“These cheroots, be the death of me,” Puddicombe observed.
“Nonsense, Max, everyone knows you’re immortal. You’ve got Lisbon, and likely Paris up your sleeve next.”
“What about you, my dear? What’s up your sleeve for the balance of this war?”
“Give me the financial side. It’s where my heart is.”
“You sell yourself short,” Puddicombe growled. “When this war wraps up, we’ll face a Sovietized Europe, squatting there on the eastern horizon. Your brothers have been saying as much for years. Keep it in the family, Eleanor: State’s going to need people of your caliber. They all think I’m going to Lisbon. Not in the cards.”
“Why are you telling me this here? Walls have ears.”
“Not in the least. I’m asking you to come and work with me. Austria. And likely Hungary, if that survives the Red horde. There’s a job going, political adviser on the military side. It’s a State Department posting but you’d be a colonel in the army, with all that entails. You’d report to me. Interest you?”
“I’m flattered, but why me? Why now? The world thinks you’re bound for Portugal—I don’t understand.”
“Let’s not mince words, Eleanor. Austria is on Stalin’s butcher’s block. D’you want to be where the action is—or forever in meetings like this?”
“How did my name come up?”
“I made it come up. You’re head and shoulders ahead of your colleagues, Eleanor. You’ve got a fine diplomatic pedigree and you know the Austrians’ little ways.”
“I know Germany better.”
“Ah, there’s a thought, there’s a thought. Better you confine your thinking to Austria, you follow? History on the boil, I call it. Engineer a new status quo in Europe, starting with Vienna.” Puddicombe chuckled. “I know, I know, I’m not the friendliest bull in the pen, Eleanor, but I know a good mind when I see one, and you have a good mind.”
“I’m an economics expert, not a military liaison, Max. What are you really offering me?”
Puddicombe was writing on the back of his business card. “A very good job. You can run your own shop, a whole country—”
“What’s the catch?”
“Seat-of-the-pants economics. Get the deals done, keep the Russkies well out of the cookie jar, all’s fair in love and war, and this’ll be war, chance to do some real good. One last thing?”
“What’s that?”
“Anybody asks, it’s Lisbon for old Max, hear?” He unfolded himself from the bench, an awe-inspiring piece of pneumatics. “I hope there’s cake with the coffee. Probably too much to expect something chocolate, though, eh?” He peered down at her for a long moment, examining her with his fell eyes. “Get back to me, end of the week.”
With that, he hauled off, leaving Eleanor to digest the old boy’s mastery of the State Department’s trapdoors and secret passages. Even before he reached the door at the foot of the stairs, Eleanor knew she’d say yes.
XLIII
BERN
MAY 1944
The Swiss girl was lithe and coolly blonde, with small breasts like apples; she smoked incessantly while Misha dressed, blowing streams of smoke out the open window as she watched. “You are English, no? The English are gentlemen. Not like the French, who are lazy in bed and not very clean, or the Germans, who are mechanical. The English gentleman,” the girl observed in her staccato Swiss-German, “can however be extremely perverted.” She showed her teeth decoratively and inhaled again, arms crossed over her bare chest.
“I wouldn’t know,” Misha said drily. “I’ve never slept with an Englishman.”
The Swiss girl hooted a laugh as efficient and straightforward as her performance—at ten gold francs plus forty-pfennig gratuity—had been. “That’s very funny. You can’t be English. They never laugh about love. It’s something they take very seriously. What are you, Polish or something? You look like a Pole, a Polish lancer,” she added, giggling. “Lancer,” she said again, and blew smoke out her nostrils.
“Thank you, fräulein,” Misha said. She blew him a professional kiss; he left an extra franc on the dresser.
In the hallway, a willowy North African girl studied him silently as she padded down the carpet in her kimono. In the wake of her frank glance, it occurred to Misha that half the men who traveled through Bern on diplomatic transit visas patronized the place, which meant Swiss counterintelligence had some—if not all—of Madame Verbier’s rooms bugged, just for the gossip, if nothing else. In the vestibule, the hennaed madame briskly inquired about his degree of satisfaction and offered him coffee and Portuguese brandy.
