The Zurich Numbers

by Bill Granger

“So is any part of it critical?”

  “You mean, for the Opposition to make probes?”

  Devereaux waited.

  “Perhaps. We don’t know. We get on the receiving end at the Section. NSA doles out little secrets from time to time to its sister services and we are grateful for each new coding machine or computer sending device.”

  “And you can’t ask NSA because I’m supposed to be under its tender loving care.”

  “Which, apparently, is not quite as good care as it should have been.”

  “What about security?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Security. At this project, others like it.”

  “You mean, actual theft? Well, it happened two years ago in Palo Alto. A member of the Polish Secret Service was dealing with one of the cryptographers at a private firm. The cryptographer said he sold out because he needed money to buy a second car for his wife. FBI broke that one. But they still don’t know the extent of the damage. These things get very involved.”

  “So the Opposition would keep plugging away, year after year, hoping to burrow in, every now and then stumbling across a bit of good luck.”

  “Yes,” Hanley said in his quiet, dull voice. “Exactly as we do.”

  “Does this Excell Importers… do they have other contracts?”

  “No, not in this area. For all we know, Excell could be legitimate.”

  “Something isn’t though.”

  “You keep suggesting that a bunch of immigrant cleaning ladies who barely speak English are being used as spies by the Opposition. It’s ludicrous, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Just as silly as that traitor in California needing money to buy a second car.”

  “But they wouldn’t know what they were looking for.”

  “At least now we know there’s something worth looking for. Mary Krakowski is a spy, Hanley. Maybe an unwilling agent, maybe even stupid, but she knows. She knows when I talk to her.”

  “Will she… has she given you away?”

  “I don’t think so. It was a risk. I had to make her more afraid of me than of them. She doesn’t want any trouble.” He closed his eyes for a moment. He saw her, clearly, saw the pain in her face, saw her greedily drink down the tumbler of vodka he gave her.

  “The child was supposed to be out. But she said there was a delay.”

  “What happened?”

  “Hell, Hanley, how can I know that? I’m waiting for the boy the same as Mary. I can use him as leverage. Once she’s got him, she won’t be afraid of the other side. We can put pressure on her.”

  “What a dirty business,” Hanley said.

  Devereaux waited.

  “How many of these people are they using?” Hanley went on.

  “I don’t know. But it’s my ass, Hanley. You and the Section and the geniuses at the Puzzle Factory were supposed to give me a new face. How come they’re still looking for the old one?”

  “We never thought about covering the trail out there. You hadn’t seen your great-aunt in twenty years. I nearly forgot she existed—”

  “No, Hanley. You did forget. And before I could figure out what was going on, I walked into it. I might as well see it through now. About Mary, I mean. Then you’re going to have to help me out of here,” Devereaux said. His voice was tired, not because of the hour but because a sort of fatal tiredness had overwhelmed him in the last few days. He didn’t want to keep at it. Survival, which is all that had counted for him in his years as an active intelligence agent in the field, seemed about to slip out of his hand. And he didn’t care.

  Dawn broke as the woman named Teresa Kolaki slipped along the alley. Her head was covered by a red babushka. A dark coat of no particular color wrapped her slim body. She wore boots against the cold, although her legs were bare.

  Every few hundred feet she stopped and glanced behind her. Nothing changed, nothing moved. Once she was frightened by a large gray rat that leaped from the top of an open garbage can across her path. She nearly cried out. Her face drained of color. The rat paused, looked at her with gentle understanding on its mean, pinched face, and then scampered on, down a gangway strewn with garbage between two brick apartment buildings.

  Her hands were cold. Her fingers were pinched red from raw, wet north winds. She carried a large brown parcel tied with white twine against her chest as she ran along the alley.

