s business, he made it big. German parts, mostly, right? Where’s he based again? New Jersey?”
“Baltimore. Got an office here, though, over on Thirty-ninth, big spread. He was going to marry a German, he said, set himself up in Germany, only place to do business, he said.”
“That’s going to be an interesting marriage these days.”
Greer closed his eyes then opened them; the worry had driven all color from his patchily shaved face. “Yeah. Well, he’s dead too.”
“He’s what?”
“Walked right out his office wind
ow first thing one morning. Two weeks ago. Another one that didn’t make the papers. Six floors down. They had to hose old Harvey off the sidewalk.”
Foster hadn’t touched his own drink. “Don’t be neurotic, Hec. Nobody’s after you. You don’t even have a plant in Germany anymore.”
Greer had his hand over his face, sighing. “Things happen in threes, you know. You should hear the phone calls. There’s people who want to kill me. They know I had Baron von Schröder on my board, and he’s in that SS. What kind of advice was—”
“Now, Hec, you get a hold of yourself.”
Greer shook his head then loosened his tie, his fingers working his collar open. “You know I swore off, but I couldn’t help myself—I went to the spiritualist. I reached my mother. We spoke, first time in months. My mother, she sees nothing but night ahead for me … and my cards are just awful.”
“Come off it. You’re a rational man, Hector.”
“I believed you. You told me there’d be no war with Germany. You said you had contacts, second to none, all over Berlin, you said, bankers and the top brass, you knew them. All the big men, you said. Now look what’s happened. That plant—I put my heart and soul into that plant. It’s not just a building to me, Foster. I have no children, no wife, no family. It’s my life, building something from nothing.”
“What exactly do you want me to do?”
“I want you—I want you to do what’s right,” Greer said.
“Hector, Hector. What’s that mean?”
“I believed you when you told me I could invest just like your other clients, you told me their names, Rockefeller and Harriman and Bert Walker’s son-in-law, Bush.”
“You made a lot of money off that plant, Hector. A lot of money.”
“And it’s gone, Foster. Now you have to make it right. You have to get me my plant back.”
Greer wept now, big slow tears on his fat cheeks. Foster watched for a few moments, then reached for the intercom. “Miss Hayes. Get Allen. Get him in here. Now.”
“I’m an engineer. I build things.” He reached into his pocket. “You have to make this right.”
“You’re not in a fit state to instruct counsel, Hector. Now put whatever’s there back in your pocket. Enough’s enough.”
Allen breezed in wearing a forced smile, glancing at his brother for a cue. “Oh, hello, Hector—”
“Hector here isn’t on his game today, Allen. He needs a word with you.”
“What seems to be the trouble, Hector?” Allen was between them now, following Foster’s eyes to the hand in Greer’s pocket.
“I’ve lost Erfurt. The war. It’s gone. Foster said there’d never be a war, that I couldn’t lose with the Erfurt deal. That plant made me. It made me.”
Allen eased Greer up off Foster’s chair. “Well, Hector, why don’t you come down the hall and we’ll see what we can do. You’re a resourceful man, always have been. Smartest chemicals man in Cleveland, Ohio, that’s Hector Greer. A little judicious thinking in the cool of the afternoon, that ought to sort it out, right, Foster?”
“Nothing that can’t be solved with a little clear thinking, I always say.”
“Another year, one more year,” Greer mumbled through his tears, “that’s all, and I would have been out. It’s too soon. You’ve got to make it right.”
Foster stood at the door now, bending close as Allen guided Hector Greer’s shambling bulk out of the office. “Get him the hell out of here,” Foster hissed. “This is a place of business, not an asylum.”
“You come with me, Hector. Let’s talk,” Allen said cheerfully. As they moved into the hall, Allen reached into Hector’s pocket and retrieved a penknife, tiny and bright against Greer’s huge body.
“Yes. A talk. Down the hall. The German thing has us all spinning our wheels, Hector,” Foster said from the doorway.
“My mother sees nothing but night, Allen,” Greer said.
“Well, you know what they say, Hector,” Allen said, winking at Sullivan and Cromwell’s heaviest client, “it’s always darkest just before the dawn.”
ACT FOUR
Si vous voyez un banquier suisse sauter d’une fenêtre, sautez après lui.
Il y a sûrement de l’argent.
If you see a Swiss banker jump out of a window, jump after him.
There’s bound to be money in it.
