Legacy of a Spy (3 page)

“Yes,” said George uncertainly. He took his eyes off the slippery road for a minute to have a look at Carmichael.

For the first time, George noted the lines of worry. Carmichael couldn’t be more than thirty-five, and he looked hard-muscled and very fit, possibly too much so, like an overtrained athlete. Hollingsworth suddenly realized Carmichael was like a watch that has been wound too tight. Someone or something would open the back, and the tight mainspring would snap out of its case and strew the works all over the place. George felt apprehensive, but not for himself. He didn’t want to see this man, whose exploits were legend, suddenly come apart at the seams. It was George’s turn to get angry, angry at the people who continued to put the pressure on a man who had already done so much. Why couldn’t they give him a rest? Montague, or Carmichael, was battle-happy.

Slater knew he was being assessed and he didn’t like it. He wanted no judgments from a young, smooth-faced diplomat.

“Give me your phone number in Zurich,” said Slater, “and always leave a number there where you can be reached at any time of the day or night. I don’t want you to call me under any circumstances, at least for the present. I will arrange for some method of two-way communication, when I get located. When I call you, I will call myself Karl. Don’t be alarmed if you don’t recognize my voice. I will know yours, and I will always ask you the time before I give you any instructions. Do you speak German well enough to understand a phone conversation?”

“Yes. I also speak the Zurich dialect.” George was proud of his linguistic accomplishments. Much to his surprise, Carmichael immediately switched to Zurich Deutsch. George was glad he hadn’t been bluffing.

Slater was pleased. There weren’t half a million people in Europe who could speak or understand Swiss German. The Swiss Air Force had spoken it on their intercom during World War II and had driven the Germans crazy trying to understand it.

“All right,” said Slater, “now let’s set up our meeting places. If I suggest on the phone that we have a drink in Munich at the Bundesbahn Hotel at ten hundred, that means I’ll meet you on the southwest corner of the Staatsbrücke in Salzburg at eleven hundred. That goes for all meeting times: they will always be one hour later than either of us indicates on the phone.

“If I suggest the Winkler Café in Salzburg, we shall meet where we met by the Hofbraü Haus. If you say no, I will expect you to be there. If you say yes, but mention another time, I will add one hour to your suggestion and be waiting for you at the new time. Should either of us give an unqualified
yes, that
will mean the meeting is out of the question.

“If, for reasons of emergency, either of us wishes to break into clear conversation, he must ask, ‘How is Horst?’ and if the reply is, ‘He has been ill lately,’ we can go ahead. If, on the other hand, the reply is, ‘He’s fine and wants to be remembered to you,’ that will mean we can’t talk now, and the one who has given the answer will try to call back from somewhere else later or will give another number where he can be reached in an hour.” Slater paused and then asked, “Do you think you have all this straight?”

George frowned. “I think so. Let’s see, all meeting times will be one hour later than stated. The Winkler Café in Salzburg means the Hofbraü Haus in Munich, and the Bundesbahn Hotel means the southwest corner of the Staatsbrücke in Salzburg. A negative answer means everything is understood and will be complied with. A qualified yes with another hour means okay, same place, but at the new time, again plus one hour. An unqualified yes means the meeting can’t be held. I’m not to call you yet. You will identify yourself as Karl, and we will speak Swiss German. You will identify yourself by asking immediately for the correct time. Should either of us wish to break into clear conversation, we should ask how Horst is. If the answer is that he’s ill, it’s okay to go ahead. But if the person says that he is fine, then that person will call back as soon as he deems it safe to do so or will give another number where he can be reached in an hour.”

“Good,” said Slater. “This may all seem like hogwash to you, but I assure you it’s of the utmost importance. Don’t forget it.

“Now,” he continued, “the next
thing to arrange are
the danger signals.” George looked puzzled. “I’ve got to know,” said Slater, “if you think someone is following you. That’s for my protection. For your protection, you need the same information.”