Eyeing himself in the baroque mirror over the tiny zinc bar, he suddenly recalled something old Dr. van Tassel, his boss at Beurling, had told him over coffee and brandy ages ago: The best telex wires have money in them.
That’s why the banks have the best ciphers, Misha thought as he boarded the elevator to the discreet circular foyer just inside the brothel’s massive black front doors, their wires are hot and cold running money.
As the lift descended, he could see the bouncer straighten his tuxedoed shoulders; he’d been reading and was smartening up to make a show of subservience for Misha’s exit.
Or so Misha thought. Immediately behind the bouncer, at the farthest reach from the entrance, hidden behind a copse of tall palms, stood what appeared to be a service door, visible only to the hawkeyed in the lift from above. Even Misha, who’d acquired the habit of inventorying exits and entrances, had missed this one as he’d entered the brothel. Curved to match the foyer’s rounded wall, the service access opened inward, like a prop door in a French farce.
An intercom buzzed once, then again.
A tall fellow, immaculately dressed and film star handsome, exited through the stand of palms, heading for the brothel’s street door. The service door began to close with a hydraulic hiss.
The bouncer in the tuxedo eased out of Misha’s line of sight to answer the intercom, and for an instant, as the lift settled onto its rests, Misha saw through the service door down a hallway—not the line of brothel cribs he expected, but a dingy institutional green hallway lit by a series of bare lightbulbs cradled in wire baskets. Over the hall’s green paint ran hundreds of conduits and cables. The passage clearly led next door, to the aboveground section of Bern’s telephone and telegraphy system.
The door clicked shut.
It was a long walk and a cool night and the fog curled among the trees as Misha tracked his quarry, unhurriedly moving past the park lined with a wrought iron fence, its great green oaks half-lit with the bluish light of the street lamps. At the next intersection his target turned left, and there the lamplight ended, at the street called Herrengasse.
Misha stepped into a darkened doorway and watched his quarry head for number twenty-three. From twenty yards away, it was child’s play. He watched the big gray-haired man in a suit coat come to the door. For an instant the streetlights glinted off his spectacles; through the lace curtains a fire burned in the drawing room grate, a beacon of civility in the night.
“Hello, Gero, come in, come in, how did it go?” a familiar warm voice asked.
The door closed and the curtains jumped together, closed by unseen hands.
May I present to you, Mr. Dulles, Misha joked with himself, Herr Gero von Gaevernitz, Bern’s favorite Hungarian-American fixer and front man.
The line to Stockholm echoed and crackled and the rotors never stopped ticking over. Like speaking into an old sewing machine, Misha thought. He’d called Beurling’s Stockholm office from the Bern central post office, eventually reaching Dr. Van Tassel at his lake house.
“It’s your summer student, the dark Latvian one, from several years back,” Misha said, speaking in machinelike syllables over the noise. “Remember me?”
A pause while the index in the old man’s head worked. Van Tassel switched to Latvian, just in case, but didn’t use Misha’s name. “Of course I do. You found me on my vacation, so your skills are still good. Ho
w may we help?”
The plural was a Van Tassel tic: he was the furthest thing from grand, with a countryman’s habit of including everyone.
“I am in Bern,” Misha said. “Do we have anyone here in the trade?”
“Moment,” Van Tassel said, and sneezed, very loudly, into the phone. “Terribly sorry, what did you say? Bern?”
“Yes. Bern. Do we have anyone here?”
“Oh, yes, indeed we do,” Van Tassel enthused, “a very good person indeed.” He switched to Russian to read the numbers, very quickly, and Misha scribbled them down. “I’ll contact first, shall I?” Van Tassel offered. “Our friend is quite shy.”
“Very kind. The family is well?”
“Oh, yes, the family is very well, rather like a Balkan circus,” Van Tassel acknowledged. “Let me know how your project turns out, will you, please? You know I like to stay in touch with my students. And how—”
The line went dead. The Swiss post office clerk’s eyebrows arched when he saw the toll charges.
