Authors: Mackenzie Ford
She cried out again and again that night.
I arrived in Switzerland four days later. I traveled by train—by several trains, in fact, changing every few hours at such backwaters as Langres, Saint-Amour, and Annecy. The brigadier had seen to it that I had some pretty impressive documentation to take with me, so although the journey was arduous, I was treated well. I had books to read but my thoughts kept straying to Sam. Our last night together had been a new experience for both of us, I think. We had explored each other’s bodies with a… an almost violent intensity. We were more like animals than people that night. I had been slightly unnerved by the intensity we had shown and so, I think, had Sam. But, sitting in those French trains, with their smell of strong French tobacco, and watching the rolling countryside go by, I kept revisiting some of the things we had done. And I was aroused all over again.
Eventually, after three nights of being shunted from the shadows to the sharp end, and shortly after lunchtime on the fourth day, my train—my sixth train, as I recall—pulled into Evian, a spa town on the southern shore of Lake Geneva. Here I had a three-hour wait before
transferring to a steamer. Switzerland’s neutrality meant that, despite the war, the regular steamer service still circumnavigated the lake: Geneva, Evian, Montreux, Lausanne, and back to Geneva. It was one of the most popular routes in and out of Switzerland, used by spies of all nationalities.
I wasn’t met. My only instructions from Malahyde were to act purposefully on arrival and to disembark quickly, as if I had made the journey many times before. If anyone was on the lookout for a spook behaving furtively they would be disappointed. I was to take a taxi to Lausanne station and board the first train for Zurich. The destination had been changed because although our embassy was in Bern, Zurich was the banking center of Switzerland. We didn’t have an embassy in Zurich but there was a consulate, where I would be based. I was told the name of a hotel in Zurich—the Olden—where a room had been reserved. I arrived just after seven in the evening, unpacked, had a bath, then ate a solitary dinner at a brasserie near the lake. It was the lake featured in the travel poster that was on the wall of Will’s bedroom, and it naturally made me think of him, and of Sam. Not that I needed any reason to think of them—this would be my fourth night without them, and their fourth night without me.
I could still hear Sam’s cries from our last night together.
The next morning I was at the consulate promptly at nine, where I met my contact, a Major Gregory Gaimster. Not only was he my contact, I found I was also to share an office with him. It was cramped, on the second floor, with a small window that looked out onto a narrow street with tramlines down the middle. Directly opposite was a dingy joint, the Bar Venner.
“It’s more interesting in the evening,” Greg said. “There’s a knocking shop over the bar. Some of the girls aren’t bad.” He was from Nottingham, which, it is always said, has the prettiest girls in England.
That morning I was introduced to one or two other members of
the consulate; then Greg went into a small kitchen, made us both some coffee, and closed the door of our office behind him.
“I’ve had a wire from the brigadier, but there’s never much detail in a telegram. Give me your version. No hurry. We’ve got all day.”
I did just that. He sat and listened without interrupting, though occasionally he scribbled notes. He was a tall, emaciated man with sunken cheeks, hollows around his eyes, and a strong jawline. He wore a tweed jacket and a checked shirt with a knitted tie. He looked as if he were just off shooting, or fishing. I liked him.
When I had finished, he sat, drumming his fingers along his lips. After a while, he murmured, “May I ask you a question?”
I nodded. “Shoot.”
“How many ships do you think Hood has?”
“I don’t have to think. I checked before I left. Three.”
“And if a ship goes to Uruguay, say, how long before it comes back?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“Say a week to ten days to get there. Four days to turn around. She’d be back in just under a month.”
“Which means …” said Greg slowly, “that if the Hood people put their minds to it, their three ships could make three deliveries a month.”
“But they don’t. The husband of my wife’s friend, the man who works in the Port of London, says that the
Samuel Hood
comes up the Thames only two or three times a year.”
“She could transport pyrethrum from other ports.”
“Unlikely. It would be wasteful, for Hood, to have insecticide depots spread out all over the country. And their extraction works
are
in the East End. The Port of London is convenient.”
Again, Greg drummed his fingers against his lips. “That fits.”
