The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  Alone again, I got back to my pile. At the bottom was the note to write the letter to London, which I was saving for last. I felt into my breast pocket, and the postal card with the return address was there. I had stopped at home long enough to scoop it up before coming to Fessler's. This was going to be only the second contact I'd had with Czech intelligence in the 16 months I had been in Zurich. The first had been to alert me to the mechanics of setting up the spy account. Now, this, the matter of the dead client.

  A knot of the old men was grabbing their coats. Henry was still by the bar, and he was talking to his father and shaking his head, and Gregory was smiling and shrugging and heading toward the kitchen. Henry walked over.

  "None of those guys paid a franc," Henry said. "The old man's going to ruin us. Sometimes I think we just should have stayed in Bratislava."

  "Yeah, maybe you could have bought Cafe Milos."

  "And smelled like goulash forever."

  "And I could have married the accordion player."

  "And smelled like goulash forever," Henry said.

  We had escaped to Bratislava in March of 1938 when Herr Hitler decided to add an addition onto his country and nailed Austria to the back of the house. We had to leave for different reasons. Henry had gotten in trouble with a Vienna police captain who was about to be given a free hand by the Gestapo, so he had to go, and Liesl was going with him. Our other great friend, Leon, had to go because he had two blots in his official Nazi copybook -- he was not only Jewish but a Jewish journalist besides. Then there was me. I had to go because I had been recruited by Czech intelligence to act as a courier during my sales trips to Germany, and had tangled with the Gestapo along the way. So all of us slipped into Bratislava on the night of the Anschluss and tried to figure out what was next.

  The answers came pretty quickly. The Czech intelligence people owed me, and they knew it. This was handy as we needed some favors in return. Leon had no passport because, in the hurry to escape, he forgot to bring his. Henry wanted to be able to get full-time resident status in Switzerland, where his father had settled in 1936 -- Gregory had seen Hitler's moves coming even back then and wanted to beat the rush to the exits, a rush that never happened. Liesl wanted to go to Switzerland with Henry, whom she was to marry, and also wanted an introduction at the library.

  So we made a deal. Leon received a Czech passport and a plane ticket to Paris, where he knew a guy who knew a guy who could get him a job on one of the newspapers. Henry and Liesl received their Swiss paperwork, two plane tickets to Zurich, and a letter of introduction at the library. I received a Swiss passport to go along with the Czech passport of my birth, along with a high-paying job as president of Bohemia Suisse. In exchange for all of this, I had to agree to keep working for Czech intelligence by becoming the banker for their network based in Zurich.

  It was impossible to make the deal without everybody knowing the details, or at least most of them. With the three of them sworn to secrecy, we embarked on our new lives. They really were pretty good lives, too. As Henry walked away, I thought about how happy he was. He could be a moody guy, but Liesl had pushed most of that out of him. The truth was, he was even kind of happy when he was bitching about his father.

  It really was a good time, if you could find a way to ignore the Hitler drumbeat that was never far below the surface.

  I got through my stack and was left with the letter to write to London. I had been made to memorize exactly one thing by my Czech handler, and it was the title of the book I was to request if I needed an in-person meeting. So I wrote to the Smedley Bookshop on Charring Cross Road in London:

  Sirs,

  I am in search of a copy of "Northanger Abbey" to complete my Jane Austen collection. Please inform me at your earliest convenience if you can obtain a copy, as well as the cost. My request is urgent, as I hope to present the collection as a gift on a special family occasion upcoming soon.

  Thank you for your consideration.

  The addition of the sentence containing the word "urgent" was meant to tell London just that. As I was sealing it and copying the address from the postal card, Gregory began making his way toward my booth.

  5

  "Mr.--"

  "Goddammit, Alex."

  "Gregory," I said, recovering.

  "You're 40 years old. I can't believe I have to remind you."

