by David Boyle
New York seemed not to have changed a jot since she had sailed from there on the Aquitania back in 1938, just as the first war scare seemed to loom over Europe. Now, it was wonderful to fill her nostrils with the distinctive smell of an American sleeper, a strange combination of antiseptic, body odour and tobacco smoke, past the ever-present shoe-shine boys and the marshmallow stalls.
After the friendly smells and sounds of Union Terminal, nothing had prepared her for being home in Cincinnati. The sheer sweetness of it, the sense of liberty and sheer commercial power of it. And above all, the sense that nobody would drop bombs on you, the sense of civilisation – the absolute lack of sirens, except those of the police.
She took a cab to her home street and, her heart in her mouth, walked up the front drive. The house was clearly empty. She could see the pile of mail dimly through the dirty window, and there was an old, rain-drenched newspaper hanging out of the mailbox. Someone, at least, had transferred the mail inside. There were weeds on the front doorstep growing through cracks in the concrete.
“Xanth?” said a loud voice a few feet away. A large woman in slacks was emerging from the house next door. It was Auntie May.
“Oh wow, honey, is that really you? And looking so grown!”
Xanthe found the tears were rolling down her face. The anticipation and fear had become too much.
“Where is he, May? I haven’t got long, and I so need to see him. Is he alive? Where is he?”
May took her in her arms and stroked her hair as if she was still a girl.
“Oh, Xanthe. He is still with us. There’s been no passing, but you will find it hard. He has had a stroke and he’s in the St Vincent home. You know, on past Madison Road, up towards Evanston. You can walk there. I visit him every day, but usually, he doesn’t – I mean he sometimes finds it hard to know what’s what.”
“Oh, no,” said Xanthe, appalled. “Does he know? Does he know I have a child? He has a grandchild?”
“A baby? You had a baby? Did you get married, honey? Or was he a pilot who was killed? We hear such stories, you know. People here have changed their ideas about the war in Europe since the election, I know. Especially after the Reuben James went down last week. And the Kearsage, of course.”
They hugged, and Xanthe marched off to St Vincent’s, her heart now lodged in her mouth.
*
It began to snow a little fitfully, and she felt herself descending into a Midwestern dream as she walked the few blocks to her father’s nursing home. She had slept badly on the train, with its curtains pulled over her shelf, and even worse on the flight across the Arctic. Now her tired mind began to blur the prospects of meeting her father with those of meeting Paul Wittgenstein the following day.
How was she going to persuade this elusive, unconventional concert pianist – from a well-known family of wealthy Jewish refugees – to do the British government’s bidding with his investments? Neither Fleming nor Turing had given her much in the way of guidance about what might actually be possible. Presumably, Wittgenstein frère could not simply march into Switzerland and insist they stop producing this chronometer or at least stop shipping it to Berlin. She didn’t know. But she found it hard to believe it would be very effective, even if he did march in. The Germans would hear about it, and there would be diplomatic difficulties, which would presumably lead to them getting the component in some other way. Not to mention putting his own family at more risk than they were already in.
On the other hand, perhaps there were no other sources of supply apart from the Swiss company. If the Nazis could have made it themselves, they presumably would have done.
First, she would have to get Paul Wittgenstein onside, and that would mean negotiating somehow through the complexities of his relationship with his brother, Ludwig, which was evidently not terribly good. Having met the great philosopher, she could well believe in the complexity of the family.
Next, she would have to ask for his help. And only if he agreed to that part could they begin to discuss what might be possible and how to go about it making it happen.
It was a tall order. Her mind went round and round as she pounded the sidewalk to get to her father – she could not help it: it kept her from panicking – yet the stakes were very high. If the Lorenz system went into full production and naval signals began to be carried by a version of the machine, then they would, once more, be in the dark on the Atlantic, and all the efforts of Turing and colleagues – even her own meagre efforts – would have been in vain.
Why was she continually being put in this position? Why, over and over again, was she expected to make decisions in the field which she felt wholly inadequate to make?
She had been thinking so deeply about the Wittgensteins that she found herself inside the nursing home before she had time to focus. And there before her, very obviously from his distinctive profile, looking out of the window in a large armchair, was the man she had come to see.
Then she forgot herself again and just ran. “Daddy!” she said, as quietly as she could. “Oh, my Daddy!”
*
“Cindy Schneider?” said a man at Grand Central Station as she stepped off the sleeper the next morning, feeling bleary-eyed and emotional.
She nodded. It must be her.
“Yup, that’s me.”
“Can you come with me, please?”
The man wore a brown homburg hat and looked irritatingly smug.
“Who are you, exactly?”
“That will be explained.”
Wary, Xanthe followed, aware also that another man walked behind her.
“I’m sorry. I’m not going to get in that car without a bit more of an explanation,” she said, intransigent, as a large black Oldsmobile hove into view.
“We’re taking you to see the chief. You don’t really have a choice. But you will be quite safe, I give you my word. Come on, honey, you have no choice really.”
