“They’re in town frequently?”
“Planning to take one to lunch? You might ask me along. For professional reasons. I’ve never broken bread with one of God’s bankers. Be a first.”
“Seriously, Diesing. Are they out and about?”
“Yes. Generally at the Red Cross’s bank, Crédit Suisse-Romande.”
“And you never bother them, because of the immunity?”
“Uh-uh.” Diesing poked a finger toward the door. “Goodbye, my young friend. That’s your one answer and you don’t want to ask more, believe me. I don’t want to answer to your stepfather if I pull you out of the Aare some fine morning, understand?” He tapped his smooth forehead. “Don’t forget to sign out or they’ll drag you back. My best to your stepfather, hear?”
“Thanks. Hope I didn’t overstay my welcome.”
Diesing had already returned to his files, but he looked up one last time. “You did, but here’s a question you didn’t ask,” Diesing said softly. “Which banks are never audited by outside scrutineers? Don’t answer.”
Misha nodded his thanks.
“One final note,” Diesing said. “Your new friend Dulles meets with the German consul, Willi Gehrig, every fifth Friday in Zürich. Gehrig is hard to miss—he’s a giant, over two meters tall. He’s a lawyer. Dulles loves him. Loves him. Gehrig helped found the Gestapo, then saw what that meant and sold out his Gestapo pals to the military intelligence people. Now he’s one of them. I’ve met him once or twice. Plausible, fluent, very anti-Hitler. Like talking to a very intelligent giraffe. Which is what we call him around here—die Giraffe. Arrogant bastard, though—pushy. Then there’s an émigré German couple here in Davos. Every other Tuesday, on the stroke of three, they have a coffee with Dulles. They’re Jews, socialists apparently, with connections in Germany worth probing, I’d say, if Dulles is courting them. Might be amusing to watch Dulles chat them up. Everyone else does.”
Misha walked for some considerable distance along the river, quite fast, sensing his fragment of a theory becoming an obsession. And Diesing never wasted a hint: he wasn’t the kind.
Whatever the Germans were doing at their Davos offices, they were doing it flat out. The coding room, Misha calculated, would be at the back, no open window for the likes of him to stare through while the clerks ran the numbers through the ciphering machine.
Misha took a table at the café next door. For the next two hours he made notes on a paper place mat and kept them as a bookmark. He saw from the lunch shift change there were at least eight employees, perhaps more, with a steady stream of visitors, several in German military uniform, one massive secretary sporting a Rhinemaiden hairdo. The most interesting were the two SS officers who came and went inseparably as Siamese twins.
They entered the café and took a table next to the bar. Misha went to the WC, walking right past their table. One of them wore a dirty shirt and smelt faintly of garlic. The other’s eyes were bloodshot, those of a burnt-out man.
Three years ago Germany stood on the throat of Europe. Now, what with Stalingrad in the history books, the tide was running the other way.
The Nazis have more money than time.
Diesing’s estimation of events had been dead right, down to the ringing of the three o’clock bell in the town hall tower to mark the occasion.
The black van bore Bern plates: the first clue. The quartet of Swiss policemen in their flat gendarmes’ kepis left the van without a care in the world, as relaxed as the SS staffers from the legation were fatigued; behind the van, a slim blue Citroën glided to a stop. Its driver was an entirely different piece of work, goateed, tall, muscular, a hunter, the intensity coming off him apparent even to Misha, thirty yards away.
At the other end of the street, Allen and the couple with him walked eastbound, the late afternoon sunlight at their backs, three figures in a row in perfect silhouette, targets in a funfair shooting gallery; Allen’s crushed hat marked him as the man on the left, minding the curb.
Misha glanced at the gendarmes and suddenly grasped what might happen, today of all days, from the simple inclination of the head from the goateed officer now instructing the gendarmes from the Citroën’s open window. He’s cutting the bloodhounds loose, Misha determined. Sure enough, the four constables fanned out in pairs, a pair to each curb, waiting, their winter coats skimming the snow piles as they closed off the street, penning the walkers in.
