‘Where’s Munro?’
‘Good question . . . In London, I think.’
Lysander travelled to Paris, then to Lyons, overnight and first class – a railway engineer’s perk, he assumed. He shared a compartment with two French colonels who looked at him with overt contempt and never addressed a word to him. He didn’t care. He nodded off and dreamed of throwing his bombs into the sap – seeing the two startled faces of the signallers looking up at him before he switched his torch off. When he woke at dawn the colonels had gone.
Lyons station was crowded with French troops about to entrain for the front. Lysander was reminded that the front line was still not far away, extending down through Champagne and the Ardennes, curving in a meandering doodle from the North Sea to the Swiss border, almost five hundred miles, of which the British Army was responsible for about fifty. Massinger was waiting for him at the station buffet – drinking beer, Lysander noticed. They took the stopper train all the way to Lake Geneva, to Thonon on the south bank, and checked into the Hôtel de Thonon et Terminus, conveniently placed for the station in the lower town.
Massinger’s mood was fractious and ill at ease. When Lysander started to tell him about his fraught night in no man’s land he seemed only to half-listen, as if his mind were on more pressing matters. ‘Yes, yes. Indeed. Most alarming.’ Lysander didn’t bother explaining in more detail, told him nothing about the bombing, about watching the dawn rise over the German lines as he crouched amongst the rushes of the drainage ditch.
They dined together but the atmosphere was still unnatural and forced. They were like vague acquaintances who – as ill luck would have it – found themselves as the only two Englishmen in a small French town. They were polite, they feigned conviviality, but there was no denying that, given the choice, they would far rather have dined alone.
Massinger at least had more information and instructions to give him about his mission. Once Lysander had arrived in Geneva and had settled in his hotel he was to go to a certain café everyday at 10.30 and again at 4.30 and stay for an hour. At some stage he would be approached by Agent Bonfire, they would exchange the double password and new instructions would be given, if Bonfire felt that the moment was opportune.
‘Bonfire seems to be calling all the shots,’ Lysander said, unthinkingly.
‘Bonfire is probably our key asset, currently, in our entire espionage war,’ Massinger said with real hostility, his raspy voice even harsher. ‘Bonfire reads all the correspondence going in and out of the German consulate in Geneva – how valuable do you think that is? Eh?’
‘Very valuable, I would imagine.’
‘Just make sure you’re at the Taverne des Anglais at those hours, morning and afternoon.’
‘Taverne des Anglais? Don’t you think that’s a bit obvious?’
‘It’s a nondescript brasserie. What’s its name got to do with anything?’
They ate on in silence. Lysander had ordered a fish, under a local name he didn’t recognize, and found it overcooked, bland and watery. Massinger had a veal chop that, judging by the effort he was deploying to cut it up, must be extremely tough.
‘There’s one thing that’s worrying me, Massinger.’
‘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.