by Richard Wake
After they had left, I asked the waiter, "Is that Ernst Steiner? I went to school with an Ernst Steiner, and I haven't seen him in 20 years, and he looked a little like him. But, you know, 20 years and four Manhattans..."
The waiter smiled that you-are-a-smudge-of-shit-on-my-shoe smile that they all must perfect before being accepted for employment.
"Matthias Steiner," he said.
"Perhaps he is Ernst's brother," I said.
24
I had a name and a face. I had the fact that they were going to drive someplace for a meeting the next day. I had that the someplace was closer to Germany than Bern was. I also had four Manhattans in my system and had long since abandoned the idea of eating a proper dinner. So I decided to go up to my room and call down to the kitchen for a sandwich.
The obvious thing to do was try to follow them to wherever they were going, although I really had no idea what I might see when I arrived. After all, a private meeting here would likely be followed by a private meeting at the next place. It isn't as if they had plans to advertise what they were doing, even if both sides probably were able to justify it to themselves -- the Germans, obviously, and the Swiss because, well, they were Swiss.
The truth was, even if I learned nothing more, I had learned a few things -- and the name of Matthias Steiner most of all. When I got back to Zurich, Gregory could send it along in our next message to London, and it would add to the picture. As Groucho once told me, "This business tends to be less about the snapshots and more about the tableau." This would be another little piece, like filling in a jigsaw puzzle.
The sandwich -- cold, rare roast beef, sliced thinly and piled on brown bread, horseradish on the side, accompanied by a pickle and a beer -- filled my stomach as my mind churned. I was less drunk and determined to see at least the outside of the place where Tanner and Steiner were meeting the next day. Of course, I had no idea how early they were leaving, which meant I would not be getting much sleep.
But following them would mean having to hire a car at the last minute. I needed to go down to the front desk and speak to someone there, even if it was almost 11. The desk clerk said the concierge was off for the night, but that he would be able to get a few phone numbers for car hire businesses if I didn't mind making the arrangements myself. I said that was fine, and he walked over to the concierge's desk and began rifling the drawers, searching for the numbers.
Leaning on the front desk, I picked up a brochure advertising tours and tastings at a nearby winery. I thought it might be a fun trip for Manon and me -- a night or two here at the Bellevue, along with some wine and whatnot. I thought, maybe in the spring, if we weren't at war. There was always that caveat now: if we weren't at war. Then I immediately remembered that we still had not received instructions from Groucho about our next move. Well, maybe Gregory had in the last day.
I looked over, and the desk clerk was still foraging. Then I saw behind him, the lobby bar. It was well after dinner, well past the let's-have-one-more crowd. Bern was buttoned-up early -- all of Switzerland was -- and this was likely the scene that Ruchti had described. Two guys were leaning against the bar -- maybe the newspapermen that he had mentioned. And, not surprisingly, there was Ruchti himself, his back to me, at the same table that he and I had shared a few hours earlier. A couple of other tables, mostly of twos and threes, were likely populated by the spies that Ruchti had said would be mingling there, seeing and being seen on their comfortable turf. There was even a table of Chinese, as he had said.
And then I saw, and it took a second for it to register. Sometimes, when you see somebody out of their normal context, it can take you a bit of time to put a name to a face. That wasn't the problem here. The issue, in this case, was the inverse, or the converse, or the reverse -- I never could keep those straight. But sometimes, when you see a familiar face in an unfamiliar setting, it can take you a second not to recognize the face, but to recognize that the context is all wrong.
Eventually, though, it hits you. And it hit me, my sudden happiness and surprise turning to something much darker, when I saw Manon, laughing it up in the bar with two men in dark suits, men who were not rug manufacturers at a trade show in Geneva.
25
"The construction will be first-rate, as good as the working people of Zurich have ever experienced," Mark Grosvenor said. A Brit who somehow landed here in the mid-'30s, he owned a construction company. He was a decent guy with a lot of personality, more fun to have a beer with than to do business with, to be honest. His latest project was an apartment block on Schweighofstrasse, out in a working neighborhood. He was hoping that Bohemia Suisse would provide a piece of the financing.
"Toilet and tub in every unit goes without saying. Kitchens with new appliances -- gas stoves and electric iceboxes."
We were having lunch at Veltlinerkeller. I had the knockwurst with sauerkraut and a pilsner. It was my favorite meal in Zurich, I think mostly because of the mustard that came with the knockwurst. There was just something about it -- a tang, a spice, something. I once asked the thousand-year-old owner if he could let me take some home with me, or at least identify the special ingredient, and he looked at me as if I had asked to sleep with his daughter.
My favorite meal and I couldn't taste it. Two days after seeing Manon with the spies of Bern, I was still pretty much in a fog.
"Nice hardwood floors," Grosvenor was saying. "Not the cheap stuff that warps on the first humid summer afternoon. Quality wood, and owners who pre-pay before construction begins will have their choice of finishes."
I did my best to nod occasionally. After a professional lifetime of acting like I was listening when I really wasn't, I rarely got caught. Of course, I had seldom been in a position where the woman I thought I loved was actually hiding this huge secret -- that she was a spy, and that our relationship might very well have been built upon her spying on me.
