Gray Zurich, solemn as church, lay under the storm that had blown north from the mountains in the morning, picking up the damp winds from the Zürichsee south of the city. Bitter snow howled against the great clock tower of St. Peter’s on the half-frozen Limmat River, which straggled north through the heart of the old town. Blue streetcars in tandem came grinding around the Bahnhofplatz in front of the central train station, the Hauptbahnhof, and turned down the mall-like Bahnhofstrasse that paralleled the river and descended three-quarters of a mile down to the frozen harbor of the Zürichsee.
The rich shop windows along the Bahnhofstrasse displayed Swiss watches and jewels and furs and leather goods; the windows were warm with lights, strung like jewels in the half-light of the stormy morning. Along the mall, the Zurichers strolled as though it might be summer, considering this window and that, this trinket and that, their faces bloated and gray, their eyes watering in the wind, their thick bodies wrapped in heavy wool against the cold. Few bent their heads to the heel of the wind.
No winter intruded inside the elegant, old-fashioned first-class-passenger restaurant on the east side of the Hauptbahnhof. Beyond the dining room, the train station concourse was bustling and gay with travelers and shoppers emerging from the underground shopping center beneath the Bahnhofplatz. The electrified Swiss trains pulled in and out of the station with the precision of Japanese clockworks. All was as it had been, and it had always been as it was: Five hundred years of peace, centuries of smug old-fashioned liberalism that saw the city provide sanctuary for capitalist and communist, conspired to make it seem that the ancient city was not so much a work of man as a monument of God’s.
This was a sentiment that Felix Krueger had thought to share from time to time with those who were not as awed by Zurich as he was. But then perhaps they would not understand that Felix Krueger meant no blasphemy.
It was nine minutes to twelve by the clocks of the train station (which were always exact) and nine minutes to twelve by the hands of the glittering gold Rolex strapped by golden bands to Felix Krueger’s freckled left wrist.
Felix Krueger, as massive and peaceful beneath the storm as the city, sat in his accustomed booth in the balcony above the first-class dining room and contemplated his plate of sausages and potatoes. Though the balcony was intended merely as a small cocktail lounge, an exception had long been made for Herr Felix Krueger. He was a man accustomed to acts of exception.
The thick-waisted waitress poured him a second glass of Züricher Löwenbräu beer—he had consumed the first waiting for the meal—and he took a sip of the amber beverage a moment before tasting the food. He was a man of slow, deliberate actions, savoring the moments of his life as though each were prized equally.
Felix Krueger was not a fat man but was heavy in the German-Swiss way. His body was large, his shoulders rounded and powerful, his belly slightly gone to paunch. His eyebrows were reddish brown and thick, his cheeks were heavy without being jowly. His small calm eyes were as blue as the Zürichsee in summer. He had very small hands for a large man and very small ears for such a large face. He combed the remains of his reddish brown hair flat and straight back from his long forehead, resigning himself proudly to approaching baldness. In winter and summer he was pale in appearance, despite a robust presence, and the dark blue suit he usually wore emphasized the fragile coloring of his skin. Freckles on the bridge of his nose attested to the fact that he sunburned too easily.
Felix Krueger picked up his knife and fork and cut carefully into the thick, blood-red sausage on his plate and pushed a piece into a puddle of horseradish at the side of the potatoes; slowly, a priest making offering, he raised the sausage to his thick, liverish lips and swallowed it.
Though he was a deliberate man in all things, he was more deliberate this morning because he was quite aware that his actions were being observed by a man he knew very well. They always played this game and Krueger never tired of it.
The Soviet courier was watching him. The Soviet courier always waited before the meeting. Who would follow him, Felix Krueger, in his own city, in his own country? So Krueger had laughed once at Rimsky. But Rimsky had no humor. None of them did.
Rimsky wore a dark leather coat trimmed with fox fur at the collar and a felt hat that emphasized his winter-red ears and ferret eyes. He had been sitting alone at a table in the first-class dining room since eleven thirty. No one had followed Herr Krueger, Rimsky had decided. Now he trudged up the stairs to the balcony and went to the booth and sat down across from the large reddish-haired man.
“There are fourteen this time, Herr Krueger,” Rimsky began in precise, accented German.
