The Swiss Spy (7 page)

‘Of course.’
What else can I say?

‘Good.’ Marcel started to walk forward again, very
slowly. He placed a hand in Henry’s back so he would join him. ‘You’ll find
that if you believe, that will help. It’s difficult enough even if you do
believe, but impossible if you don’t. Don’t allow yourself to harbour doubts. If
you force yourself hard enough, it’ll work. Trust me.’

Marcel said nothing more, but continued to walk on
slowly. They had not gone very far when they passed an alleyway on their left
and Henry noticed Marcel peering into it. In the shadows he could just make out
a bulky figure standing still at the far end of the alley. They carried on
walking, but now Henry could hear footsteps behind them. They reached the
corner of Rue de la Vallée and Marcel stopped. When they turned round a large
man was standing a few yards behind them. He was wrapped in a long, black coat,
its collar turned up to conceal the lower half of his face, with much of the
upper half hidden by the brim of a large fedora.

Marcel placed a hand on Henry’s shoulder: ‘attends!’
Wait.
He walked over to the man and they spoke for a minute, no more than
that. They weren’t speaking French or German. As far as Henry could tell, it was
Russian or Polish. When they had finished talking, Marcel turned and beckoned
for Henry to join them.

The three of them stood together for a moment, not a
word being exchanged. Then, as if on a signal, Marcel turned and walked quickly
away, back along Rue Verdaine.

It was the last time Henry would ever see him.

***

As
Marcel disappeared into the mist the man in the long, black coat and hat moved
off in the other direction, making it clear Henry should follow him. Halfway
down Rue de la Vallée, he stopped by a parked Citroen and opened the rear
passenger door, allowing Henry to enter first. The driver turned around and
nodded, and without a word being exchanged, they drove off.

The car drove fast through the Old Town, the speed
and the mist making it difficult for Henry to work out where he was. As far as
he could tell, they were heading south through Champel but then he noticed they
were heading back into the city, driving along the banks of the River Avre. Soon
they were in Jonction, a working-class district Henry was quite unfamiliar
with. The driver stopped for a while, his eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror
then started again. Less than a minute later, he braked suddenly then reversed
hard into a narrow alleyway, stopping alongside a large wooden door. Henry was
guided out of the car, through the door and quickly up a flight of steps into a
small attic room which smelt of gas and cabbages.

Once he had closed the shutters and turned on the
fire, the large man looked Henry up and down, his head slowly moving as if
checking him out from every angle. He gestured to a pair of chairs in front of
the fire and removed his fedora, revealing a lined face that showed no hint of
emotion. Once Henry had sat down, the man unbuttoned his coat and lowered himself
onto the chair opposite. He addressed him in French, which he spoke with a
heavy Eastern European accent.

‘English is your first language, yes?’

Henry nodded.

‘And you also speak French and German?’

‘Yes, though I’m more comfortable with French.’

‘We shall speak French in that case, I understand it
better than English. Two foreigners speaking French; they would like that in
Paris.’

‘Henry Hunter.’ The man removed his overcoat and took
out a brown leather notebook from one of the pockets. From his top pocket he withdrew
a pencil and began sharpening it with a penknife, letting the shavings fall on
his shirt before he blew them away on to the floor. He squinted as he checked
the notebook, the pencil now lodged in his mouth like a cigar.

 ‘I know everything I need to know about you, Henry
Hunter.’

 ‘Not too much I hope!’
A nervous laugh.

Over the course of the next hour the man delivered a
quiet monologue. He told Henry things about himself he had thought no-one else
could possibly know, and other things he had long forgotten or hardly been aware
of. He gave him the name of the maternity home where he was born; revealed the
names and addresses of family members long forgotten or never heard of;
informed him of the name of the accountancy firm for which his father worked
and described in some detail his routine, such as it was, in Geneva: when he
left home in Nyon, his route into the Old Town and to the library. He knew the
name of every book he had taken out. He knew the names of the bars in the
Pâquis he liked to hang around in, where he cut a lonely figure as he eyed the
working girls without ever quite managing to sum up the courage to approach
them. When he had finished, he smiled for the first time, displaying a set of
large teeth, half of which seemed to be made of gold. Henry sat incredulous.

‘You can call me Viktor, by the way.’ A long
silence, during which Henry wondered if he was meant to say anything, but he had
no idea what.

‘Marcel tells me you were about to join the Swiss
Communist Party?’

‘Not quite: I attended one of its meetings. I told
him I was thinking of joining, nothing more than that. We had a nice chat after
the meeting and he mentioned something about not joining or attending meetings.
He said there were better ways I could help the cause. I was not altogether
sure what he meant.’

‘You will work for me Henry Hunter: that is how you’ll
help the cause. You are a communist, yes?’

Henry thought. ‘Yes, I suppose…’

‘You are ideal Henry. You have two nationalities and
three languages. Most people in Europe have just one of each. You are the kind
of person who people do not notice too much, if you understand what I mean –
you don’t stand out.’

‘What does working for you entail, Viktor?’

‘It means what Marcel said: it is another way of
serving the cause.’

From a nearby rooftop a clock struck eight. ‘Look, I
ought to be getting a move on. I should have been home ages ago and my mother
will be getting worried. Perhaps I could think about things for a few days?’

Viktor was smiling again, displaying even more gold
teeth than before. When he smiled he looked friendly, but the second the smile
disappeared his demeanour became cold and menacing. ‘No, no, no Henry Hunter,’
he said, shaking his head. ‘It doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid. I’m not
advertising a vacancy at a Swiss bank, I’m not looking for a man to deliver
cheese. You are already working for me: you started working for me the moment
we met.’

