The Swiss Appointment

by David Boyle

  Ralph. Whom she had fallen in love with and who had abandoned her for the Nazis late one night, the evening of Hitler’s last peace offer to Britain in July 1940.

  What had she actually been seeing? It could hardly have been Ralph, who had defected in no ambiguous way and was still, as far as she knew, in Berlin. It was he who had sent her on such a wild goose chase involving ciphers, that it had plunged her into the world of Bletchley. Perhaps she should have been grateful to the man for that at least.

  Nor could it have been Hugh she saw, because he was definitely dead, his body in one of those mass graves dug for air-raid victims in the Westminster parks. She was sure that neither of them had any brothers. So it could hardly have been a real person. It must have been her own exhausted mind, unstitching her fatal love for Ralph and her emergent love for Hugh.

  She knew that Fleming concealed a continuing nervousness about the psychological health of agents in the field, and any rumours about her seeing people who were not there might lead to some kind of discharge before she was ready and before she had made any arrangements to sail home. So she kept it to herself and brooded on these disturbing sightings, especially in the dead of night, when she was dragged, bleary-eyed from sleep, to comfort her crying child, rocking him gently and subtly as her mind wandered backwards and forwards over what might have been.

  She dared not wish her affair with Ralph had never happened because that would have meant no Indigo. But she wished she had understood a little more about Hugh’s growing feelings for her, and she wished she had felt able to confide the truth to him. As it was, he had gone to his death without knowing why she held herself back from him – or that her child was also his relation.

  *

  “Hey, you know what?” said Liebling when they met. “I just listened to the V campaign in Serbo-Croat, and our Colonel Britton was called ‘Pukonyik Britonia’. I like that!”

  Liebling was searching for notebooks and hats and spectacles, propelling himself around the room, upsetting books, papers and teacups in his wake.

  “I think I already know the basis of this piece. Imagine thousands of people huddled around secret wireless sets, in places I’ve never been to, listening to the voice of Pukonyik Britonia coming out of the darkness… Good huh?”

  “In blacked-out rooms?”

  “Good, yeah!”

  Xanthe decanted herself from a cab outside Bush House, the new headquarters of the European Service, and pulled Liebling out next to her – he seemed to dwarf the taxi – like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube.

  “They call it the BBC,” she said, “but actually it is run by the Foreign Office.”

  “Right,” said Liebling. “My information is that the BBC guys are pretty pissed about that.”

  Next door, Xanthe could see the burned-out ruins of St Clement Danes on one side and the billboards at the Gaiety Theatre, advertising Robertson Hare in some kind of calamitous farce, on the other.

  They were ushered into a waiting room, decked out in marble as befitted the former European headquarters of the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson. Minutes later, they were whisked upstairs to listen to the recording of Colonel Britton, who did not really look like a colonel. They watched him through the glass partition.

  “The studio’s about as big as my bathroom in Half Moon Lane,” whispered Liebling.

  Thanks to her persuasive spadework and a nudge from the Foreign Office, which wanted to make sure the news about the V campaign reached the waverers in the USA, they did not have to interview Britton from behind a screen. They had lunch with him afterwards, as Liebling had promised, at the Savoy. Ritchie – the man behind Britton – had never been a colonel, but they had to promise to keep up the pretence. There was also something about his voice which exuded authority.

  It was during the starter, while Liebling nursed a glass of whisky, that Xanthe had her third encounter.

  She saw him over by the reception desk, looking, if anything, more like the long-lost Ralph than the more recently lost Hugh.

  “Excuse me a moment,” she said. The two men, Liebling and his guest, ignored her and she raced across the atrium. But there was no trace of the apparition left.

  White-faced, she returned to the table.

  “Jeez, honey, you look like you saw a ghost,” said Liebling.

  “The thing is, I may have…”

  “You know, it is surprisingly common these days,” said Ritchie. “People are so busy, so tired that they think they see people all the time. Who knows what’s real and what’s not?”

