He threw his morning paper away, the pages spiraling down from the tiny kitchen table, a wire photo of the Germans marching through Marseille blurring as the broadsheets fell. Misha had a shopping list of bits and pieces, housekeeping research, to keep the chatter with the Americans going; he’d have a visit at the American legation, cool off, gossip with Kronthal, take back the banking files he’d borrowed over the weekend. If he timed things right he’d be there just in time for one of the pastry trays Ambassador Harrison sent round on busy mornings for the plebs.
The American legation was jumping. At the door the unarmed Swiss policeman who usually read the paper seated on his bentwood chair now stood at a jerry-rigged wicket, a fresh rubber stamp out, issuing passes; the imprest squeaked as he stamped Misha’s yellow entrance card. The place smelt as it always had, of beeswax in the corridors, the closets musty with old rumors, the aroma of an old woman’s purse. He jogged up the stairs past the bust of General Grant some daft Swiss politician had donated, God alone knew why. At the landing, Misha took the short corridor left and heard Kronthal well before he saw him, a hissed order, almost impossible to understand, except it was repeated, very fast, then the phone slammed down with a report like a small-arms shot. A harsh “Never call me here” was all Misha heard, in a German tight with stress.
He hesitated, heard dialing, then Kronthal’s voice, supplicant: “I’m sorry. That was wrong of me. I said I’m sorry. Six-fifteen.” Then the phone was replaced, civilly this time. Misha crept backwards and then overweighted his footsteps, reapproaching Kronthal’s open door.
“Up early, aren’t you, James?” he asked, sailing in fast. Kronthal had an armful of cables, a month’s worth, Misha calculated.
“Stay there,” Kronthal ordered as he enclosed the loose coded dispatches in the clothbound binder Misha knew went straight into the big vault in the room next door, a coding officer’s housekeeping. He snapped the binder rings shut. “Heard the latest?” Kronthal lit his cigarette with a worn gold Ronson, squinting at Misha through the smoke.
“France? Felt it coming for days. I could strangle the nearest German.”
Kronthal frowned. “The Swiss don’t care for that kind of talk. Their kissing cousins, the Germans.” He exhaled, calmer. “Actually, I meant the other news. He’s done it again, our friend Eleanor’s brother. Just had a telegram from the border post at Annemasse. Some gendarme let him through.”
“He’s heading here?” Misha asked.
Kronthal shrugged: he had, the gesture said, not given it much thought.
“The ambassador’s going to blow a blood vessel,” Misha said. “There’s history there. Dulles and Harrison go back.”
“Harrison hates Foster Dulles’s guts. And that’s not the half of it: Allen’s got a million-dollar bank draft in his back pocket. Harrison wouldn’t even touch the paper—he stared at Allen’s voucher like something’d just died on his blotter.”
Misha had an arm draped over his chair back, thoughtful, listening. “Not much cover in that, is there?”
“It’s the all-American way—says we’re open,” said Kronthal, chewing his thumb thoughtfully, “open for business.”
“Speaking of which,” Misha said, keeping things moving, “I’ve got those accounts files Dalton wants back. He in yet?”
“Of course. Before sunup,” Kronthal replied. Treasury’s liaison to the Bern legation, Dalton was a little too damn quiet for an American, Misha had decided, a shrewd stringbean who produced flawless briefs on Swiss bank arcana.
Schorr loved Dalton’s reports. He’d dedicate an entire teapot’s worth of reflection to them, drawing Misha in for the finer points. Not only did Dalton not say much, but he disappeared for days at a time, God alone knew where. Spain, the trainspotters said, the long way round, via Lisbon, nosing around the Madrid banks and the ticker tapes at the bolsa and the hallways of the law courts. He had a wife and kid at home in Toledo, Ohio, Misha knew; Dalton had left for Switzerland a month after his wedding. He was the kind who went the extra mile, utterly reliable, and he didn’t mind helping Misha, who’d share his own gleanings in return.
Kronthal’s extension rang. Misha guessed there might be something to that call too, from the speculative look Kronthal gave the telephone before picking it up. Misha threw Kronthal a backwards wave and saw himself out.
