by Richard Wake
"But Denmark and Norway? Does that make any sense to you?"
"It does," Herman said. "They're constantly worried about supplies and materials in the high command. Hell, you know that -- what was that shit your family mined and sold them for their blast furnaces?"
"Magnesite," I said. It hadn't even been two years, but it seemed like a lifetime ago.
"Well, think about iron ore," he said. "Think about nickel. Stuff like that, stuff that Germany doesn't have, or doesn't have enough of. Well, a place like Norway is full of natural resources. You take them first, you guarantee your supplies for the armaments factories. Krupp's happy, Hitler's happy, and France and Britain will still get it in the end."
And when she came back with the drinks, that is what I told Manon -- not about Herman or Honold or my second fruhstuck, but about Denmark and Norway and April 9th. And, after she let out a low whistle, I offered her the rationale that Herman had provided, about nickel and iron ore and whatever. Then, another low whistle, followed by a look at her watch.
"Your place?" I said.
"Can't. Now I have this to deal with, and also a ceramics show tomorrow afternoon in Lausanne."
I looked at her skeptically. I would come to call it my rug manufacturers' look.
"Hey, I still have a day job, too. As do you."
"All right, I'll walk you," I said. It was only a couple of blocks. I shouted at Gregory as we got to the door. "I'll be back in 10 minutes for one more. I need you to explain to me how they haven't shot that goalkeeper of yours yet. What's his name? They should call him the Holey Ghost -- H-O-L-E-Y."
"Alex, you are too harsh," he said. "You did not see the game. I did. Only four of the goals were really his fault."
"Okay, you're right. Maybe they should give him a raise instead."
Thus armed, two of the fossils would still be badgering Gregory when I returned. I had the one drink, and then another as I helped him tidy up after closing. Then we went upstairs and sent the message about Denmark and Norway to London.
41
The yellow chalk mark on the MCMIX fountain was being peed on by a spaniel-ish mutt when I happened upon it. The lower half was likely washed away, deepening the color of the puddle at the base. I would be sure to tell Brodsky to recalibrate his aim the next time. Maybe we would even laugh about it, which would be novel. Laughs were growing shorter and shorter in supply, at least when it was the two of us getting together.
As it turned out, when I got off of the tram and tripped into the Barley House, all was as before. Hitler's army was on the move, and the Nazi gold was undergoing a fresh laundering in Basel, but the Lowenbrau brewery was still running three shifts, and the Barley House remained a dark, loud, smoky, blue convention. It might even have been more crowded than the last time.
After getting my beer -- again, the longest part of the process was the time it took me to reach into my pocket for some money -- I walked toward the same table in the back corner, shouldering through the blue coveralls. But there was a surprise this time -- Brodsky had already been joined by another man, as conspicuous and he and I were, black coats amid the blue. It was Herman.
"It isn't First Thursday," I said. "The people at Cafe Tessinerplatz are going to be furious if they find out we've been cheating on them."
"I think we're safe," Herman said. "Cafes are like wives. A little part of them expects to be cheated on."
"Something you're not telling us, Herman?"
"Past life," he said. For some reason, I began wondering if he was sending a little something home to the former Frau Stressler, and how that might be possible, given that running a specialty magazine that didn't sell shit would seem to make for some pretty tight budgeting for the current Frau Stressler as it was. But that was his problem, and I just didn't have time for it. I also didn't care.
We started talking about Norway and Denmark. The information from Herman's source had been spot on. Both the countries and the dates were exactly correct. The Wehrmacht went in on April 9th. In the days afterward, the newspapers were full of color and details about the great Nazi war machine. Unfortunately, it appeared that most of them were true.
"Although," Brodsky said, at one point. "It's hard to measure exactly how big and bad the Wehrmacht is when Denmark rolls over in six hours."
"They didn't even buy them dinner," I said.
"Just fucked," Herman said. "Fucked, fucked, and fucked again."