  “Like Colonel Britton, you mean,” said Liebling with a guffaw.

  II

  London, October 1941

  The raids had let up considerably in recent months, especially now that Hitler was driving into Russia on three fronts. Xanthe and Turing had abandoned their fruitless quest to meet with Professor Wittgenstein in Cambridge and had sent telegrams to him, apparently hiding out in the London nurses’ home. The business with Colonel Britton was now complete and she found herself back working directly with Turing again.

  “Hardly hiding, is he?” said Turing when she used the term on their way to find him in Southwark. “I can’t think of a more dangerous and exhausting place to live and work as a hospital in the heart of London, right now – unless it’s Leningrad. Especially right by the river. I can’t imagine what he thinks he’s doing.”

  “Is there any scope for reading philosophy at Guy’s Hospital, do you think?” said Xanthe.

  “I don’t imagine so, but he’s a very practical man, is Wittgenstein. He started by studying aeronautics and designed a house in Vienna before he came here. He’s not escaped Cambridge to think, that’s for sure. Oh, that reminds me…”

  He reached into his briefcase.

  “I meant to give you this.”

  He pulled out a Heffers paper bag and handed it over to her. It was a slim volume called Tractatus Logico Philosophicus.

  “Heavens, Alan. Do I really need to read this? What do you want me to do? Seduce him?”

  “I don’t honestly think he’s susceptible, Xanthe. Despite your undoubted charms,” said Turing.

  “Flatterer,” she said, opening the book.

  “This book will, perhaps, only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it…”

  “This may rule me out,” said Xanthe sadly. She read a bit more, wrinkling her nose as she did so:

  “It is therefore not a textbook. Its object would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it affords pleasure…”

  “Oh, for goodness sake, Alan. This guy is… Do I really have to read it?”

  “Hah!” said Turing, as he sped off in the direction of the Euston Road. He had another meeting before they were due with Fleming. “See you at the Admiralty!”

  For a moment, Xanthe could not imagine Fleming – always so British, so carefully turned out in his blue uniform and his wavy gold stripes – working on a Sunday. On the other hand, she said to herself as she searched for a bus in the direction of Park Lane, she knew he seemed to be there all the time.

  As she wandered along, feeling a little strange not to be pushing Indy in his pram, she was horribly aware of the destruction and ruined buildings on either side of her, some of them demolished down to their basements and converted to store emergency water for when the hydrants failed. London seemed to be holding itself together like an elderly widow who had seen better days.

  Indigo must now be having his morning feed, she thought, aware that her mind was failing to keep quite still. It was probably the influence of the wretched Tractatus, now in her bag.

  *

  “I’m all ears,” said Xanthe, wondering if she had passed Hugh’s spectre again in the street outside, but aware that actually, she had not. Thank goodness they were not asking her to go abroad again. She wasn’t sure she could hack it. Fleming took a deep breath.

  “You remember I t
old you that Professor Wittgenstein might be in a position to help us? No? Oh well, I must have been talking to you, Turing. Well, when I said that, you must have realised that I didn’t mean as a philosopher.”

  Fleming was pacing up and down beside the famous bath, the same one that their boss at Bletchley had spent his nights during the First World War, puzzling out enemy ciphers.

  “It’s really because his family owns a chunk of a company that turns out, as far as we know, to be extremely important in the development of the coding system that comes after Enigma.”

  Xanthe felt incredulous.

  “But we’ve only just – I mean, you’ve only just begun to read naval Enigma. You mean they’re going to change it?”

  “Well, they will inevitably change it. The issue for us is how to delay that, and we believe – for reasons I’m going to tell you – that the professor can help.”

  “Really?” said Turing, nervously. “From Cambridge? Or Guy’s Hospital? Really? Have you ever met him? He likes cowboy films, but otherwise, he wasn’t really built for this world.”

  “The thing is, as I said… Anyway, never mind that. Have a look at this!”

  Fleming flourished a printed paper, like the ones that poured off the teleprinters into Hut 8.