  The truth was, I couldn't help it and would never change. Henry, Leon and I met in the army and stayed friends after the war in Vienna. We were a pretty mismatched threesome. Leon was a crusading journalist and a crusading womanizer. I was a traveling salesman for the family magnesite mine, a job I shared with my uncle. And Henry, well, he was the son of Gregory, a small-time mobster who made his money through illegal gambling, loan-sharking, a little bit of protection work, and the family restaurant, which was actually a bar, a restaurant, a nightclub, and a series of rooms in the back whose purpose was, in Gregory's words, "for shared company and a few moments of relaxation amid the tumult of the modern world." The shared company charged by the half-hour.

  "The schnitzel was good tonight," I said. It was a small lie, a just-making-conversation kind of lie, but Gregory would not tolerate it.

  "No, it wasn't. It's nothing like we made at home."

  "It's pretty close."

  "It's nowhere near as good, and you know it. I don't think the veal's as good, and the cooks here, they just can't get it crisp. Is it really too much to ask? I mean, how hard could it be?"

  Gregory had a couple in him, and it was going to be that kind of conversation. His wife had died about five years earlier, and it took a lot out of him. It's why he worked the late shift and gave Henry the mornings. As he said, "The nights are too long if I'm not doing something."

  He left Vienna in 1936, only months after Hitler marched back into the Rhineland and France sat on its hands and watched. He was the first one who I remembered insisting what everybody in Austria was insisting a year later, that we were next on the corporal's to-do list. He had been quietly shipping money to Switzerland for years anyway, and in a matter of weeks, he sold the gambling, loan-sharking, and protection businesses to his under-boss, gave Henry the restaurant to do with what he wanted and bought a train ticket to Zurich. Within two years, he had picked up the former Cafe Mortimer when Morty Spiegel died. Now it was Cafe Fessler, on Oberdorfstrasse in the old town, where the narrow, cobbled streets were crowded with small specialty shops and apartment houses, many in converted hotels from the 1700s.

  Gregory pointed at his last two customers, besides me. "You know them?"

  "No. Tell me."

  "The guy on the left owns the coin collecting shop on Kruggasse. The other guy owns the stamp collecting shop across the way. You know how narrow that street is -- if you're sitting on the toilet in one of the apartments upstairs, the guy across the way can read your book along with you. So these two guys stare at each other all day with pretty much nothing to do but dust their inventory. I bet they don't have five customers a week. But look at them, happy, laughing. But how can they be happy? It's so fucking dead here."

  And then, Gregory delivered the line the same way he always did when this was his mood:

  "It's true that I always figured I would die here. But I didn't think I would be dead when I was still living."

  This was not a conversation that Gregory ever had with Henry, and it was understood that I was not to share it. Fathers and sons have tricky relationships when things are simple and, well, let's just say that having a father who was a mobster was not simple for Henry. Gregory was not Al Capone or anything like that. He had no involvement in drugs, and he did not want his guys doing anything permanently disabling to someone who got behind on his payments. He did not even want his guys allowing their customers to get too far underwater. His theory was, "What good is this guy to me if he loses all of his money and his family? I want regular, happy, return customers -- no broken legs, no busted marriages."

  But Gregory did carry a gun, and he
had used it in his younger days. He taught Henry to shoot and wanted him to carry, too. But Henry could barely rough up a guy who was behind on his payments -- he punched a guy in the face once, and it made him physically sick -- and at a certain point, he told his father that the only part of the business he would consider working in was the restaurant. Gregory told me once that he respected Henry for standing up to him, but that's something else the father never told the son. So when he was younger and drinking more, Henry would often come to this conclusion: "He just thinks I'm a pussy."

  But that was in Vienna. Now Henry had Liesl, and now his father wasn't a mobster anymore. Zurich was simple for Henry. Zurich was happy for Henry. But for Gregory, oddly, the only time he seemed happy was when he was talking about the thing he hated most -- Hitler.

  "You hear the radio today? The Poles are barely hanging on. Poor bastards."

