The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  I had all of that bottled up in me, and when Groucho said, "We want you to get back in the game," I exploded with a "FUCK NO!" that was loud enough to startle a couple of the kids running around nearby.

  "Calm the fuck down," Groucho said.

  "I'm not fucking doing it."

  "Just hear me out."

  "Fuck you. This wasn't part of the deal."

  "First of all, I didn't make the deal," he said. "Second of all, if you've read a newspaper lately, things have changed a little bit in the last month or so. Things are getting serious."

  "Getting serious?" I said. "Getting? First, he swallowed the country where you and I lived, then he swallowed the country where you and I were born, and only now you think it's getting serious?"

  "Look. When Hitler made the deal with the Russians, everything changed. You can admit that to yourself or not, but it's the truth. And once they get done squeezing the life out of Poland, Germany from the west, Russia from the east, well, you know."

  "No, I don't know," I said, lying.

  "Yes, you do. While Stalin guards his ass, Hitler is coming this way. And I love my country as much as you do, but this has become way bigger than Austria or Czechoslovakia. If we're going to have any chance to stop him, it's when he goes into France. And on-the-ground intelligence could make the difference."

  "Fuck you. I'm not doing it. I might just quit the bank and get the hell out of here. You can't stop me."

  I stopped talking. He stopped talking. We both looked out into the distance, the view obscured by the low cloud.

  "Can't see shit," Groucho said. "Kind of a metaphor."

  We talked some more, quieter now. I agreed not to quit the bank. Groucho said he would be in town for a bit and would be in contact again if necessary. I left first. What was a 15-minute walk on the way up the hill took less than half of that on the way down.

  7

  "When's the date?" Liesl said.

  "Date? With who?" Henry said.

  "Is it the French one from the other night?" Gregory said.

  And so went the ritual dissection of my love life. We were in the cafe, near closing time. Henry and Liesl had come down from the apartment for their nightly drink. Gregory was tidying up or appearing as if he were tidying up, mostly for Henry's benefit. Two of the fossils shared a table up front by the door. It was just a Wednesday night in October.

  Manon and I had both been busy -- she had traveled to Lausanne to a convention of fabric manufacturers or some such thing -- but we were going to have dinner Friday night. It would be my first actual date in nearly six months. I really had no expectations, even as Liesl was talking her up to Henry and Gregory and making it seem as if I had a shot, and that it would be my fault if it didn't work out. The two times I had met Manon, it just had not felt right. But, well, whatever -- it clearly beat the alternative.

  As I sat there, trying to change the subject, the door opened. I didn't hear it as much as feel it, because it was a chilly and windy night, and wind could sometimes chase up Oberdorfstrasse from the Grossmunster and fill the narrow, cobbled street, almost creating heightened pressure that would burst through a release point, such as an open door. I felt the cold and looked up and saw a man wearing a dark overcoat and hat and carrying a portfolio. He looked around and then fixed on our little group and headed toward us.

  His face brightened as he approached, and brightened was followed by grinning when he arrived. He opened the portfolio pulled out a pen and began pointing at us as he spoke.

  "I think this is my lucky day. You are Gregory. You are Liesl. You are Henry and Alex, in some order. I think I have hit the jackpot."

  That the man was presumptuous went without saying. That he was unlikeable besides also was plain -- hair slicked down, suit just so, perfectly knotted necktie, a well-kept weasel. It took a second for us to digest the fact that he knew who we were and that he had yet to introduce himself.

  "And who would you be, exactly?" Gregory said, finally. "And what are you doing with our names in your goddamn leather notebook?"

  With that, the grin was gone, replaced not by anger but by a kind of hurt puppy kind of look. He was getting more unlikeable by the second. He said his name was Ernst Meissner, and that he was some kind of junior assistant bullshit attache stationed at the German legation in Zurich.

  He positioned the portfolio under his arm and held his hands up, as if in surrender. "I am nothing more than the humble census taker. As a service to our citizens, we attempt to keep track of all expatriates from the Reich and to offer them contact information and social opportunities with their brethren."

  "None of us are German so you can go," Liesl said. Her rudeness was more than a little sexy.

  "You hold a Czech passport, according to my records. So do Alex and Henry. Gregory holds an Austrian passport. That makes all of you citizens of the Reich."

  "But we're not Germans." Gregory this time, angrier. "And what right do you have to come into my place of business and--"

  Meissner held up his hand, stopping the rant.

  "I am sorry you are upset. Let me assure you that there is nothing nefarious about this cataloging of our citizens. Each of our legations in Switzerland has an office in charge of just such record-keeping. That is all it is -- paperwork designed to benefit you and our other citizens living abroad. In Switzerland alone, we have located thousands just like you -- tens of thousands. We keep their contact information on file. If there is ever a need to speak to someone, because of some kind of emergency back home, God forbid, or maybe to offer a business contact or a social opportunity, we have the means to get in touch. That's all this is."

  Of course, anyone who knew the Germans knew that nothing was quite that innocent. I had no doubt that they were organizing little Nazi hit squads, in case the Wehrmacht ever came calling on the Swiss border and needed a little help with their entrance. I also had no doubt that the names in Meissner's portfolio, and in other portfolios around the country, were encouraged to keep their eyes and ears open and report any interesting morsels of rumor or gossip to the legation. You know, just like back home. Because while you couldn't openly wear the swastika or go all pro-Nazi in this country, there was no way they could tell what was written on your heart.

  The fact that the four of us had so clearly identified ourselves as non-cooperators was also to Meissner's benefit. If the Germans ever did invade, grabbing all of the gold and the chocolate, they would already have a list of potential enemies. Which, I guess, was why Meissner uncapped his pen, ticked a couple of boxes on his paperwork, and clapped shut his portfolio. Then he stopped for a second, re-opened it, and removed a sheet of paper that he left on the table.

  "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 o
n 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.