Bowing to the inevitable, she slipped into the car which drove off down Forty-Second Street and turned into Fifth Avenue. It was extraordinary, the sheer weight of people and traffic compared to the deprivations and emptiness of wartime London.
She turned her attention to the two other people in the car apart from herself and the driver. One was the man who had picked her up at the station and the other was much older, in a homburg hat with a large overcoat, smoking and quietly looking out of the window. He looked like a powerful man, in most senses of the word.
As soon as he sensed her attention, he spoke.
“Miss Schneider, I am delighted to meet you. I have heard a great deal about you. Let me come straight to the point.”
He flicked ash into the tray beside him.
“You have the advantage of me,” said Xanthe, cross now. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”
“I guess that’s the way it’s going to have to stay. I work with a group of businessmen. We are Canadians. We don’t like to advertise the fact that we are supporting the war effort against the Nazis. We call ourselves the British Security Commission. I’m not actually the chief, but I report to the chief and the chief has asked me to be here. Now, here’s the thing. The politics are extremely sensitive here. We can’t have British agents on missions here cutting across what we’re doing. We have had no proper information about what you’re doing, and we just wanted to have a little chat to make sure we don’t trip over each other. Understand? That’s why we met your train. So how can we help?”
This was not a helpful turn up for Xanthe. Nor was her brain really engaged. It was going backwards and forwards around her all-too-brief conversation with her father.
He had recognised her immediately and they had wept together, but it had become clear that either he had received none of her letters, photographs and cuttings with her byline in the Chicago Tribune and New Yorker – or he had forgotten them.
Their conversation had still been echoing around her brain even while she was half asleep, in discomfort on the train.
She also knew there was no way she could confide in a man, however well-dressed, on the basis that he claimed to be from the British Security Commission – though she knew that organisation had helped her, at least indirectly, to get out of Berlin the year before.
“Look, I don’t want to be difficult,” she said. “I am here for only one thing – which I’m not prepared to talk about – and then I am going home. I have a baby to look after. And if you really need to know more, I will have to refer you to Commander Ian Fleming at the Admiralty in London.”
She noticed, to her great surprise, that she had used the word ‘home’ about Bletchley.
“I have done, honey. Like a clam, your Fleming guy. But we know you’ve made an appointment to see Paul Wittgenstein, the one-armed concert pianist.”
One arm? He only has one arm? Why was she never properly briefed? Perhaps Fleming thought this wasn’t one of the important details she needed to know.
“You are well-informed. Yes, and when I’ve seen him, I will have to go – I also want to drop into the offices of the New Yorker, who employ me in London.”
Even now, during this stand-off, her mind was wandering. What was it her father had said?
“My beautiful girl—” that was it. “In years gone by, I might have questioned you more closely on why you had a baby with no husband…” He breathed heavily. “But these days things are changing, and I know you will have had your reasons, and I know what those poor Londoners have been going through. I’m just happy – I am delighted to have a grandson. I hope to see him one day, but I fear I will not live to see the end of this European war.”
“Oh, Dad, you will. Of course you will. Here are his snaps.” She had tears running down her cheeks. “I will bring little Indigo to see his granddaddy as soon as the ocean is safe to cross. As soon as the ink is dry on the peace treaty, I’ll be here with you.”
She was wrenched out of her reverie by the realisation that this car trip, apparently with well-meaning allies, was actually aggressive. She suddenly felt cross. Who were these men, risking so little, to cross-question her? What exactly were they threatening?
“Listen,” she said. “I’m as American as you are – more so, in fact. But if you want me to believe you are who you say you are, you will respect my orders as an employee of the British government, which are to say nothing to anybody about what I am doing. Yes, I’m going to see Dr Wittgenstein, and when I’ve seen him, you don’t need to worry about me any longer.”
She caught a look pass between the two men in Homburgs. Strangely, this little speech seemed to have done the trick. Within minutes, they were speeding back towards the Upper East Side and the tiny hotel on the edge of that wealthy enclave, near the Wittgenstein residence, that she had booked herself into. Seconds later, the sidekick was out, carrying her bag for her up the stairs to the hotel. The older man was shaking her hand.
“Goodbye, Miss Schneider. You are, of course, right. I hope you will forgive our little test. My very best wishes for your trip. Perhaps you will allow me to make an appointment for you to see Harold Ross at the New Yorker this afternoon. Oh, and just so’s you know, the Wittgenstein recital got some iffy reviews last night.”
“Thank you, Mr, er… that would be extremely helpful.”
It reminded her again, as the black car disappeared around the corner, of saying goodbye to her father.
“Goodbye, my Daddy,” she had said to him, already with the strange sense that the whole encounter had been like a kind of dream.
Then he had taken her hand, as she rose to go.
“You know, Xanth – you are the apple of my eye. You are the reason I have stayed alive as long as I have, to see you again.”
“Oh, try and stay alive to see Indy, won’t you, Daddy? Please try.”
“Ok, honey, I will. I will. I’m just overjoyed to see you. You’ve made me happy again.”
