The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  "They're not idiots," he said. "They're just so married to what they know that they can't accept that they might be wrong, that the thing they believed in for so long might not be true after all."

  "But there's evidence," Herman said. "There's more than one piece of evidence. They each confirm the other."

  Brodsky shook his head. "It's the curse of old men. They stop listening at some point. They stop learning. It's like they never opened a book after 1918. If it made sense then, it makes sense now. If it was smart then, it's still smart now."

  "But it didn't fucking work the first time," I said. "Why do they think the Germans will try it the same way again?"

  "It almost worked," Herman said. "Close enough to give it another go."

  "But the sources? The information?"

  "You're not listening -- the book is closed. The old men will not open it. How old is Gamelin? Sixty-what?"

  "Sixty-seven -- I read it in the paper the other day," I said. "The story was all about the wisdom of the French high command, and listed all of his postings through the years."

  "Sixty-seven, there you go," Brodsky said. "He probably made up his mind about things somewhere along the Somme, and he will never change."

  "And the evidence be damned," Herman said.

  "Experience becomes blinding," Brodsky said. "The three most dangerous words in any language, especially for a soldier, are 'I remember when...'"

  In an effort to join Gamelin in his blindness, we rotated through rounds of each of our cocktails, first my Manhattans, then Herman's rye and ginger ales, and then Brodsky's vodka shots. The waiter just brought the bottle, and we emptied it by the end of the night.

  Somewhere along the way, we began to debate whether or not it made sense for either Herman or Brodsky to publish what we knew about the German invasion, Herman in his magazine or Brodsky in the Finnish newspaper. We were talking more than thinking at that point, given our alcohol consumption, but even drunk, it seemed like a bad idea. Making the Ardennes possibility public would not be alerting any decision-makers to information that they didn't already possess -- the French and British already knew, and so did the Germans, obviously. All the publication would be doing was drawing attention to Herman and/or Brodsky, attention that would only make their further attempts at unearthing information more difficult.

  As Herman said, "The last thing I need is even more Nazis up my ass. They look at me warily now, and keep half an eye on me -- I know all the Zurich legation guys at this point. They don't even try to hide it when they're watching me. But it's only half an eye. I don't need both eyes."

  "I get that," I said. "And it's easy for me to say, seeing as how I'm not at risk if you publish. But if they're going to ignore the information we all get, what's the point? Don't we need to find a way to make a difference here?"

  "You're kidding yourself, by the way," Brodsky said. "About not being at risk on this one. Let's say the Germans are playing your source, even a little bit. If his information gets published, you will be a link in the chain. You don't think they'll find out, but you don't know. The Gestapo is pretty good at finding things out. For all we know, they're outside in a big black Daimler right now, waiting for us to leave so they can make a report to whoever about the strange coincidence of the three of us being here together, all of us already on their radar."

  I knew well about the Gestapo. I knew Brodsky was right. There was no such thing as not being at risk, not for me, not anymore. Not unless I bailed out and headed to Argentina, which had been on my mind all day after reading an article about it in the travel section of Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

  "So we do nothing?" I said.

  "We just keep doing what we're doing," Brodsky said. "And we hope that it matters in the end."

  On the way back from a trip to the toilet, I bumped into a slender brunette, maybe 30 years old. I literally knocked her off of her shoes, and she grabbed me to keep from falling. My profuse apologies were likely adorable, as she invited me to join her and her two friends at a table on the other side of the cafe. My charm somehow supplanted my intoxication, apparently, as the two friends grabbed their coats and said their goodbyes soon after. I was too drunk to catch the signals that my girl, Angela was her name, had sent to her friends to hasten their exit. Maybe they were telepathic.

  All I knew was that, as soon as the friends were out, I was in. It was about 1:30 a.m. when I got myself buttoned up and began the cold walk home from Angela's flat.