“Not good morning or good afternoon? No amenities, no civilities?” Herr Felix Krueger paused with a bit of sausage on his fork, his knife held in his right hand like a weapon, his blue eyes twinkling.
“Meetings should be brief in public places,” Rimsky said. He pulled a small white envelope from the recesses of his leather coat and handed it across the table. He expected Krueger to take it. But Krueger popped the bit of sausage in his mouth and showed no inclination to drop knife or fork from his hands.
“Guten Morgen, Herr Rimsky,” Felix Krueger said elaborately, smiling broadly, his teeth still moving to tear apart the sausage as he spoke.
Rimsky could not frown any deeper than the perpetual frown he wore for these meetings. He would not be made a fool by this man. “They are all from Poland this time.”
Krueger chewed for a moment, swallowed, and then sighed. He put down the knife and fork and reached for the white envelope. “A mixed bag?”
“Nine men, five women.”
“The usual terms?”
“Three years for the men, two for the women. Three are teachers. The women, I mean.”
“Teachers do not frighten me,” Krueger said. “The greater their intelligence, the easier to explain the situation to them.”
“You mean to intimidate them.”
Krueger was surprised; his eyes widened; he smiled. “Yes. That’s one way to put it, Herr Rimsky. They see all the possibilities and realize they have no choice. The more intelligent they are, the more docile they become. The stupid ones, they can be problems. Like animals, some of them. The ferret, trapped, fights knowing it must die but knowing it must fight to death as well.”
“You won’t have problems with these. They were carefully screened.”
“Yes.” He weighed the envelope in one beefy hand. He slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit coat.
“You don’t want to examine the list?”
“You can tell me what I need to know,” Krueger said.
“One of them is Wanda Wyczniewski. Only twenty-one.”
“A teacher.”
“Yes.”
“A husband? Child?”
“No. Unmarried.”
Felix Krueger smiled. “Are you bringing me a virgin?”
Rimsky did not speak for a moment.
“A joke, Herr Rimsky.”
“I see.”
“You are so serious about this business. You never see the aspects of it that are… ludicrous.”
“Do you think it is a joke?”
For the first time, Felix Krueger frowned. Rimsky was a dull man. A man without perceptions, without humor, without horizons. He saw so little. It made him a good workhorse, Krueger presumed, but a dull table companion. Krueger picked up his knife and fork and cut into a small boiled potato.
Because Krueger did not speak, Rimsky felt his rebuke had hit solidly. He went on: “Her father is forty-two, he was a professor at Warsaw University, he was disgraced. She wants to take him out of Poland. She will trade two years of her life for that. Frankly, the Polish government wants to be rid of her father more than she. He was one of the intellectual apologists for Solidarity.”
“The father could be exported without—”
“He won’t leave. The daughter understands. She will become… what would you say? Hostage. She will be hostage to us to force her father to leave. For his own sake.”
“Interesting. There are so many motivations for them to… accept your conditions. I am fascinated by the variety of thought processes. Aren’t you, Herr Rimsky?”
“No,” Rimsky said honestly.
“No. I suppose not. You are as docile as a horse, do you know that?”
Rimsky frowned.
“A horse such as they had when I was a child, to plow the same row on the same mountain terrace spring after spring, without understanding anything of what he is part of, save that it is ritual.”
“Are you speaking of philosophy now?”
Felix Krueger sighed again, massively, at the stupidity around him. “They are numbers to you, Rimsky, more than they are to me.”
“You give them the numbers.”
“Yes. And the guarantees without which this arrangement could not work for you. For your masters. I am the honest broker in this but you think I am interested only in numbers.”
“Yes,” Rimsky said. “The numbers in your accounts; the numbers in your bankbook.”
“Numbers are order, Rimsky. I am a man of order. But don’t suppose an accountant has no soul because he lives in a world of numbers.”
“Capital,” said Rimsky. “It is numbers because capitalism is a cold thing.”
Felix Krueger had been in a good mood all morning. He had taken the funicular down to the square in front of the central train station. He had browsed among the shops beneath the Bahnhofplatz. He had even shared a glass of beer and a colorful story with the old drunks who stood around the beer bar on the train station concourse. He had felt the good feeling of approaching winter in his good gray native city and now the good feeling had trickled away with the dull, stupidly certain pronouncements of the Soviet courier. It was being replaced by irritation bordering on anger.
