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.
However, sitting in the Taverne that afternoon, waiting for another hour go by uninterrupted, and thinking frustratedly about this child that he had and did not have, he began to think how foolish and absurd this process was, like some child’s game of espionage. He’d been for a row on the lake, watched a film in a cinema and attended a concert in the cathedral. Perhaps he might visit an art gallery, or enjoy a drink in the bar of the Beau-Rivage and fend off the ‘dubious’ women.
In fact there were two young, rather attractive women sitting in the window taking tea. One of them, he thought, kept glancing over at him as he sipped his beer. But no, that would be too risky, even for this child’s game –
Somebody sat down on the next table blocking the view. A widow in black crêpe, he saw, with a flat straw hat and a small half-veil. Lysander signalled a waiter – one more beer and he was off.
The widow turned to look at him.
‘Excuse me, are you Monsieur Dupetit?’ she asked in French.
‘Ah . . . No. My apologies.’
‘Then I think you must know Monsieur Dupetit.’
‘I know a Monsieur Lepetit.’
She came and sat at his table and folded up her veil. Lysander saw a woman in her thirties with a once handsome face now set in a cold mask of resignation. Hooded eyes and a curved Roman nose, two deep lines on either side of her thin-lipped mouth, like parentheses. He wondered if she ever smiled.
‘How do you do?’ she said and offered her black-lace-gloved hand. Lysander shook it. Her grip was firm.
‘Have you come to take me to him?’ he asked.
‘Who?’
He lowered his voice. ‘Bonfire.’
‘I am Bonfire.’
‘Right.’
‘Massinger didn’t tell you?’
‘He didn’t specify your gender.’
She looked around the room, seemingly exasperated, thereby offering Lysander a view of her profile. Her nose was small but perfectly curved, like a Roman emperor’s on a coin, or like some photographs he’d seen of a captured Red Indian chief.
‘I am Madame Duchesne,’ she said. ‘Your French is very good.’
‘Thank you. May I offer you something to drink?’
‘A small Dubonnet. We’re quite safe to talk here.’
She wasted no time. She would meet him tomorrow at his hotel at 10.00 in the morning and would show him the apartment where the consular official lived. He was a bachelor, one Manfred Glockner. He usually left for the consulate around noon and returned home late in the evening. She had no idea what his official diplomatic role was, but to her eyes he seemed a, ‘smart, bourgeois, gentleman-type – something of an intellectual’. When he started to receive letters from England she became curious and decided to open them. She had missed the first three but she had opened the six subsequent ones. Nine letters in all over a period of eight months from October 1914 to June 1915.
‘Opened?’ Lysander asked. ‘Do you work in the consulate yourself?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘My brother is a senior postmaster here in Geneva, at the central sorting office. He brings me all the letters I ask for. I open them, I read them, I make copies if they’re interesting, then I close them again and they go to the recipient. Letters coming in, letters coming out.’
No wonder she was Massinger’s prize agent, Lysander thought.
‘How do you open them without people knowing?’
‘It’s my secret,’ she said. Here a normal person might have allowed themselves a smile of satisfaction but Madame Duchesne just raised her chin a little defiantly. ‘Let’s say it’s to do with the application of extremes of heat and coldness. Dry heat, dry cold. They just pop open after a few minutes. No steaming. When I’ve read them I stick them down again with glue. Impossible to tell they’ve been opened.’
She reached into her handbag and took out some sheets of paper.
‘Here are the six Glockner letters.’
Lysander took them and shuffled through them – six pages dense with columns of numbers like the one he’d seen in London. He folded them up and slipped them in his pocket, suddenly feeling unusual trepidation – the child’s game had become real.
‘I’ll show you where Glockner lives tomorrow. I would suggest your visit be either at the dead of night or perhaps a Sunday – when the building is quiet.’
Tomorrow’s Friday, Lysander thought. My god . . .
‘I’d better get to the bank,’ he said.
‘It’s up to you,’ she said, unconcernedly. ‘I’m just going to show you where he lives. What you do next is your affair.’ She finished her Dubonnet and stood up. She was tall, Lysander noticed, and he spotted that the material of her dress was of good quality and well cut. She pulled down her half-veil and screened her eyes.