by Richard Wake
"My apologies for interrupting your evening," he said. "I assure you that no one else will be visiting your cafe. Participation in our expatriate program is strictly voluntary. I hope to see you again someday, but that is entirely your decision."
We all watched him walk out and felt the rush of wind again as he opened the door. The creepiness of the whole episode was palpable. We had gotten out of Austria and Czechoslovakia ahead of the Nazis, so Henry, Liesl, and Gregory only had the knowledge provided by newsreels, and newspapers, and by their imaginations. But I had been to Germany many times before the Anschluss. I had seen the Gestapo raid someone's home and bundle a man off to who-knows-where. I had spent a few hours naked in a Gestapo jail cell, consumed by my worst fear -- electrodes attached on one end to a car battery and on the other end to my balls. I never experienced it, but I dreamed it enough times that it seemed more than real. Just thinking about it now had me involuntary raising my ballsack from the bench in the booth in a quick motion, only an inch. I don't think the rest of them saw me.
Here in Switzerland, we were allegedly protected, safe from Nazi invasion, swaddled in a golden security blanket. Herr Meissner, though, had just offered an unsettling vision of what might be.
"One more?" Henry said, and everyone nodded in the affirmative. He was breaking his one-Manhattan rule.
I looked down at the piece of paper that Meissner had left behind. It was a flyer advertising a night of German music and dancing at a social hall on Forrlibuckstrasse, over by the Hardturm stadium.
Liesl caught me reading it. She said, "It's on Friday. You should take Manon and make a night of it."
8
The sun shone through the curtains and woke me. I reached for the watch on my night table. It was 7:15. The other side of the bed was empty, but her scent was still on the pillow.
I scanned the room for bits of her clothing, listened for running water in the bathroom, then for a teacup's clinking in the kitchen or footsteps in the living room. Nothing. But there was the smell on my pillow, and my fingers. I closed my eyes and remembered.
What was the last thing she said before I fell asleep? Yes, this: "Not French, but not bad."
The night had not begun well. We agreed to meet at the restaurant, Orsini, which was at one of the entrances to the plaza in front of the Fraumunster. It was my favorite, from the look outside -- a black iron gate guarded the entrance, along with a corner turret on the second floor painted a kind of salmon color, one you didn't see much on the outside of a building -- to the classic menu. It was old Zurich, old Switzerland, and I enjoyed going inside and shutting out the Hitler headlines on the newsstands. If only I had known how much Manon detested the Swiss.
Or, as she said after the waiter had taken our orders, "You've been here longer than I have, so you might know the answer to this question: Are they born with the stick up their ass, or is it inserted at the christening."
I laughed and said, "Oh, they're not that bad," defending them for no apparent reason other than to make conversation. "The Swiss bankers are a little, uh, Swiss, but ordinary Swiss people seem like people everywhere to me."
"And you know a lot of ordinary Swiss people?"
I thought for a second. The truth was, I had very few friends other than the people who came with me from Vienna. Part of it was because I flitted around pretty consistently because of my work. Part of it was because I was at an age where making new friends was simply harder than when you are in your 20's. But part of it also was because I was still my late Uncle Otto's nephew. I took on so many of his characteristics, for better or worse -- and his worst attribute was his reluctance to make lasting bonds outside of his small, established circle. I was still like that.
And so, I said to Manon, "Come to think of it, I don't have a lot of ordinary Swiss friends. So let's agree that they're all assholes and talk about the weather or something, what do you say?"
"The weather? Cold and gray, followed by gray and cold. The perfect Swiss metaphor."
"But what about the two glorious weeks of sunshine in the middle of July?"
"The tease," she said. "Another perfect Swiss metaphor."
"Are you talking about Freddy?"
"Don't insult me. He never had a chance."
Finally, a smile. This was much harder work than I had hoped. Eventually, though, I was able to get her to talk about her background. She was from Lyon, the daughter of a silk manufacturer who could never understand why she would join France's foreign service as a trade rep, even if she were promoting industries like silk-making.
"My papa always said, 'But why would you want to leave?' When I made the decision, it was obvious -- I had lived in the same place my whole life, never out of earshot of the clattering of the looms. Why did I want to leave? Wasn't it obvious? But now I can't wait to go back."
"Have you told him?"
"Too late," she said. Her father had died two years earlier.
I offered up my story, the one that was appropriate for public consumption. Mother died in the Spanish flu epidemic after the war. Father ran the mine from near Brno with my asshole younger brother. Uncle Otto and I lived in Vienna and handled the Austrian and German clients. Then Otto died. Then Hitler came, and I fled with my friends. Then, Zurich. I left out the part about being a spy, and the identity of the most important customer at Bohemia Suisse. That was still need-to-know, even if it was my whole life.
Which hit me as I was talking: what kind of a future might I have with Manon, or with anyone, if I couldn't talk about the most important part of my life? Still, I kept on. Talking is what I did for a living, what I always have done. She asked me what I missed about my old life, and I went on an extended riff about the trains that I loved, notably the Orient Express, which came through Vienna a couple of times a week and often took me as far as Cologne. Again, I left out the part about Otto getting murdered in Cologne by the Gestapo, his body thrown off of a bridge into the Rhine, and my subsequent attempt to kill the Gestapo captain who was responsible. More secrets. So many secrets.