The word “protection” and the idea of being followed caused a responsive twinge in Hollingsworth, but his admiration for the man he knew as Carmichael was rapidly increasing.

“In Munich, I will be standing by the blue-and-white parking sign nearest the Hofbraü, and I will be looking for this Mercedes. Remember, George, you must always use the same car. If my hat is on, keep right on going and wait for me at the Bundesbahn Hotel restaurant, where we first met. If I don’t show within two hours, forget me and go home. I’ll try to phone. If I take my hat off, everything is all right as far as I know. If the meeting is to be in Salzburg, follow the same procedure, but wait for me at the Hotel Horn in the Getreide Gasse. Better get a city plan, so you will know where it is. In both cases take at least fifteen to twenty minutes to get to the second meeting place.”

“Sure,” said George, “but why?”

“Because,” said Slater evenly, “if I get there first, I can watch you go in and satisfy myself that you aren’t being tailed.”

“I see.” Putnam had been right; Carmichael was not going to trust him entirely. “What do I do to indicate that I’m being followed?”

“In the case of Salzburg, you will be turning right to cross the Staatsbrücke. Turn on your right directional signal and move past me. I’ll know. In Munich you will be turning left. Use your left signal and keep on going. My arrival, before you, at the second meeting place will allow me to tell whether you are clean. If I don’t meet you, you’ll know you’re still under surveillance.” Slater looked carefully at George. “If you think you have all that, repeat it. If not, let’s go over it again.”

The two men went over and over the entire procedure. George was finally convinced he had never learned any lesson so thoroughly. By the time Slater was satisfied that George had the signals straight, they had reached the outskirts of Munich.

“I have one more request to make, George, before you drop me at the Hofbraü. I want you to have Wyman at the bar of the Baur-au-lac Hotel in Zurich at 10:30 tomorrow morning. You can invite him for coffee.”

“I’ll try, but Wyman and I aren’t on very good terms.”

“Then get someone else to invite him, Putnam himself, if necessary, but get him there. I would like to look Wyman over in the flesh.”

“Right.”
It was obvious that Carmichael really knew his business. “I don’t suppose I could drive you to Zurich?” George smiled.

“I’m afraid not.” Slater returned the smile.

The Mercedes maneuvered nicely through the narrow streets and George pulled into the parking place by the Hofbraü Haus. Slater got out and grabbed his suitcase. He set the suitcase on the sidewalk and, keeping the door open, poked his head inside.

“Hollingsworth,” he said, “sorry to have been quite so ornery. I think you can see this is no business for amateurs, but I think you’ll do.” George was obviously pleased. “And one more thing, don’t worry about me. I’ll admit I’m honed down pretty fine at the moment, but I’m not going to bust apart.” George flushed scarlet. “If Webber’s still alive, I’ll get him out.”

Before George could say anything, Slater had shut the door, picked up his bag and was walking across the street toward the main entrance to the Hofbraü Haus. The wind had picked up the bottom flap of his coat, and he was forced to hold onto his hat with his free hand. To George, he looked a lonely figure, tall and slim and straight, despite the wind. Slater disappeared into the beer hall, and George put the car in gear and drove off.

Carmichael—Montague—was a strange man, also positively clairvoyant. George’s face flushed again at the thought that he had been caught in judgment. As George turned the corner, he realized that, in spite of their long conversation, all he could distinctly remember of Carmichael was a strong face, dark hair, green eyes and a surprisingly gentle smile. If, as he had said, Webber was alive, Carmichael would find him.

