The Spies of Zurich Read online

  "Ah, he's just an animal lover," Marta said, conceding the point with a smile.

  "He's batshit is what he is," I said. "But we're happy to have his money, and we're happy now to have Herr Kerner's money."

  That seemed to satisfy her. She usually said something snide when she took note of the withdrawals on the accounts that I had posted -- they tended to be at night or on weekends and handled by special appointments with me -- but that was it. "Shiftless" was her favorite word to describe the nephews. She did meet one of them once and handled his transaction, and told me later that "he had obviously been drinking at lunch." That also was by design, to assist in keeping her suspicion level low.

  Marta was going to meet a second nephew that afternoon. Until, well.

  She pulled herself together pretty quickly and asked, "Are you going to inform Herr Kerner?"

  "No, I don't think so. It's not my news to tell. I'm sure the police will get to him soon enough."

  Of course, Marta did not know how right she was. I was going to have to tell somebody else -- not Herr Kerner, but Herr Kerner's handler.

  Because Herr Kerner was actually Fritz Blum, the man in charge of an espionage network working in Switzerland, Belgium and Holland on behalf of the French, the British, and my old bosses, the Czechs, whose spies had fled to London along with the leaders of the government after the Nazi takeover in 1938. My Czech bosses, who were actually running the operation, shared everything with their hosts. My job was merely to be in charge of this sleepy bank and to distribute funds for operations to the spy network on demand. The truth was, it was the easiest and best-paying job I had ever had.

  Well, it was until that day. As Marta got up and went back to her desk, I was wondering how quickly I needed to contact London, and pretty much immediately was my conclusion. But the contact information was back in my house, the return address on a random postcard currently being used as a bookmark in a book I had never read, "Dante's Inferno." And while I contemplated precisely what circle of hell I was about to enter, Marta poked her head into my office.

  "There's somebody to see you," she said.

  "Is there an appointment I forgot about?"

  "Nope. He says he's a police detective."

  I stood, and buttoned my jacket, and batted a flake of dandruff off of my shoulder, and walked out to fetch him. What circle of hell indeed?

  3

  Anders and the cop were talking as I approached. They were laughing, in fact.

  "You guys know each other?" I said.

  They stopped laughing. Anders said, "Army training together."

  Perfect. That Anders did not like me had been made pretty plain over the prior 16 months. I'm not sure I had seen him laugh -- or, if I had, I didn't remember. But here he was, laughing with the cop. The two of them had probably been drunk together more than once, because what else do you do during Swiss army training but march and drill and...drink? And what do you when you're drinking but tell each other endlessly, in some variation, "Fuck them -- we are so real soldiers."

  I stuck out my hand and introduced myself. The cop's name was Peter Ruchti, and he was a detective. He said his goodbyes to Anders and suggested we head into my office. The look on Anders' face indicated that he knew all along that I was a pickpocket or a pervert or something, and that I was about to be found out. In his heart, Anders was likely hoping for pervert.

  Ruchti sat down, didn't want anything to drink. I tried small-talk, which is about the only professional skill I possessed. "So, were you in the army long?"

  "Just two years -- I didn't make it a career like Anders. That was enough time for me to make the world safe for democracy and the bankers."

  Great. Just great. "So what can I do for you?" I asked.

  "Do you know a Michael Landers?"

  In the minute or so I'd had to think, I had played this question out in my head. Would I admit it or not? There were upsides and downsides to both answers. Telling the truth is always best when dealing with the police, and there would be no harm in admitting that I knew the guy other than having to endure a series of follow-up questions. But then, the more I thought, there was a problem. There was no way Ruchti could find out that Landers was able to draw on an account at the bank because the Swiss banking secrecy laws were pretty much impenetrable. And there was no self-respecting Swiss banker who would ever identify one of his private clients. So if I told Ruchti that I knew Landers, I would have to invent some other context for knowing him, and that lie would be more complicated.

