The Swiss Spy (41 page)

‘Empty your pockets, quickly.’

Edgar placed the contents of his pockets on the
table. The man shuffled them around, finding it hard to disguise his haste. The
noise was getting closer now. Edgar turned around, in time to see a woman and
young girl being manhandled across the reception area; they were both blinking
and looked terrified.
Rosa and Sophia.
The policemen and Gestapo who had
found them brought them to a halt in front of the reception. They were just
yards from Edgar. He turned around and looked at the Gestapo man.

‘Can I leave now?’

The other man was already moving from around the
table. ‘Yes, yes. Go.’

The senior officer and the short man
in the
ill-fitting suit moved over to Rosa and her daughter.

‘We found them hiding in a room at the back of the
basement, sir.’

‘What about the man?’

‘It was just them, sir.’

‘You’re certain?’

‘Yes, but we’re continuing to search the basement.’

‘We must search every inch of this wretched hotel. What’s
your name?’

Rosa clutched Sophia, but a man dragged the child
away. As he did so, a toy rabbit the little girl had been holding fell to the
floor. A policeman kicked it out of the way.

‘
Dagmar Keufer, from Frankfurt. I have papers. This
is my daughter, Gisela.’

The Gestapo officer held his hand out for the
papers. He looked them over and snorted, passing them to a colleague.

 ‘A joke! Not even good forgeries – the photographs
look nothing like you! You, little girl. What’s your name? Come on!’

He had bent down in front of Sophia, hands resting
on his knees. Sophia’s eyes were wide with fear as she tried to look at her
mother.

‘Go on, your name!’

‘I don’t know.’ Tears were streaming down her face.

‘You don’t know! What girl doesn’t know her own
name, eh? It’s Sophia, isn’t it? Sophia Stern?’

‘Yes,’ she said, sounding relieved. Edgar took his
time in picking up everything he had removed from his pockets and putting them
back. They were still searching for Henry: he must have got away after all.

‘So,’ said the Gestapo man, standing directly in
front of Rosa. As he shouted, his spit covered her face. ‘If this is Sophia
Stern, you must be Rosa Stern. I’m pleased to meet you.’ Rosa said nothing.

‘Where’s the Swiss man?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He was here with you?’

She nodded. ‘Yes, but he left.’

‘When?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘Where did he go.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was he on his own?’

There was a long pause before Rosa replied.

‘Yes.’

The Gestapo officer hit Rosa so hard that Edgar heard
the crack of bone.
Leave now, go,
a policeman was indicating.
Go. None
of your business.

‘I’m not going to tell you anything.’ Rosa’s voice
was defiant, even confident.

‘I think you may now!’

Edgar straightened his coat and moved towards the
door. He turned around to see the Gestapo man holding a revolver against
Sophia’s head, the barrel buried in the girl’s thick hair. One officer stepped
back and another held out a hand, as if to restrain the man with the gun.

‘You tell me exactly where he is and who’s helping
you!’

‘But I don’t know.’ Rosa sounded panicked, no longer
defiant.

Because he was holding the revolver directly against
Sophia’s head, neither the sound of the gun nor its echo were nearly as loud as
Edgar would have expected, especially in a relatively confined space. Then
there was the silence. Edgar stepped closer to the hotel exit, not certain he
could avoid being sick. He noticed a horrified look on the face of a policeman
and broad grins on the faces of others. Then the scream came. It was restrained
at first, like someone calling from a distance. By the time Edgar reached the
hotel entrance it had turned into a wail, so loud people in the street stopped
to see what it was.

He turned into
Friedrichstrasse,
pausing to compose himself before quickening his stride towards the station. With
every step that took him away from the hotel, the scream became louder. He
turned into a small alley, crouched behind a large dustbin and vomited. The
noise drowned out the scream, but for no more than a second or two. He waited a
minute then hurried to the station.