  Teresa Kolaki turned into a gangway marked 4601. She pushed against an iron gate into a small backyard bare of grass or trees. She climbed five gray painted wooden steps to the back door of the three-story townhouse. For the first time, she hesitated; if she had stopped to think, to reconsider, at Stolmac’s apartment in the black minutes before dawn, she could not have done this thing. Not even for Mary.

  She bit her lip and knocked hard at the door and then looked around her. A dog barked joylessly from a yard up the alley.

  She waited a moment and then knocked again.

  A bolt was drawn from behind the door. She saw the door open a crack.

  Thank God, she thought. It was the same man Mary had described to her. A man from the government. A man who said he would do something.

  “Mary told me. You are the man,” Teresa said. Her light voice was accented but clear; unlike Mary, she had studied English for two years at school.

  “Who are you?”

  “Teresa Kolaki.”

  He opened the door wide. She hesitated a moment and then, chin down, walked in. “It is about Mary,” she said. Her brown eyes were wide. There was terror in them.

  She put the parcel down on the bare kitchen table. She turned. She considered him shrewdly a moment. He closed the door behind him but his eyes did not leave her. Was he strong? Was he to be trusted? Sometimes men seemed strong and broke so easily. “Also about me.” She decided by rushing into the words. “A bad thing has happened.”

  Devereaux went to a pot on the stove. He took down a glass and poured Teresa some coffee.

  “Sugar?”

  “Yes.”

  He mixed it and gave it to her. “Sit down.” Quietly.

  Devereaux sat down across from her at the table. He waited. Teresa sipped the scalding coffee. “I did not know you are up.”

  He waited. It was only small talk. She wanted to feel sure. But she would have to make up her mind without help. It was the only way.

  “John does not know I am here.”

  Still he waited. What could he offer her to reassure her? Nothing. Words were not real promises; they carried no guarantees.

  “They killed Mary’s son.”

  She put down the glass of coffee and stared at it, her hand still around it. Anger had been banked in her by the long, cold night of fear, of listening to Mary’s tears. Her eyelids flickered a moment as though she had become lost in a trance and was trying to break it, or trying to awaken from a dream by force of will.

  When she spoke again, her voice was filled with ashes, leaden. “They sent a man they say was a priest last night to tell Mary her son is dead. The priest says it was an accident. He says that Karol was run over by a car. He showed Mary a picture from the Vienna paper. He said he was a priest. I don’t know what he was. They promise Mary it was an accident and they want to take her home now. Mary tells me, in the night, that she does not believe this man is a priest. She says they kill her son and now they will kill her. She has a contract. Here.”

  She snapped the twine with sure, strong fingers. She opened the parcel. Papers. And a letter from someone who wrote in a childish hand. He examined the papers slowly.

  Something had been wrong from the beginning, from the moment he got Melvina’s strange letter. He was still targeted by the other side. Perhaps Rita was being watched as well and would be dealt with after they were sure Devereaux was dead. Rita Macklin was still of use to them if she could lead them to Devereaux. They were like bulldogs. They had held on so long they had forgotten why they bit in the first place. Devereaux was to be killed. There was no change in the plan from the day two
Bulgarian assassins walked up a mountain trail in Virginia and were ambushed and killed.

  Part of what was wrong was Mary Krakowski, the reluctant agent. And now this one. They were all agents, all seemingly reluctant, all closemouthed. Teresa wanted to change the terms of her deal; she wanted assurances not just from them but from Devereaux. What did she want him to say?

  I am a dead man, Teresa. I can’t save my own life. I can’t save the life of a woman I love. And what can I do for you?

  “This is a contract,” she said in a stubborn voice.

  Devereaux picked up the document. A legal paper, in German. Devereaux picked through it; he had studied German a long time ago and the words came back to him, slowly. A contract between the American-Polish Export Agency and Excell Importers, Inc., of Chicago, as well as Universal Janitorial Service. All involving one slightly sad alcoholic woman named Mary Krakowski.

  He read slowly, unconcerned that Teresa Kolaki sat impatiently across from him. The kitchen filled with gray light. The house was quiet. A clock ticked on the second landing.

