by Richard Wake
The Spies of Zurich
Richard Wake
Manor and State, LLC
Copyright © 2018 by Manor and State, LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To Rich and Casey,
Wonderful children, even better adults, you are an endless source of love and pride.
Contents
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part II
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Part III
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Part IV
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Afterword
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled
Afterword
About the Author
Part I
1
The heart of Zurich -- the heart and maybe the soul, too -- were at the Paradeplatz, a vast expanse just off of the Bahnhofstrasse where about 10 tram lines converged. The lake and all of its beauty, and Switzerland really is a beautiful country, was off to the right. The temples of conspicuous consumption and commerce made this country go more than any place I had ever been, dotted the street to the left as it led ultimately to the train station and the transportation links to still more commerce. But what held it all together was in the Paradeplatz, because that was where the banks were.
It was two banks, two substantial buildings, stone fortresses, staring at each other across the expanse. Kreditanstalt was on the north side, and Bankverein was on the west side. Those two ran everything. The truth was, they ran the country. There was plenty of money to be made by the minnows, the small private banks tucked into the side streets between the Paradeplatz and the Grossmunster -- different churches, yes -- thanks to the Swiss secrecy laws. But the whales on the Paradeplatz made the biggest decisions, funded the biggest developments, and controlled their smaller competitors by throwing them morsels of side work, or not.
That was the dynamic on a beautiful September day in 1939. It was still more than a month away from the sun's autumnal retreat, and three months away from the cold and miserable gray that descended upon the city every winter. It was bright and blue and much too nice to be inside, but the massive fourth-floor reception room in the Kreditanstalt building was filled that day with that great oxymoron, the smiling banker. One of the bank's directors, Gerhard Femmerling, a miserable prick even by Swiss bank director standards, was retiring, and we had all been summoned with engraved invitations to wish him well at a noontime reception. Looking around at the assembled dozens, grins plastered in place, I did a quick head count, and it appeared that everyone had RSVP'd in the affirmative. It was just business, after all. You had to retain your place in the queue for when it was morsel time again.
I had two rules at these kinds of things. The first was to make sure to be seen by the person or people who needed to see me and to do it quickly. There was nothing worse than waiting your turn for an audience. So I took a direct line to old Femmerling as soon as I walked into the room, and barged in on the group surrounding him, and offered a random sampling of pleasant conversational nothings, and was done with the work of the day in five minutes. That allowed me to attend to my second rule, which was never to be out of direct contact with the bar.
This was a rarity, seeing as how Swiss bankers didn't drink at lunch, except for maybe a glass of wine -- one glass, and not drunk to the bottom. But it was a full bar this day, and the scotch was really from Scotland, and the bartender was pouring my second when I received a nudge in the ribs followed by, "Bonjour, Alex. I see that Zurich has not changed -- that there are almost no women in the banking business, and that they have never been seen in public without every button of their blouses buttoned all the way to their eyebrows."
Freddy Arpin had made the trip up from Geneva, where his family owned Banc Arpin, a little private joint whose principal customers, in Freddy's words, "were either French pseudo-Fascists or outright Fascists, hedging their bets." We had met at a conference in Basel and immediately hit it off, mostly because we were clearly oddballs in the banking business in that we didn't give a fuck. Or, as Freddy put it, "My father and brother are in the sharp pencil and green eyeshade business. I am in the cognac and silk stocking business." We got along fine.
"Long way to come for this, huh?"
"My father insisted," Freddy said. "It's OK, easy to kill the time on the train. There's plenty to read in the papers."
"Anything new?"
"No. Warsaw is still holding out, but --"
"Poor bastards," I said. "Any sign the French or the Brits are getting off their asses to help?"
"Nope."
"Useless fucks."
Some variation on this conversation was happening all over the room, no doubt. The Germans had invaded Poland two weeks earlier. The British and French had declared war on Germany a couple of days after that, but sat and watched as the Wehrmacht went about its business. The conversations -- and I had participated in my share as president of my own little bank, Bohemia Suisse -- were all about the sober calculation of the effects of war on European business in general and Swiss business in particular. I could do sober calculation if the social or business setting demanded it.