"At least Norway fought a little bit," Brodsky said.
"And the government and the king got away -- can't have too many kings," I said.
"And that jackass," Herman said. "What's his name?"
"Quisling," I said.
"Right, Quisling," Brodsky said. "Talk about following which way the wind is blowing. But look, I didn't get your here to re-hash everything that's been in the newspapers."
"Well, maybe we should talk about how nobody is listening to the information we're bringing them. I mean, shit -- that information was dead-on, but there was no reaction that I could see. They just let Hitler walk in. I mean, are they even fucking listening?"
Spying was, by its very nature, a solitary existence. But I was fortunate, in that I could share at least part of what I was doing, and what I was feeling, with not only Manon but also Herman and Brodsky. They were living the same life, to varying degrees. They dealt with the same frustrations. And while I sometimes wondered if there was always a tension between field agents and the people who ran them, just as in any employee-boss relationship, the disconnection between the information being gathered and the decisions being made, or not made, was profound.
"Am I wrong, or does this seem really fucked up to you?" I said, looking first at Brodsky, then at Herman. "I mean, nobody's fucking listening."
We all sat and drank. Herman stood up and got us three more. The fug along the ceiling seemed particularly thick. Metaphors were everywhere if you looked hard enough.
"This is going to make you feel even worse," Brodsky said. "But here's why I called you both. I have new information on the Ardennes invasion. It's a pretty good source, and it's in two pieces. Yes, he also has heard that the focal point of the invasion will be the Ardennes, and not Belgium and Holland. And I didn't lead him at all -- it all came from him."
"Great," I said. "Three confirmations now. But if they didn't listen to two, three won't matter."
"But I also have a date," Brodsky said.
I actually leaned forward to get closer to him. Herman dd, too.
"So?" I said.
"May 10th," Brodsky said.
"This is solid?" Herman said.
"Yeah, my guy says it's solid. He's in the Soviet high command. He says the Germans have consulted them as a courtesy."
May 10th. Three weeks.
So this was it. France and Britain had two weeks to get their shit together. They were either going to listen to information that could not be more solid, that came to three different spies -- a Russian, a German and a Czech -- from three different sources who had access to the German military. Hell, one of them, Ritter, was in the German military, and so was Herman's source, probably. Nothing in life is certain, and that was perhaps even truer when you were dealing with a homicidal lunatic like Hitler, but this was not ignorable anymore. They had to listen.
Once again, Gregory got one whiff of my overcoat and insisted that I hang it outside before entering his apartment. The message he sent was as short and unemotional as I could muster: "Russian confirmation of Ardennes invasion. Date set is May 10." The reply was swift, as always. Dash-dash-dot. G.
But as Gregory and I drank and talked, I got more and more worked up. I mean, this was it. There was no getting around it anymore. I had been forced to leave Austria and would have been forced to leave Czechoslovakia if I hadn't beaten the Wehrmacht to the border by a few months. Now Hitler was coming my way again, probably not here, not to Zurich, but who knew? Britain and France were going to stop him here, or he wasn't going to be stopped. It was that simple
, and there had been no signs thus far that indicated they realized it.
I grabbed a pencil and scribbled out another message. Gregory read it.
"Really?" he said.
"Yes, really."
"This is a bad idea."
"Just send it."
"Alex--"
"Just fucking send it," I said. It came off harsher than I had intended. Gregory translated from the bible page and sent it in silence. The message read, "Are you even fucking listening?"
We sat and finished our drink. He was pissed, and I didn't have anything left to say. There was no reply from London, no dash-dash-dot confirmation, nothing. Gregory looked at his watch.
"Should I send it again?"
"No, fuck it," I said. It was time for me to get out of there. I needed to get over to Manon's flat, to wake her up and tell her the latest.