  “Now, take a close look. On the face of it, these aren’t Enigma codes.”

  Xanthe read it. It looked like gobbledegook. It was in blue ink on a narrow strip of paper, with a line that wobbled around but with no curves. There seemed to be only two letters possible…

  Fleming flicked the paper suavely over to Turing.

  “As you can see, this is another animal entirely. Your colleagues are wrestling with it at Bletchley, and normally we wouldn’t compromise the secrecy by bringing you in on it. But since you know the professor, it seemed sensible – and Turing suggested you might be able to help too,” said Fleming, with a wink that Xanthe could not interpret.

  Turing peered at the sheet with deep concentration.

  “It is clear the code is different, isn’t it?” said Fleming. “Groups of letters or symbols to mean specific letters, maybe even specific words. We’re not sure yet. But what we do know, from diplomatic sources, is that this isn’t produced by an Enigma machine. It’s produced by an ordinary teleprinter. The code would be too onerous for a human to input precisely, especially in action. Which is why we concluded that it was coded to be read and decoded automatically. You don’t have to look anything up, but you do have to set the machine correctly.”

  Turing was fiddling away with his notebook and pencil, staring both angrily and excitedly at the screed. He loved the thought of a new mathematical challenge,

  “I need hardly tell you how important this is. As you know better than anyone, we can now read a great deal of Enigma traffic. Even the signals between U-boats. We simply cannot countenance this access being blacked out again at such a critical moment in the Battle of the Atlantic. It would be disastrous, not just to the lives of merchant seamen but to the whole war effort. This shift could lose us the war. We call the new code ‘Tunny’. It’s one of the new fish codenames we’re using, which Turing knows all about. Are you actually listening, Xanthe…?”

  Xanthe cleared her mind. She had been listening but had also been thinking about whether she was sane enough for this job, however simple it might seem.

  “Oh yes, of course.”

  “I mean, I’d hate for you to nod off because I was being so boring. Because, here’s the important bit. Through our intelligence sources, we believe this is the work of a new coding machine called the Lorenz. It is made in Berlin and we have been getting messages in Tunny, along these lines, for the past two months. Our understanding is that it comes from the Lorenz factory there, but that it uses an absolutely vital component which can only be bought in Switzerland and that is made – we believe – by a company in Berne called Scherzinger Verlag, which is contracted to Siemens. There is not much we can do about that, and yet, in Wittgenstein, we have a refugee from Nazi persecution who happens to own much of the company.”

  Xanthe looked at Turing, who appeared to be in his own world, scribbling calculations.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “I thought the Swiss were neutral.”

  “They are, but they keep the Nazis sweet by turning a blind eye to some supplies getting through to them – and we turn a blind eye too. So it is a somewhat delicate task for you…”

  Fleming suddenly focused on Turing’s scribbles.

  “Hold on! Turing, what are you doing exactly? For goodness sake – have you heard a word I’ve been saying? Honestly, what a pair – one of you dreaming of goodness knows who, the other one code-breaking as if his little heart would break. If Denniston has asked you to tackle this one he, no doubt, has good reason!”

  “This is a pity,” said Turing, oblivious. “Look at this – doesn’t compute.”

  “All right, all right, one thing at a time,” said Fleming, fuming. “We need to persuade your professor that he should help us and tell us what is possible and what might be possible. My understanding is that you both know the man…”

  Turing’s head emerged from his figures.

  “Well…”

  “Actually, I’ve just been in his bedroom during a seminar,” said Xanthe.

  Fleming stared at her suspiciously, then a big, knowing smile suffused his face.

  “Really, it isn’t what it sounds like. I’ve actually never even spoken to him before.”

  “Well, you’ll know what to do, I’m sure. And remember, he’s on a refugee visa, so if he isn’t co-operative, you know what you can threaten him with.”

  *

  “I think we can discount that last idea of Fleming’s. He really has no idea of what kind of personality he is dealing with here.”

