The Human Pool (15 page)

ZURICH

BY ANY CONSERVATIVE ESTIMATE
there were at least six of Mother's lovers at Willi Schmidt's birthday party. This was something I could hardly tell Hoover about when he began to refer to it.

During Hoover's recovery there is a growing recognition that both our lives have been governed by blanks and secrets kept from us. I wish nothing more than to be his guide yet am forced to keep my own counsel to protect Mother's reputation—particularly with regard to Willi Schmidt, and how that relates to Hoover.

Many of the connections Hoover seeks to make in his own life I know about. What to him is coincidence is to me a matter of affiliation. With his return, the past took on an extra and unwelcome significance, and I became increasingly compromised. Yet the attraction between us persists, however much in one respect I rue the day we first met. It was only because of him that I went through Mother's papers for the first time. Otherwise I suspect my tardiness, which I see now was a form of self-protection, would have continued.

However much I already knew, I was still shocked to the roots by the casual confessions of so much promiscuity. Mother, usually so correct in her language if not her morals, writes of ‘fucking' Allen Dulles. I was upset by this unloosening, and frustrated, too, because she avoided the real subject, which for me was Father.

Family seems to have meant very little to Mother, compared with her other world of intrigue, adventure, control and assignation. I read on with a sense of terrible discovery that left me with a dirty sexual itch, which frightened and compelled. When Hoover came back that first afternoon, I was surprised to identify my feelings towards him as close to lust. Sex with Hoover would be a negation of my mother, I decided in the dark corner of my mind. It was hard not to make a fool of myself with him since my life has been lived on emotional ice. My first husband's accusations of frigidity still cut deep. My second marriage aped my mother's, without her infidelities. My second husband and I live apart, an arrangement disguised by his constant travelling.

My subsequent reticence towards Hoover has been governed by duty. Power of attorney over Mother's affairs takes precedence over my emotions. Before she became too ill, Mother gave me a sealed letter to post if any element from the past announced itself. This, I presume, extends to Hoover.

Mother's papers are what she in that refined but racy East Coast voice of hers would have called dynamite. Her private correspondence with Allen Dulles reads like one long breach of security. There are dozens of letters and diaries and notebooks, too, some pornographic descriptions of lovers, and undated jottings on the stationery of different hotels. Also included are many secret government papers which should have been destroyed or returned and not left to lie around in the garage. Many deal with what I can only describe as boring spy stuff, a kind of intrigue that holds no interest for me, or so I told myself. But the sense of personal danger I get from reading them persists. I now see them as a form of time bomb, which was perhaps Mother's intention.

ZURICH, 1942

WILLI SCHMIDT'S BIRTHDAY PARTY
was attended by several hundred guests and held in the gardens of the German Embassy of all places. Willi was proud of having fixed that. He had called in a lot of favours. Even God had complied by providing a balmy evening, if not the Chinese lanterns, which made for a miraculous sense of intimacy not at all Germanic. For Willi the beauty of the place was that its diplomatic status meant that the Swiss couldn't complain about the noise. Later there would be an informal party, he told me, in a cellar club where they could play American jazz. German tolerance did not extend to that.

Willi introduced me to three other guests, including a comical-looking little man with carroty hair and gap teeth. Willi introduced him as Bandi Grosz, the smuggler king of Budapest. Bandi looked pleased with the description, more so than the others who were described by Willi as, ‘Herr Kleer, a German spy, and his friend Herr Busse.'

Bandi pointed at Busse and added, ‘
Big
German spy.'

Kleer said, in the tones of a man already very drunk though it was barely seven, that it was as well they were in Switzerland, otherwise they would have Bandi shot. Bandi looked at me and mouthed the word
Jude
.

He was being outrageous, I presumed.

Bandi was content to play the knockabout drunk, though not as drunk as Herren Busse and Kleer on that first evening. His patchwork of languages included English which remained incomprehensible. A Jew at the same party as Nazis, even if it were in a neutral country, was by 1942 the unlikeliest sight, and I assumed that he and his companions were playing a joke at the expense of their hosts for the evening, the German diplomatic corps.

