Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

Another crazy idea I had was that I was followed all the way from Genshagen. Except that it wasn’t crazy at all. With so little automobile traffic, it’s not easy following someone unnoticed on the autobahn. Another Mercedes 190 in your rearview mirror, matching your speed for six or seven hundred kilometers, is hard to miss. Schellenberg had warned me I might get followed by the Gestapo in Switzerland. I suppose I wasn’t very surprised that they decided to follow me in Germany, too.

I arrived at the factory in Sindelfingen just before six in the evening. My replacement car — another 190, with a civilian paint job, black — was awaiting collection and I was soon on my way again, although with less pleasure than before. I was running the engine in, of course, but that shouldn’t have made the new car seem heavier and more sluggish than its predecessor. And soon after leaving Sindelfingen I stopped the car and opened the trunk just to make sure I wasn’t carrying anything illegal. I found nothing, but this still worried me all the way until Fort Reuenthal on the southern side of the river Rhine, where Swiss customs searched the car more thoroughly and, much to my relief, they found nothing illegal, either.

The fort wasn’t called that lightly. There were bunkers, tank barricades, infantry barracks, and artillery emplacements, including two 75-millimeter rapid-firing antitank guns. Seeing all of this for the first time, I realized just how seriously the Swiss took the matter of defending their borders against any foreign potential aggressor, namely Germany.

Sergeant Bleiker, a detective from the Zurich City Police, met me with my visa and some Swiss money, which I bought with the gold reichsmarks that Eggen had given me: the Swiss didn’t like taking our paper money and, even with Hitler’s head on them, preferred the hundred-mark coins. Gold has a jingle when you count your money, I suppose. The Swiss detective was in his forties, a tall quiet man with a small mustache. He wore a brown flannel suit and a brown felt hat with a wide brim. He had a firm handshake and looked a sporty type. But gregarious he was not. I’ve had longer conversations with a parrot.

“That’s quite a fortress you’ve got back there,” I said when at last we were on the road.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “Tell your Nazi friends in Germany.”

“When was it built? It looks modern.”

“Nineteen thirty-nine. Just in time for the beginning of the war. Otherwise, who knows what might have happened?”

“Right. And by the way, for the record, now that I’m in Switzerland, I don’t have any Nazi friends in Germany.”

“I certainly hope that doesn’t mean you’re going to claim asylum here, Captain Gunther. Because the boat is full. And I’d hate you to waste your time trying to stay and then get into trouble with your own people when we had to send you home again.”

“No, no. I just got married. So I have to go back. In fact, they insisted on it. The marriage, that is. You’ve heard of a shotgun wedding. Mine involved the threat of a falling ax.”

“Congratulations.”

“So you can relax, Sergeant. Our leader, Adolf Hitler, doesn’t like it when his citizens choose not to come home.”

Sergeant Bleiker sniffed. “I couldn’t even tell you the name of our leader. Or anything about him.”

He didn’t talk much after that except to issue directions from the passenger seat, and this happened all the way to Zurich, for which I was grateful, as most of the roads were small and windy.

We drove through the Talstrasse entrance of the Hotel Baur au Lac after dark. Bleiker oversaw my check-in, bowed gravely, and told me that Inspector Weisendanger would come to the hotel and meet me for breakfast first thing in the morning.

Exhausted after my long drive, I ate some supper and went to bed. But not before I had telephoned the lady from Zagreb.

In the morning I got up very early and took a short walk along the shore of Lake Zurich and watched a passenger ferry landing bespectacled, quiet men wearing even quieter suits as they disembarked and headed to work in banks and offices. I wasn’t sure I envied them their steady lives but there was a pleasing predictability about Swiss life in general. The water tasted sweet and the air tasted fresh, although that might only have been because Berlin’s air and water were always full of bomb dust and a permanent smell of cordite. Sometimes, after a heavy night from the RAF, Berlin’s famous air smelled like a sulfur mine.

I wouldn’t say I loved Zurich but it’s hard not to like a city that isn’t being bombed day and night and where no one is going to arrest you if you make a joke about your country’s leader. Not that there was anyone in Zurich who could have told you the name of the Swiss prime minister any more than there was someone who knew a joke. With government by direct democracy, the idea of having a leader simply was not important. You have to love a country like that, especially when you’re a German. There was also something very reassuring about a city with so many banks, where beer and sausage still tasted like beer and sausage, where the last person who made a speech was John Calvin, where even the best-looking women didn’t care enough about their appearances not to wear glasses. Another reason to feel reassured was that I had been booked into one of the best hotels in Europe. That’s something else the Swiss do very well: hotels.

My room overlooked an attractive canal off the Limmat, the river that ran through Zurich and into the lake. The Baur au Lac was a little like the Adlon in Berlin in that everyone famous seemed to have stayed there, including Richard Wagner, the Kaiser, and more recently, Thomas Mann. According to Hans Eggen, the Baron von Mannerheim, Finland’s head of state, was now in residence and, having recently signed an armistice with the Soviet Union after several years of war, he was trying to negotiate his country’s independence of Germany, too, much to Hitler’s fury.

In spite of the war, the atmosphere of the hotel remained elegant. Champagne was still in supply on the recently constructed rooftop terrace. Afternoon tea was served in the pavilion, and dinner dances took place regularly. But food was predictably scarce. The front lawn of the hotel, which had extended all the way down to the lakeside, was now a large potato field. These potatoes were protected with rolls of barbed wire that had once served to protect the hotel itself, although from whom was not obvious as it was impossible to imagine the luxury-loving German High Command treating Zurich’s finest hotel with anything but the utmost respect. There was also an air-raid shelter in case Switzerland’s neutrality was suddenly curtailed by the German Luftwaffe.

Inspector Weisendanger joined me in the restaurant for breakfast. He presented me with a business card using two hands, as if he had been giving me the keys to the city, and refused, ridiculously, to let it go until he had seen that I had read what was printed on it.

“My address and telephone number are here,” he said gravely. “And I am at your disposal for the duration of your stay in Zurich.”

Like Bleiker, he spoke German very well — at least to me — but when he spoke to other Swiss he used a dialect of yodeling German called Alemannic that would have been difficult to comprehend at the best of times but, through a gray-black mustache that, joined to his sideburns, was as big as a tart’s feather boa, seemed quite inscrutable.

“I get it. I’m to use this card if I get into trouble, right? I can get a taxi to this address. Or find a telephone and dial this number. This is going to be really useful.”

“I’m not sure how things are with policemen in Berlin,” he said. “But it’s usually best to assume that any Swiss policeman you’ll meet does not have a sense of humor.”