The Human Pool (10 page)

ZURICH, BRUSSELS, 1942

IT WAS WILLI SCHMIDT,
and not Betty Monroe, who turned up to greet my arrival in Switzerland, with Betty's apologies, and not for the last time. He collected me from the airport and took me to the commercial hotel where I would be staying. We drank a coffee and a beer together. I can't remember if he told me his name. He was very tall and smooth-skinned. His fair hair was worn flat in an effort to look older—he told me so. He kept a silver comb in his top pocket. With hindsight Willi reminds me of the rich young men who hung around and drove for the Red Cross in Budapest a couple of years later because it gave them a petrol allowance for their private cars.

Betty I finally met when she interviewed me, more or less formally, in an office above a Zurich florist (funerals a speciality). Betty was in her thirties then but she had the confidence of someone older. Men fought to be in her orbit. She made a great show of letting them know if they were in or out of favour. Betty's smile, when it came, was worth waiting for.

I did a couple of runs for her to Lyon, throwing up from nerves in the train toilet most of each way. I met Willi Schmidt again, in April 1942, on her recommendation. She vouched for us as a way of guaranteeing both sides. ‘There's someone I want you to meet. Swiss but charming, and useful.' I was surprised when it turned out to be Willi. We laughed about it.

•   •   •

Willi was attractive company. He had the knack of making you want to be his friend, gave the impression that knowing him could prove useful and amusing, as Betty had promised. Women were drawn by his thoroughbred ease, with its hint of something darker and more controlling. Willi had a temper which he kept on a tight rein, though he was susceptible to showing it in places with poor service. Willi insisted on the best restaurants.

He liked to speak English because he wanted to live in America, and boasted the best collection of jazz records in the country. Willi could dance, which made him popular.

Willi made out that I entertained him.

But Willi had his down days. He confided that he was frustrated. He derided Switzerland's neutrality. He hinted that he was involved in secret work. I dismissed him for a playboy, while envying his ability to loaf around, to drink and not feel the effects, and his easy manner. By comparison, I felt out of step and restless. The desert had stripped me of my ability to feel comfortable among people, never marked in the first place. So when he leaned forward and asked confidentially how I felt about making a trip back to Belgium, I shrugged and said, ‘Why not?'

The job he had for me was working for the family firm. I took his offer at face value, until I saw that my papers would show me as a local representative of Brevecourt's Lisbon office. The irony was not lost on me: Betty Monroe's hand. There were itineraries, meetings and appointments, an official diary. There were tickets and permits showing travel between Lisbon and Brussels and Brussels and Zurich, and books of leather samples. I learned the basics of Willi's trade.

It was during this preparatory period that Willi invited me to join him for dinner. He was seeing someone it would be interesting for me to meet.

Our dinner partner was German, dressed in an exquisitely tailored flannel suit. He was upper class in manner, aristocratic even, a little older than Willi. I assumed from his smooth manner he was a diplomat. I felt gauche and scruffy by comparison. In spite of my travels, I was not sophisticated. The worldly nonchalance I affected fooled no one. Karl-Heinz was civilised and ironic, and when, after too many glasses of wine, I learned he was an SS officer and asked if he was a devout Nazi, he smiled and said that he was off duty and in a neutral country. Willi added: ‘Karl-Heinz is a gentlemen, and gentlemen are never fanatics.'

I was distracted by Willi in the same way that I had been by Betty, by her imperiousness and her sharpness, and the way she patronised with her assumption that you knew as much as she did, while making it plain that she was indulging you, knowing perfectly well you didn't. Willi's only false note: the occasional use of the silver comb in smart public spaces.

 

My arrest in Brussels in July 1942 replayed itself for years afterwards in the form of a dream. Always the same dream: being taken from a dark space, escorted by an armed guard. The dark space was the cellar of a large public building, revealed to be a smart hotel. It was wartime, but the hotel's guests seemed not to know. None paid us any attention as we marched up the central staircase with its faded expensive Persian carpet. As we made our way down a long, empty corridor, an alarm bell rang, and the corridor filled with people running the other way. Often in the dream I was aware of this detail being wrong: the actual hotel had been requisitioned, and there were no civilian guests. The guard shoved me through a door into a linen room and locked me in. Down in the courtyard the guests were shot as they ran out of the building, but the linen-room window was open.

The source of this dream was my third trip to Brussels for Willi. The previous two had been unremarkable, banal even, except for the state of my nerves. I learned with painful slowness that survival depended upon a lack of imagination. I learned to walk with my head down—I have little memory of the sky and weather in wartime, until the spring of 1945. The point wasn't what you knew, it was what you didn't know. I learned to look for the warning detail—a countermovement in a crowd, a sudden crossing of the street, a car reversing—anything that might signal something unexpected. On the first trip I handed an envelope under the table in a station café to a man wearing spectacles which had been repaired at the bridge with tape. The second trip, I left a small wrapped package in a waste bin in a park. I assumed Willi was using me to make contact with the Belgian resistance.

On the third occasion I was picked up at the station, just as I was about to depart. Two men in plain clothes asked to see my papers. The second man was armed. Everyone avoided looking at us as I was led away.

My interrogator was an SS officer, who told me he was based in Paris, with a roaming brief. His favoured method of questioning involved strip searches and lit matches, a practice that he hoped he would not have to extend to me. He gestured towards the bathroom of his suite to indicate that it was in there that these sessions took place.

The tall curtains were always drawn. He smoked incessantly, black tobacco which clogged up the room. I let him see I was scared while trying to hide from myself how scared. I'd had no training to withstand questioning.

Over the next days he grew more familiar. He told me his name was Jaretski and he worked for the DSK, a department of the SS whose purpose was currency control. He was frank about how it worked. Local civilian agents set up illegal sales to entrap anyone attempting transfers of liquid assets. These agents worked to a ten-percent commission. Jaretski gave me a worldly man-to-man look.