Manon asked if I had ever taken the train from here to Jungfraujoch. "I think it's the highest Alp, and it's truly breathtaking," she said, and then caught herself. "It almost makes you forget how cold and calculating the people are."
Jab.
"Their only emotion is greed."
Double jab.
"I'm not sure greed is an emotion," I said.
"But it's a way of life for them. A governing principle. A physical law, like gravity."
We walked around after dinner, vaguely in the direction of my flat, but only vaguely. It was a beautiful night and a clear night, and the moon reflected brightly off of the lake. The boats were tied up along the piers, not yet tarped and shut down for the winter. There were a lot of people out and about, it being Friday night. At a certain point, she took my hand.
We talked about her job for a while. She was a trade rep, which meant she talked up French industries and products in all kinds of settings -- trade shows, business conferences, private one-on-ones with businesses and government officials.
"Last week, I got to talk about silk, which I could do all day," she said. "I got into an argument at one point with a Swiss silk manufacturer. I was really trying to be polite--"
"Really?" I said.
"Well," she said. "The man went on about the quality of silk manufactured in Zurich, which is second to Lyon in the size of the business. I pointed out that Lyon was first. He said, 'Quantity is not the same as quality.' So I said, 'You are correct, sir. But even a blind man would tell you that Lyon silk is superior to any Swiss product.' It degenerated from there. We actually drew a crowd of other exhibitors from the show. He turned on his heel and stormed off at a certain point -- I think it was right after I used the term 'tight-assed fraud,' but I'm not sure. The crowd applauded. I bowed."
All I knew about silk was that I enjoyed how it felt in a darkened bedroom -- as it did, maybe an hour later. And proving that I am not a complete idiot,
after gently removing her silk underpants, I rubbed them on her cheek, and then on mine and whispered to Manon, "From Lyon. Definitely, from Lyon."
9
Cafe Tessinerplatz, a pretty big place across from the Enge train station, ran a promotion they called "First Thursday." Once a month, the drinks were two-for-one and a free buffet was set up, a table laden with bread and cheese and little wursts and other assorted shit. They got a good crowd, and my guess is that they broke even on the night but maybe made a profit on return visits. Me, I'd never been back except on another first Thursday.
The first time I came, about eight months prior, had been as a specific attempt to make a couple of actual Zurich friends -- not another emigre from Vienna or Prague, not another banker or a potential client whose ass needed kissing, but an actual, no-strings-attached human being. As it turned out, I met a guy the first night who was a major in the Swiss army, Marc Wegens. We had become legitimate friends. I had met his wife and kids. He had met the Fesslers, which was as close as I had to family. But mostly, because of his travel and mine -- he was a kind of roving inspector who checked on whatever a roving inspector in a fake army checked on -- we were limited to first Thursdays at Cafe Tessinerplatz. We both actually scheduled our business appointments around it.
So when I walked in at 6:30 on Thursday evening, Marc was already there. He was drunk enough already that I could tell he had been there for a while. Drunk or sober, unlike Anders, he didn't mind a little kidding about the tremendous Swiss military machine. Or as he said himself, "When they promoted me to major, they told me it would be twice as much work, and they were right. Now I have to work on Monday and Tuesday."
With the kidding out of the way, and my first drink beginning to take hold, we settled into a minute of comfortable silence. As it turned out, the place wasn't that busy. The waiter guarding the buffet table appeared to be even more bored than the waiter's guild required of its members. The tables of twos and threes were hushed enough that the phonograph music playing in the background seemed too loud. My mind drifted for a second to Manon, and then Marc snapped me out of it.
"Your face," he said. "I can see it. You met somebody. You're fucking somebody."
"You must be in military intelligence."
"Just human fucking intelligence. So give."
So I told him. He congratulated me in the typical male fashion, with a pat on the back and an "about fucking time" and an order of two shots of schnapps.
"But seriously," he said. "It is about fucking time. Miriam has been hinting around that she wanted to introduce you to one of her friends, Myra, who isn't tough to look at but is a horror show of a person. Miriam made her brother go out with Myra for a while and he calls her the shark because you spend a little time with her and you just know she's going to end up biting off either your head or your dick, you just don't know which. I've been putting her off but, to be honest, I was starting to lose the battle -- and, you know I love you, but my marriage comes first. Now I can call her off with a clear conscience."
"I'm touched. But this might not last that long. We both travel a lot, and she could get recalled to France or posted somewhere else."
This was the truth. I had no idea what I was into with Manon. Part of me wondered what it would be like to live a life with a person who had such a strong personality. I had spent a good portion of my life avoiding all manner of controversy, especially in my personal life. And while she was funny and physically attractive, a life with Manon would be a life of controversy. She wouldn't be able to avoid it. She seemed to have no filter.