But this was a little more personal for me. My adopted home, Austria, had been seized by the Nazis in March of 1938. My real home, Czechoslovakia, had been gifted to them, bartered away a couple of months after that by Chamberlain and Daladier. So, yes, useless fucks.
I asked Freddy, "Are you guys seeing an increase in deposits?"
"You might say that. We actually had a guy show up last week from Lyon in his car, and he had the driver get out and carry in a
picnic hamper stuffed with French francs. We sold him Swiss francs --"
"At an obscene markup --"
"That is getting more obscene by the day. Or, as my brother says, 'Add a point for every drop of piss you see dribbling down their legs.' So his deposit is in Swiss francs. Then we had a guy drive the French francs back to Paris and bought gold coins -- at a markup, yes, but not yet obscene. Then he brought the gold back, and it's in our vault."
"All in the same picnic basket?"
"The very same."
Freddy was saying that his father was calculating that they wouldn't be able to accept French francs at all in a couple of weeks, the way things were going -- unless, that is, the bank wanted to get into the business of using them to buy French real estate.
"If the little corporal keeps going, we could probably get houses in Paris at knockdown prices," Freddy said. "But that's a really long game. Maybe buying artwork is the way to go."
He stopped as if he were hearing himself for the first time, then said, "You think we're shitheads, don't you?"
"I don't know who isn't a shithead anymore, me included."
I went to grab two more drinks and returned to find Freddy talking to the only woman in the room with her top button undone. Her name was Manon Friere, and she was a trade representative from the French consulate, and she was more than a pleasure to look at. In this room, her red lipstick was like a beacon in a gray flannel night. She apparently had been working out of the consulate in Geneva but now was stationed in Zurich.
I waved my arm toward the windows to point out the expanse of the Paradeplatz, lit by the sun. "So how do you like our fair city? Freddy hates it, but you probably already knew that."
"You mean Tightassville?" Freddy said.
"Freddy is a Parisian at heart, trapped in a Swiss hell," Manon said
"Hell?" I said. "All of it?"
She shrugged.
Hell it is, then.
"Are you a tiny banker, like Freddy?"
"No one is as tiny as Freddy."
"That's pretty much what I hear --"
"Your vengeance is unbecoming," Freddy said. He pointedly turned away from Manon and looked at me. "Here's the story. I was dating a friend of Manon's in the consulate. At the same time, I might have also made an attempt to date Manon. It was honestly a mistake."
"You're honestly a pig."
"And my penance is her indiscriminate use of the word 'tiny' in conversations such as these."
"If the name fits," she said.
"I think it's more like when I was in high school," I said. "We had this buddy who was about 6-foot-4, and we called him Shorty."
"Exactly. Alex Kovacs, you are a true friend," Freddy said.
"No problem, Tiny," I said.
She snorted. Freddy made a face. I was smitten but also in a hurry. I had a 1:30 appointment that I couldn't miss. So I said my goodbyes and walked out into the Paradeplatz. I'm not sure I had ever been there without stopping on the way home at Confiserie Sprungli, on the south side of the square, for a small bag of something sweet and rich and decadent -- although, as everyone knew, the truly rich and decadent things happened on the north side and the west side. Anyway, I stopped, collected my little stash, and began the 10-minute walk back to Bohemia Suisse.
As I turned onto Rennweg, I looked ahead and saw a small crowd had gathered outside of Gartner, a little restaurant that I had walked past about 500 times and never once thought to enter. As I got closer, the crowd grew, and I could see the frightened looks on the faces and hear the cries and the shouts for help. Then, in the distance, I heard a police siren.
I got to the edge of the crowd and shouldered my way through it. Finally to the front, I looked down and saw that I suddenly wasn't in a hurry anymore. Laying on the ground was my 1:30 appointment, his head framed by a puddle of blood. He had been shot through the left eye.
2
A few blocks away, on Fortunagasse, was Bohemia Suisse. The bank was tucked in amid a row of houses, each with a ground floor and four floors above. It could have been just another residence in the hilly line of homes, but for the small gold sign on the door that identified the bank and said, "By appointment only." I always thought that it seemed to be more of a warning than a statement of information.
