He yawned again. “Little nap,” he murmured apologetically and ambled into the next room.
“There’s only one bed in there,” I called hastily, cringing at the thought of what reposed on that bed.
Kaspir turned benignly in the doorway. “Won’t disturb him,” he said, drawing the door to behind him.
Through the closed door we heard the bed creak. “Move over, old boy,” said Colonel Kaspir. Then all was serene.
THE COURIER
DAN FESPERMAN
THE AUTHORS OF BOOKS about secret agents often have started their careers as agents too, and their assignments, taking them to distant lands, have provided background color for their novels. Dan Fesperman (1955– ) has traveled to thirty countries, including three war zones, but not as a spy. He has worked as a foreign correspondent for several newspapers, including the Miami Herald and The Sun and Evening Sun of Baltimore, leading to several adventures, one of which was assisting in the capture of ten Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait in 1991 and narrowly surviving an ambush of a convoy of journalists in Afghanistan in 2001.
Fesperman’s work has received numerous accolades, including winning the 1999 (British) Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger for best first novel for Lie in the Dark (1999), which features Vlado Petric, a homicide detective in Sarajevo who is confronted with the assassination of the chief of the Interior Ministry’s special police.
The CWA’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for best thriller was given to The Small Boat of Great Sorrows (2003), which again featured Vlado Petric, the now-retired homicide investigator who has been exiled to Berlin, where an American working for the International War Crimes Tribunal recruits him to return to Sarajevo to bring an old Nazi collaborator to justice.
The 2006 Hammett Prize, awarded by the International Association of Crime Writers, was given to The Prisoner of Guantánamo (which, incidentally, Fesperman visited); USA Today selected it as the best mystery/thriller of the year. An Arabic-speaking former FBI agent is brought to Gitmo to work on a Yemeni holdout, a prisoner who is believed to have valuable information about al-Qaeda, but the focus changes when the body of an American soldier washes up in Cuban territory, raising fears of Cold War antagonisms.
In 2016, The New York Times named The Letter Writer one of the ten best crime novels of the year. Set in New York in February 1942, it concerns a shabby, gnarled old man named Danziger who writes letters for illiterate immigrants. When one of them is found floating in the Hudson River, NYPD detective Woodrow Cain enlists the multilingual Danziger to find the murderer, but the death is merely the tip of a wide-reaching conspiracy.
“The Courier” was originally published in Agents of Treachery, edited by Otto Penzler (New York, Vintage, 2010).
THE COURIER
DAN FESPERMAN
IN THIS BONEYARD of Nazi memory where I make my living, we daily come across everything from death lists to the trifling queries of petty bureaucrats. Our place of business is known simply as the Federal Records Center, and it is housed on the first floor of an old torpedo factory down by a rotting wharf on the Potomac.
I am told that elsewhere in this cavernous building there is a Smithsonian trove of dinosaur bones and an archive of German propaganda films. But on our floor there is only paper, box after box of captured documents, with swastikas poking like shark fins from gray oceans of text. The more papers we move, the dustier it gets, and by late afternoon of each day the air is thick with motes of decomposing history. Sunbeams angling through the high windows shimmer like the gilded rays of a pharaonic tomb.
Seeing as how the war ended thirteen years ago, you might figure we’d have this mess sorted out by now. But, as I’ve discovered lately, lots of things about the war aren’t so easily categorized, much less set aside.
My name is Bill Tobin, and it is my job to decide which papers get tossed, declassified, or locked away. The government hired me because I am fluent in German and know how to keep a secret. I’ve worked here for a year, and up to now the contents have been pretty much what I expected—memos from various Nazi ministries, asking one nagging question after another. Have Herr Muller’s new ration coupons arrived? Must we initial every page of every armaments contract? How many Poles should we execute this Saturday?