SLATER ENTERED one of the many dining rooms on the first floor of the Hofbraü Haus and sat down at a table which was covered by a checked cloth. He remembered the Hofbraü Haus was not only for beer drinkers, who wanted to see true Bavarian entertainment, but also for those who really enjoyed plain German food. It was the noon hour, and a glance at the rough hands and coarse clothing of the clientele was enough to reveal that here was a place where the working men and women ate. Slater was fascinated by one giant of a man at the next table. His face was gaunted by years of hard, manual labor, but his body looked hard and well muscled. He had a prodigious appetite, and washed his food down with great gulps of beer, occasionally taking time to wipe the foam from his upper lip with his sleeve. “If that bruiser ever quits working,” thought Slater, “he’ll blow up like a balloon.”

Slater ordered a Filetschnitte “Meyerbeer,” feine Erbsen, pommes frites, a liter stein of beer, and set to with a will. He had a difficult job in front of him; but past experience had taught him to enjoy the free moments while he had them, and that a full stomach will carry a man a lot further than an empty one. He quaffed his beer and marveled at its wonderful taste. As far as he was concerned, there was no beer like the draft beer at the Hofbraü; and here a man could eat as a man should, with both feet if he wanted to. Slater couldn’t match the giant at the next table for his pure “go to hell” style of eating, but he did put his body and soul into it. He was surprised when it was all over, and he had nothing left to do but light a cigarette and pay the bill.

Slater found a small hotel nearby and checked in. The room was just large enough for a dark-paneled wardrobe with two drawers at the bottom, a piece of furniture common to every hotel in Europe, and a tremendous four-poster. The window looked out on a dark alley. Slater was glad he didn’t have to spend the night there. He had paid for the room in advance and intended to slip out unnoticed a few hours later. He had signed for the room in the name of Bruce Carmichael, but had shown his passport only briefly.

Slater locked the door and returned to the washstand, where he opened his heavy suitcase. He took out a tweed sport coat, a pair of oxford-gray flannels, a white button-down shirt, a pair of argyle socks and a pair of rubber-soled cordovan shoes and laid them on the bed. He turned to face the mirror and looked at himself closely. He believed he looked natural enough, as long as he could keep some sort of a tan. He removed his hat. He moistened one of the hand towels and dampened the top of his forehead and his temples. Deftly, he removed the toupee and laid it carefully on a piece of tissue paper which he took from the suitcase. He turned back to the mirror and scrubbed his eyebrows. A good deal of the black came off. Next, he bent over and untied his shoes. When he stepped out of them, he was three inches shorter or about five feet, ten inches in his stockinged feet. With regular shoes on he was about five feet eleven.

Slater went back to the mirror and smiled. Everybody couldn’t be six feet one with his shoes on. Who wanted a widow’s peak anyway? Slater’s own hair, now very short, was brown and coarse and his natural hairline was higher than the wig. The first touches of gray were noticeable at the temples.

Slater took a very small half-moon piece of foam rubber from inside each cheek. His face now had a flatter, longer look; his cheek bones were a little more prominent, and he looked more Teutonic.

Slater dressed himself and checked his appearance once again. He could have been a young executive on a holiday. There would always be the impression that, whatever else he did, he managed to spend time out of doors. Preston would have said that Slater was “quite acceptable—good background and all that.”

There was one more important detail. He had to put Carmichael’s American passport carefully away and take out his own. Since he had entered Germany as Slater, he would have no trouble leaving as Slater. At some future date, if he thought it advisable, he would have to copy the entrance and exit stamps into Carmichael’s passport. He wasn’t going to do it now, as he might need an alibi for his whereabouts someday, and a Carmichael who hadn’t left Germany, or possibly hadn’t even entered, might come in handy. There were some things it didn’t pay to do immediately. Papers were a problem to Slater, particularly in Europe, but, fortunately, an American didn’t require visas in most of Europe; and there were times when the travel regulations could be extremely useful.

Slater carefully put everything back in his suitcase, including his hat. He put on his overcoat, picked up his suitcase and, leaving the key in the door, walked down the two flights of stairs, past the small lobby and into the street. Luckily, there had been no one in the lobby.