“No, Herr Rimsky.” Slowly, as precisely as if he were chewing a sausage. “Capitalism is like an Italian church, all murals and candles and statues of the saints, marble arches and gargoyles in the ceiling. That is capital; that is capitalism. For you, for what you are, all is gray, the same, dull, each day folding into each day to come like a box collapsing itself into another box. Without my numbers, there is no order to things. But I do not worship numbers; you do. Order is the end to people like you; it is only my means.”
Rimsky blinked, still frowning.
Krueger put down his fork and knife. The courier did not understand. He would never understand. Not the complexities of someone like this Wanda what-ever-her-name-was, using her freedom to make someone she loved do something he did not want to do. Slavery to slavery, all for love. He longed to point out the absurdity of it but a man as narrow as Rimsky would never understand.
So. Business. “The papers are in order,” Krueger said.
“As usual.”
“Here is a receipt.” Krueger removed a slip of paper from his pocket, wrote in a number, and signed it. “When does the shipment arrive?”
“In two weeks.”
“The train from Vienna?”
“Yes.”
“I will be the host for the lunch, as always. Is the schoolteacher very pretty?”
“Do you want to learn something?” Rimsky said coldly.
“I do not involve myself.” Irritation flamed the back of his thick neck. “I observe, I am interested.”
“I did not intend to insult you.”
“Yes, I think you did.”
A moment of silence. Then Rimsky said, “In six days, we want you to survey a group in Prague. A really large shipment. Thirty in the group.”
“It will make it difficult to get back by the twenty-eighth—”
“We can arrange for you to fly back from Prague.”
It was intolerable. Felix Krueger permitted emotion to play on his heavy features for the first time. His small, calm eyes became agitated; his left hand began to tremble. Of course Rimsky had meant it, meant to mock him.
“I do not fly in airplanes, Herr Rimsky,” Felix Krueger said slowly in a warning voice. “You know that.”
“I forgot, I apologize, Herr—”
“No. You do not apologize to me. I told you…” He seemed to choke on his words. “I do not want mention of this matter again and you mention it again. I do not wish to do business with you again.”
Rimsky paled.
“You tell your control that he must send another courier. Another who is not…” Again, he made a choking noise. He thought of the airplane, the walls pressed in, strapped to his seat, the plane banking into clouds, fleeing earth, toy mountains below, the peculiar sickening smell of oxygen blowing dryly into the cabin, climbing through clouds, winds banging against the plane, this way and that, the warning lights flicking on overhead…
His face was covered with sudden sweat. He stared through Rimsky, seeing only his own vision, unable to step out of the horror his mind conjured.
“No offense, I meant no offense, I apologize,” Rimsky was saying, the voice finally penetrating.
Felix Krueger blinked, the vision left him, his hands were trembling against the white tablecloth.
“You have spoiled my sausages,” Krueger said, heavy as a church bell tolling.
Absurd. But Rimsky was more shaken than the large man in the opposite booth. Krueger was important to the Committee for State Security, more important than Rimsky; Krueger’s demands were always small and businesslike; there was no reason to offend him. Control would not be pleased with Rimsky. There were worse assignments than this. Yet something in the superior manner of the fat Swiss always offended Rimsky and forced him to the edge of cruelty in dealing with him. Now he had gone too far.
“Herr Krueger. If it is possible for me to apologize. I could speak to my control, I could arrange for this woman who interests you…”
“You are a fool, Rimsky. I spoke to you of her merely to see her more clearly. If I were as limited as you, she would be a number. I would transport her from column A to column B and think nothing about her. Once in a while, I wish to see what these creatures are, to see if they are flesh and blood. It is curiosity, a quality of intellect you do not share because your intellect is so blunted by your stupidity.” The words goose-stepped over Rimsky’s self-esteem. The smaller man shook with concealed rage; but it remained concealed.
“You may pay for my lunch. I will be in Prague in six days.”