Misha focused down the street, hard, into the sunlight. Two of them. He had to look twice: Allen had vanished in an eye blink, the couple continuing on toward the first pair of gendarmes, oblivious.
The two SS fellows hadn’t moved; the confrontation happening right before them, the café’s big front window a proscenium for the unfolding collision—they were oblivious, one reading a newspaper, the other smoking and rubbing his eye.
Misha saw no more than a flicker of movement in the tiny café across the street, a shadow moving amid the white disks of the marble tabletops behind the plate glass, dim in the shadows cast by the roofs opposite.
Allen had taken a table to take in the proceedings.
A minute passed as the couple ambled down the street, stopping to window-shop here and there, their destination evidently the train station.
The woman was exceptionally beautiful. Misha would have recognized her anywhere: the dark-haired American beauty whose photograph he’d seen at the cottage, Eleanor’s friend, the economist’s wife … Marta Neimann.
The gendarmes closed in: Gunter saw them and read them, but his wife did not.
It made no difference.
The police van was discreet, under way moments after the four gendarmes confined the Neimanns in the lockup at the back, even with Marta nearly fainting. Above, in the windows of the second-floor apartments, several lace curtains snapped shut, the neighbors satisfied at the neat work of their efficient constabulary. A minute later the street was clear, the evening sunlight collapsing on itself, and nothing might have happened: one never would have known the Swiss had arrested two Germans on the run.
Misha looked for Allen in the café on the corner, but the table near the door stood empty except for the wineglass and the newspaper, curling up and down in the wintry breeze.
God and all his angels alone knew for certain, but Allen was hardly in the habit of having his constitutionals interrupted by Swiss policemen, especially those duty bound to feed two émigré Jews into the Gestapo’s bottomless maw. Was this a quid pro quo, a debt being called in? Had Allen squired Eleanor’s friends right onto the abattoir ramp? Or was this just dedicated Swiss police work, arresting two German nationals with expired visas?
Who knew? Misha could barely think: powerless to intervene—it was against every rule Shiloah had taught him—he was on fire inside. And all he knew for certain in that bleak slice of time was that, had there been a bus nearby, he would happily have pushed Allen under it. The only good Misha could see in this episode was that now he had a match, a small one but useful nonetheless, with which to burn Allen.
Next on Misha’s shopping list for Shiloah was a detective-inspector of the Swiss police service, the inimitable Hans-Peter Russi, lead choreographer of the spies’ minuet that year in Switzerland—a dance Allen Dulles evidently knew well. As Misha left, the SS men were debating Swiss chocolate, killing time. They hadn’t noticed a thing.
XXXVIII
A WEEK LATER
If Diesing was a rotund Mutt, Hans-Peter Russi of Bern was an ascetic Jeff, a short, cautious man, even for a Swiss bank policeman, which was saying something. He was dark and droll, of Bavarian descent, which marked his eyebrows, and also of French descent, which marked his palate. He was thin, rarely ate, and only then with the careful strategy of the practiced gourmand, hampered by the trigger finger he’d lost in a hunting accident. Heavy-bearded and slow to gesture, Russi was a bachelor with no known liaisons, famous in Switzerland for his uncanny ability to play his informants.
His children’s choir, he called them, and h
e kept them in tune partly by force of his pragmatic wit and partly by regularly spending a goodly portion of his departmental budget on them. He was also that rarest of witnesses, completely unbiased. Having been lied to by so many for so long, Russi took the rather humane decision that life was essentially a comedy, with an intriguing cast, many of whom were motivated to sin by the forbidden holdings of Swiss banks.
Russi put down his coffee and looked at Misha. “Who’s paying for this?” he asked genially.
“I am,” Misha replied. In the background, a string quartet was working its way through a Haydn piece. Misha had been half listening, half watching Russi efficiently demolish the most expensive dinner in Bern.
“You mistake my meaning,” Russi said. “Who’s paying you to talk to me? You might as well tell me the truth: I’ll find out anyway. I read enough wiretaps over breakfast to know what half of Bern is having for dinner, my friend. Besides,” he said, winking, “the truth is a very refreshing thing in our business.”