During the
short walk, something died inside Edgar. He felt tears welling in his eyes and he
pulled his hat down low to hide them. He had never experienced anything quite
as dreadful as this and was quite unprepared for its impact. He continued to
hear the scream long after he entered the station, the noise of the trains unable
to muffle it. The scream was still ringing in his ears as he asked the clerk
for a ticket; he heard it above the sound of the train that took him south.

It was the
last sound he heard as he slipped out of Germany that night and the first sound
he heard as he entered Switzerland.

***

Edgar
arrived back in Zürich on the morning of Friday, 4
^th
April.

He had started out from Stuttgart the previous
morning well aware of how perilous the journey could be, but throughout it he
was accompanied a sense of almost surreal detachment, brought about by the
shock of what he had seen at the hotel and the consequences of his own failure
to do anything. Had it been a routine search of the hotel or had they been
tipped off? If it was the latter, who could have told them?

He had been forced to deceive Henry: he knew that
promising him he’d help Rosa and Sophia escape was the only way to ensure he
would leave the hotel with Rolf. Trying to bring Rosa and Sophia with him back
to Switzerland was always a risk he simply couldn’t contemplate; they would
never have stood a chance. Even going into the basement to warn them would have
been too dangerous.

But the sight of little Sophia being shot in cold
blood had utterly overwhelmed him. For a few hours, his defences were down and
his normally pin-sharp judgement was blunted. When he looked back on that day
in the months and years that followed, he realised that for much of it he
hardly cared what happened to him. It was not just Sophia: he did not want to
contemplate what fate awaited Rosa, and he doubted Milo and her brother would
survive either. For all he knew, Rolf and Henry may even have been caught after
all. It had been an utter disaster and what would displease London most was the
possibility that the Russians would not even get to see the Rostock Report. But,
for a few hours that day, it did not bother him at all.

Edgar’s trance-like state continued as he broke all
the rules by not taking the first train out of Stuttgart. Instead, after buying
his ticket, he sat in a corner of the draughty station buffet, nibbling a
sausage and sipping at an ersatz coffee he’d allowed to get cold. By 8.30, a
sense of reality slowly began to return to him as the initial shock thawed and
he began to think more clearly. Rolf and Henry would have tried to cross the
border after Singen and he decided to try a different route, just in case. He
chose to wait for a train that would give him other options and caught one
heading south at 9.30. The train was crowded, with a large number of soldiers
on board. About ten minutes out of Stuttgart a woman brushed past him as she
pushed her way down the carriage. Even from behind there was something familiar
about her and, as she turned to open the door at the other end of the carriage,
Edgar caught a glimpse of her face: had he not thought that at that moment she
was in the hands of the Gestapo he would have sworn it was Katarina Hoch.

He did not spot the woman again and left the train
at Tuttlingen. It was 11.45 and according to the timetable on the wall of the
deserted forecourt there was a train to Waldshut-Tiengen leaving at 2.20. Waldshut-Tiengen
sat on northern bank of the Rhine, with Switzerland on the other side: it would
be a safer place to cross the border.

The ticket office was closed, so Edgar walked into
the town and came across an inn. The innkeeper was leaning against the bar,
seemingly intent on avoiding serving anyone. Edgar had to position himself
directly in front of the man and cough loudly to attract his attention. When he
did deign to look at his new customer it was with a pair of eyes that never
stopped blinking.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m looking for a room please, just for a couple of
hours.’

The eyes blinked faster then narrowed. ‘A couple of
hours? What kind of a place do you think we are?’

‘I am sorry, there’s a misunderstanding. I’ve been
travelling for a long while and I’m just looking for somewhere to have a bath
and change my clothes before I return home to Geneva. I’m catching a train in a
couple of hours.’

The innkeeper leaned closer to Edgar. ‘But the
journey from here to Switzerland will take you just two hours.’

‘I realise that, but then I have to travel on to
Montreux, which means I’ll arrive home late. Look, I’m happy to pay the full
daily rate for the room if that helps.’