How on earth did Willi manage to avoid the taint of compromise? I wonder now. By making sure that everyone got drunk and had an excellent time, I guess Dulles—should he have even been there?—and I bumped into each other in the gentlemen's lavatory and studiously ignored each other as we flanked a reeling man with a Nazi armband who stood pissing in drunken circles. Betty Monroe was at the heart of the party, working the ambassadorial set. I saw Karl-Heinz behind a haze of smoke, in what looked like erotic conversation with a feral woman in a pink silk shift. Given the array of dignitaries on show, I wondered if the party really was Willi's and if he hadn't managed to insert his own guests, somehow, into a larger diplomatic affair.

Bandi loudly informed me that he had agreed to work for the Nazis in exchange for his freedom. He had done this to avoid arrest by Hungarian customs after being caught supplying Austrian Jews with Hungarian papers and running gold in and out of Switzerland. What he called his survival kit included an impressively embossed document stamped by the Vatican (he said) and a letter from the director of Actio Catholica announcing his indispensable work for the Roman Catholic Church, to which he had converted. But his real hope of safety lay in the services he believed he could provide to all parties. Bandi's motto was that everyone ended up talking in the end. Even the Nazis and the Jews would talk in the end, impossible as that might seem.

Bandi Grosz went on to earn a few mentions in history books, which referred to him as a sleazy courier in Eichmann's and the Nazis' ‘trucks-for-Jews' ransom negotiations in the summer of 1944. This footnote has gained him a tiny, dubious immortality.

Kleer and Busse remained oblivious to Bandi's indiscretions the night of Willi's party. Kleer was on a drinking marathon, and Busse's priority was finding a woman. Busse had travelled down from Stuttgart, where he ran the bureau controlling espionage in Switzerland and Spain, Willi told me afterwards. When in Willi's jazz cellar Busse got what he wanted, I was surprised to note Willi's disapproval. I mistook it for Swiss puritanism, and only properly understood later when he told me that he regarded money for sex as an unnecessary transaction. Women were not to be paid for. It occurs to me now to ask if Willi's moral blind spot was rooted in money, in spite of his generosity, and whether his emotions remained controlled by a Calvinist thrift.

Willi remained ambivalent towards Bandi because Bandi was a sentimentalist and Willi was cool, and he didn't like being with people who weren't physically attractive. There was something else about Willi. For all his assurance and social front, he was keen to go out of his way to prove to me that he was serious and an operator. He flattered me, told me that he couldn't do what I had done. ‘It takes a special kind of nerve to go undercover,' he said more than once. I had given the matter little thought. I had never thought of myself as going or being undercover, because I had no idea of what I was under the cover of. I simply thought of my excursions as more or less dangerous journeys.

Willi's importuning was evident the day after his party, when he dragged me out of my hangover bed to watch him operating with Bandi Grosz. Bandi's ostensible task was arranging the purchase and delivery of food for Germany. Rice, cocoa, and chocolate were on his list. He was also trying to find out the names of Swiss transport firms dealing with the British, and the names of companies selling bomb fuses to the Allies. But his real purpose was to create tight relations with Willi. Bandi had smuggled platinum as a sweetener for Willi, who traded it on to an associate of Karl-Heinz at a good profit. Karl-Heinz's papers make a reference to the sale.

Bandi needed Willi for the Swiss end of his business. Swiss corruption was so institutionalised that an inside contact like Willi was essential. Bandi joked that in Switzerland his kind of work was done by bankers; also, the Swiss had fewer illusions than the Hungarians. Hungary was run by a man calling himself an admiral in a country that was as sealess as Switzerland.

I was about to make my first trip to Croatia in search of supplies for the Red Cross. My trip to Zurich for Willi's birthday parties—Willi: ‘Why have one party when you can have two?'—had been passed off as work. I had told Geneva I needed to attend another session with the Croatian legation, whose travel requirements were subject to constant revision.