“The U.S. Treasury Department,” Misha replied. “I’m working for Enskilda Bank by day and nosing around for the Americans by night.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” Russi shot back, making a sour face. “You’re working for Schorr, for the British.”
“Oh, really? Am I?”
Russi had lost his sense of humor. “Here are your marching orders, my young comedian. You just keep nosing around Bern, where I can keep my beady little eyes on you,” Russi said, already, to judge from the gleam in his eye, thinking of the next course. Then came Russi’s bombshell: “How’s Mother Russia these days?”
Misha felt as if he’d slid into a mountain stream. “Fine,” he said.
“Oh, come, come, my friend, do you think I live in restaurants? I’m quite happy to listen to your side of the New York incident.” Russi allowed himself a satisfied smile. “All this and you’re paying for the dinner. It’s a good night’s work.” Russi arranged his cutlery perfectly, the etiquette of a man much used to doting service. “Care for an opinion?”
“As if I have a choice.”
“Not if you’re paying,” Russi reminded him. “The Soviets are a far more dedicated lot than the Germans who hang about cafés, where the likes of you can watch them for hours on end, like goldfish. No, I would be minding my back rather carefully if I had the Soviets interested in my whereabouts.”
“Your fantasy life’s getting the better of you, Hans. You’re seeing things.”
“And, quite out of character, you’re not saying anything,” Russi said. “That in itself is interesting.”
“Tell me about Dulles.”
Russi gave an unpleasant laugh. His laugh, like his body, was all acute angles and sharp edges. “There? Good for you! See what I mean?”
“About what?”
“About how refreshing the truth is? Tell me, my young friend, don’t you feel better, now that we have the truth on the table between us?”
“Bugger this for a lark, Hans. You’ve eaten like a king. Let’s do business.”
“Fine,” Russi said equably, and waved the waiter over for another bottle of crackling iced Sancerre.
“Dulles has been meeting with various German anti-Hitler people for months,” Russi was saying. “Stalingrad brought them out of the woodwork. Princes, Catholic aristocrats, Abwehr people, and even the occasional SS man, who, despite their preference for the café life, are realists. They’ve been lining up to talk to Dulles, rather like I imagine his clients at his posh law office in New York did, everyone with a problem and story to tell. Do your people read his cables?”
“How the hell should I know?”
Russi tutted. “Now, now. I get very put out when foreigners cross my wires. My government here likes my reports nice and orderly—just like our neutrality. That’s what I give them. Look, I like you, Misha.”
“Well, that makes all the difference.”
“Right, have it your way,” Russi said, bruised. “Everyone here is watching Allen Dulles. It’s the fashionable Bern pastime. After coffee and a good read of the newspaper, have a listen to what Allen’s telling Washington. It’s no secret, really. Half the time he just talks on the telephone. I’ve played the acetates for several of my Abwehr colleagues and they’re not terribly impressed at the quality of Dulles’s work here. And I gather Washington isn’t either. But that’s not the point, is it, from your point of view?”
“You believe in capital punishment, don’t you, Hans?”
Russi looked horrified. “No! Why do you ask?”
Misha poured himself half a glass of Sancerre and topped up Russi’s glass. “Because you’re boring me to death. I know all this. Anyone in Bern or Davos for a couple of hours knows all this. What I want to know is, why, if Dulles is such a befuddled operator, are they queuing up for days on end to pay their respects?”
“You work for the Ministry of Economic Warfare, Misha. You know the Americans have enough money to buy whatever they want to hear. That’s why you and I are here, isn’t it?”
“But what do you hear, Hans? What’s crossing your desk as you eat your breakfast brioche?”
Russi suddenly ran out of charm. “It’s damn hard, balancing things the way I do. I have all kinds of competing interests to weigh. Who do I tell? What do I bury? Those German Jews I arrested and deported, the Neimanns? They’re somebody’s son, somebody’s sister, but they have to go. So they go. That’s the game. Nobody wins, nobody really loses, but we get to spend lots of money demonstrating how suspicious we can be. Dulles? The English counterintelligence people are wiretapping him, we’re wiretapping him. I’d bet next bottle the Germans, to make it unanimous, are wiretapping him too. Or, if they’re ambitious, they’re trying to buy our intercepts. And the band plays on, isn’t that the English expression?”