  The alternative was to deny knowing him. Again, the banking secrecy laws protected me there. But it was a lie, and if Ruchti could ever put Landers and me in the same place at the same time, it could be a problem -- and we had met for a drink once, and he had made a previous withdrawal on a Saturday afternoon, and who knows who on the street might have seen us together.

  So there were risks either way.

  I went for the lie.

  "No, I don't think I know him. Why?"

  "He's dead. Murdered about three blocks from here. Shot through the head. You must have heard the sirens and the commotion."

  "It is pretty quiet in here," I said, pointing to the leather padding on the walls behind him, and on the door. "That's official, standard-issue private bank wall paneling, gracious soundproofing. It really works pretty well -- but I did hear a little something. I thought it was maybe an ambulance siren."

  "You mean maybe 10 ambulance sirens. I think the whole police force is on Rennweg. This would be a great time to rob a bank."

  I shrugged. Maybe I was going to get out of this after all. "So you're just asking everybody in the neighborhood?"

  "Street cops will get to that in the next few hours," Ruchti said. "I came to you because the deceased had your business card in his wallet. When I saw that and saw how close you were, I took you for myself. Besides, I'd had enough of the crime scene. Puddles of blood turn my stomach."

  He removed the card from his breast pocket and flipped it on to my desk blotter. It was, indeed, my business card.

  "You sure you don't know him?"

  "Pretty sure."

  "So how did he get your card?"

  "Beats me."

  As soon as I said it, I was pretty sure I was going to need more than "beats me" to end this conversation. Flippant doesn't work with these guys. So I started to tell Ruchti how I spent my time. When I wasn't in the office, I was going through the motions of drumming up business -- and being seen drumming was significantly more important than actually signing new accounts. So besides lunching with prospective clients, mostly wealthy friends of friends who lived to have their asses kissed and their lunches paid for, I attended banking conferences and trade shows and sat through boring speeches at arts festivals and municipal project unveilings and whatnot. The truth was, I gave out 50 business cards a month, easily. For all I knew, the next random dead guy they found would have my card, too.

  If Ruchti was swayed at all by my explanation, he wasn't letting on. He had that cop face perfected, that vaguely-smelling-shit-on-your-shoe look. I didn't know if I had made any progress, but I was out of things to say and didn't want to start babbling. So I just shut up.

  He stared back at me, three seconds, four seconds, five seconds. Silence like that can be better than thumbscrews sometimes, and it took everything I had to match him, wordless second for wordless second. Finally, Ruchti gave up.

  "Okay, we'll be in touch," he said, standing and shaking my hand and heading for the leather padded door. I scrambled to follow him, but he stopped me. "I can show myself out."

  I sat at my desk and grabbed a stack of letters to sign and a pen, playing over that one phrase in my head: "we'll be in touch." About what? I said I didn't know the guy. There should be no need for any other questions, no reason to be in touch. Maybe he didn't mean anything by it. Maybe it was nothing.

  I began signing the letters and, after each signature, took a quick peek. One letter. Two letters. Three letters. Four. And R
uchti and Anders were still talking as they stood near the bank's front door.

  4

  One of the privileges of friendship, when the friends you are talking about are the owners of a cafe, is your own personal stammtisch. Mine was a tiny booth in the back corner of Cafe Fessler, where I could see the whole place. The table was designed for two people, max, but the space was big enough that I could spread out a couple of file folders stuffed with paperwork, and there was a decent light overhead.

  I had never been an office guy, and much preferred a more comfortable environment when I was wading through the black-and-white avalanche that came with my job, as it did with a lot of jobs. Order forms and delivery schedules back when I was a magnesite salesman in Vienna had morphed into legal compliance forms and weekly deposit reports in my bank job, but it was all just shitwork, there to remind you that your job was, indeed, a job. And in my experience, it tended to go down easier with a beer or two.