  "I know," I said. "Brave and doomed is a tough two-step."

  "You know, I knew it from the minute they went in the Rhineland."

  "I remember."

  "It was so fucking obvious -- first Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland. Anybody who could read a map could see it. At least the Poles are fighting back."

  "Brave and doomed," I said.

  "Better than laying back and throwing their skirts up," Gregory said. "Austria never had a chance. But if your people had fought, Hitler might have backed down."

  This was true. It was at least part of the information I brought back from my trips to Germany as a courier, that the German army was more of a figment of Goebbels' newsreels than anything. But that was about a year and a half earlier, a long time in Krupp years.

  "It's too late now," Gregory said. "You know they're much stronger now. It's only a matter of time."

  "What is?"

  "He's coming this way. He'll finish off the Poles, take a little rest to digest, belch once, and head in our direction."

  "To Switzerland?"

  "No," Gregory said. "France."

  "What about France?" It was Liesl's voice. She was hovering over the table after her night out. At her side was a friend. It was Manon Friere, whose top button was still unbuttoned.

  I stood. "Miss Friere, twice in one day. The gods must be telling us something."

  "Only that Zurich is a small town," she said.

  "Still, what are the odds?"

  "I'm sure a statistician would come up with a calculation that would leave you quite disappointed."

  If this was flirting, it was a bit on the chilly side of normal. Seeing as how there wasn't really room for four in the booth -- there wasn't really room for three, to be truthful -- Gregory got up to get the women a drink and then joined the stamp guy and the coin guy. As it turned out, Manon had been at a banking reception at lunch and a booksellers' reception at 5, where Liesl and the librarians had gone for a couple of free cocktails before their dinner. They were introduced to Manon there and brought her along.

  The conversation over the drink was entirely forgettable. I said a couple of witty things, for I was nothing if not a witty motherfucker, but Manon barely cracked a smile. Oh, well. But as Manon stood and began sliding into her coat, Liesl kicked me under the table, then stared at me and offered a quick flick of her eyes in Manon's direction. I had not sensed an ounce of interest on her part, but Liesl was watching the whole thing with a woman's eyes. What the hell.

  So I said, "Dinner sometime? I'll show you that it's a bigger city than you think."

  Manon leaned over, grabbed my pen from the table and scrawled her phone number on one of my folders. That was it. Liesl grabbed her arm and walked her to the door, the two of them giggling the whole way.

  6

  The tram ride to Uetliberg started in the Bahnhof and lasted about 20 minutes, give or take. I wore an overcoat, knowing how cold it could be at the top. In the wintertime, even when there was no snow in Zurich, there would invariably be a few inches on the ground surrounding the tracks as you pulled into the station. In mid-October, with the temperature forecast for the high 40's downtown, it would be 30-something on the mountain.

  I didn't know who I was meeting. The return postcard from the Smedley Bookshop in London had been succinct:

  Sir,

  We have located a copy of "Northanger Abbey," as per your request. We will put it in the mail on the 2nd. Please remit 1 pound, 15 schillings upon receipt. As a favor to us, if you could include a picture postcard of Uetliberg along with your remittance, it would be most appreciated. I told my grandson about your beautiful city mountain, and he is desperate to add the picture to his collection.

  Cheers,

  Giles Hadley

  So, 1:15 p.m. on October 2nd at Uetliberg. Unless he meant 1:15 a.m., but that seemed unlikely -- there were no trains out there in the middle of the night, and no lights besides. Daytime would be much less conspicuous than nighttime. It had to be 1:15 p.m. And if it weren't, well, whoever it was would have been stood up, figured out my confusion, and come back again in the afternoon.

  There were a handful of people on the tram -- an old couple, a single old man, a mother attempting to corral a pair of 4-year-old boys, and another woman with a pram. It would have been different on a summer weekend when the trams were packed, and the whole menagerie would alight, mostly families, most with small children, many with prams that required a complex geometric negotiation with the doorway of the tram.