“Anyone made you an offer, Hans? Just between us, Hans, as friends?”
Russi’s face darkened—he missed the joke completely. He fussed with the creases in his napkin for a moment. “If that’s what the word is about me, you’ve heard wrong. I find too much pleasure in my restaurant vice to take a bribe. Besides, who would I spend it on? No, it’s much more interesting being the cat and watching the mice run the alleys than actually getting down on all fours in the muck. Personally, I’d ask the Luftwaffe ciphers lads about Dulles: they have a branch here, you know. Three tired men in spectacles and terrible body odor above that fur shop just down the street from the phone exchange. Three little men who listen like ferrets all day to the main telephone line into France, the Bern–Strasbourg–Paris trunk line, the only route for all the international calls and telexes north. We’re thinking of burning one of them: he likes it when the girls tie him up, and Swiss maidenhood can only be perverted so far. We call him Anton the airman. He’s really quite something when the girls—”
“You know what I think?” Misha interrupted. “I think Dulles is here looking after his old prewar German clients, and quite likely his American clients too, just to round off a day’s work. Is he playing games with the banks?”
Russi raised his hands. “Off-limits. What I tell you I have to tell my Abwehr colleagues—more or less, you understand—and I’m not about to tell them. Understand?”
“That’s fine. Couriers or telexes?”
“Yes. Well,” Russi said, curt and moody again, “the bank transfers, they’re all done on Beurling machines, my friend. You probably helped design half the machines in Switzerland.”
“I’m overrated as a mathematician, Hans, trust me,” Misha said, favoring the little Swiss with a glowing smile. “Now if you want a good cornetist, then we can talk.”
They nattered about jazz for a few minutes while the waiters cleared. Misha waited for Russi to open up again; he didn’t dare lose the Swiss at the last hurdle.
“Dulles isn’t an anti-Semite, you know,” Russi said at last, examining the backs of his hands in great detail. He raised his eyes and stared at Misha. “He’s just a little busy.”
Misha ma
de a skeptical face. “What brought that on?”
“I told you. We read his reports. Do you know how many people have told him what’s happening to the Jews in eastern Europe? Do you know what an open secret the massacres are? Half the commercial travelers who come through here have heard bloody good rumors of atrocities from their contacts in Germany and farther east. Dulles is sitting on those rumors. Which begs the question why.”
“So we’ve heard. Good money says he’s talking to the wrong kind of German to hear those rumors, agreed?”
“Why would I agree with you, Misha? For one thing, which ‘we’ are you this time? You really are a changeling, my friend—a dangerous thing to be in this town.” Russi was looking at Misha for the first time with something like genuine frankness. “If you’re playing a double game to get at Dulles, don’t count on me to watch your back.” He sucked his teeth, weighing what he would say next. “I don’t see all the surveillance reports, you know. But I do know one German industrialist who’s through Bern several times a year who’s an eyewitness to senior SS people bragging about the killings. They’re quite open about it among their business associates. The numbers are staggering, from what he’s told one or two banking friends who talk to me. And do you know something? He talked to Dulles within a day or two of coming here.”
“And Dulles hasn’t forwarded the reports to Washington.”
Russi gave his Cheshire cat smile again. “You’re a bright fellow. You can draw your own conclusions about which Germans Dulles is doing business with.” He drained his glass at a single gulp, something Misha had never seen him do before. “But you ask me, it’s a penny to a pound your average Dulles lawyer colleague in the SS, he has no trouble getting his reports to Washington if it suits Mr. Dulles. These old banking comrades, they stick together.” Russi scratched a nostril irritably, then sniffled. “Likewise every passenger off the train from Berlin whose fictions Dulles cables weekly to Washington. Them too.” Russi sneezed and blew his nose into his fine white handkerchief. “No dessert fondue for me,” he announced. “I am allergic to chocolate. It’s a very great pity.”
The Witness Tree Page 29