  Cafe Fessler usually did an early dinner business, as it was a family kind of place and an old guy kind of place. I was 40 and single, and there was precisely zero chance of me finding a date in the cafe most nights, this one included. It was 8 p.m., and we were already down to what I liked to call the "fossil collection." They were all over 70, all men. Their conversations were dominated either by jokes that traveled another mile along the rutted road from risqué to raunchy with the consumption of each successive round of drinks, or by spirited-beyond-all-sense arguments about the FC Zurich vs. Grasshoppers football rivalry.

  I was plowing through the latest compliance schedule and half-listening to an anguished debate about the substitution patterns employed by "that fucking Bohm," the FC Zurich manager, when Henry sat down.

  "Shouldn't you be massaging your wife's feet or something?" I said.

  "She's out at dinner with a couple of girls from work."

  "What do you think librarians talk about at dinner?"

  "I think they rage on about the Dewey decimal system."

  "Or they talk about the male librarians," I said, and Henry shrugged. Henry was one of my dear friends from Vienna, and also one-half of the Fessler empire. He ran the cafe during the day while his wife, Liesl, was working as a librarian at the Central Library, the biggest in the country. Henry's father, Gregory, was the other Fessler, still automatically Mr. Fessler to me. He took over in the afternoon and closed up at night. They both lived above the shop in enormous apartments -- it really was a big building -- with Gregory on the second floor and Henry and Liesl on the fourth.

  Henry stood up almost as soon as he sat down. "I'm just getting my drink," he said. I hadn't seen Henry legitimately drunk in a while, probably years. He was on a one-Manhattan-per-day plan, a regimen from which he rarely deviated.

  "Besides," he said, with a quick flick of his head toward the circle of fossils that included his father. "You know how he gets."

  How Gregory got was angry if he perceived that Henry was hanging around because he thought the old man was letting things slide. Henry ordered the provisions and the alcohol, supervised the deliveries, scheduled the staff, kept the books, and made sure to go upstairs when Liesl got home from work. Gregory was the central presence in the cafe from lunch till closing -- pinching babies, telling tales, very much the charming rogue. And if he tore up a few checks now and then, well, Henry would just have to understand.

  Alone again, I got back to my pile. At the bottom was the note to write the letter to London, which I was saving for last. I felt into my breast pocket, and the postal card with the return address was there. I had stopped at home long enough to scoop it up before coming to Fessler's. This was going to be only the second contact I'd had with Czech intelligence in the 16 months I had been in Zurich. The first had been to alert me to the mechanics of setting up the spy account. Now, this, the matter of the dead client.

  A knot of the old men was grabbing their coats. Henry was still by the bar, and he was talking to his father and shaking his head, and Gregory was smiling and shrugging and heading toward the kitchen. Henry walked over.

  "None of those guys paid a franc," Henry said. "The old man's going to ruin us. Sometimes I think we just should have stayed in Bratislava."

  "Yeah, maybe you could have bought Cafe Milos."

  "And smelled like goulash forever."

  "And I could have married the accordion player."

  "And smelled like goulash forever," Henry said.

  We had escaped to Bratislava in March of 1938 when Herr Hitler decided to add an addition onto his country and nailed Austria to the back of the house. We had to leave for different reasons. Henry had gotten in trouble with a Vienna police captain who was about to be given a free hand by the Gestapo, so he had to go, and Liesl was going with him. Our other great friend, Leon, had to go because he had two blots in his official Nazi copybook -- he was not only Jewish but a Jewish journalist besides. Then there was me. I had to go because I had been recruited by Czech intelligence to act as a courier during my sales trips to Germany, and had tangled with the Gestapo along the way. So all of us slipped into Bratislava on the night of the Anschluss and tried to figure out what was next.

  The answers came pretty quickly. The Czech intelligence people owed me, and they knew it. This was handy because we needed some favors in return. Leon had no passport because, in the hurry to escape, he forgot to bring his. Henry wanted to be able to get full-time resident status in Switzerland, where his father had settled in 1936 -- Gregory had seen Hitler's moves coming even back then and wanted to beat the rush to the exits, a rush that never happened. Liesl wanted to go to Switzerland with Henry, whom she was to marry, and also wanted an introduction at the library.