What I didn’t expect to find—here or anywhere—was the name of Lieutenant Seymour Parker, a navigator from the 306th Bomb Group, U.S. Army Air Force. Yet there it was just the other day on the bent tab of a brown folder, our latest retrieval from a mishmash we have begun calling the Total Confusion File, mostly because we never know which ministry letterhead will turn up next.
At first, seeing Parker’s name was a pleasant surprise, like having an old pal visit from out of the blue. After reading what was inside, I was wishing he hadn’t dropped by.
It’s been fourteen years since we handed Parker over to the Germans in the spring of 1944, along with three other American flyboys. It was part of a prisoner exchange. The Germans had agreed to ship our boys home via occupied France. We gladly would have done it ourselves, of course, but at the time I was working for the OSS in Switzerland, a neutral country surrounded by Axis armies. To put it bluntly, we had no way out, and neither did the U.S. airmen who regularly parachuted into Swiss meadows and pastures after their bombers got shot up over Germany.
So we escorted Parker and the others up to the French border at Basel and then watched as a haughty SS officer in black ushered them onto a train bound for Paris. From there they would make their way to Spain, to be turned over to American custody for the voyage home.
I had helped Parker pack for the trip. His duffel was filled with cartons of cigarettes, and his head was stuffed with secrets. The former were for handing out to Germans along the way. As for the latter, well, that was more complicated.
It was the last time I saw him, and from then on our crew in Bern rarely mentioned his name, because surely everything had gone according to plan. Kevin Butchart had volunteered as much a year later, on the same afternoon the radio broke in with the happy news that Hitler had blown out his brains in Berlin. Someone else—I think it was Wesley Flagg—happened to ask if anyone knew what had ever become of Parker.
“Didn’t you hear?” Butchart said. “He’s back home in Kansas. Down on the farm with Dorothy and Toto, and didn’t even have to click his heels. Whole thing went off without a hitch.”
Since then, I had thought of Parker only once—last summer, while watching my son play Little League baseball on a leisurely Saturday. It was a key moment in the game. The best player on his team, one of those natural athletes who you can tell right away has a college scholarship in his future, was rounding third as the opponent’s shortstop threw home. Runner, ball, and catcher arrived at the plate simultaneously, and there was a jarring collision.
The catcher, a pudgy kid with glasses who had been flinching on every swing, took the impact square in the gut and went facedown in the dirt. As he righted himself and pulled off his mask you could see the conflict of emotions on his face—a rising storm of tears that might burst loose at any moment, yet also a fierce determination to tough it out without a whimper.
To everyone’s surprise he held aloft the ball, which had never left his mitt. The umpire called the runner out. The catcher then nodded for play to resume even as tears rolled down his dusty cheeks.
Something about the kid brought Parker to mind. He, too, had that contradictory bearing—flinching in one moment, stoic in the next—and for the remainder of the afternoon I was weighted by an inexplicable gloom. I wrote it off as yet another flashback, one of those anxious moments in which you realize yet again that the war still hasn’t left you behind. Then I mixed a crystal pitcher of gimlets for my wife and me, and by the following morning I’d forgotten all about it.
Not long afterward, I was offered my current job at the Records Center. The pay wasn’t great, but it sounded a hell of a lot mor
e interesting than signing invoices at my father-in-law’s shoe factory in Wilmington, Delaware. So we packed up and moved to a rented town house in Alexandria, Virginia.
When I came across Parker’s file, I was standing in one of those golden beams of late sunlight as I pulled the last batch of documents from Box #214. My plan was to knock off early and take my son to the movies. Then I began to read, and within a few paragraphs I was transported back to the afternoon in early 1944 when I first met Parker aboard a Swiss passenger train.
Switzerland was the strangest of places then. Hemmed in by the Axis, its studious neutrality had turned it into an island of intrigue. On the surface it was Europe’s eye of the storm, an orderly refuge from gunfire and ruin, a place where weary émigrés could catch their breath and tend their wounds. Bankers still moved money. Industrialists kept cutting deals.