The nurse took her aside as she left the room. “I’m so glad he recognised you,” she said. “Some days he recognises nobody, I’m afraid.”
Once Xanthe was up the stairs and safely inside her tiny bedroom, she fell on the uncomfortable bed and burst into tears.
*
“Dr Wittgenstein will see you now.”
It occurred to her that this is the kind of thing they said at the doctor’s surgery in Bletchley, and she grinned.
As she walked through into an ornate sitting room, with silver mirrors and secessionist art from Vienna before the First World War, she tried to think her way more effectively into the role she was playing – an emissary from a government at war, asking for help from a neutral. It was just that seeing her father had made her feel like a little girl again.
“Miss Schneider. Delighted to meet you.” Paul Wittgenstein bowed a little as he held her hand, like an old-fashioned Viennese prince. She searched her upbringing – not exactly small-town America, but Midwest – and found nothing that would prepare her for persuading a European aristocrat.
She also found the missing arm a little disorientating.
“You are looking at my arm. You are not aware that I am a one-armed concert pianist? I am, as a result, an impresario of music. I have commissioned some of the leading composers in the world to write pieces for me. There are those – I know what they say – who believe that losing my hand was the making of me: that otherwise, I would have been a second-rate two-handed pianist, and I am now a first-rate one-handed pianist.”
“The competition is not quite so intense, I suppose.”
It had just slipped out. She was not concentrating. She looked at him nervously for a reaction.
“Quite so, quite right. But it has certainly allowed me to be, not quite unique, but at least experimental, don’t you think?”
He smiled broadly.
“I hear your performance last night was well-received,” she ventured.
“In that case, you hear wrong. It fell a little flat, or so the critics informed me this morning. Still, what can you expect of the New York Post…”
What was it about these Wittgensteins? So sharp and yet so deluded.
“Now, please sit down, Miss Schneider. May I get you something to drink? You have a letter from my brother, I believe.”
“Please call me Xanthe.”
Wittgenstein peered at her with interest. “What an unusual name! And, of course, the name suits you – you really do have yellow hair!”
Xanthe fished in her bag to pull out the precious envelope which she had carried across the Atlantic for precisely this moment. He read the letter and pursed his lips.
“He says here that you have a very particular request of me. He goes on at great length to say that he has no right to ask me anything about the family trust since he is no longer a beneficiary – but that therefore I must ask, as he assures me, whether the cause is both just and urgent. One of those is not enough, he says. This has to be both.”
“You are a German citizen; is that right?”
“Well, my sisters are, since they still live in Austria.”
“But you have no love for the Nazis?”
“Of course. That hardly needs expressing. I was not brought up as a Jew but I am of Jewish extraction. If I lived in Vienna now, in the city where I was born, I would be in great trouble.”
Xanthe took a deep breath.
“I need to ask you these things before I trust you with the information, which is highly confidential, that forms the basis of what we are going to ask you. If you could help the allied cause and undermine the Nazis, by use of what remains of your investments, would you do so?”
The pianist became increasingly red and agitated.
“You must know, Miss Schneider – Xanthe – that we will have to trust each other. I have to confess to you that, to secure my sisters’ lives in Austria – which they refused to leave – I have paid the Nazis such a sum… such a vast amount, it could have paid for the war effort. I will not say how much…”
“My understanding is that it was around six
billion… pounds, that is.”
Wittgenstein’s face went, if possible, that much redder and – like his brother – he began to pace around the enormous room, from grand piano to grand piano.
“Well, you seem well informed. But what can I do? What should I have done? I fear, Miss Schneider, that I was and am powerless in the face of this great evil.”
“I don’t believe you are. I don’t feel powerless, and I’ve just got a tiny slice of the power you have.”
“No, and I’ll tell you why. Any hint, any tiny move from me and my sisters will be in one of those camps, billions or no billions. Do you not understand? I dare not help. I cannot. Now. I fear this interview must end.”
Aware that she might manage a second attempt the following day if she acceded to his request, Xanthe hurriedly gathered herself together and was soon back in Central Park, puzzling about what on earth could be done. She longed to ask him about the selfishness of his sisters, and the funding of the Nazi machine – especially when they remained in Austria as virtual hostages – but this was not the moment.
*
“Miss Schneider? Yes, we liked your piece from Greece – hey, it rhymes! Perhaps I should say your despatch from your patch? No? Say, are you busy this evening? There is a new place on West Fifty-Fourth. I’ve wanted to go to for ages.”
It was a frustrating afternoon. Not only had Dr Wittgenstein turned her down in no uncertain terms, but the editor of the New Yorker turned out to be busy, and she was seen instead by a young man with verbal diarrhoea, who only seemed to want to get her on a date. She had wanted to thank Ross for his support and to suggest a couple of ideas, but if she confided them to this guy, she would probably see them under his byline in the next issue.
“I am so sorry,” she said, in her best English way. “I won’t be able to come because I have to catch a plane back home to look after my family.”
She caught a furtive look for her ring finger. Then another look of confusion. Was this girl for real? Was she English or American? Was she married or single? Life was sure confusing…