Dalton’s office was across the hall, a long zigzag of a room, lit for some long-forgotten reason by a spectacular brass chandelier, its walls held up, the joke went, by Dalton’s files. The Treasury man had his feet on his desk, reading an old copy of the American Mercury.
“Oh, heya, Resnikoff. Says here that there’s termite mounds in Africa forty feet high. Can you beat that?”
“What’s to beat?”
“No, seriously, takes ’em years. Sorta like a cathedral, y’know? Whatever termite starts it never lives to see the mound finished. Great place, Africa. I’m going back.”
“You are?” Nothing about Dalton surprised Misha anymore.
“Sure. Once the war’s over, I’m taking the family. See it before it all changes. What you got there? Treats?”
Treats was Dalton’s code for more files. “Traders,” Misha said, putting them down on a spare chair.
“Sure, traders,” Dalton said, pointing with his free hand to a thick typescript on his desk. “Take it—yours truly on the Davos beehive. All about crooked lawyers and their SS playmates. Right up your alley.”
“I never get to read them,” Misha said, taking the paper. “Schorr reads the good bits aloud to me and then files them somewhere ultrasecret. He’s quite mad.”
“He’s sane as you and me and a really fine investigator, that guy Schorr,” Dalton said, still reading. “And you better behave or old Schorr’ll send you back to London, where there’s real bombs falling.” Dalton’s big soft melancholic eyes blinked slowly, like a seal’s. “Me, I’d keep my head down and my shoes shined.”
Misha shook his head. He took Dalton’s paper and walked out, pausing only for a moment at the big window overlooking the top of the stairwell to watch Allen Dulles leaving the black Bern taxi downstairs, wearing the same shapeless hat Misha had last seen him wearing in New York, a size too small for his head. Allen headed straight for the stone steps fronting the building, a thin attaché case his only luggage, purposeful as a door-to-door salesman, Misha surmised—and as sure of his lines.
It was nearly five-thirty and the party should have wound down, but everyone was staying to see how the ambassador would play the Dulles arrival. “I don’t think he’s going to show,” Dalton, who didn’t drink, muttered to Misha. They were at the edge of the crowd ranged around Dulles in the reception room, where the Swiss bartender built whiskey sours and manhattans two at a time to keep up with the demand. Ambassador Harrison, a stickler for protocol—Dalton did an acid imitation of Harrison ordering his breakfast in excruciating detail, a turn that went on for nearly a full minute—had not made his appearance. Dulles’s impromptu reception was edging toward college smoker, everyone talking and no one really listening. Americans, Misha decided, weren’t much for a quiet drink. He wondered what he’d say to Dulles. Or, more to the point, what Dulles would say to him.
The legation’s big translator, Dan Cossey, a thickset Brooklynite who spoke equally flawless German and French, winked at Misha and inclined his head toward the door: the ambassador had finally arrived, a tanned man, more English than the English in the manner of the American upper class, sporting flicked-up hair over his ears and collar and a horseman’s languid posture. Looking through the crowd, Harrison tugged for a moment at his shirt cuff and then allowed rank to open his path to the bar, a route, Misha noted, that took His Excellency well away from the scrum around Dulles, through the secretaries and the abashed Swiss cleaning staff close to the wall, stoically holding their orange juices—no spirits for the proles.
Leland Harrison’s finger of single malt awaited him on the bar on a silver salver. He turned, cleared his throat, and t
he room fell silent. Harrison, wearing a half smile, gave Allen a tart welcome, using the word cooperation four times.
The entire greeting absorbed less than a minute. Dulles wasn’t allowed the benefit of more than a brief toast in return before Harrison dispatched himself to the peace and quiet of his pasha’s lounge, his drink vanishing in a single impatient swallow.
After he left, Allen Dulles led the party up another notch, telling an uproarious story about a Bern adventure of his a quarter-century before, rounding it off with the worn joke everybody already knew about the statue in front of the parliament across town. They all laughed anyway, but none more than Allen, that booming hollow laugh Misha remembered from the election conspiracies at the Belmont Hotel. From the corner, Kronthal edged through the crowd to the bar and deposited his empty glass.