But playing out beneath this facade was a gentleman’s war of espionage among the snoops of all nations, and at times it seemed as if everyone was involved—émigrés, bankers, washed-up aristocrats, deal-hunting factory barons, and, of course, the Swiss themselves, who were trying to curry favor with the Americans even as they sweet-talked Hitler into not sending in tanks from the north. Everyone had information to offer—some of it dubious, some of it spectacular—and, as I discovered first-hand, the competing intelligence agencies were all too happy to vie for them by every means at their disposal.
On the day in late March that I met Parker, I was accompanied by the aforementioned Kevin Butchart. We were lurching down the aisle of a swaying train car, bound for Adelboden from Zurich via Bern.
The view out the windows was of an alpine meadow—cows and early spring wildflowers—but our attention was focused on the passengers. Several freshly arrived American airmen were on board, looking tired and dispirited. They had dropped from the skies after their B-17 had limped into Swiss airspace, following a bombing run over Bavaria. Butchart and I had come to scout them out as they made their way to an internment camp. We were hoping to find just the right one for use in an upcoming operation.
We knew we had to tread lightly. Even though the country was filled with spies, espionage was illegal. Swiss gumshoes regularly kept an eye on us, and we would be recruiting an operative right beneath their noses.
The flyboys had to mind their manners as well. The Swiss had already interned more than five hundred up in Adelboden, a resort town in the Alps, where they played Ping-Pong, read paperbacks, hiked around the town, and ate cheese three meals a day. The restless ones who tried to make their way back to the war by escaping into occupied France risked detention at a harsh little camp called Wauwilermoos. It was run by a supposedly neutral little martinet who would have done Hitler proud. Strange people, the Swiss.
I tugged at Butchart’s sleeve.
“How ’bout him?”
I pointed at a stout fellow in a leather flight jacket who was munching on a chocolate bar from his escape kit.
“No way,” Butchart answered. “Look how worn the jacket is. He’s been at it for ages. And stop pointing. I saw your minder in the next car back.”
I glanced behind me for the bearded Swiss gumshoe whom I called Alp Uncle, mostly because I didn’t know his real name. Nowhere to be seen, thank goodness.
Butchart herded me along.
“Keep moving. We’ve only got an hour.”
He was pushy that way, one of those short, muscular fellows whose aggressive movements can quickly get on your nerves. But as an employee of the U.S. legation’s military attaché, this was his show, so I nodded and kept moving.
When Butchart wanted to engage you in conversation he came at you like a boxer, cutting and weaving, as if looking for an opening. Any suggestion that his point of view was flawed prompted an immediate counterpunch. He jabbed at your weak spots until your opinions were on the mat. I had learned not to pick these fights unless I could deck him with the first sentence, or unless we were in the presence of a superior officer, when he tended to pull his punches. For the moment I was inclined to defer to his judgment.
He tugged at my sleeve.
“There’s our boy. Next compartment on the right. Skinny guy with red hair. See him?”
About then the train lurched into a long descending curve, wheels squealing, and there was a sudden improvement in the scenery out to the right. A tall blonde milkmaid with braided hair was carrying buckets toward a barn. Wolf whistles and applause erupted in the railcar. One of the flyboys slid open a window and yelled, “Hey, good lookin’!”
Then he was shouted down.
“Close the fucking window!”
“It’s freezing in here. You outta your mind?”
“But it was Heidi!” the offending airman protested. “Only she’s all grown up!”
Heidi, indeed. My own experience with local women had already provided ample proof that the natives were friendly, even though in this neck of the woods most of them spoke German. But it could be dangerous to let the hospitality fool you.
“Any sign of Alp Uncle?” Butchart asked.
I turned, scanning the car.
“Still out of sight.”
Lately our minders seemed to be losing interest. We first noticed it after the German defeat at Stalingrad. The worse things went for the Wehrmacht, the more lenient the Swiss got with the Allies.
