“If his orders had been to kill you, he would have done so.”
“Really? Then why didn’t he?” Suddenly she sounded angry.
“You’re an American. A protected species, especially at the moment.” He inspected the cloth. The flow of blood had stopped. “Don’t underrate the enemy, Fraulein.”
“Don’t underrate me. If I hadn’t come home, he’d have killed you.”
He decided to say nothing. She clearly kept her temper on a hair-trigger.
The apartment had been thoroughly ransacked. Her clothes hung out of their drawers, papers had been spilled across the desk and on to the floor, suitcases had been upended. Not, he thought, that it could have been very neat before: the dirty dishes in the sink, the profusion of bottles (most of them empty) in the bathroom, the yellowing copies of the New York Times and Time, their pages sliced to ribbons by the German censors, stacked haphazardly around the walls. Searching it must have been a nightmare. Weak light filtered in through dirty net curtains. Every few minutes the walls shook as the trains passed.
This is yours, I take it?” She pulled out the Luger from beneath a chair and held it up between finger and thumb.
“Yes. Thank you.” He took it. She had a gift for making him feel stupid. “Is anything missing?”
“I doubt it.” She glanced around. “I’m not sure I’d know if there was.”
The item I gave you last night…?”
“Oh that? It was here on the mantelpiece.” She ran her hand along it, frowning. “It was here…”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, she was grinning.
“Don’t worry, Sturmbannfuhrer. It’s stayed close to my heart. Like a love-letter.”
She turned her back on him, unbuttoning her shirt. When she turned round, she had the envelope in her hand. He took it over to the window. It was warm to his touch.
It was long and slim, made of thick paper — a rich creamy-blue with brown specks of age, like liver spots. It was luxurious, hand-made, redolent of another age. There was no name or address.
Inside the envelope was a small brass key and a letter, on matching blue paper, as thick as cardboard. Printed in the top right-hand corner, in flowery copperplate, was: Zaugg Cie, Bankiers, Bahnhof Strasse 44, Zurich. A single sentence, typed beneath, identified the bearer as a joint holder of account number 2402. The letter was dated 8 July 1942. It was signed Hermann Zaugg, Director.
March read it through again. He was not surprised Stuckart had kept it locked in his safe: it was illegal for a German citizen to possess a foreign bank account without the permission of the Reichsbank. The penalty for non- compliance was death.
He said: “I was worried about you. I tried to call you a couple of hours ago, but there was no answer.”
“I was out, doing research.”
“Research?”
She grinned again.
At March’s suggestion, they went for a walk in the Tiergarten, the traditional rendezvous for Berliners with secrets to discuss. Even the Gestapo had yet to devise a means of bugging a park. Daffodils poked through the rough grass at the foot of the trees. Children fed the ducks on the Neuer See.
Getting out of Stuckart’s apartment block had been easy, she said. The air shaft had emerged into the alley almost at ground level. There were no SS men. They were all round the front. So she had simply walked down the side of the building, to the street at the rear, and caught a taxi home. She had stayed up half the night waiting for him to call, rereading the letter until she knew it off by heart. When, by nine o’clock, she had still heard nothing, she decided not to wait.
She wanted to know what had happened to him and Jaeger. He told her only that they had been taken to Gestapo headquarters and released that morning.
“Are you in trouble?”
“Yes. Now tell me what you discovered.”
She had gone first to the public library in Nollendorf Platz — she had nothing better to do now her press accreditation had been withdrawn. In the library was a directory of European banks. Zaugg Cie still existed. The bank’s premises remained in Bahnhof Strasse. From the library she had gone to the US Embassy to see Henry Nightingale.
“Nightingale?”
“You met him last night.”
March remembered: the young man in the sports jacket and the button-down shirt, with his hand on her arm. “You didn’t tell him anything?”
“Of course not. Anyway, he’s discreet. We can trust him.”
“I prefer to make my own judgements about whom I can trust.” He felt disappointed in her. “Is he your lover?”
She stopped in her tracks. “What kind of a question is that?”
“I have more at stake in this than you have, Fraulein. Much more. I have a right to know.”
“You have no right to know at all.” She was furious.
“All right.” He held up his hands. The woman was impossible,’Your business.”
They resumed walking.
Nightingale, she explained, was an expert in Swiss commercial matters, having dealt with the affairs of several German refugees in the United States trying to extract their money from banks in Zurich and Geneva.
It was almost impossible.
In 1934, a Gestapo agent named Georg Hannes Thomae had been sent to Switzerland by Reinhard Heydrich to find out the names of as many German account-holders as possible. Thomae set up house in Zurich, began affairs with several lonely female cashiers, befriended minor bank officials. When the Gestapo had suspicions that a certain individual had an illegal account, Thomae would visit the bank posing as an intermediary and try to deposit money. The moment any cash was accepted, Heydrich knew an account existed. Its holder was arrested, tortured into revealing the details, and soon the bank would receive a detailed cable requesting, in proper form, the repatriation of all assets.
The Gestapo’s war against the Swiss banks became increasingly sophisticated and extensive. Telephone calls, cables and letters between Germany and Switzerland were intercepted as a matter of routine. Clients were executed or sent to concentration camps. In Switzerland, there was an outcry. Finally, the Swiss National Assembly rushed through a new Banking Code making it illegal for banks to disclose any details of their clients” holdings, on pain of imprisonment. Georg Thomae was exposed and expelled.
Swiss banks came to regard doing business with German citizens as too dangerous and time-consuming to countenance. Communication with clients was virtually impossible. Hundreds of accounts had simply been abandoned by their terrified owners. In any case, respectable bankers had no desire to become involved in these life-and-death transactions. The publicity was damaging. By 1939 the once-lucrative German numbered-account business had collapsed.
“Then came the war,” said Charlie. They had reached the end of the Neuer See and were walking back. From beyond the trees came the hum of the traffic on the East-West Axis. The dome of the Great Hall rose above the trees. Berliners joked that the only way to avoid seeing it was to live inside it.
“After 1939, the demand for Swiss accounts increased dramatically, for obvious reasons. People were desperate to get their property out of Germany. So banks like Zaugg devised a new kind of deposit account. For a fee of 200 Francs, you received a box and a number, a key and a letter of authorisation.”
“Exactly like Stuckart.”
“Right. You simply needed to show up with the letter and the key, and it was all yours. No questions. Each account could have as many keys and letters of authorisation as the holder was prepared to pay for. The beauty of it was — the banks were no longer involved. One day, if she could get the travel permit, some little old lady might turn up with her life savings. Ten years later, her son could turn up with a letter and a key and walk off with his inheritance.”
“Or the Gestapo might turn up…”
“…and if they had the letter and the key, the bank could give them everything. No embarrassments. No publicity. No breaking the Banking Code.”