VOLTAIRE
XXXV
BERN, SWITZERLAND
JANUARY 1942
The door on the third-floor landing was enameled black, fresh paint; a single brass thumbtack held a card lettered Herr Professor Dr. S.R. Schorr, Commercial and Legal English Translations, home to Misha’s old don from his middling college at Cambridge, the sharpest economist around the place. Misha knocked. When the door opened, he didn’t recognize Schorr at first, a boy’s face given over to gravity, a wide mouth with too many teeth. That changed when Dr. Schorr spoke, kind, quick, appraising eyes behind the tortoiseshell ha’penny spectacles. “Come in, come in, you’re early, aren’t you,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
Misha made a fast inventory of the place: sloped ceiling above a wall full of wooden card files, like a public library’s; a low bookshelf full of bankers’ folios, the kind auditors lug around the City—and then he knew what London wanted him for. The papers on Professor Schorr’s desk were like architect’s drawings, with a clear template for the shapes linked by dotted lines and lettered in colored inks.
“Tea.” That wasn’t a question either. “You roomed next to Gunnison at Cambridge, Charlie Gunnison, the astronomer, didn’t you? I tutored his brother last term before the war.”
“I suppose I did,” Misha replied, trying to recall what had happened to Charlie.
“He’s up in Wales, hunkered down with the latest radar antennas,” said Schorr, fiddling with the very precise Swiss gas ring. “Mind Beryl, would you? She’s a bit fragile now the weather’s changed.”
Beryl was Schorr’s aspidistra: Misha added Beryl to Schorr’s boiled tweed suit and the dull beige lace curtains and the green metal desk and the deflated rose-and-trellis tea cosy next to the red telephone to the growing list of Ministry of Works–issue furnishings, all clues to Schorr’s real job—and it wasn’t translations.
“Been here long?” Misha asked politely, thinking I’ll die up here come summer.
“Since August. Lovely breeze off the river,” Schorr said. He must be psychic, Misha thought.
“Navy got you? Spying for the nautics?” Misha gratefully accepted a steaming mug of tea. Bern was penetratingly cold and that was a very dead coal fireplace on the far wall.
Schorr seemed impervious to the frigid state of his den; he loosened his woven wool tie thoughtfully. “Oh, God, no, never the nautics, dear boy. Ministry of Economic Warfare. We’re the bank detectives, like W.C. Fields—no transaction too big or too small, that’s our motto—bonds, gilts, reinsurance shenanigans our specialty. And we do like oil. Lots of trade there—oil’s always dirty.” Schorr grinned his terrible teeth and Misha remembered that Schorr for some unaccountable reason was a terror with women. “Yours truly’s the entire Swiss research bureau. Or rather, we are. London was rather afraid you’d leg it to Lisbon, you know. Shouldn’t want the whole war to myself up here, frankly. Plenty of muck to shift for two, honestly.”
“Fine. Wonderful. Robbing Swiss banks for His Majesty, are we?”
“We don’t rob them, dear boy. We leave that to MI6. Our boys wire the accounts and then you and I, we do our sums, figure out which comings and goings are smelly. And then there’s the poor bloody commercial travelers. I spend a lot of time listening in hotel cafés to the raincoat brigade. I’m first on their list, friends from my uncle Rex’s days in the motor trade on the Continent, you know, keep the pot boiling. How’s your dad these days?”
“My stepfather, you mean. He’s well. Still running—”
“Enskilda, I remember Sam. Have a look at this file, if you wouldn’t mind. He and I were the only two Jews at a conf
erence in Egypt once. Good man to know in Cairo, is Sam. And knows his way around a vodka bottle. Next page, the blue personal file: recognize this bird?” Schorr had his back to Misha, staring out the window over the rooftops of Bern to the winter mountains and France beyond.
“Dittersdorf? Germans aren’t my patch,” Misha observed, scanning the typescript.
“No. Next one, the Dutchman. Thyssen’s legman.”
“Schippers. Ah. Yes. Him I know. Friend of my stepfather’s—ran the Haifa branch of the Union. I did a summer placement there, God, in ’36. What’s Renni’s crime? Nicked the silver service?”
“Dunno. We’re doing a trace on the naughty Dutch banks these days. Which would be just about all of them. Meinheer Schippers is running a very suspect bank, looks like to me, a real witches’ brew—Thyssen and oil and Rockefellers.” He drew back his cuff and peered down at his watch. “Oil again. Dead boring, really. Look, take your coat off. Have a go at Schippers, there’s the lad. And have a care for Beryl, would you? I wouldn’t stand so close. She’s a bit neurotic.”
XXXVI
NOVEMBER 1942
The borders were sealed, spoke the wireless; Misha listened for a minute more, then, with a single pithy expletive, switched the radio off. He was well in harness now, stowed daily at Schorr’s back desk. There he deviled away at the reports Schorr fed every evening into the cracked leather pouch for the long flight to Lisbon.
Misha’s trajectory had placed him precisely where Shiloah wanted him: at the crossroads of secret finance, at the height of the war, at the side of one of the cleverest investigators London had. Everything London knew about gold or dollars moving to Spain, Shiloah knew within the week, with Kauffmann and his kin working the courier routes south. Misha, hundreds of miles from Stockholm and a lifetime from the Cambridge backs.
The Witness Tree Page 27