42
The stack of paperwork on my desk at Bohemia Suisse had begun to lean, ever so slightly. One more bulging file folder might just topple the whole mess, and there was no question who was going to be picking it up and reassembling the folders if it did. The end of the month was always like that, but even more lately, given my other preoccupations. Mostly it was just initialing and signing, but some of it was more in-depth. One afternoon a month, I carried the adding machine from the nook it usually occupied near Marta's desk and brought it into my office for a series of calculations that required a double-check. They were never wrong, and I don't know if Marta resented it more than she resented everything else I did, but it was mostly an exercise that forced me to pay attention to the key financial aspects of the bank. Besides, I kind of enjoyed the clicking noise the machine made when it came time to total a column of figures.
That's what I was doing when Marta came in.
"One of the nephews is here," she said.
"Does he have an appointment?"
She said that he didn't. I asked her if she could handle the withdrawal, attempting to minimize how curious I was that one of the spies was in the bank, one who had never been here before. I also knew that we were currently in a spot in our relationship that whenever I said "white," Marta would reply "black." So I wasn't surprised when she said he asked specifically for me.
"Give me 30 seconds," I said, getting up from the table where the adding machine was sitting, rolling down my sleeves, and slipping on my jacket. That was another thing I liked about the adding machine, the excuse it gave me to unencumber myself a little. I was just shooting my shirt cuffs out of the sleeves when Kensinger walked in. I didn't remember his first name. I had only met him one time, but he was memorable, a 20-something-year-old kid with mostly gray hair. He was carrying a brown leather satchel, almost like a schoolboy's, with two buckled straps in the front.
I walked around the desk and shook his hand, then walked the few additional steps and closed the office door. As I did, I caught Marta's look of disapproval, or maybe disappointment that she wouldn't be able to hear through the leather-padded door.
I pointed him to one of the two facing wing chairs and offered him coffee from the pot on my sideboard. It had been there a half-hour but was still hot enough. That would be it for the niceties, as it turned out. Kensinger was not much interested in small-talk.
"I'm here to take almost everything in the account. Do you have a problem with that?"
I was interested, certainly. But a problem? No.
"I have no control over the account," I said. "This is your decision. The bearers of the account have all of the power. The bank is just a repository."
"Good."
I sat, silent. Five seconds. Ten seconds. I put on my placid face, but the nervousness grew on his. At 15 seconds, he just began blurting.
"We need the money to go further underground."
Again, placid face.
"You have to understand," he said. "It's nothing specific, but the Germans are just strutting more. Have you noticed it? Do you deal with anybody at the legation? They're just -- they're such arrogant assholes anyway, but it's worse now. We can all sense it."
Silence. Maybe a small nod.
"We've been doing some digging," he said. "There might be 1,000 of them in Switzerland between the embassy in Bern and all of their legations. There's about six of them -- here, Geneva, Basel, St. Fucking Gallen, pretty much anywhere there's a dozen Swiss families."
"A thousand?" I said. "Seems high."
"Between the actual embassy employees, and the locals they've put on the payroll, we think it's 1,000, easy. And they're just starting to show up in the oddest places. I nearly bumped into one of their guys -- like physically bumped into him -- outside of a little Italian restaurant a couple of blocks away from where I grew up, and where my family still lives. Grimaldi's -- you ever heard of it? It's good, but it's no Orsini's, and it's about five miles from here, and there are 10 places just as good between here and there. There's no way somebody from the German legation would be in that neighborhood for no reason. It's got me spooked."
"I get that." Just keep him talking.
"Things like that have been happening to all of us. You try to convince yourself that life is full of coincidences, but there are just getting to be too many of them."
"So what does Blum think?" Blum was the controller, the one who dressed up as the old man to open the original account.
"He doesn't know what to think," Kensinger said. "Between you and me, he isn't that smart. And he's getting nothing from London. Like, no direction at all. So we've decided to act on behalf of self-preservation. We're going to take the money and use it to go deeper, go darker -- new safe houses, maybe a small base over the border in France. Hair dye for me, done professionally. Fuck it. The only thing I know for sure is I have to get this away from my family."