The address was above a toy shop, across the street from the university bookstore. The sign said simply BORG, in blue ink on the card jammed cockeyed in the brass mail slot. Misha buzzed and the electric dead bolt snapped open. The stairs were eerily clean. A huge freight door, complete with counterweights and a medieval padlock, blocked further passage; the landing smelt faintly of acetone.
The same card, with the same blue ink reading BORG, was pinned to the wall next to the door; a pair of galoshes stood on a small yellow rug, the galoshes stuffed with newspaper to wick them dry. He’s finicky, Misha thought to himself as he knocked, old and finicky.
He was utterly wrong. Borg answered the door in his stockinged feet. He looked barely twenty, a slim Swiss cursed with a spray of reedy blond hair and thin pantograph arms and bulbous fish eyes behind rimless glasses. His place was a cheerful maze of old radios and telephones and microphones on metal shelves, half spools of wires of assorted gauges, and the scent of soldering rosin thick in the air. “It was once a shoe fabrik,” he said in a singsong farmer’s Swiss-German, “but nobody wanted a place this size but me.” He waved a bony hand at the art nouveau iron arches far overhead. “So I live here,” he said, leading Misha to a scarred old gray table and a couple of chairs. Against the wall, a small woodstove began to clink and pop.
“So? You are a friend of the professor’s, from Sweden?” Borg’s voice naturally fell to questions, and he kept moving his lank hair from his eyes as he spoke.
“Yes, Professor van Tassel was my boss at Beurling. He thought you might be able to help, as a colleague.”
Borg looked a little shocked. “But of course! He spoke very highly of you.”
Misha took a sheet of paper from one of the many heaps on the large gray table and began to draw. “I have a theory, about banks, Swiss banks,” he began as Borg moved around the table to watch. “It’s not all the way there yet, but let’s try this.”
And so Misha began to engineer a window in the wall around the back pocket dealings of Mr. Allen Dulles and his colleague with the penchant for phone exchanges, Gaevernitz.
“Sure, sure,” Borg said. “So? That’s the phone line to Berlin? How very interesting.” Misha glanced at his new acquaintance, but Borg was staring down hard. “How can I help?”
Half an hour later, they had had tea and covered six pages in notes, Borg pacing back and forth in his socks while Misha lobbed questions at him from the unhappy gray table, its surface pitted by hot solder and God only knew what else.
“He told you I do some work for the police?” Borg asked. “I ask because I have certain, you know …” He left that part open.
Misha nodded. Van Tassel hadn’t said a word, but Borg was rolling and the last thing Misha wanted to do was derail him.
“There is a section of the criminal police that handles the banking cases,” Borg said, “only three guys, Russi and his two investigators. They’re good, but they’re only part-time. They have full criminal duties too—anyway, they’d need thirty to do the job properly. That’s how much information the surveillance on the Berlin accounts turns up, even without the wiretaps. Now, about the codes?”
“That’s the easy part. They’re pretty well all prewar Beurlings. They’d probably customize them, right?”
“It’s so,” Borg said, “I’ve done some work for several of the banks. Not here, in Zürich.”
“How many phone lines are there between Switzerland and Germany?”
“Thirteen direct, but there are dozens of circuits possible. Davos for instance goes through Bern, but two of the Zürich banks use a single circuit, a dedicated telex line, right to Berlin. They share the line.” Borg smiled his strange smile.
“And?”
“No one’s broken the ciphers. Not here, anyway. I know they’re trying, but they need someone like me. Or you.” “But it is technically possible?”
“To tap the banks’ telex circuits? Sure, sure. The Zürich phone exchange’s a piece of cake. I’m in and out two, three times a month, keeping the government lines clean.”
“So there’re lines somebody guarantees are untapped?”
“Certainly, of course. Can’t have some minister chatting up his mistress on a tapped line, now, can we?”
Misha was gathering the notes he’d made and folding them neatly in half. He slid a buff envelope onto Borg’s desk then walked over to the wood-burning stove and dropped the folded papers in, slamming the cast-iron door shut with the tip of his shoe. When he turned, the envelope was gone.
“We’re in business, then?” Misha asked.