Edgar peeled a generous amount of Reichsmarks from
his wallet and slipped them into the innkeeper’s hand, whose eyes stopped
blinking for a moment. He smiled briefly, allowing Edgar a glimpse of dirty
yellow teeth.

‘No problem, sir, use room four. Here’s the key. Can
I send some food up?’

Edgar said that would not be necessary, he would eat
later. Once in the room he locked the door, jammed a chair against it and
placed his small suitcase on the bed. It took him ten minutes to carefully
unthread the lining just far enough to extract his Swiss papers. He was now
Marc Rassier from Montreux. What remained of
Karl Albrecht was torn up
into little pieces then burnt in an ashtray, the charred scraps flushed down
the toilet. Once he had washed and changed, Edgar went back to the bar and
ordered lunch, leaving the inn as soon as he felt it was reasonable to do so.

The 2.20 train arrived on time to take Marc Rassier
to Waldshut-Tiengen, arriving at the station in the north of the town at half
past four. An elderly policeman checked his Swiss papers as he left the
station.

‘Are you taking the bus across the border?’

He had saved him from asking the question. ‘Yes. When
does it leave?’

‘An hour: you’ll need to register for it though. They
have to check everyone who gets on. Wait over there – those ladies are going
too.’

Edgar waited with two Swiss-German women, who were
thankfully as reserved as he would have expected them to be, especially when
they realised he was French-speaking. At 5.30 a noisy blue bus pulled up in
front of the station, by which time another four people were in the waiting
area. A police car arrived and a young officer, wearing a smart raincoat and
leather gloves, checked everyone’s paperwork.

‘What’s been the purpose of your visit to Germany,
Herr Rassier? I need to know where you’ve visited in the Reich.’

Edgar affected broken German.
I am sorry; my
German is poor. Do you speak French perhaps?

He didn’t. One of the Swiss-German ladies explained
to the officer this was typical. ‘They make no effort: they expect us to speak
French but you never hear them speak German!’

She spoke to Edgar in slow French. ‘He wants to know
where you’ve been in Germany.’

Edgar launched into a lengthy travelogue, covering
as much of Germany as he could manage and speaking quickly. The Swiss-German
lady clearly did not understand too much of what he said.

‘I’m not terribly sure, sir,’ she told the police
officer. ‘They speak so fast. He seems to have been in Munich and elsewhere in
Bavaria, as far as I can gather. He says he has many documents if you want to
check them.’

Behind them the queue had lengthened. The officer
checked the papers again. ‘And you entered Germany where?’

Edgar managed to look irritated and took back his
passport. ‘Look, it says here – Munich; by train, one week ago.’

‘I see. You may board now.’

It was approaching six o’clock when the bus pulled
away from the station, driving slowly through the town and over the bridge
crossing the Rhine. Once they were on the Swiss side, they pulled alongside a
narrow building, where their papers were checked by the Swiss police. Half an
hour later the bus had arrived in Baden. It was seven o’clock and he was back
in Switzerland, but felt little sense of elation.

‘What time is the next bus to Zürich?’ he asked the
driver.

‘A quarter past seven.’

‘And do I catch it from here?’

‘Yes.’ The driver had turned off the engine and was
locking up, anxious to leave.

Edgar put his suitcase down and settled on the bench
inside the small bus shelter. The driver set off, turning around after he had
walked past Edgar.

‘I wouldn’t make yourself too comfortable. It leaves
at quarter past seven in the morning.’

***

It
was 8.30 on the Friday morning when Edgar walked slowly across
Basteiplatz
to the small apartment above the hardware shop. He had thought about
telephoning Basil Remington-Barber from Baden the previous night or when he
arrived in Zürich, but had decided against it. A few hours’ sleep in a small
inn in Baden had cleared his mind and now the enormity of what had happened was
hitting him hard. He needed time to consider quite how to explain this disaster
to London: a debacle, they would call it, these people whose only experience of
danger was dodging the traffic around Trafalgar Square on the way to their
clubs. He would probably end up in Wales looking after munitions, if he was
lucky.