***

For
the best part of a year, Henry was little more than a messenger for Viktor. At
first this amounted to taking an envelope from – say – Geneva to Paris then
stopping off in Lyons to deliver another one on the return journey. Even Henry,
normally naïve, came to realise these errands were tests. About once a month
the errands would coincide with meeting Viktor, usually in Paris but sometimes
in other cities. He was, he realised, being trained: Viktor would talk at
length in either English or French about what helping him really meant. He
explained the rudiments of espionage: the need to fit in to any environment or
circumstance without being noticed; the need for discretion; the ability to see
and remember everything; how to assume different identities to the extent that
you became that person for however short a period; the importance of thinking
of not just one step ahead, but two or even three, and at the same time not
forgetting what you’d been doing before, your cover story.

At no stage did Viktor actually say who he worked
for, although over a period of time Henry came to understand that he worked for
Soviet intelligence or possibly Comintern, but he was never totally sure which
branch it actually was. Henry’s instincts told him the less he knew the better.
Viktor began to talk about the ‘service’ and that became how they referred to
who his new employers were.

 There was a travel agency in Geneva’s Petit-Saconnex
that was a front for Viktor’s operation and Henry became a courier for them. It
provided a perfect cover for his trips and meant his mother, though curious and
somewhat dubious as to whether a travel agency was the right job for her son,
did not question his frequent absences.

In the spring of 1930, Viktor introduced Henry to a
German called Peter and a week later Henry accompanied him to an isolated
farmhouse in northern Germany, somewhere between Hamburg and Bremen. There were
five other recruits there; two German men; a French woman and a Dutch couple. All
were a few years older than him.

On the second day at the farm the six recruits were
taken to a shed and shown a litter of puppies.
Choose one each: it can be
your companion while you are here!
Having a dog will make your stay here
easier, they were told. Henry chose the smallest of the litter, a black puppy
that he named Foxi. He’d take Foxi for walks two or three times a day and, as
with the other recruits and their puppies, they became inseparable.

For the next six weeks they were trained in what
Peter described as field craft. They learnt how to create and use secret
message drops; how to follow people without being noticed and in turn spot if
they were being followed and how to lose the shadow. They learnt unarmed combat
and how to use a series of handguns; there was even instruction in making bombs
and other forms of sabotage. And in the evenings, there were lectures:
ideological instruction was how they termed it. Any hint of doubt about
commitment to the cause was spotted and eliminated. By the end of the first
week, everyone fully understood that working for the cause in the way they were
meant there was no room whatsoever for discussion: without total commitment and
utter loyalty, they would fail.

Never question; never discuss; never hesitate.

And along with this there were individual sessions. Henry
spent hours with first an elderly German man and then a younger Polish woman. They
were intent on teasing anything personal out of him. The German man seemed to
be a psychiatrist of some sort, asking a series of apparently unrelated
questions and making extensive notes. He seemed to be preoccupied with Henry’s
relationship with his mother.

Everything about the Polish woman looked severe: her
manner, the heavy glasses and the way her hair was pulled into a tight bun. She
insisted he tell her everything about his personal life. Had he ever had a
girlfriend, for instance? Henry had blushed and muttered something about there
being one or two, but nothing serious. Had he ever slept with a woman, she
asked – or a man? Henry was so shocked that he readily told the truth. No, he
had never slept with a woman. The thought of sleeping with a man, he said, had
simply never occurred to him.

That night he lay in bed, unable to sleep as he
tried to make sense of what was happening to him. He felt trapped, drawn into a
life he’d never have willingly chosen, but one which did at least offer some
prospect of excitement. He had just drifted to sleep when he was woken by
someone sitting on his bed and turning on the bedside lamp. It was the Polish
woman. Her hair was now loose and she’d lost her glasses, and was wearing
bright red lipstick and perfume that smelt of lemons. Henry found himself unable
to say anything.

She leant over and brushed his face with her hand then
gently pulled his head towards hers and kissed him. ‘How can we let you go out
into the world and not know what to do with a woman?’ she said softly. ‘That
would be… risky.’

Henry opened his mouth to speak, but she placed a
finger inside his lips, holding it in there for a few moments before pulling it
slowly away. She stood up and removed her dressing gown so she was totally
naked. Then she stood still for a moment, her eyebrows raised, inviting Henry
to look at her, silhouetted by the bedside lamp. Through a gap in the curtain
on the other side of the bed, the light of the moon lit up the front of her
body.

Had she not remained with Henry for an hour after
they had made love, he would have readily passed it off as one of his more
pleasant dreams. But they lay there together and every time he tried to say
something, which he felt he ought to do, she placed a finger on his lips and
shook her head – her long hair brushing his bare shoulders. As the first hint
of dawn peered through the half drawn curtains, she climbed out of bed and got
dressed. ‘We never discuss this, you understand? This was something you needed
to do: there is a saying that there are more secrets to be found in a bed than
in a safe. For your first time you were quite good Henry, but next time
remember you don’t need to rush so much. Try not to think about what you’re
doing: it will come naturally, it’s the most natural thing we do. At least next
time won’t be your first.’

Henry was confused, but at the same time quite
pleased with himself.

Never question; never discuss; never hesitate.

On his penultimate day at the farm, Henry was
walking with Peter and Foxi in the woods, when the German turned to him and
handed him a pistol.

‘Shoot her,’ he said, pointing at the puppy.