  There was a bond in the amount of five hundred thousand Swiss francs. A guarantee bond of performance. At the end of two years, a period of indenture to Excell Importers would be ended and, as an inducement (on a second sheet of paper), the signature of one Felix Krueger guaranteed passage of a Polish minor, Karol Krakowski, from Warsaw, Poland, to Chicago, Illinois, United States of America. To be effected four days ago.

  “You see, mister?”

  Devereaux put down the paper. For a long moment, he stared across the table at Teresa Kolaki. She was afraid but not the way Mary Krakowski had been afraid, a woman on the edge of panic that was kept down only by doses of alcohol at regular intervals. Perhaps Teresa’s fear was mitigated by the stubborn cast to her chin or the clear brown eyes that did not leave his face. Then he saw what it was: Her hands, strong, with long fingers and broken nails, extended like a spider’s web over the bits of paper on the table. “You see,” she said, “I have brought you what you wanted. Brought you proof. What will you do for me now? What will you do for any of us?”

  “Do you have a contract as well?”

  Again, she hesitated, but her eyes did not leave his face. She bit her lip. The warmth of the room, the utter silence of the house around her, both assured her and frightened her. Who was this strange, solitary man sitting alone in a kitchen at six in the morning as though he had always expected Mary or Teresa to come to him, waiting as a cat waits beneath a tree for its victim to make a mistake?

  “Yes,” she said.

  “For how long?”

  “Two years.”

  “You work with Mary.”

  “Yes.”

  “At the university.”

  “Yes.”

  “You live with her and John Stolmac.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who have they promised you?”

  “What?”

  “Who will be released when your time is up?”

  Her hands trembled but she kept her eyes on him as though she would be lost if she turned her gaze away.

  “My son. Stefan.”

  “And now that Karol is dead, you’re afraid.”

  “Yes.”

  He waited.

  “My God,” she said. “I am sick with grief for him. Do you understand? I don’t want to be here. I want the contract to end, I want Stefan…”

  She had started to cry but there were no tears. Only her eyes shone wetly. She wiped her hand across her eyes. He made no move. He watched her.

  “What do you do for them?”

  “Work.”

  “What kind of work?”

  He knew, she thought. He knows everything.

  Devereaux spoke again, flatly, without warmth or feeling. “You can’t tell me part anymore. None of you. You have to tell me everything.”

  “They would kill me.”

  “No. I don’t think so. Why did you come here if you thought that?”

  “What can you do?”

  Devereaux let the ghost of a smile turn at the corners of his lips. She wanted leverage. She wanted an American side if that could serve her; but she didn’t want to close the door on the other side either, not until she got Stefan out safely.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “What I said,” Teresa said. “I said I want Stefan.”

  “Perhaps I can do that.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I have to know why I’ll do it.”

  She understood but she wouldn’t acknowledge it. “We are just dumb Polish cleaning—”

  “Cut it out, Teresa. You’re a schoolteacher. You speak at least one foreign language. Don’t waste my time. If you came here, you came here for a reason.”

  “What can you do for Stefan?”

  “What can you do for me?”

  “What do you want?”

  “The university. How do you arrange it?”

  She kept her eyes on him. She hated him as much as John Stolmac. All men were the same when they had power over women. “In the trash. I don’t know what to look for, no one does. They want many things. Anything from a computer, on computer paper. Also notes, handwritten notes. They are very careless. And nobody sees a cleaning woman. No one.”

  “They have security.”

  “Guards? One is a boy, nothing; he flirts with us. I think Tanya is in love with him. But we let Tanya and the boy go into one of the laboratories together. They make love.” Teresa made a face. “I know it is hard for Tanya but she should not be so easy. She wants to be married. To an American. So her brother can come more easily.”

  “Everyone at Excell has someone back in the old country.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s their hold on you. But why do you expect they will honor the contracts?”