"Pre-construction or after, we'll paint for the new owners, pretty much whatever color they want," Grosvenor said. "We'll have faux marble wainscoting in the common areas. And for customers willing to pay 10 percent extra, the men will be able to receive a free weekly blowjob from a woman who lives in the basement."
I heard it, but not soon enough. My reaction was apparently too slow.
"Am I boring you, mate?" Grosvenor said. "What's the matter. For the whole lunch, you've been even less focused than usual, which is saying something."
I made up something about coming down with a cold. By the end of the lunch, we shook hands on a deal for me to provide 25 percent of the financing. I had already read the prospectus and a copy of the plans, and it was a decent opportunity for the bank. Walking over, I told myself that I wouldn't go more than 20 percent. But then I just didn't care.
After seeing Manon in the lobby bar, I never hired the car, never followed Tanner and Steiner to wherever they were going. Instead, I checked out of the Bellevue Palace on the spot and told the kid behind the desk to ship my bag. He told me it would be a few minutes before he could make up my bill, and I just dropped some francs on the counter and told him to ship the bill with the luggage. And then I wandered out of the hotel and in the direction of the train station, buying a small bottle from the next bar along the way. I was pretty sure -- no, I was confident, given the configuration of the lobby -- that Manon had not seen me.
The next morning, I was beyond useless. Because the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that the whole relationship had been a sham, that I was not Manon's lover but her target. Thinking back on it, the entire thing had been just a little too coincidental. Seeing her at the bank retirement reception had been one thing, but her suddenly befriending Liesl on the same day strained credibility for anyone doing their thinking with their big head. Which I wasn't.
Concluding that I was the target was one thing. I almost got used to the idea after about 24 hours. The other issue: who was she working for? I assumed it was France. I prayed to God that it was France -- although, as with the prayer I s
aid on the day Michael Landers was murdered, I wasn't sure exactly how effective a prayer would be that included the phrase, "Just please don't let her be working for the fucking Nazis."
The damn diary on Marta's desk had another meeting for me after the lunch with Grosvenor -- a drink at 5 with Thomas Koerner, president of Bank du Lac, another private joint like Bohemia Suisse, a place that was about as big and as influential. That is to say, not very.
Koerner was on a kick to have the small, private banks join together into an association that would give us more leverage in our dealings with the big two, Kreditanstalt and Bankverein. That this was a surreptitious aspiration went without saying. He never met with more than one other private banker at a time, so as not to offer even the slightest hint of a conspiracy. Because the truth was that, if they found out, the big two would castrate Koerner in the middle of the Paradeplatz and sell tickets -- and we all would buy one. We might buy two, just to demonstrate our fealty to the current structure.
"But aren't you tired of sucking at the hind tit?" Koerner always said, before his first drink was empty. This time, he said it before the first drink even arrived. His idea actually had a small bit of merit, provided the association was large enough. The problem was, we were dealing with bankers here -- and let's just say that bankers are significantly more loyal to the columns of figures in their ledgers than they are to the truth. There was no way to trust that the association would hold together -- and as it collapsed, there would be carnage. It just wasn't worth the risk.
Which is what I always told Koerner. Except for this time, I didn't have the energy. I just let him talk, which he much enjoyed.
"The older directors at Kreditanstalt will never go for it, but I know two of the younger vice presidents, and they know the world is changing, and..."
I zoned out and kept thinking about Manon. I had accepted that she was a spy and that I was probably her target. But the smallest part of me wondered. It all went back to her guffaw when I asked if she was going to tell her family about me. Oddly, even counter-intuitively, that very hurtful laugh was my main hope. I figured that if I was her target, and she was desperate to keep me close and interested, that she never would have laughed at that question. She would not have risked it. She would have invented some plan to tell them at Christmas dinner or something, layering loving detail upon loving detail.
So that's where I was, clinging to a hurtful moment as my greatest hope. After extricating myself from Koerner, I returned home and called Manon, because that is what I would typically do after she returned home from a trip. My hand shook as I dialed the number and my voice cracked as I said hello. Manon sounded a lot better than she had before she left. I could hear the life in her voice immediately. I wondered if she could hear the hollowness in mine.
I asked her how the trade show in Geneva had gone. She said it had been fine, and told a story about two of the rug manufacturers -- one portly, one with a hairpiece, "a rug man with a rug" -- competing with each other to bed one of the display models hired for the show. It was a funny story. A week earlier, I would have laughed.
26
My booth at Cafe Fessler. Another meal that I did not taste -- fried perch with little round potatoes and green beans, a dish that Gregory actually thought the kitchen did well. "I could have served this one in Vienna with a straight face," he said. But, again, I couldn't enjoy it. I couldn't enjoy anything.
The paperwork made for a big pile after the dishes were cleared -- everything signed in three places, one copy for the customer, one for the files, one for the regulators. Except some of the transactions were entirely secret and unregulated, which meant a second copy in a second set of files. I once asked why. The answer I received was so unsatisfactory that I never asked again, instead just whistling quietly whenever I saw the quarterly line item for paper supplies that the bank purchased.