Bandi warned me Croatia would be a waste of time, and advised me to ‘get my ass' over to Budapest, where he could help me locate produce and transportation. He implied that the Germans had a vested interest in Red Cross channels, too, so there would be no interference. He made the universal gesture for money, rubbing thumb against forefinger.

CROATIA, 1942

CLAUDE BUVIER WAS A BUSINESSMAN
. I once told Jackie Kennedy I had travelled to Croatia with a man called Buvier, a slightly different spelling to her maiden name. She hadn't been amused, and that was the full extent of my social contact with Jackie K (or Jackie O, for that matter). Buvier was what Dulles had in mind for me. It was Willi who had made the actual introduction some time before his birthday. Buvier needed a driver.

Buvier had had a long career as a wholesale buyer and shipper of provisions, and was recruited out of retirement on the recommendation of Willi, whose family were friends of the Buviers. Buvier's task was to acquire food and provisions for Red Cross relief. As the Red Cross ranked low in the list of wartime priorities, aid had to be scrounged. Transportation was poor, fuel hard to come by, communication unreliable. A rumour of a warehouse of maize would turn out to be several tons of bonemeal.

It wasn't until later, when Willi and Bandi Grosz became involved in Budapest, that any significant results were achieved, just as Bandi had predicted. Bandi and Willi knew whom to buy off and whom to bribe. There was a difference, I learned. They knew what would later become known as the Catch-22 of any given situation. Buvier was dead by then. He died, unnoticed by me, somewhere on a road in Slovenia, his polite expiry masked by the rattle and thump of the car. Guards at the Austrian border were curious to know why I was transporting a corpse, and when I told them I was unaware that I had been, they fell about laughing, held me for forty-eight hours while they did the paperwork, and knocked me about a bit as a matter of course.

That first trip with Buvier in late August 1942 involved an unreliable old Citroën which overheated. In spite of the summer weather he travelled in homburg and overcoat. He wore pince-nez glasses and had a politician's moustache, and his grey skin looked as if it had never seen outdoors. He was old and fussy, and dressed like a diplomat. His mild manner was, on acquaintance, unpromising.

Once past the Swiss border the white Citroën with its large red crosses attracted plenty of stares. We clipped the top of Italy and passed into Slovenia, where for long stretches we had the road to ourselves, apart from the occasional horse and cart. Once we were buzzed by a fighter plane, which forced us to pull over for the convoy it was escorting. As we travelled on we found ourselves in an old Ruritania, a summery landscape of heat haze and ripened crops, with few signs of military order apart from the occasional nineteenth-century barracks. Buvier regarded it all with equanimity: flat tires, the overheating engine, slow to nonexistent service in cafés, the ubiquitous tomato and cucumber salad (often all there was), and the way we were looked at as though we had stepped out of a novel by Jules Verne.

It wasn't until we reached a small town near Rijeka that he addressed his first personal remarks to me. There were many refugee camps in Hungary, he said, and in winter the temperature would drop into the minus thirties, and refugees would be without warm clothing. Most of his own business had been in Spain, where we could easily have found what was necessary to prepare the camps for the coming winter. Yet here we were, because of bureaucratic in-fighting, hunting chickpeas in Croatia. I barely knew what a chickpea was. Chickpeas were Muslim, Buvier informed me. The potato was Christian, and that's what we should have been looking for.

Buvier was a strict Roman Catholic, and he attended early morning mass. Sometimes I went with him, if only for the familiarity of the universal ritual and the bright feeling of stepping out of the gloom into sunshine. Buvier would stand on the steps and converse in Latin with the priests. Our promissory note for the chickpeas was to be guaranteed by the church, and to this end Buvier carried an important-looking letter of introduction to Dr Stepinac, cardinal of Zagreb, stamped with the Vatican seal (shades of Bandi Grosz).