“Sure, sure. When?”
“Tonight, as a matter of fact. One more question. There’s a posh whorehouse on Knopfmanngasse, you know the one? Madame Verbier’s place?”
“Of course. It’s right next to the—”
“That’s right. The municipal phone exchange. There’s a common wall. Even a common service door, if you know where to look. I thought so,” Misha said, registering Borg’s nod with satisfaction. “If you wanted to beat a wiretap, you’d go right to the exchange, wouldn’t you?”
Borg stared at him. “You could do, yes,” he said slowly. “No one can wiretap an entire exchange. You could guarantee a clean line there, though. It is possible.”
Misha winked at his young Swiss friend. “We’re going to find out if you’re right.”
Borg smiled. “Sure, sure.”
Six hours later, Borg waved him into the telex cubicle. Misha checked the hallway for the night operator but heard only silence. “Don’t worry, he’s got a girlfriend he meets out back for a smoke and a smooch. He’ll be gone for fifteen minutes, no problem,” Borg said. “He’s got better things to worry about, trust me.”
They both wore blue Post Office work suits. Borg opened a cigar box on his workbench. “He’s lazy, but he’s fast, that’s the thing,” said Borg, holding up the night shift keys. “And his girlfriend’s pretty fast too,” he added, grinning. “She’s going to get him fired one of these days.”
“If we don’t do it for him first,” Misha said, lowering himself into the steel stenographer’s chair. The console was just like the test machines Beurling used, and after a few trial keystrokes he felt at home. “Can you switch to a government circuit safely before I start to transmit?”
Borg stepped behind the telex machine and guffawed; the laugh echoed in the concrete room and unnerved Misha. “You haven’t done this in a while, have you? Hell, this machine has burst capability. You key your transmission in, and then I’ll show you how to send the message in two seconds flat. Go on, start typing.”
Borg fiddled with a series of plugs at the back of the machine then leant over the top of the console. “Type fast, friend, you’ve ten minutes.” He winked at Misha, then slipped out to stand watch; Misha could hear the squeak of his crepe soles on the linoleum all the way down the service corridor.
Misha read off the code groups that made up his message and typed them in slowly and metho
dically, all three hundred–odd of them. It took a good five minutes.
“I can’t get the tape to spool,” Misha hissed out the doorway.
Moments later, Borg was back. “Watch,” he said, aligning the paper tape with an expert jab through the sprockets. The paper tape shot snick-snick-snick through the gearing, snapping and looping like a caterpillar, and the silent machine stuttered to life. There was a rapid-fire clicking for far less time than Misha expected, a blur of metal and ribbon and yellow paper as the burst transmission went down the line, all the way to Tel Aviv.
The automatic typing stopped; Misha tore off the yellow sheet. There, in all its spare beauty, lay revealed a terse message to Shiloah, telling him how Switzerland’s banks had a very private line all the way to Berlin and how he had stumbled on the mother lode: the Americans’ head spy hereabouts, for whom dollars were no object, had bought himself a slice of the Swiss government’s private telex line to Berlin.
XLIV
JULY 21, 1944
Misha’s debriefing with Allen was originally slated for Saturday noon, but Allen—unprecedentedly: they loathed one another—had called Schorr directly at the tiny MEW office, asking to meet a day early, at three. “Don’t be late,” Schorr ordered, straight-faced, as he replaced the telephone, raising a reproving finger at Misha. “Word is Dulles is waving a fresh batch of twenty-dollar notes around—you’ll want to be at the head of the queue.”
The café facing the Klein Schanze gardens was nearly empty in the wake of a busy Friday lunch. Misha waved the waiter over for the bill as he worked his way through the café’s inventory of foreign newspapers—reported bomb attempt on Hitler’s life apparently true; the Allies were still bottled up in Normandy; would the Germans torch Paris?—finishing with a three-day-old account of the latest battle in the hallways of the Swedish legation in Budapest. ANOTHER 630 VISAS ISSUED TO RESCUE JEWS, read the headline. He sighed and snapped the paper shut as the waiter laid his bill on the table.
The Witness Tree Page 33