  35

  The next morning, I called Sophie Buhl from the office. Since the night we had spent together, we had missed each other a couple of times, partly because I felt so bad about Manon, partly because I had become sidetracked away from the Nazi gold business while collecting the Ardennes invasion information from Fritz Ritter, and then being ignored. But I didn't feel bad about Manon anymore, and the Nazi gold was all I had at the moment as far as a promising avenue of information-gathering.

  When she said, "Come on over to the office at 2:30, I think I can find a towel to protect the couch in my boss's office," I was already 80 percent out of my hangover and confident of the rest of the distance. I did think about Manon, but just for a second. By 3:00, my second sex act with a second woman in a 15-hour period was complete. Walking back to the Bohemia Suisse, I decided to place a call to Paris to tell Leon, just so I could get it on record with someone who would appreciate the accomplishment. Predictably, he started by calling me an "amateur," and ended by saying, "My little boy, you're all grown up." It was good catching up, and I asked him what his newspaper and the rest were saying about war.

  "They're not writing it, but we're fucked," Leon said.

  "We? You've only been there a year."

  "I was born to be a Frog," he said. "It's, I don't know, freer than Vienna. I can't imagine how much looser it is than tight-assed Zurich. I don't know how you stand it there. Although, twice in 15 hours --"

  "What did you mean by fucked, though?"

  "They love their army," he said. "But if you talk to people on the street, just in the bars and cafes, half of the rich people are kind of rooting for the Nazis -- they won't lift a finger against Hitler. As for the rest, I'd say half of them would rather the country go to the Communists -- and they're never going to fight anybody. So, fucked."

  I did that math in my head after we hung up. Half of the country in a reasonable state of mind, a quarter Fascist, a quarter Communist. Even if the numbers were a little bit off, it didn't add up to French success under normal circumstances, and it especially didn't add up to success if the thinking of the military leadership was cemented in 1918.

  I had placed the call without Marta's assistance, which annoyed her. A few minutes after the call, she marched into the office with the diary pressed to her bosom. Her style of walking always told me what I was in for, and there really were only two possibilities. A whistling sashay meant I had screwed up something and she was there to fix it. Marching meant annoyed. Those were my two choices, and this was marching.

  "How was your call?" she said.

  "Fine, thanks." I was offering no details, and she couldn't leave the office without having regained the upper hand in our relationship, so she put down the diary and began paging for something-or-other that I had messed up. I stopped her.

  "Tomorrow, that thing with Greitzinger, you're going to have to reschedule it."

  "It's not a thing. It's the closing of that Bierman deal. You remember -- big building, nice profit for the bank."

  "It's not that big, and the profit isn't that nice," I said. We were providing something like 1/64th of the financing of a seven-story office building a couple of blocks off of Bahnhofstrasse.

  "There are attorneys involved. They'll be quite angry."

  "They'll get over it. We can do it next week. You pick the time."

  "Why do you have to cancel?"

  "Meeting in Bern," I said.

  "A new client?"

  "A big new client," I said. She was pulling out her
pen and preparing to write a new entry in the diary.

  "Very big? Name of?"

  "Sorry, that's confidential," I said.

  "Confidential? This isn't Bankverein, for God's sake. It's you and me. I see everything. What does confidential even mean?"

  "It means that this is a private bank, and that it's my job to find the clients, and that this client is seeking the utmost discretion as he considers our services, and that until he's ready to sign the papers and back up an armored car full of his money, it's confidential."

  There was nothing Marta could say in reply.

  "Confidential means just me and him." I was enjoying this thoroughly.

  She stood up, snatched the diary off of my desk, and marched out. I almost never got the pleasure of seeing the reverse-march, which meant that she was still pissed and had not, in fact, regained the upper hand. It was a glorious sight. I stared at her walking out as if she possessed a backside worth staring at, which she did not. At least, you couldn't tell, given the gray flannel tents that Marta favored for office wear.

  I shouted, "Don't worry, I'll make the train reservation myself," and received not so much as a growl in reply. What a day.