  “Always in the past. Until—”

  “Until Karol was killed. And you think they did it.”

  “They want to take Mary back. Tonight. They give her drugs. Last night. She is sick, holding her stomach.” She closed her eyes. She couldn’t describe the horror of that long night with Mary, half mad with grief, drugged, sleeping and dreaming and calling out Karol’s name over and over.

  “What is the guarantee?”

  “Mr. Krueger.”

  “Felix Krueger. The name on the guarantee. Who is he?”

  “A rich gentleman. A businessman. In Zurich. He promised us.”

  “What?”

  “You see, he says that he has no interest in this.” Teresa frowned. Her English was good but the concept that Felix Krueger had explained was subtle. She had understood it when the Polish interpreter had repeated the words but now she was not certain she could explain it.

  “Mr. Krueger says that we are numbers. We are only numbers on a sheet of paper. He says we are an account to him. And because we mean nothing to him, we can trust him. He says it is all business. We want something, they want something, and Mr. Krueger makes money by helping to everyone to get what they want.” She realized her grammar had slipped; again, characteristically, she bit her lip. But she saw that Devereaux understood.

  And so did the woman who had been standing at the door behind them. “My God, Red, just as I said it. Slavery.”

  Teresa turned, startled.

  Devereaux glanced at his great-aunt with lazy eyes. “This doesn’t concern you, Melvina.”

  “This is my house, Red; everything concerns me here.” Cold.

  “You don’t want to be involved in this business.”

  “I am involved, Red. You didn’t even know about it until I wrote to you.”

  And that was perfectly true.

  Devereaux placed the tips of his fingers together in an attitude of prayer and leaned back in the wooden captain’s chair.

  “I can help you,” he began. It was the first lie. He stopped, stared at Teresa. Her eyes questioned him and then believed him. He proceeded to the second lie. “You won’t be harmed. Not by us. Not by them.”r />
  He stopped again. She wanted to believe him, that was working for him.

  The third lie was easier. “I know what to do but I need you to give me full information. Not now but when you can arrange to meet me. Away from this house. I want to keep these contracts—”

  “No. I have to bring them back with me.”

  “Then we’ll make a copy. There must be a goddam copy machine in this ghetto.”

  “Then what?”

  Then what? He paused, considered a fourth lie, and decided it might work. “I need a description of Stefan—where he lives, where he goes to school, everything. We have people in Poland.”

  “You can get him out?”

  “Yes.” The lies were very easy now.

  “Oh, my God—”

  “It’s too late for Mary.”

  “But they will kill her.”

  “Probably not. In fact, I’m sure they won’t harm her.” The next lie. They all were underpinned with Teresa’s belief; believing made his lies so plausible. And his manner was calm, gentle even. He was a strong man, she thought. He could do these things.

  Perhaps Melvina, who should have known better, believed him as well. “How will you do it, Red?”

  “This doesn’t concern you.”

  “Red. This poor woman. And Mary—”

  “Mary’s child is dead. He was killed. Intentionally or not. I think not. And Mary has to go back to Poland. And Teresa has to go back to the apartment and be quiet and say nothing until I see her again.”

  “But it’s slavery, Red.”

  “Yes. In a way.”

  “But she’s a slave.”

  “Yes. I suppose.”

  “My God. You can’t permit this—”

  “I can’t do anything about it. Not right now.” He looked at Teresa. Did she understand that?

  Teresa, as though answering, nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “Let’s go, Teresa—”

  “I won’t permit you to let—”

  “Be quiet, Melvina.” Sharply, the crack of an ice field. “This doesn’t concern you anymore.”

  “I am not a slave.”

  They both looked at her. It was so fierce a pronouncement that it startled them.

  She looked from one to the other. “I am not a slave.”

  “You are, dear,” Melvina said in her icy, patronizing voice. “You are a bondwoman. You traded your freedom for… for what?”