I eased closer to our target, but Butchart grabbed my sleeve.
“Never mind. Scratch him.”
“Why?”
“Scar, back of his neck. Saw it when he turned to look at Heidi.”
“So?”
“So it was probably a major wound, but he went back up anyway. Not our man. We’re looking for Clark Kent, not Superman.”
Butchart and I had been chosen for this assignment because we knew exactly what these fellows had been through. We, too, had come to Switzerland on crippled bombers that couldn’t make it back to England.
I am not ashamed to admit that for me it was a welcome development. It had occurred the previous fall during my seventeenth mission. Seventeen doesn’t sound like much until you’ve tried your first one—a terrifying ride through flak bursts and the raking fire of Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs. As a starboard waist gunner in a B-17, it was my job to shoot down these tormentors, a strategy roughly as effective as pumping a Flit gun at a sky full of locusts. If you’re lucky you get one or two. The rest eat their fill.
On my sixth run I was sprayed by the entrails of the port gunner when a 20-millimeter shell exploded in his midsection. On the eighth my gun jammed, and I spent the next two hours watching helplessly as bandits blew holes in the skin of our plane. On the fourteenth we ditched in the Channel but were rescued from rafts. Three of our crewmen drowned. After each trip it took me hours to warm up, and all too soon the mission day routine became unbearable: Rise at two a.m. for the briefing. Swallow a queasy breakfast. Inhale gas fumes and the sweet scent of pasture grass while you loaded up in the dark. Then eight hours or more in cramped quarters, freezing most of the way while people tried to kill you from every angle. After a while the throb of the engines was the only thing you could still feel in your hands and feet. Staticky voices shouted their panic and pain in your headset. Out the gun port you saw carnage everywhere—your colleagues’ bombers smoking and then spiraling, spewing black dots as crewmen ejected. That could be me, I always thought, falling toward a field in Germany.
Until finally one day it was me. Three of our four engines were out, and Harmon, our pilot, was nursing us south toward the Swiss border. When he gave the order to bail, we weren’t yet sure we had made it. The rest of us jumped while Harmon fought the controls. Fighters were still in the neighborhood, so I didn’t pull the rip cord until I was below a thousand feet. Even then, as soon as the canopy opened I heard a Messerschmitt buzzing toward me from behind. I turned awkwardly in my harness and waited for the flash of guns. None came. The pla
ne roared by, close enough for the prop wash to rock my chute. Only then did I notice the large white cross on its side—the Swiss air force, welcoming us with their German planes.
That left me feeling pretty good until I watched our plane hit the ground in a ball of flame and black smoke. Someone else said Harmon jumped just before impact, but his chute never opened.
Swiss soldiers rounded us up. They boarded us overnight at a nearby school, and the next morning they put us on a train for Adelboden, where we were supposed to be billeted in an old hotel. But that’s when I lucked out. The man who would soon be my new boss came across me napping in a rear compartment. Apparently what caught his eye was a dog-eared copy of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon splayed across my chest. I awoke when I felt someone picking it up, and looked into the blue eyes of an older gentleman with a pipe between his teeth. The pockets of his overcoat were stuffed with newspapers. He took a seat opposite me and began speaking American English.
“Any good?” he said, holding up the book.
“Not bad.”
“I’m Allen Dulles, from the American legation.”
We chatted long enough for him to find out I was fluent in German and had spent two years in graduate school. He then surprised me by suggesting I come to work for him. I was flattered, but I needn’t have been. I learned later that Dulles had made it into Switzerland only hours before the country’s last open border was closed, cutting him off from reinforcements.
That meant he had to be creative about finding new employees. Stranded American bankers and socialites were already on his payroll, so it was hardly surprising he would take an interest in me once a bunch of American airmen literally began dropping to him from the skies. I told him I liked the idea, and he said he would see what he could do. Two weeks later I was summoned to his office in Bern.
The Big Book of Espionage Page 52