When Kensinger walked in, I wasn't 100 percent sure that he did not know of my further involvement. But the fact that he never asked me what I had heard, or what I knew, and that he was willing to crap on his boss in my presence, told me that he did not consider me to be a player. I was just a connected outsider in his mind, maybe a shoulder to cry on because of the connection, nothing more than that, which was a relief. Part of me wanted to tell him what I knew, about the Ardennes and May 10th, but it wasn't my place to tell him. Besides, given that it only took 15 seconds of silence to break him, I didn't think trusting him with any of my secrets made a lot of sense.
"Leave 5,000 francs and give me the rest," he said. I looked up the balance -- it was in the pile of paperwork on my desk -- and had him fill out a withdrawal ticket. He waited in my office while I took the satchel and handled the transaction myself. Marta was dying to get up from her desk and walk across the bank and look over my shoulder, but we still had enough of a boss-employee relationship that she stayed in her place. Besides, she would see the withdrawal ticket within minutes of Kensinger's departure, anyway. It was her job to keep the books.
As it turned out, it was precisely four minutes.
"Are you kidding me?" Marta said. She was waving the withdrawal slip.
"It's his money."
"And you just let him take it?"
"I tried to talk him out of it."
"Father to son?"
"I went more for big brother to little brother," I said. "But it's their money. I don't know how many times I can tell you. Their money, their rules."
"It's still wrong," she said. She was waving two things, actually -- the withdrawal slip and a telegram, which she remembered when she saw it. "Here. This came while you were doing such a bang-up job talking some sense into that spoiled brat."
Marta had put me back in my place. All was again right in her world. She hummed as she sashayed back to her desk.
Safely alone, I opened the envelope. The telegram said:
Fred arrival May 10. Please prepare welcome and menu including apple fritters.
"Fred" was France.
"May 10" was May 10.
"Fritters" was Fritz Ritter.
This was a confirmation of t
he invasion date that Brodsky had received from his Russian army contact. It was entirely unsolicited, and it seemed beyond unlikely that Ritter's source was the same officer in the Russian high command. So May 10th was it. There could be no doubt now. Gregory and I sent the news to London that night.
43
Sechselauten was Zurich's "Six O'clock Festival." It was always near the end of April, always on a Monday, but the date hopped around a little bit from year to year, for whatever reason. It might have been my favorite Zurich-y thing. It was a celebration of the arrival of spring, and its roots were in the 6 o'clock church bells being run to signal the end of the workday, back when. In the winter, you worked until it got dark. But as summer approached, and the days got longer, that wasn't practical -- so when it became necessary, they rang the church bells at 6, and everybody got to go home. This was a celebration of those bells, and the chance for the workers to see daylight again. They had bonfires and pageants and shit, and the highlight was the burning of Bogg, this great stuffed dummy held high on a pole. They said he was supposed to represent Old Man Winter. I think he was really supposed to represent their bosses.
Whatever, it was an excuse to drink outdoors after work, down by the lake. Manon and I walked around and got lost in the crowds, drinks in hand, hand in hand, and I actually forgot about Hitler and the Ardennes and the Nazi gold and the rest of it, at least for a few minutes. We had 11 days before May 10th, 11 days for our bosses to get their heads out of their asses. There was still enough time to make a difference.
After witnessing Bogg's glorious demise -- I had forgotten how much little children could squeal at the sight of a big fire -- we decided to walk back to Fessler's, not for dinner but maybe just dessert. We weren't two blocks away from the festival when the real world began crowding our thoughts.
"Did I tell you the latest from my boss?" Manon said.
She had not. I did not know her boss's name. I knew he was a man, based upon her choice of pronouns -- as in the phrase, ''he's such a fucking asshole" -- but that was it. I had no idea about his age, or what he looked like, or where his office was, or anything.