Misha was on the move first, outside and posted in the soft evening shadows, pausing silently for a long breath, well ahead of Kronthal as he pattered down the legation steps, his hands deep in his pockets, and walked quickly past, the wrong way for his habitual journey home. Misha gave him another fifteen yards and then slipped behind the American, keeping to Kronthal’s blind spot as the thin gray Bernese dusk, full of leaf smoke and coming rain, closed in on them.
They were down by the river now, on the periphery of an old cemetery set on terraces below the sheltering firs, the tang of wet earth rising into Misha’s bones. He shivered, watching from the side of a tree bent starboard by centuries of Alpine wind as Kronthal picked his way down the flagstones along the path, merging with the shadows. Fog, shapeless and slow, crept through the trees ahead of Misha, accompanied by the slow drip of the afternoon’s rain down through the layered leaves and pine needles and, quite close, the dull, breathy flow of the Aare. A pumping station thrummed in the distance, a Victorian sound of steam and turbine and spillway, its clerestories bleeding light through the mist.
Misha could hear Kronthal’s footsteps in front of him and then the snap of a fallen tree branch. Then a susurration of voices, muffled by the dripping rain and the river, not German but fluid French.
Kronthal was speaking, his hands moving: Misha could see nothing beyond him. And then he glimpsed a second shape, close to Kronthal in the evening gloom, a hand extended, perhaps two. Misha moved very slowly, to the bend in the path, minding his steps, the low pine boughs scraping his back as he peered downhill.
He circled, checking his own back, making sure. Should be wearing a hat, he thought absurdly, lose all that body heat otherwise. A gaggle of ravens settled into the trees, their cries sharp and insistent.
Misha was now just close enough to see: a slender shape in a greatcoat, moving to embrace Kronthal then leaning back, clearly another male, his dark hair slicked straight back, an epicene face, quite young, almost certainly Chinese. Kronthal was very close to him now, Misha could see, and then he turned away, just as the slender man’s coat fell away, tumbling backwards, thrown clear by Kronthal’s long reach.
Misha stared, wide-eyed, horrified at Kronthal’s recklessness. Now Kronthal had the Chinese youth’s white shirt wide open, his head bent down to the younger man’s chest. He held Kronthal’s head in his hands, murmuring.
Misha had seen enough. He stalked back up the trail, thinking furiously, overheated by the connections and consequences of Kronthal’s folly. He slowed his walk deliberately. And therefore … and therefore Allen Dulles, freshly imported hero and temporary millionaire, has a very large problem: his cipher man James Kronthal, a sitting duck for blackmail, sees every coded cable, incoming or outgoing. His mind went suddenly icy calm, clear as glass. The vision of Kronthal and his catamite was, Misha thought, the kind of connection one banked for a rainy day—an insurance policy against the vagaries of what looked to be a very long war in Switzerland. He climbed the wooden steps at the head of the path and took his first steps along the pebbled main walkway to the park gates.
Five minutes from his flat stood a photography store. It was well after hours, but the owner had just come out of his darkroom and Misha tapped on the glass, pointing at a used German camera, small enough to fit in his pocket, on sale with a pair of decent detachable lenses.
XXXVII
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND
FEBRUARY 1943
The officer in the hallway pointed at the open doorway and nodded. And good luck, his frown said.
“Hello, Diesing.”
The obese fellow who seemed part of his enormous desk didn’t look up—not the kind of man who took kindly to interruptions. “The hell d’you want?” he growled, his frugally short pencil gliding across the accounts page.
“It’s me, actually, Diesing, young Resnikoff, Samuel’s Misha, just in town.”
Still without looking up, Martin Diesing extended a paw. “You’ve closed the door before you shook hands, Resnikoff: you want something. I know you aristocrats, always on the prowl, propping up the family balance sheet. How’s my old friend?”
“My stepfather’s doing very nicely, thank you, I should think. He’s got a new investment strategy.”
“Let me guess. Something to do with oil.”
Misha settled into Diesing’s stiff wooden chair with a dry laugh. Diesing finally looked up from his grand paper-strewn desk dominated by a great red and green accounts ledger.