  Then I thought about Sophie's backside -- you're not responsible for where your mind goes, you know. And then I wondered about what I would find the next night in Bern, where Sophie had told me that her boss and the big Nazi were meeting again.

  36

  It was just past 5 p.m. when Marta marched in again, this time wearing her overcoat and hat. She carried a stack of mail, the afternoon post. She usually had it on my desk by 3, and I couldn't resist.

  "Was the postman late today?" I said.

  She dropped the pile on my desk, literally dropped it from about a foot. The letters scattered but didn't spill off of the side. But the one on top did flip over. It was sealed with a circle of red wax that had been melted on the flap, which was beyond formal and archaic. The last time I had received a letter sealed with wax, it was back in Vienna, an invitation to a fancy wedding where the reception was held in the old Royal Apartments.

  Marta snatched up the envelope as if her real purpose was straightening the stack. She handed it to me and said, "Well, aren't we special. 'Personal and confidential.' Well, well."

  That's what it said on the front, in the bottom right corner, 'Personal and confidential.' But that wasn't what got the majority of my attention. Neither was it the decidedly feminine writing, nor the faint whiff of perfume that hung in the air. There was no doubt that the wax, and the writing, and especially the smell, were what grabbed Marta's attention.

  The first thing that stood out for me was the postmark. It was severely smudged, but it looked like Liechtenstein. I don't know if Marta saw that or not -- you really could barely read it. I wasn't 100 percent sure where it was from, to be truthful. But what I really couldn't stop staring at was the return address, preprinted on the envelope. The letter had been written on hotel stationery. The hotel was the Torbrau in Munich.

  Marta stood over me as I held the letter and considered. There was no way I was going to open it in her presence, though, a fact that she realized after about 10 seconds of me just staring at the envelope. For the second time, I was treated to the reverse-march.

  "Have a wonderful night," I called out, as sweetly as I could. She did not reply, never even breaking stride.

  The Torbrau in Munich. I had never stayed there. I had never seen it, I was pretty sure. I had only heard it mentioned one time. It was when Fritz Ritter was telling me the story of the time he and my Uncle Otto first met.

  It was in the 1920s, and both were middle-aged bachelors who happened to travel a lot for work, and who happened to find themselves one night sitting on adjacent bar stools at the Torbrau. One drink led to another, and the two of them decided to venture out into the night in search of whatever. In this case, whatever arrived in the personages of a pair of sisters. Back in the flat shared by said sisters, before anything really interesting happened, Ritter and my uncle and the girls found themselves on their knees, half-dressed, peeking out of the windows and observing the start of what would later come to be called the Beer Hall Putsch, the failed coup that nonetheless led to Adolf Hitler becoming a household name in Germany.

  So, there was no question who the letter was from, handwriting and perfume aside. Ritter had made that obvious, if only to me, which was the point, after all. I looked at it, held it, tapped its side on my desk blotter. At the front door, though, Anders was still at his post, bouncing on the balls of his feet, apparently waiting for me to leave. I walked out and sent him home, telling him I had some paperwork. He offered to stay. I insisted, and then I locked the door behind him.

  The letter, in the same feminine hand as the envelope -- I wonder who Ritter got to write it? -- was a mundane, it-was-wonderful-seeing-you-again kind of note. It was benign, dull even. It began with "Dearest Alex," and the signature was "Fondly, Clarice." It could have been written by an old maiden aunt.

  I left the letter on my desk and walked out to the lobby to jiggle the front door again. It was still locked. Returning to my office, I pulled down the window shades. In my bottom right drawer, there was a candle and some matches. Groucho had taught me what he called the "half-assed, quick-quick" version of revealing secret writing on a letter. As he said, "It wouldn't fool a professional, but 90 percent of the time, you don't have to. We have invisible inks that we use, and constantly update, that can only be revealed by a special reagent. We change them every month, probably. But this is quick-and-dirty."

  "Ninety percent, huh?" I said.