I was telling some of this to Marc, and parrying his attempts to find out some details of the sex, when I sensed a hulking presence over my shoulder. Marc said, "Herman, Herman, sit down. Alex, this is Herman Stressel."
"I don't mean to interrupt," Herman said. The accent was German, maybe Alsatian.
"Please do," I said. "You can assist me in changing the subject."
"Alex, I'm an old married man. Just a few details to warm my night."
Herman said, "Maybe I should leave."
"You're staying," I said. "Marc's nights are warm enough. Tell me about you. What do you do for a living? Are you German?"
Stressel was indeed an emigre, a magazine publisher. I was worried I was going to have to watch my mouth, just as a matter of politeness -- because you never knew where people stood until you knew. This dance had been all the rage in Vienna before the Anschluss when you didn't know if somebody hated the Nazis or was ready to welcome them with a smooch. It was the same thing in this part of Switzerland, where -- emigres aside -- there were so many people with a German heritage or a love for German culture, and you just didn't know if that love extended to the maniac with the mustache. So you spoke carefully until one of you hinted where he stood, and then you took the hint. Delicate did not begin to describe the process.
But Stressel wasn't 30 seconds into his abbreviated biography when he made a reference to "that shithead Goebbels," so we were going to be fine. Marc and I had done the Nazi dance the first night we met, and while he represented all that was proper and neutral when he wore his uniform, he could motherfuck Hitler with the best of them after a couple of pops. So it was going to be a relaxed evening.
As it turned out, Herman left Germany in 1936. "I wasn't exactly one step ahead of the Gestapo, but I wasn't a mile ahead, either. I couldn't publish what I wanted, and I couldn't sneak enough of my true beliefs between the lines of what I could publish. They confiscated one of my editions because of a story where, if you looked only at the first letter of every paragraph, it spelled out "FUCK YOU ADOLF." Sophomoric, I know. And then there was a mysterious fire that would have destroyed my printing press if I hadn't been in the office late one night because I was fucking my secretary."
He could see my eyes widen. "True story," he said. "We were both stark naked throwing buckets of water on the fire. But, anyway, that's when I decided to get out. Now I publish what I want here."
"And what about the secretary?"
"Now she's my wife," he said. "True story."
Marc had apparently heard the tale before. I caught him checking his watch and asked if anything was wrong. He said that Hildy, his 3-year-old, was sick with the croup. He wanted to get home and see her before it got too late.
"Next month," he said, gathering his coat and his hat. "And then, I want details. No excuses accepted."
10
I offered Herman my bare-bones biography, leaving out the spying part and the business about how I came to be running Bohemia Suisse. If you don't know all the details, the story is a little bit thin. Seriously, how does a traveling salesman from a Czech magnesite mine suddenly find himself parachuted into Switzerland as the president of a private bank? Most people, though, just let it go, either because they weren't listening, or they didn't care, or if they did care, they didn't want to get involved. Because that was one thing about the Swiss -- they were buttoned-up tight, and that was true, but the melange of cultures and languages and the emphasis on banking and money seemed to leave everyone with a secret or two.
Herman, though, was less complicated, and he saw through my story. Or, as he said, "Do people actually believe that bullshit when you tell them?"
I tried to act offended, then confused by his question. He literally laughed in my face.
"I'm a lot of things," he said. "But I'm not a fucking idiot. You're connected, somehow, and you're going to tell me."
"And why would I do that?" I said.
"Because we're both half-drunk, on the way to three-quarters. And because I already told you my true story, and you owe me."
For some reason -- because I was, indeed, half-drunk, and because he was a friend of Marc's -- I trusted Herman. But I offered a caveat.
"Marc doesn't know, and you can't tell him," I said.
He agreed. And I told him the story -- again, not all of it, but enough. I told him I was a courier for the Czechs. I didn't tell him I tried to kill a Gestapo capt
ain and ended up in a tribunal in front of Rudolf Hess, the deputy Fuhrer. I told him that I was forced to flee Austria after the Anschluss and that the Czechs sent my friends and me here as a favor. I didn't tell him that I was still working for Czech intelligence. That seemed not to matter.
"So you're still spying?" he asked.
"No," I said.
"So they set you up with a plush job as a bank president because they're swell people who were doing you a solid?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"I know that's bullshit and you know that's bullshit, but I like you, so I won't embarrass you by pressing for any more details. At least for a while."
I drank and thought for a second. The story really was pretty thin. Finally, I said, "Do you think Marc knows?"
"I'm sure if he doesn't know, he suspects. But he's more polite than I am."
We started talking about Hitler and Poland and what might be next. I had opinions. Herman had opinions. But as we kept drinking, and I kept working harder and harder to listen to what he was saying, it suddenly struck me that he was offering military details that were interlaced within the opinions. Finally, I stopped him and repeated back a statement he had just made about the thickness of the armor on some-such model of a Panzer tank.
"Twenty millimeters on the sides, huh?" I said. "So now who's the fucking spy?"
"I'm not a spy. But I do continue to have, shall we say, sources of information within the German military establishment."
"That makes you a spy."
"Only if I covertly give the information to a foreign government, which I have not done. I am merely a humble reporter."