  So we made a deal. Leon received a Czech passport and a plane ticket to Paris, where he knew a guy who knew a guy who could get him a job on one of the newspapers. Henry and Liesl received their Swiss paperwork, two plane tickets to Zurich, and a letter of introduction at the library. I received a Swiss passport to go along with the Czech passport of my birth, along with a high-paying job as president of Bohemia Suisse. In exchange for all of this, I had to agree to keep working for Czech intelligence by becoming the banker for their network based in Zurich.

  It was impossible to make the deal without everybody knowing the details, or at least most of them. With the three of them sworn to secrecy, we embarked on our new lives. They really were pretty good lives, too. As Henry walked away, I thought about how happy he was. He could be a moody guy, but Liesl had pushed most of that out of him. The truth was, he was even kind of happy when he was bitching about his father.

  It really was a good time, if you could find a way to ignore the Hitler drumbeat that was never far below the surface.

  I got through my stack and was left with the letter to write to London. I had been made to memorize exactly one thing by my Czech handler, and it was the title of the book I was to request if I needed an in-person meeting. So I wrote to the Smedley Bookshop on Charring Cross Road in London:

  Sirs,

  I am in search of a copy of "Northanger Abbey" to complete my Jane Austen collection. Please inform me at your earliest convenience if you can obtain a copy, as well as the cost. My request is urgent, as I hope to present the collection as a gift on a special family occasion upcoming soon.

  Thank you for your consideration.

  The addition of the sentence containing the word "urgent" was meant to tell London just that. As I was sealing it and copying the address from the postal card, Gregory began making his way toward my booth.

  5

  "Mr.--"

  "Goddammit, Alex."

  "Gregory," I said, recovering.

  "You're 40 years old. I can't believe I have to remind you."

  The truth was, I couldn't help it and would never change. Henry, Leon and I met in the army and stayed friends after the war in Vienna. We were a pretty mismatched threesome. Leon was a crusading journalist and a crusading womanizer. I was a traveling salesman for the family magnesi
te mine, a job I shared with my uncle. And Henry, well, he was the son of Gregory, a small-time mobster who made his money through illegal gambling, loan-sharking, a little bit of protection work, and the family restaurant, which was actually a bar, a restaurant, a nightclub, and a series of rooms in the back whose purpose was, in Gregory's words, "for shared company and a few moments of relaxation amid the tumult of the modern world." The shared company charged by the half-hour.

  "The schnitzel was good tonight," I said. It was a small lie, a just-making-conversation kind of lie, but Gregory would not tolerate it.

  "No, it wasn't. It's nothing like we made at home."

  "It's pretty close."

  "It's nowhere near as good, and you know it. I don't think the veal's as good, and the cooks here, they just can't get it crisp. Is it really too much to ask? I mean, how hard could it be?"

  Gregory had a couple in him, and it was going to be that kind of conversation. His wife had died about five years earlier, and it took a lot out of him. It's why he worked the late shift and gave Henry the mornings. As he said, "The nights are too long if I'm not doing something."

  He left Vienna in 1936, only months after Hitler marched back into the Rhineland and France sat on its hands and watched. He was the first one who I remembered insisting what everybody in Austria was insisting a year later, that we were next on the corporal's to-do list. He had been quietly shipping money to Switzerland for years anyway, and in a matter of weeks, he sold the gambling, loan-sharking, and protection businesses to his under-boss, gave Henry the restaurant to do with what he wanted and bought a train ticket to Zurich. Within two years, he had picked up the former Cafe Mortimer when Morty Spiegel died. Now it was Cafe Fessler, on Oberdorfstrasse in the old town, where the narrow, cobbled streets were crowded with small specialty shops and apartment houses, many in converted hotels from the 1700s.