William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

“What’s that?”

“When I come to bribe this official…What if he won’t accept my bribe?”

“He will. I guarantee.”

“Indulge me in the hypothesis.”

“Then cut his fingers off, one by one. He’ll spill the beans.”

“Most amusing.”

Massinger put his knife and fork down and stared at him, almost with dislike, Lysander thought, it was disturbing.

“I’m deadly serious, Rief. You have to return from Geneva with the key to that cipher — don’t bother coming back if you haven’t got it.”

“Look —”

“Have you any idea what’s at stake here?”

“Yes, of course. Traitor, high command, etcetera. I know.”

“Then do your duty as a British soldier.”

After dinner, Lysander went for a calming stroll along the quayside and smoked a cigarette, looking across the vast lake — Lac Léman as it was known from this side — towards the shadowy mountains in Switzerland that he could still just make out in the gloaming. There was a strange light in the evening sky, the palest blue shading into grey — the Alpenglühen , he knew it was called, a unique admixture of twilit purple valleys combining with golden sunlit mountain tops. He felt excitement build in him — he would be off to Geneva on the first steamer tomorrow, more than happy to say farewell to Massinger with his tetchiness and insecurity. As Fyfe-Miller would have eagerly reminded him, phase two was waiting for him across the still black waters. He was ready for it.

As he strolled back to the hotel he found his thoughts returning to the Manchesters and the brief experience of trench warfare he’d undergone. He thought of the equally brief but intense acquaintances he’d made — Foley, Dodd, Wiley and Gorlice-Law. They were as familiar to him here, as he walked the streets of Thonon, as old friends, his memories of them as vivid as members of his family. Would he ever see them again? Probably not. It was inevitable, he knew, this dislocation and sudden rupture in war — still, the fact that it was did not console. Back at the hotel a note from Massinger was handed to him with his room key, reminding him that his steamer left at 6. 30, but that he, Massinger, would not be present for his embarkation as he was feeling unwell.

♦

The Hôtel Touring de Genève was a disappointment. Almost two years of war in the rest of Europe had effectively killed off the trade of regular visitors — tourists, alpine climbers, invalids seeking medical cures — all the customers that this type of establishment relied on. The atmosphere in the lobby was defeatist — it seemed uncleaned, dusty, waste-paper baskets unemptied. Geraniums were dying unwatered in the planters on the small terrace and this was midsummer. The hotel had eighty rooms but only five were occupied. Even the surprise arrival of a new client for an unspecified length of stay raised no glad smile of welcome.

That first evening he was the only diner in the dining room. The waiter spoke to him in clumsy German (asking him some question about Zürich that Lysander deflected) but he saw the logic in Munro’s choice for his identity — as a germanophone Swiss railway engineer in francophone Switzerland, and in a mid-level establishment like the Touring, Abelard Schwimmer was entirely unremarkable, run of the mill — almost invisible.

The Hôtel Touring was on the Left Bank, two blocks back from the lake front, in a street with a tram-line and some sizeable shops. On his first morning Lysander bought himself a pair of black shoes, some white shirts and a couple of silk ties and replaced his Homburg with a Panama. He changed clothes and felt more like himself — a well-dressed Englishman abroad — until he remembered that was exactly whom he wasn’t meant to be. He put the brown shoes back on and the Homburg but he refused categorically to wear a ready-knotted bow tie.

He went to the Taverne des Anglais at 10. 30 and drank two glasses of Munich lager as he waited the hour out. Nobody came, and nobody came at 4. 30, either. That evening he went to a cinema and watched, unsmiling, a comedic film about a botched bank robbery. He reminded himself that when the day came for him to return to his old profession he really must follow up some more cinema-acting opportunities — it looked ridiculously easy.

During lunchtime the next day (the 10. 30 rendezvous was also not kept) he bought himself a sandwich and hired a rowing boat at the Promenade du Lac and rowed a mile or so along the length of the right bank. It was a sunny day and the white and pink stucco façades of the apartment blocks, with their steep roofs, cupolas and domes, their curious splayed tin chimney pots, the quayside promenades and the Kursaal theatre with its cafés and restaurants spoke only of a world of prosperity and peace. As he rowed he could see beyond the city and the low bluffs that surrounded it to the almost searing-white peaks of Mont Blanc and its chain of mountains to the west. He came to a halt for a minute or two in front of the tall façade of the Grand Hôtel du Beau-Rivage — or the Beau-Espionage, as Massinger referred to it. “Keep out of it at all costs. Very dubious women of all nationalities, swarming with agents and informers, everybody with some story that they’ll try to sell you for a few francs — from the manager to the laundry maids. It’s a sink.” Children were screaming and splashing in the big swimming bath by the Jetée des Paquis and for a moment Lysander wondered if he should buy a swimming costume and join them — the sun was hot on his back and he felt like cooling off. He thought of rowing on to the Parc Mon Repos — he could see its woods and lawns beyond the jetée but he looked at his watch and realized that 4. 30 was not far away. He’d better return to the Taverne des Anglais and make do with a cold beer.

It turned out to be another non-encounter, so he had an early meal in a grill-room and went to hear an organ concert at the cathedral with music by Joseph Stalder and Hans Huber, neither of whom he’d ever heard of. He changed rooms in the Touring, asking to be moved to the back where it was quieter as the trams woke him early. He noticed he was beginning to sleep badly — he kept dreaming about throwing his bombs into the sap below the tomb. Sometimes he saw the starkly lit faces of the fair boy and the moustachioed man — sometimes it was Foley and Gorlice-Law. It wasn’t sleep that he was being denied, so much as that he didn’t welcome the dreams that sleep brought — the idea of sleeping and therefore dreaming was off-putting and disturbing. He decided to start delaying going to bed; he would walk the streets until late, stopping in cafés for hot drinks or a brandy, until boredom drove him back to his room in the hotel. Perhaps he might sleep better then.

The next morning, after another fruitless hour in the Taverne (he was being welcomed as a regular by the staff), he went to a pharmacy to buy a sleeping draught. As he wrapped the powder of chloral hydrate, the chemist recommended that he visit a health resort — but one that was above 2, 000 metres. Insomnia could only be cured at that altitude, he insisted. He suggested the Hôtel Jungfrau-Eggishorn high on the Rhône Glacier — very popular with the English before the war, the man said with a knowing smile. Lysander realized he was unthinkingly letting his disguise drop — he had to concentrate on being Abelard Schwimmer and speak French with a German accent.

As he left the pharmacy his eye was held by the sign of another, nearby shop: “G.N.LOTHAR & CIE” — and seeing this name, his son’s name, he felt the acid pang of this strange loss, the love-ache for someone he’d never seen, never known, who was present in his life only by virtue of the conferred familial role: this ‘son’ of his — this abstraction of a son — destined to be identified by inverted commas to distinguish his purely notional presence in his affections. Of course, new anger for Hettie returned — her callow ineptitude, her absolute thoughtlessness — but he quickly recognized this was fruitless, also. A waste.