“Diamond drill bits. The world needs diamond drill bits, and the cheapest way to get ’em is artificial diamonds. There,” Misha said, “you’re a millionaire.”
Diesing, so overweight and slow-moving his colleagues called him “the ox,” had almost no need for sleep—he could work for days on end, and did.
He was the chief auditor for the Swiss bankers’ association. His soft pink eyes had seen more bank paperwork than anyone in Switzerland, so the story went. He should have had an office in Bern or Zürich, but he was from Davos and refused to move or commute, so they moved the office in around him.
“A millionaire?” Diesing said. “I know enough about money to know I’ll never have any. I’m still saving up for a car, but since I want a Mercedes, I think I shall have to wait until the present disagreement ends. Spare parts from Germany are an adventure these days.” He squared off a stack of financial statements and filed them, covering the closed file with the palm of his plump hand, as if the contents might fly away and escape his sharp eye, an eye he fixed on Misha.
“You have a shopping list or just one item? I haven’t got all day. Unlike you, I work policeman’s hours.” He smiled, undercutting his irritability with what might be affection. Samuel had done Diesing an obscure favor once; Diesing never forgot anything.
Misha set his elbows on the inside of his thighs and leant forward, his voice low. “If one wanted to move large assets—not cash—in and out of Switzerland these days, what’s the safest way?”
“‘One’? Does that mean you, young Resnikoff? Taking up a life of crime, are we?” Diesing coughed and took a pastille from a drawer without offering Misha one. “Your stepfather warned me about you, you know. Said you were a buccaneer. I can have a round-the-clock watch on you in an hour, my friend, if you’re having an adventure, you and your pal Schorr.”
Misha shook his head. “A research question, I assure you.”
Diesing looked at Misha. “Best leave research to the researchers, no?” But then he cracked a small smile. “Fine. I’ve warned you. I can always tell your stepfather that much when you land behind bars. A courier,” the big Swiss continued. “That is, if you can find a trustworthy one these days. Last I heard, the starting bid for a peek at the contents of a courier’s locked satchel was five hundred gold francs. The courier who told me … well, I rather think his employers have given him a raise, at those rates.” Diesing put down his pencil stub. “Personally, I wouldn’t send a pfennig by wire. Or telephone transfer. Unless you’ve got a solid ciphering machine, half Europe could know your business by sundown. That’s what I tell my people. But do they listen?”
Diesing examined his paperwork with silent care. “You kno
w all that part, don’t you? Don’t need my humble opinion.” He turned his hand over and rubbed at a stubborn ink stain on his finger. “In any case, didn’t you spend a couple of years fiddling with such things? Haegelin, was it?”
“Beurling, actually. But I take your point.”
“See that you do.” Diesing moved the pastille from one round cheek to the other, his gaze steady on Misha. “No, couriers are the way to go. What are you planning to move, the Bank of England?”
But Misha was thinking; he unbuttoned his greatcoat as he spoke. “There’s a German commercial legation in Davos, isn’t there?”
Diesing pulled a face and for a moment Misha thought he’d be out on his ear. “Yes, you are a buccaneer. It’s in your eyes. How did you know about the legation?”
“Public library. I looked at all the phone books until I found the Germans had a commercial office in Davos.”
“It’s quite a place, you know. They have a dozen people working there, a coding office, and a trio of lawyers next door they keep very, very busy. Half of them are SS, the other half civilian or military, the Abwehr. Hate each other like tomcats.”
“Who has the best couriers? The most trustworthy. In your opinion.”
Diesing made a windy noise as he exhaled. “The Soviets. Screw Moscow and you get a bullet in the back of the neck, no questions asked—Schorr will tell you the same. They’re not often here, mostly Bern or Zürich. Very good, professional, almost inhuman, I’d say. Everyone else is more or less corruptible. Except, one hopes, the black army from Rome. The Pope’s men all have diplomatic immunity. Which is a nice touch. We’ve never even asked one of the Vatican bank couriers for so much as the time of day. No point. The nuncio’d be all over us. Very bad scene.”
The Witness Tree Page 28