Slater hailed a taxi and drove through the late afternoon crowds to the station. He never could sleep on trains, particularly European trains, which screeched through the night like banshees and continually threatened to jump the corrugated roadbeds. He preferred to take the next train, instead of the later sleeper, and check into a hotel in Zurich. He wouldn’t get to bed until late but he could sleep until nine the next morning.

On the train, Slater sat by the window and watched the countryside flash by. There was
a timelessness
about the European scene. An observer had the feeling he was witnessing a vast pastoral setting which hadn’t changed for hundreds of years and wouldn’t change for many, many years in the future. Horses and oxen still pulled the wagons. The farmers milked by hand. Everything was done today as it had been over a century ago. Only the main roads were modern.

Even the people were the same. Wars didn’t seem to have any lasting effect. The farmers went right on planting and harvesting their crops, getting ready for winter; and now that winter was almost over, they were patching and mending, preparing to begin the cycle all over again.

Slater continued to watch until darkness enveloped the scene, and he could no longer look anywhere but inward. He hadn’t wanted to but before he knew it, he was remembering.

The Office of Security, or whatever it had called itself in 1948, had first approached Slater in Zurich. He had been doing graduate work at the University, simply marking time, wondering what to do with his life. Government service had seemed to be the answer. They would pay him enough to live on, send him all over the world, and he could be of real service in the protection of his country’s security.

He had done that first job successfully, in spite of the government organization. He had been appalled at the department’s slipshod methods and cavalier approach to international security; and when they had asked him to take on another project, he had refused unless he could work his own way—and alone. He had been told that if he didn’t become integrated into the organization, he couldn’t advance his career. Slater had said he didn’t care, that he had no intention of making this a career. Slater smiled ruefully.

He had had a great many ideas of his own. He had believed in training, for one thing, and the government had paid for it. Slater had sought out professionals to give him, individually, the skills he believed his job required. He had learned judo the hard way from a professional wrestler in Japan. A German mercenary in the French Foreign Legion had taught him the use of firearms and knives. Slater had gone into the prisons to learn forgery and illegal entry. He had learned how to make an effective bomb with several timing devices from things anyone could purchase at a drugstore.

His superiors had laughed at him when he had requested permission to study the art of make-up from a well-known Broadway authority. That was cloak and dagger Hollywood style; he would never use it. But Slater had stuck to his guns, and, little by little, the wheels had finally become convinced by his successful performances that, for him at least, this training was worthwhile.

The idea that had been gnawing at Slater for eight years was the increasing realization that his primary reason for all the special training he had received was his own fear. He had to be good, or he would be killed. This thought kept running through his mind and had, to a large degree, spoiled any feeling of accomplishment. Each new mission, every close call, and there had been many, left him more and more fearful. He had deliberately isolated himself from contact with people in his own organization. This had been done out of fear for his own security, but lately it had boomeranged. He needed desperately to confide in someone, and there wasn’t anyone.

Slater knew he had built up a legend about himself. He was considered the best counterespionage agent his country had, and now they counted on him for too much. They told him too much. He knew almost every important Allied counterespionage operator in Europe. The Communists would give a great deal to nail the man called Montague, and Slater knew this for a fact. He had seen a copy of one of their dossiers on him. They had given him credit for some things he hadn’t done and had missed a few he had been in on, but they were still too close. That dossier was now two years old.

Over the years, Slater had used so many identities he had no concrete idea which were compromised. He was pretty certain that the only one he could be sure of was his own, William A. Slater. In any event, it was a pleasure to be
himself
for a change. He had already made up his mind that this was to be his last mission.

At the Swiss border, the passport inspector took Slater’s passport and looked him over carefully.

“You are a tourist, Mr. Slater?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Slater cheerfully, “that’s right.”

“What is your business in the United States?”

“Well, I’m about to open up a ski resort in New Hampshire.” Slater smiled. “I’m sort of on a busman’s holiday.
Thought I might get a few good ideas from your country.”