“Fits? What fits? Fits what?”
“We think it works slightly different from the way you have it.”
“What are you talking about? What do you know?”
He pushed back his chair and lifted his feet onto his desk. His brown brogues could have been cleaner. “We’re not complete turnips out here, you know. We recognize what Switzerland can be used for— that’s one of the reasons we’re stationed here in the first place. But your information could be the final link in the chain.”
I didn’t say anything immediately. He would explain in his own good time. “What chain?”
“More coffee?”
“Have we still got all day?”
He looked at his watch. “Long enough. It’s your turn in the kitchen.”
I made the coffee.
Again he made sure the door was shut.
He tried his coffee, winced, and said, “More beans next time. One of the perks of living in Switzerland is the coffee—can’t get this back home, can we? So don’t spoil it—and that means don’t stint it. Okay?”
I nodded.
“Now, let me fill you in. It works differently in Geneva and in Lausanne, and even in Bern, but in Zurich and Basel we are very aggressive—discreet but aggressive—in our attitude to Brits in Switzerland. Yes, the damn country’s neutral, but we want to know why every Brit who’s here is here. A lot of legitimate business goes on during a war, of course, which means that some people are here for perfectly proper reasons. But some aren’t.”
He dolloped sugar into the coffee and that seemed to help, judging by the expression—or lack of it—on his face.
“We’ve infiltrated the Swiss border guards and their police, and so
we get discreet lists of all Brits—and all others, too—arriving either by steamer on the lake or by train at Geneva. The police lists give us passport details and addresses inside Switzerland. We can’t check out everyone, but anyone who stays in central Zurich or Basel gets our attention. Again, discreetly, of course. They are followed, their hotel rooms are, shall we say,
inspected
while they are out. Their contacts are followed too.
“A lot of it is a waste of time, of course, but now and then we turn up an interesting pattern. And we have identified one pattern that we don’t fully understand but may just—just—fit with yours.”
I drank my coffee. I didn’t think it was so bad. But then I had been living in London. And it was good to have some sugar.
“One of the people we have highlighted is a certain Bryan Amery. He registered at the consulate in the normal way. He’s in his early thirties, was born in Leamington Spa but has spent time in London. According to such digging as we have been able to do—at this distance and while there is a war on—Amery is a precious-metals man. He works for a small firm with headquarters in Hatton Garden and his job is to keep his ear to the ground in Zurich and give his masters back home advice on when to buy and when to sell gold, silver, platinum, and copper. We haven’t actually faced him with this, you understand. This is all research on our part, back home.”
“But you doubt that gold and silver are his real job?”
“We don’t know. He has a small office here, in the Thuringstrasse, but we haven’t been able to get in there yet. He has a suite at the Bar au Lac, the best hotel in town, overlooking the lake, and although we’ve taken a look, the entire suite is almost document-free. No use to us at all.” He drained his cup and laid it on the desk in front of him.
“So what makes him suspicious?”
Greg made a face. “He meets a lot of people. Usually in cafés where they speak only in German. We have followed these individuals
after the meetings and, although a lot of them are perfectly innocent Swiss, a handful of them—more than a handful, in fact—are Germans who are representatives of companies that are like Hood-Frankel. That is to say, Anglo-German firms that, before the war, were one and the same company or very close business partners.”
Greg stood up and arched his back. “My spine seizes up if I don’t do something like this,” he muttered.
“It had crossed my mind,” he continued, “that something very like what you say is happening with Hood is happening with these other companies. Why should this sort of deal be confined to just one outfit? If Hood has only three ships and makes, as you suggest, only around nine deliveries a year to the Germans, it would be expensive to keep Amery at the Bar au Lac full-time.”
He stretched his back again.
“But, and this could be a big ‘but,’ maybe that’s only part of the picture. Germany, we know, is short of raw materials. Say a handful of treacherous British firms are willing to profiteer from this state of affairs. That could mean that Amery uses his front to collect money on behalf of—what, half a dozen? a dozen? a score? of companies, taking a hefty commission along the way.”