In Zagreb, Buvier was entertained variously by the church, the local fascist puppet government, the Ustashi, and Nazi diplomats. The priests were everywhere, better dressed for the most part, focused by celibacy and unencumbered by meaningless familial and matrimonial duties, their sense of politics silky and insinuating. The power of the Holy Mass fed directly into that of the state. The doltish Ustashi was their blunt instrument.

The Nazis cultivated blandness and were friendliest towards me. Herr Veesenmayer, German plenipotentiary, with his gracious incline of the head, was a good listener, expert at small talk. ‘Aren't we having marvellous weather? Let me introduce you to my friend Wisliceny.' ‘Till we all meet again,' he had toasted on our first departure. And we would, with the exception of Buvier (R.I.P.), in Budapest in the summer of 1944. Wisliceny, big-boned and amiable, spoke of what he was doing in Zagreb: technical adviser. He showed his teeth when he laughed. He and Veesenmayer regretted being stuck in a provincial backwater and were happy to entertain visitors. ‘Chickpeas?' I remember Veesenmayer repeating with a raise of the eyebrows. They were men of clear-eyed ideology, at ease with the implications of what they were doing, who would resent the guilt imposed on them later.

We were also separately introduced to Father Draganovic, who talked airily of a policy of rapid conversion of Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism. I am ashamed to say I yawned at all these backyard politics, ignorant of the implications. I sympathised with Veesenmayer and the others' boredom.

We first met Draganovic at an evening recital of local music and poetry. There was a children's choir and a lot of native doggerel, presided over by a room full of badly uniformed men who laughed and smiled and pinched the children's cheeks and clinked glasses.

Draganovic's kingdom might have been of the next world, but he was thoroughly adept at negotiating his way through this one. In private he touched one's arm to make a point, the point being that he was there ‘for all to talk to'. I was twenty-three at the time. Through men like him I came to see that the ways of the world were unfathomable. He was forced to spell things out for me, insofar as a man of his circumspection was willing. The church would act as intermediary for people otherwise unable to talk, he told me. He hinted that the Allies and the Nazis should find ways of opening a dialogue about everyone's next problem, Communism, which was the real enemy. Placed where it was, Croatia was especially vulnerable, and the Catholic Church had been in the front line of the fight against the heathen for centuries. I told him I would pass on his thoughts.

‘To Mr Dulles only,' he warned me. Dulles's name came as a surprise. I realised I had a lot to learn.

 

That afternoon I was arrested by the Ustashi. A lieutenant interviewed me in atrocious French about currency irregularities. The man was drunk enough to be dangerous. At one point he opened his desk drawer and threw something on the table. It wasn't until he tugged my ear and pointed to the bayonet in his belt that I realised what it was, at which point we were interrupted by an SS officer who marched in and shouted the lieutenant out of the room. Then I decided I really
was
in trouble.

Only when he took off his cap, after milking his dramatic entrance and its effect on me, did I recognise him. I had not seen Karl-Heinz in uniform before. He made fun of my surprise as he sat down and casually put his immaculate boots on the table. He offered me a Balkan Sobranie cigarette. They were a present from Father Draganovic, he said. Of my obvious confusion over how much he was supposed to know, he remarked, ‘You wouldn't be in Zagreb if it weren't for me!'

Karl-Heinz was all knowing smiles. ‘I think you may find that Father Draganovic will turn out to be a friend to all of us yet'. And he was right: at the end of the war Draganovic was active in the Vatican in assisting the safe passage of many of Karl-Heinz's colleagues out of Europe.

Karl-Heinz also proved well acquainted with my chickpeas. Unfortunately, they had been reassigned, he said. When pressed he sounded tetchy. ‘Anti-guerrilla Muslim forces, if you must know.' I told him what Buvier had said about chickpeas.

He assured me that my trip would not be wasted. Produce would be made available to us, and the matter was being given priority. Father Draganovic had issued a statement saying that charitable donations to the needy would lead to considerable dispensations in the next world. Herr Veesenmayer, an economist as well as a diplomat, was studying the problem.

Thus I got my first inkling that co-operation over aid was one way of facilitating this other secret alliance Draganovic was servicing.