Remington-Barber answered the door, looking as if he
had seen a ghost. In the lounge Rolf and Henry were sitting around the table. It
was a while before anyone said anything.

‘Well, this is quite some reunion,’ said
Remington-Barber finally, sounding quite jolly.

‘When did you two arrive?’ Edgar asked.

‘Yesterday,’ said Rolf, who had now come over to
Edgar and was shaking him warmly by the hand. Henry was half-standing, half-sitting,
saying nothing and peering beyond Edgar, looking to see if anyone was behind
him.

‘Plain sailing?’ asked Edgar, as he removed his hat
and coat, and dropped them on to the armchair.

‘Surprisingly so,’ said Rolf. ‘When we arrived at
the station in Stuttgart I saw the train to Singen was delayed until four
o’clock, but there was one to Ulm leaving almost immediately. From there, we
found another train was leaving soon for Friedrichshafen. We booked into a
hotel overlooking the lake and yesterday morning we took a bus to Konstanz. We
crossed the border there using our Swiss passports then took a train to Zürich.’

‘Where are they, Edgar?’ Henry had stood up now and
walked past Edgar into the hallway. He opened the door of the apartment, came
back in and walked over to the window overlooking Basteiplatz.

‘You promised me you’d bring Rosa and Sophia with
you. Where the hell are they?’ His voice had an urgent tone to it, louder and
more broken than usual.

Edgar signalled to Rolf to stand by the door. ‘Sit
down Henry.’ He led him over to the sofa and sat him down, then placed himself
in the armchair.

‘I’m afraid they’re not here. I’m sorry.’

‘Where are they?’

Edgar hesitated: he had rehearsed several versions
of what to say in answer to this inevitable question and was quickly deciding
which one to use.

‘I’m sorry Henry, I really am… But they were
arrested before I had a chance to get them out of the hotel. I…’

‘Arrested by whom?’ Henry had stood up from the sofa
and only sat when Remington-Barber guided him down with a firm hand on his
shoulder.

‘Don’t shout,’ said Edgar. ‘I promise you this is
something I regret just as much as you do, but I’m sorry to say it was the
Gestapo. They must have come to the hotel late on the Wednesday night. I’m not
sure what happened, but because Milo hadn’t made contact with me I decided to
go down and find her at around one in the morning. As I went down, I saw she
was being questioned in the reception area and I heard them say they were going
to search the hotel in the morning. There were police everywhere. I went back
to my room and remained there until seven in the morning. If there was any way
I could have gone down to the basement I would have done, but every time I
looked out the door there were police patrolling the corridor. When I went down
to check out, I saw Rosa and Sophia being led away.’

‘And you didn’t try to warn them or anything?’

Henry was shouting so loudly now that Rolf shut the
windows and Remington-Barber slammed the lounge door.

‘I told you Henry, I just didn’t get a chance, I
promise you. The Gestapo were all over the place. I was worried that if I went
down into the basement I could be caught and that would alert the bastards to
search down there. I…’

Henry had begun to cry. It started as a gentle
sobbing but within a minute had turned into uncontrollable weeping, tears
streaking his cheeks. Remington-Barber stood awkwardly in front of him holding
out a handkerchief, while Rolf sat next to Henry and placed an arm around his
shoulder, but nothing would console him. He was grief-stricken and everyone in
the room knew there was nothing to be said that could be in any way reassuring.

Henry did nothing other than weep for five minutes. By
now, Remington-Barber had taken Edgar’s place in the armchair. He held a glass
of water and in his open hand were two large white tablets.

‘Take these old chap: they’ll help you rest and when
you wake up it will be with a clearer head.’ Henry looked at the tablets and
took them one at a time. Within five minutes he was stretched out on the sofa,
fast asleep. They waited another five minutes then carried him into the
bedroom, which Rolf locked from the outside.

‘He’ll not wake for most of the day.’

‘Well, before he does, we need to check something,’
said Edgar.