  "The other 10 percent of the time, they slit your throat," he said. "Kidding. Kidding. If the letter is mailed in Germany, you have to be more careful -- because the Gestapo reads everything they can. Outside, though, police and intelligence officers in other countries don't have the manpower or the urgency that the Krauts do. So this is good enough."

  What you did was light the candle and run the flame back and forth over the underside of the letter, close enough to scorch the paper but not to set the thing on fire. And if there were secret writing between the regular lines of the letter, it would be revealed if it had been written with water. I didn't believe it until Groucho showed me, but it did work. And there in my office, as I passed the letter back and forth over the flame, words began to appear between the lines of the existing letter.

  The message:

  Vogl is back with the Gestapo. He was in Poland with them during the invasion. He is now part of a unit that is likely headed west. We both need to be careful.

  Suddenly, my wondrous day, with its two sexual encounters and two views of Marta reverse-marching out of my office, was over.

  Vogl. Shit.

  37

  I decided to drive to Bern. The roads were good, and so was the weather, finally. The 75 miles would take maybe two hours, and that was if I took my time. I needed to clear my head and, for some reason, the open road helped more than the train. It would help to have the car, too, in case I had to follow Big Ears and The Mole who knows where. Or maybe, if nothing were happening, I would just commute, and sleep in my own bed, and maybe hide underneath the covers.

  Vogl. Shit.

  Werner Vogl was the Gestapo captain who I tried to kill in 1938. He was responsible for my Uncle Otto's death, even if he wasn't the one who pushed him off of the bridge and into the Rhine. He used Otto in an attempt to gain information on Ritter, information that Otto did not have. But Vogl didn't care -- he tortured Otto in the basement of the Gestapo's headquarters building in Cologne, and then either he or his people shoved Otto's bruised body into the river. Vogl did that, and I might have been next, had I not decided to kill him instead, an absurd notion that would have worked. But then Ritter interceded, using me as a pawn in an elaborate scheme to frame Vogl as a traitor to the Reich before Vogl could prove the same thing about him.

  Ritter's plan worked, and Vogl was theoretically headed to Dachau, or worse. When I asked
him if it wouldn't have been better just to let me kill him, Ritter said, "No, it wouldn't work. I mean, first off, we couldn't count on you following through -- and I was running out of time. We couldn't afford it if you chickened out. But more than that, killing Vogl wouldn't solve the problem -- it would just put it off. If he's dead, his replacement just picks up his old cases. But if he's disgraced, and found guilty of fabricating evidence against me to preserve his dirty secrets, the case is closed. Nobody's going near me now."

  Except something happened between then and now. Mostly, a war happened -- and, well, time heals all disgraces when the bullets start flying. Vogl was a smart guy, and organized, and ruthless -- all of the things a good Gestapo man should be. He also had been right about Ritter, and his suspicions about me hadn't been far off. He probably did a little time in a camp somewhere -- but a nice camp, or the nice part of a bad camp. Or, if he had a patron, maybe he just got stripped of his command of the station in Cologne and sent to shuffle paper in the file room in Berlin for a few months. And once the shooting started, well, who knows what evil stood watch in Himmler's heart, and how Vogl might have been a useful instrument.

  He should have just let me kill him -- which is easy enough for me to say now. I was ready to do it, in an alley behind a bar where Vogl played his weekly chess game. As the cops say in the movies, I had motive, means, and opportunity -- the means was going to be Otto's old knife, a cliche, but I didn't care. I had always been more of a thinker than a doer, and a bit of a physical coward besides, but I had worked out the details of the plan, and it was a sound plan, and I was literally seconds away from doing it when Ritter intervened. Now, a lot can happen in a few seconds, but I had whipped up a mental rage, a noise in my head, and I really didn't think I was going to back down. I was going to do it. I was. I might or might not have killed people during the war -- who knew, from hundreds of yards away? -- but this was going to be for real, and for Otto.