Our meeting lasted as long as it took to chain-smoke three Balkan Sobranies. Karl-Heinz stubbed out the third, looked at his watch, stood, clicked his heels ironically, gave me a lackadaisical ‘Heil Hitler,' and was gone, leaving me to work out that my arrest had been for the sole purpose of allowing us to speak in private. Again I realised I had a lot to learn.

 

Buvier was doing some spying of his own, and being less than discreet about it, as I learned when I went through his belongings. After telling myself that such precautions were necessary. His copy of the
International Christian Press,
published that March in Geneva, contained a report, which Buvier had underscored in ink, noting the extent of persecution of Orthodox Serbs in Croatia. As Father Draganovic had indicated, his aim was to turn the country into a full Catholic state by 1952, and to that end Orthodox churches had been seized and their priests assassinated. Several hundred thousand Serbs had already been killed. The persecution was endorsed by the archbishop of Sarajevo, whose sermons asserted that the struggle against evil should not be carried on ‘in a noble manner and with gloves'. Cardinal Stepinac personally approved the efforts of the Ustashi, whose policies were succinctly summarised by its leader's remark that ‘blood will be shed and heads will roll'. The Germans, still finessing their own policies, watched with interest.

It was hard telling Buvier that I had been snooping among his possessions. My excuse was that I had been detained by the Ustashi, and, as I was responsible for his safety, it was my business to make sure he was not carrying anything that might compromise him. I could see he thought less of me, but he agreed to destroy the article. ‘I no longer understand the world,' he said.

Dry old Buvier. There were few I misread more than him. He was one of only a handful of men I have met who possessed real courage.

We made several trips to Zagreb over the next months as the aid supply line was set up. Veesenmayer, who was, as he put it, ‘always popping in and out of Zagreb', was helpful when it came to scrounging rolling stock and train schedules from the Croatian railways. Veesenmayer was a schedule fanatic. He was making a scientific study of train timetables, he told me. Like Draganovic, Veesenmayer developed the habit of taking me solicitously by the arm when we talked, which I came to interpret as a sign of my necessary compromise. I was not altogether naive, though it wasn't until Budapest that the exact nature of his work became apparent.

In Zagreb, Veesenmayer used Red Cross wagons for the transportation of crates of his own, marked
fragile.
We reached an agreement that they would be unloaded en route. Later, in Budapest, Karl-Heinz told me they had contained paintings. Veesenmayer was acting as intermediary between Hitler himself and his art adviser, who lived in Zagreb of all places. The crates were always accompanied by three armed Germans dressed as civilians who reminded me of those in Dakar, poorly disguised spies.

When I reported back to Willi, he quizzed me most about Buvier. I stuck up for Buvier, and it was only after his death that Willi showed me one of Buvier's secret accounts of Ustashi atrocities. How it had come to be in his possession Willi never said. He wanted to know if I had ever met Pavelic, the Ustashi leader, who was in the habit of displaying baskets of plucked eyes to diplomatic guests. Even Willi, who liked to make a point of being worldly if not cynical, wondered at that.

In fact, the Nazis were not as unflustered as they made out. Karl-Heinz's papers contained the following undated note: ‘Germans prefer their atrocity cool. It should be more systematic, with steps taken to disguise each stage, especially from the victims. German anti-partisan activities, as they are called, are fine for summer sport, but the psychological toll is incalculable. The process needs to be more technical—more of a business—especially now that the Reichsführer has been a (shaky) witness to the more direct method. Always sensitive to the pressure it puts on the men, he is determined to find a more orderly way, controlled by regulation and office, and suited to the talents of administrators.'

I kept the existence of Veesenmayer's crates secret from Buvier. It was hard for him to accept that the help and aid we were being offered were rigged. It saddened him even more when we returned to Geneva with a potential supply line and were hailed in triumph. After a particularly fulsome set of congratulations, Buvier's eyes watered, and everyone looked away, thinking he had been overcome by embarrassment, a quality not usually attributed to him.