I was shocked by what Gaimster said. It simply hadn’t occurred to me, as it should have done, that other firms than Hood could be acting in this way. “So why haven’t you picked him up?”
“Three reasons, all of them good ones. First, we can never get close enough to overhear the conversations, so we can’t be sure what the meetings are in truth about. Second, we have never observed any money being handed over. Occasionally they shake hands but never anything more. No one swaps bags or anything obvious like that. And third, we don’t have any authority to pick him up. If we denounced him to the Swiss police, they would ask for evidence—evidence we don’t have.”
He sat back in his chair and laid both hands, palms down, on the desk in front of him. “If we ever
do
prove that Amery is trading with the enemy, or collecting the cash on others’ behalf, if we can be certain of our ground, there’s only one thing we can do. Very quietly, and very discreetly, and totally tidily, we have to kill him.”
He let this sink in. “So, you can see, we need to be sure. Your evidence may help. If, in the next few days, he meets someone from Frankel, it will be very powerful evidence that what we suspect to be happening actually
is
happening.”
He glanced again at his watch. “Come on. Amery usually has a prelunch cocktail at the Café Odeon. We’ll stroll down there and you can take a look. Size up our man.”
The Café Odeon, the famous home of Dada. I couldn’t believe it. My very first full day in Switzerland and I was on my way there.
As we went, I asked a question that had been bothering me. “Greg, why don’t the Germans just pay Amery direct into his bank account? Bank to bank.”
“Too dangerous. One, there would be a paper trail, and two, the Swiss would hate it. They would see it as an abuse of their neutrality and they would close the whole thing down.”
There was something else, too. “What does Amery look like? His name rings a bell.”
Greg shot me a sideways look. “Really? He’s small, shiny black hair, mustache, sideburns too long. Always wears a turtleneck pullover.”
I shook my head. That description didn’t ring any bells at all.
“If there’s even a slight chance you know him, Montgomery, we don’t want him seeing you. We’ll sit right at the back of the café.”
What a difference it was to be in Switzerland, after Britain and France. There was nothing drab about Zurich; it was throbbing with life. Looking around, you could see flowers, people sitting at cafés, eating ice cream and fruit; there were no soldiers framing every view;
the faces of passersby did not look weary. I had forgotten what peace was like.
The Café Odeon, when we came to it, was large, busy, with a polished wooden façade and bright red-and-yellow umbrellas outside. The waiters were dressed head to toe in black, with long black aprons that stopped just above their shoes.
We found a small table inside, right next to a pillar, behind which I could hide if I needed to. On the table, besides salt and pepper and an ashtray, was a small jug with fresh milk. Greg ordered beers and went to fetch two newspapers that were hanging on a contraption by the entrance, each with a wooden pole down its spine.
“How’s your German?” said Greg, in German.
“Ich bin zweísprachíg,”
I said in reply. “I’m bilingual.”
“I think we should talk in German from now on,” he said, sticking in the same language. “It will attract less attention.”
“Sehr gut,” I
said softly. “Very well.”
I leafed through the paper. The king had just returned to London after a ten-day visit to the front lines in France. Back home they were experimenting with air-raid sirens—until then the warnings had been sounded by whistle and the all-clear by bugle. The Americans had mobilized their National Guard.
But my eye kept straying to the lake. I have always loved lakes. For me they are more interesting than the sea—at least the open sea. I have never been able to understand the attraction of sailing. Being on a small boat, out at sea, with only the horizon for company is my idea of what the newfangled psychologists call sensory deprivation: nothing to feast the eyes on. With lakes, however, there is always something to watch: the far hills, yachts, the glitter of the waves—
“Here he is. On schedule. Amery’s here.”
I looked across in the same direction Greg was looking. A small man was pulling back a chair near a table at the edge of the pavement.
He was being helped by a
waiter
who clearly knew him and stood close. As a result, my view was partially obscured. The man sat down and looked up at the waiter as they conversed. At first all I could see was his neck and shoulders and I registered only that he had a large Adam’s apple, which jiggled when he spoke. He was obviously giving his order because as soon as they had finished the waiter moved away. At last I got a full view—and immediately ducked behind the pillar.