“This is your first visit to Switzerland?”

“Oh no,” said Slater. “I was a graduate student at the University of Zurich, but, unfortunately, that was a long time ago.”

“I knew it.” The inspector looked pleased with himself. “I thought I had seen you before. You Americans,” he shook his head, “you never grow old.”

“What do you mean? Look at that gray in my temples.” Slater put his head to one side and invited closer inspection.

“Ach!
Your hair is too light for it to show. No one would ever know.”

Slater laughed. “Tell me, where did we meet?”

“Oh, we didn’t meet, Mr. Slater! I only checked your passport in Basel.” He chuckled. “I pride myself on remembering faces. I remember you because you tried to speak German with me. My English wasn’t so good then, and I was pleased that an American had taken the trouble to learn our language. Well, I must go. I will see you again, I hope. Auf Wiedersehen.”

“Auf Wiedersehen!” Slater was amazed. You never knew. If he had lied about himself, the officer might have sent in his name to the Swiss authorities; and he would have been watched. By telling the truth he avoided suspicion. After all, he mused, he really was William A. Slater, and Slater had nothing to hide. Anyway, he hoped not. How outgoing he must have been then—in spite of a war. Well, he thought, I’ll never be that way again.

Slater got off the train and jostled his way through a crowd of skiers who were waiting for the Thursday-night trains to Davos and St. Moritz. Some would go north to the Schwarzwald, to Garmisch in Bavaria and to the Austrian Tirol. Prices were lower there. Slater loved to ski and had been to all of these places. He hadn’t had time for skiing in the last two years.

He stood by the currency exchange booth and watched the skiers laughing and shoving, their bright costumes forming a contrast to the gray concrete of the station. He wished he could go along as one of them. The girls all looked beautiful in their tight-fitting ski pants. He turned away from the crowd and changed some greenbacks for Swiss francs. As he left the station, one of the girls winked at him, and her friends shouted for him to come along. Slater waved and smiled and headed for the street. He crossed over to the Schweizerhof and checked in. He went straight to his room, took a bath and went to bed.

He awoke at eight, refreshed but terribly hungry. He pushed off the great white feather quilt and dressed. The only thing he added to his wardrobe of yesterday was a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He didn’t like to wear them. He didn’t need them, and he had a very high-bridged nose which the frame irritated. He remembered that his oxygen mask during the war had nearly driven him crazy. He had wanted to rip it off, even at 24,000 feet. The only time he hadn’t been aware of it was during actual combat.

Slater was an eater. It was one of the few pleasures he permitted himself. He ordered croissants with Swiss butter and jam, milchkaffee, and roesti with ham and eggs. Breakfast took over an hour, and the waiter marveled in silence at the still trim figure of a man who could eat like that. When Slater had left, the pale-faced waiter shrugged his shoulders. “That one can eat, because he is rich and has nothing on his mind.”

He turned to a fellow waiter. “Glück and Geld sind nur für Amerikaner.” Fortune and money are only for Americans.

Slater bought the
Nue Züricher Zeitung
and walked along the Bahnhofstrasse. He stopped at a fashionable men’s store and purchased a green Tyrolean hat, complete with a Gemsbock ornament. All he needed now was a camera slung over his shoulder, and the perfect picture of an American tourist would be completed. He decided to forego the camera.

He sauntered along the main streets of the town he knew so well, trying to recall his student days when his irrepressibility had gotten him into one minor scrape after another. Zurich was a beautiful city, the modern blended with the medieval, the old city with its narrow, winding streets clinging to the side of a hill, the new city in the valley split by the Limmat River, a mountain on either side, and the Lake of Zurich for its southern border.

Slater walked to the stone embankment at the water’s edge and looked across the lake and far beyond, to the snowcovered Swiss Alps. He remained standing there for a minute. Finally he turned slowly, almost sadly, and crossed the street to the Baur-au-Lac Hotel.