“Again, I apologize—”
Perhaps I will accept it,” said Felix Krueger, wiping his thick lips with the linen napkin and dropping it on the plate of congealed grease and sausage and potato remains. “These fourteen—” He tapped his breast pocket. “Is there one for Paris, a replacement for the Pole who was deported?”
“Yes.”
“Then isolate him from the others at the lunch. My remarks are for those going to the United States. I will speak privately with this other one. What about Gemp?”
Gemp had been placed in a Paris cell three months before, working at the Institut Pasteur as a maintenance man. He had foolishly allowed himself to be taunted into a fight with two Portuguese in a brasserie on the Quai Voltaire one night, with the result that all three had been arrested by the Paris police and deported after a hearing. The time spent in preparing Gemp for his assignment at the Institut Pasteur had been wasted; now a new man was ready to fill the spot.
“Gemp? I don’t know. He was taken care of, I suppose.”
“You are still accountable for him. The replacement will cost you full value.”
“We understand the terms, Herr Krueger,” Rimsky said.
“So the manifest for the twenty-eighth is fourteen full-cargo charges? Agreed?”
Rimsky nodded.
Business as usual. Gemp or Wanda Wyczniewski or any of the others were shipments—precious shipments to be sure, marked Handle with Care and Fragile, but shipments of goods nonetheless. Felix Krueger was a businessman in Zurich, an accountant and sometime banker and guarantor of insurance policies; he was a shrewd man of shrewd bargains with an eye for details whose books were always in balance. He dealt honestly; even the human cargo he dealt in had to admit to that. Someone who did not understand his business might think he bought and sold human beings on a perpetual international market that showed no signs of abating; Felix Krueger would have explained that a man who provides a service that benefits all, even those in temporary disadvantage, is merely a good man of business.
Felix Krueger was not a monster. Not in his own eyes. He had an aged father in Bern whom he visited every other Sunday and to whom he showed honor and respect; he had never married but he had enjoyed the company of beautiful women and was a witty and sometimes charming companion to them. He was a middle-aged man of vigorous health with middle-age mores and middle-age values. He was not a monster at all. The human cargo from Poland and Czechoslovakia and Hungary could trust Felix Krueger and therefore could trust the bargaining faith of the monstrous regimes they fled.
At the Grossmünster on Sunday morning, in the cold splendor of that Protestant edifice without icon or color, Felix Krueger prayed Sunday morning to God and felt certain that God would not judge him more harshly than He judged all men.
These thoughts soothed him and he was not angry with Rimsky anymore.
“The Prague shipments? For America?”
“Not all. Six are to be diverted to Montreal before overseas manifests are signed.”
Krueger nodded. “If there is a separate lading for them, the usual fee is one percent.”
“Yes. I was told that was acceptable.”
Krueger opened a little leather notebook and consulted a sheet. “The license for shipment 239 expires in three weeks. Is everything satisfactory?”
“The bond sheets will be returned. There were no problems.”
“I think I remember that shipment,” Krueger said, staring at the notebook. “There were two sisters?”
Rimsky smiled with the sincerity of a servant. “You have a good memory. They were quite useful. In fact, we have induced one of them to continue… her employment voluntarily.”
“Really?” Krueger’s eyes widened. “Does that happen often?”
Rimsky felt he had said too much. But the need to ingratiate himself with Krueger was greater than discretion. “Sometimes. Not often. Sometimes.”
“Remarkable sisters. So alike, so different. I wished I had know them better. I wonder which one it was.”
Rimsky did not speak.
“All right. Business is concluded, Herr Rimsky. I shall expect to be met at Prague Central the morning of the twenty-eighth.”
“I’ll be there,” Rimsky said.
“And now the bill.” Krueger raised one freckled hand slightly and the waitress at the far end of the balcony came forward with the bill on a small plastic tray. She handed it to Krueger but the large man smiled.
“Not for me today, Fräulein. My associate insists on paying for my little meal.”
The heavyset waitress turned. Rimsky flushed in that moment and nearly spoke and then reached into the pocket of his jacket for his wallet. He had stepped once today against Felix Krueger; it was best not to do it twice. He took the bill and added it and reached for the francs in his wallet; when he looked up again, Felix Krueger was already at the stairs, beginning his descent. The humiliation, Rimsky was sure, was intended.