Manon came in at about 8, got a drink and chatted with Liesl, who was showing now. She came down to the cafe for a glass of milk most nights now, and maybe for a beer once a week. This was a beer night. Manon had ignored me after a quick kiss when she arrived, dropping her coat at the booth. That was fine. I didn't want our confrontation to happen here.
At about 8:30, I gathered up my file folders and shoveled them back into my briefcase. I put on my coat and carried Manon's over to her, managing a minute or two of banter with Liesl about how nervous Henry was about impending fatherhood.
"We were over at one of my co-worker's house on Sunday, and they have a newborn, and Henry was afraid to hold her," Liesl said. "He was afraid he would drop her. He wouldn't take her until he was sitting on the floor so the distance wouldn't be so great if he went oops."
"Wood floor?"
"Yeah," she said. "At least we have carpet upstairs."
"Maybe you can leave pillows out everywhere."
Manon and I decided to go to her place. We didn't exactly alternate -- it was based more on who had the earliest appointment the next day -- and she had a breakfast meeting. I had gone over in my head how I wanted to do this, but couldn't settle on a particularly artful approach. Unless something hit me at the last second, I was just going to blurt it out.
It was only about a five-minute walk from the cafe, and we were able to pass the time in a comfortable silence. We got inside and took off our coats, and she walked toward the kitchen, asking over her shoulder, "Do you want a whiskey?" I would normally say yes, and she would carry the two drinks into the bedroom, where I would usually be undressing. Normally. Usually.
"No, I want to talk to you for a second," I said.
She must have sensed my tone. I don't know if it was hurt, or mad, or severe, or just different. She stopped and walked back toward me.
"Something wrong?" she said.
Nothing had come to me, so I just blurted.
"Bellevue Plaza, lobby bar," I said.
I was watching her intently for a reaction. There was just the hint of one, just a millisecond of something, but then it was gone.
"Is it nice? I bet it's nice. We should go sometime," she said.
She was playing the only card she had. She undoubtedly was hoping it was just a coincidence that I had brought it up. The smile on her face betrayed nothing other than the excitement for a little potential trip, maybe for a dirty weekend in Bern.
"You were just there. Wednesday night," I said.
"You saw?"
I nodded. And with that, I finally received an honest reaction, the look of being caught. Or at least I thought it was honest until she opened her mouth.
"I don't know what to say," she said. "I am so ashamed. I could insult your intelligence, but I won't. I wasn't in Geneva with the rug manufacturers. I was in Bern with a friend. Another man."
I said nothing. Into the silence, Manon kept talking.
"I know this must hurt you," she said. "We have become close, and I do love you. But in my defense, we never said our relationship was exclusive. And this was an old friend, someone I knew before you."
So that was her play -- to pretend it was an affair, and maybe to ask for my forgiveness. I will give her this, that she was very good. I might even have believed it, had I not known. Part of me wanted to wait her out, to listen more, to hear how she might embroider the story, to see just how well this devious mind could operate under pressure. But I couldn't. I blurted, again.
"That's all a lie," I said. I was almost whispering, looking down at my hands. "You're a spy."
Now Manon was speechless. She knew that I knew, and that was that. There was no more fiction for her to spout. There was no worthy denial. But I was the one who ended the silence this time, asking the question that had been foremost in my mind since I saw her in the bar.
"Thank you for not denying it," I said, as a kind of preamble. Her eyes were welling up. It was the only card she had left, but it completely set me off. The tears in her eyes, manufactured female bullshit, turned my hurt into rage.
"Fuck you with the tears," I said. "Is that
in the manual, learning how to cry on command? Is that what they teach you when your job is to target a man and lead him around by the dick?"
"It's not that simple," Manon said. Now she was the one who was almost whispering, even as I got louder.
"But that was it, right?" I said. "I was your target. You wanted to find out what the banker from Bohemia Suisse was really up to. So you lifted your skirt and reported back to Paris what I was doing, who I was meeting, like that. Did you go through my briefcase after I fell asleep? Of course, you did."
"It only started out that way," she said.
"Fucking bitch," I said. It almost under my breath, except we were only about three feet apart. Her anger flashed.
"Well, it's not like you haven't kept any secrets from me," Manon said. "I mean, you're a goddamn spy, too."
"And that had nothing to do with you. That had nothing to do with our relationship. My feelings for you were real. By not telling you, I was protecting you. My love."
I spat those last two words. She just looked at me.
"Yeah, well what about Jan Tanner's secretary?" she said.
It surprised me that Manon knew about Tanner. Then again, I don't know why it should have.
"What about Jan Tanner's secretary?" I said. "It was just business."
"Fucking her was just business? You had to fuck her? There was no other way? Come on."
I thought about denying it. Then I thought, the hell with it.
"Yes, fucking her was just business, just a way to get information. How can you even ask me such a question? You were fucking me for business. You were fucking me to get information. For all I know, you're fucking half of the association of bankers for business."