  The path off to the left was paved, and it was about a 15-minute walk straight up the hill if you were alone and persistent, a bit longer if you were involved in a leisurely conversation with a companion, a bit longer than that if you were wrangling two small children who were alternately racing ahead or complaining that they needed to be carried.

  In winter, the macadam would be covered by layers of ice and then a thin carpet of packed, dirty snow, all of it topped by a healthy dressing of rough gravel. It was the gravel that prevented most pratfalls. But in the summer and early autumn, before wet leaves turned the path into a slalom, the walk was nice and comfortable and smooth. The forests along the sides had been thinned recently by workers, the felled trees hewn to precise lengths and stacked immaculately along the route. This was Switzerland, after all.

  At the top, especially in the summer, the reward was an unparalleled view of Zurich and its environs -- the river, the lake, the rooftops looking down as if seated in an amphitheater. The view and the gentleman selling cold drinks and wurst from a grill were the reasons to go on an October afternoon. Unfortunately, on this day, the view was largely obscured by low cloud, and the gentleman had not fired up the grill and had only hot chocolate on offer, and it wasn't even that hot.

  I sipped it, though, and waited. I had taken a place on the far side of the viewing area, a couple of hundred feet away from the public binocular things that the kids were all climbing on and attempting to see the roofs of their houses. After about 10 minutes, I began calculating how long I had to wait before abandoning the meeting. A minute or so after that, Groucho arrived. I didn't know his real name, but he had been my Czech intelligence contact when I was recruited in Vienna in early 1937.

  "Wait a minute," I said, pointing. The mustache was gone. "What happened? What will I be calling you now."

  "You can call me 'Sir,' asshole."

  He laughed. We had an odd relationship -- although, to be fair, I didn't know what a healthy relationship between a spy and his handler was supposed to look like. Groucho had recruited me by arguing that, given the stakes, only a coward would refuse. It worked, but it left us in an odd spot. He needed me, and I knew it, and he knew it, yet he spent most of his time giving me shit. The shared experience, though, had worn off some of the roughest edges.

  "I thought you were getting out of the business," I said. In his real life, Groucho had been some kind of banker or financial guy in Vienna.

  "They kept me in Vienna for a while, but it's not like there was a lot of covert information to be gleaned. Hell, they fucking bragged about how badly they were
treating the Jews -- they put it in the newsreels, for Christ's sake. I was wasting my time. I was back in Czechoslovakia in a couple of months, right after you left. I became a full-time intelligence officer, and we all left for London after they fucked us at Munich."

  "How's London?"

  "Let me put it this way: everything they say about the food and the dentistry is true."

  "But at least the Gestapo isn't in your pockets," I said.

  "Well, there is that."

  Groucho already knew about Michael Landers getting shot, which I expected. In the couple of weeks since it had happened, things had settled down. There was a big splash in the newspapers on the day after the murder, and then the story was on the bottom of the front pages the second day, and then on an inside page the third day, and then gone by the fourth. Nothing at the bank changed. Marta asked me if I was going to the funeral, and I made up something about it being a private service. She never asked again. And, most importantly, Ruchti had never returned with any additional questions.

  Still, I was worried. I told my story to Groucho and asked what he thought.

  "I can see you're concerned, and I am too," he said. "It's a complication we were hoping to avoid. We can deal with it, but it is a complication. But there's something else I want to talk to you about."

  This "something else" had been my fear since I had first agreed to the whole me-running-the-bank scheme, that they were going to want more. And I wasn't going to do it. I wasn't going to spy for them again. Babysitting the bank was one thing. Actively spying was something else. They had screwed me the last time, and I wasn't going to get screwed again. They used me as bait in a scheme to frame a Gestapo officer who had uncovered their prized informant, and only through sheer luck did I survive. They swore it wasn't luck, that they always had my fate under their control, but I was convinced they were lying. The cynical bastards had used me, and I wasn't going to be used again.