He wanted to know if I knew anything of such operations or whether I had been approached by anyone seeking to take advantage of my commercial position to move money around. He believed I was involved in transferring gold to Switzerland. Of course not, I said. My business was leather.

‘Yes, I know,' said Jaretski. He had a habit of sitting back in his chair which made it hard to see his face in the deliberately underlit room. He turned out to be so well informed about me that I remember thinking: Who told him? I began to suspect that my arrest had not been a coincidence. Jaretski was much exercised by the fact that a Jewish family, which had previously been in the leather business and traded with Brevecourt, was attempting to move money out of the country and escape to Switzerland. Jaretski wanted to know if I had ever met them.

I told myself that he was fishing. He was acting on partial information, didn't have names. But Jaretski's urbane manner was not reassuring. I suspected it wouldn't be long before we moved into the bathroom.

I escaped as in my dream—fire alarm; linen room—except I was taken by lift rather than the stairs, and there were no guests. The window was open, and I clambered along the roof and down the back stairs of another building and walked out onto the rain-swept street, minus papers, money, or a hat. The only contingency plan was a memorised address in a suburb.

This turned out to be a big detached house in a prosperous district about an hour's walk away. It had a tradesman's side entrance, which I used. A nervous old woman answered, then a man came. He was stocky, with a fine head of leonine hair, about fifty and careworn, with deep furrows down the side of his mouth. The old cardigan he had on must have been expensive in its day. He left me in the kitchen, then went away, and the woman returned and showed me a room in the servants' quarters, which hadn't been used for a long time. She was dressed in widow's black and behaved like a maid, but I thought she and the man were related. At one point I heard their raised voices.

Nobody came to fetch me, and the rest of the day passed into a strange convalescence. The lower windows were frosted. By standing on the chair it was possible to see a large walled garden with a green pond and a tall poplar beyond. The flower beds were untended and the lawn neglected. It stopped raining, and two young boys in overcoats came out and stood by the pond and threw stones which separated the green surface scum, showing black water beneath.

Eventually the man came in and handed me an envelope, leaving again before I could open it. Inside was money and a name and a commercial address in central Brussels. I let myself out.

I decided that the man with the leonine hair was the man Jaretski had questioned me about.

The episode had been like a dream-play where you knew nobody else's lines. The impression was reinforced by several days of hiding in the attic above the commercial address, again in a more or less mute relationship with the middle-aged woman who appeared to be the only person in the office. When I was given a cardboard box, I found it contained my papers and even my hat, but not my money.

 

Willi reacted to my escape with his usual panache. He threw a party. He had a gift for finding out-of-the-way places where noise wasn't a problem. Jazz records, free drink, plenty of women, and a liberal mix of Swiss, Germans, and Americans, along with a few suspicious-looking Irishmen rumoured to be IRA gun runners. Willi set me up with a plump, easygoing brunette who performed expert fellatio in the room being used for guests' coats, which had the advantage of a lock. She was a bank teller and up for a good time. The American presence in Switzerland had helped promote pockets of hedonism, and Marthe was a willing subscriber.

The surprise of the party was the reappearance of Karl-Heinz, mysteriously there and well informed. He had been told of my arrest, and knew of Jaretski; he described the DSK as a complete racket and a looting machine. The Germans were always strapped for cash and endlessly thinking up money-making schemes, he said, which was why they sucked up to the Swiss so much. The DSK gave the SS a bad name, and he reckoned I was lucky to have got away. I should have read more into his look, but I was wondering at the wisdom of Willi telling an SS officer so much about what I was doing.

When I confronted Willi, I was angry and drunk, and for the second time that evening ended up in the coat room with the door locked. Willi told me to relax. My secrets were safer with Karl-Heinz than half the Americans or Swiss he could think to name. Karl-Heinz needed me, Willi said. The Obersturmbahnführer wanted me to run an errand for him.

‘Karl-Heinz wants you to deliver a message to Allen Dulles.'

I had trouble making sense of what Willi was saying. I didn't know Dulles then, and I couldn't see why Karl-Heinz should want to contact him. ‘They are enemies,' I kept repeating. The darting moves made by everybody at the party, including Marthe, confused me. Jaretski's confinement had seemed straightforward by comparison.

 

In retrospect, I wonder what if the open linen room window had
not
been an accident, the fire alarm likewise? There had been no pursuit. Perhaps I had a guardian angel. Jaretski was SS. Karl-Heinz was SS. If Karl-Heinz had an interest in what I was doing, he would have found it easy to trace me once it was known I was missing. What did he tell Jaretski? That I was a penetrative SS agent and must be allowed to escape without jeopardising my cover? And there was Jaretski's line of questioning about the money transactions. Had he been trying to muscle in on connections of which he was vaguely aware and I was completely ignorant? Had he and Karl-Heinz done a deal over me? Had Jaretski managed to cut in on whatever Karl-Heinz and Willi had been up to?

Looking back, there seems to have been some kind of progression to the sequence. Betty Monroe hired me and subcontracted me to Willi Schmidt, who introduced me to Karl-Heinz and made me the link between Karl-Heinz and Allen Dulles, which took us back to Betty Monroe, who was Dulles's confidante. The more I thought about it, the more I puzzled about Karl-Heinz's role, especially after remembering that my arrest was bookended by my first two meetings with him, both at the instigation of Willi Schmidt.

Nor could I get Frau Schmidt's reason for Willi marrying her out of my head. She was Jewish. Had I read Willi wrong all these years? Maybe even in Budapest when it was rumoured he was working for the Nazis, had that been part of a greater deception? I was left wondering if something much more complicated was going on than I had realised.