  Turing and Xanthe were walking along the Victoria Embankment, gazing at the barrage balloons floating high over the Thames and at the busy tugs, belching smoke.

  “I can’t actually think of anything more likely to enrage Wittgenstein then threatening him with deportation. He is highly moral – moral beyond moral – and he can’t stand his own perceptions of the right thing to do being questioned. We just have to proceed a little carefully. No! Correction – we need to proceed extremely carefully! I think they have asked you to come because they think you’re more of a – I don’t know – people person than I am. I know I have a reputation for being so completely logical that I can’t communicate at all…”

  Xanthe knew he was right. That is certainly what people said about him.

  “Oh, poor Alan. You can communicate just fine. I think you’re right though. I’m here because Fleming thinks that just because he’s so susceptible to the charms of women, that your professor is going to be too. Either way, I’ll do what I can.”

  As they walked east along the Thames, crossing the river at Blackfriars Bridge, the damage looked, if anything, more intense. Xanthe could see the defiant tower of Southwark Cathedral, next to Guy’s Hospital, and her mouth went a little dry.

  Come on Xanthe, she told herself. You’ve done more difficult things than this. Why was she so nervous? Was it because she felt a fraud alongside a real intellectual like Turing? Nonsense, she said to herself. Rubbish. Of course she could manage. Was she not the Cincinnati Under-Fourteens Crossword Champion of 1932?

  *

  In reply to their telegram, the professor had agreed to meet them in a small transport café, under the arches outside London Bridge station. It was beginning to rain.

  “He clearly doesn’t want people to know who he is for some reason. I wonder why.”

  “Oh well, we’ll know soon enough,” said Xanthe as they picked their way past the bombed warehouses of Southwark, down cobbled streets where the trams never ventured, and up onto London Bridge.

  “What I don’t understand is, if the Wittgenstein family is Jewish, how come they still have all this money invested in Germany?”

  “It’s in Switzerland, dummy,” sh
e said.

  The café looked tiny, dimly glowing in the semi-drizzle.

  Turing pushed the door and held it open. He brushed the rain from his hat, and Xanthe looked around. There was only one other person in there, nursing a cup of tea, tall, cadaverous with unkempt hair – and familiar. He was staring in their direction with piercing dark eyes.

  “Professor? Professor Wittgenstein?” said Turing tentatively, hoping for his attention.

  The professor closed his eyes and put the palm of his hands on the wooden tabletop. He looked exasperated.

  “Please, please,” he said, with irritation, the moment they reached whispering range. “For goodness sake, don’t use my name. I have no intention of anyone here knowing who I am. And there’s no point in replying that we’re the only ones here. Let me say that I’ve been here in London for nearly five weeks now and I know how this place works. News gets around.”

  “Fair enough,” said Alan. “May I ask what you are doing here?”

  Wittgenstein’s eyes clouded over. He looked menacingly at Turing.

  “Mr Turing, I am grateful to you for coming all this way to see me – we have known each other of old, though I never managed to jolt you out of your somewhat simplistic beliefs about mathematics. It is quite false that – but… well… one thing at a time.”

  Turing went pale.

  “Well, Doctor, er, Professor. May I introduce my colleague, Xanthe Schneider, from naval intelligence?”

  Xanthe found herself lowering her eyes. She proffered her hand. Laboriously, he extracted his right hand out from beneath the table and shook hers.

  So far, so good, she said to herself.

  “How do you do,” she said, in her most demure English style.

  “You are an American? Or are you Canadian? I find it quite hard to tell.”

  “Yes, I am. An American, I mean.”

  “Working for the Royal Navy?”

  “I wanted to do something to help.”

  This seemed to animate the philosopher.

  “Listen to her, Turing. She wanted to help. I too wanted to help. That is why I am now at Guy’s, working on the wards. That is what appears to me to be the human thing to do. But I don’t want to undermine my efforts by broadcasting that I am actually a rather useless philosopher. Like me, your friend wants to make a contribution.”