I moved slowly away from the crowd surrounding the body. I walked for five minutes in the wrong direction and did my best to check behind me while looking in the reflection of shop windows. I turned and walked in a circle around the Fraumunster and actually said a little prayer to myself somewhere behind the church, although I wasn't sure, in retrospect, about the effectiveness of a prayer that included the phrase, "Please let this not be completely fucked." Only then, when I was sure no one was following me, did I start walking toward the bank.
Even I couldn't let myself in during business hours -- such was the show of security required for private banks in Switzerland. And it was a show. At night or on the weekend I just used my key, but at 1:30 in the afternoon I rang the bell and was greeted after about 30 seconds by Anders, the security guard. He was dressed in a blue blazer and gray slacks. He was dressed that way every day, the coat specially tailored to smooth the line of the pistol he carried beneath it. He was a retired captain in the Swiss army, which I always thought was a hoot. I had fought in Caporetto for the greater glory of Austria-Hungary, for the emperor and his whiskers, while Anders oiled his gun on weekends in some barracks beneath an Alp. I made a joke about it when I first met him. His reaction, not in words but in the more powerful language of the body, made it quite clear that there would be no need to make the joke a second time.
"Herr Kovacs," he said.
"Anders," I said.
This was pretty much the extent of our conversation most days. He returned to his desk in our small lobby. What he did all day was beyond me, seeing as how most days we had no appointments. I never even saw him read a newspaper. He would let himself in. He would let me in. And he would let in Marta Frank, the office manager. She handled everything when I wasn't around, which was often. She could authorize cash deposits and withdrawals. She could, in the presence of Anders, open the vault and assist customers with their safe deposit boxes; she knew the lock's combination while he held the required key. Only I could open it by myself.
Marta had heard the police sirens. She said, "What is going on out there?"
I told her that a man was dead outside of Gartner and that he had been shot. And just as she got done gasping about that, I told her the dead man was Michael Landers, our 1:30 appointment, at which point she pretty much collapsed into the chair beside my desk, clutching my diary to her bosom. The diary was always either open on her desk or open in her hands.
She pulled herself together and looked down at the diary. "Landers. You wrote this one in. Who is he? Did I ever meet him?"
She knew very well that she had never met him, and I knew that she knew. We had only about 50 clients, most of them ancient Czech expats, so it really wasn't tough to keep track.
"He's one of the nephews in the Kerner Trust."
"Rich fool setting his money on fire," Marta said. She had been disapproving of the setup from the first time I explained it to her.
"But it's his money, and he pays his fees, so as far as I'm concerned, Bohemia Suisse will always be happy to supply Herr Kerner with all of the kerosene and matches that he requires."
The Kerner Trust was the fiction that had been created during my first months at the bank. The original depositor was a 40-year-old who had, with the aid of some stage makeup, a hunch, a limp, and a cane, passed himself off as an 80-year-old when he made his one and only appearance at the bank. It was important that Marta and Anders saw he was a real person, living and breathing. There was no way, after all, to hide a mysterious account from them, and especially from her, seeing as how the client base was so small and she kept the books.
The deposit he made was sizable, 200,000 francs. The money could be withdrawn by any of four of his nephews, all of
whom I was to meet personally later that evening at Herr Kerner's home. There were no restrictions on the withdrawals. I would bring the required account identification materials on the home visit and distribute them so that a withdrawal could be made if I wasn't around.
Marta actually snorted and said, "The whole thing is ridiculous. And what are you now, his butler? Going to his house?"
"Look, it's a lot of money, and it's a service business, right? And you're acting like he's the only eccentric on the client list. What about Herr Lutz?"
Rudi Lutz was one of our wealthiest depositors. He never made a withdrawal but, once a month, he came in and asked to see a full accounting anyway. Then he inspected the contents of his safe deposit box. This did not make him eccentric in my book, just untrusting. The eccentric part was that he showed up for every visit with a chauffeur whose job, besides driving the big black Daimler, was carrying in a small fish tank, and the several fish swimming inside, and placing it on my desk as we went through the accounts, and then on the table in the room where deposit boxes were examined in private.
