The Lady from Zagreb

Thirty-seven

In an elegant dining room a horse-faced maid served a dinner of cold rabbit fillets with creamed horseradish, and pike and perch with a peppercorn sauce, on Meissen tableware that was the same color as the napkins and the blue-and-white curtains. A virtual cornucopia of pears, red currants, and plums occupied a central spot between two candelabra. Silver place settings glittered and crystal glasses chimed lightly as Meyer poured a delicious Spätburgunder from an ancient-looking and probably very valuable wine jug. Patrizia was up and down from a mahogany Zopfstil chair with a back that was almost as straight as hers, helping the maid to bring to the table tureens of vegetables and more fish, bowls of radishes and pickles, bread baskets, and sauce boats. On the wall, a picture of a lady wearing a wimple as tall as a circus tent stared down at our simple Swiss dinner and licked her lips at seeing so much food. She was probably German.

“Hans was telling me that you were married just before you came to Switzerland,” said Patrizia. “That you hadn’t even managed to go on your honeymoon.”

I glanced at Eggen and gave him my best blue eyes.

“That’s right, Frau Meyer.”

“Tell me about her? Is she very pretty?”

“Her name is Kirsten and yes, she’s pretty. She’s younger than me. Her father owns a small hotel in Dachau. Which is where she’s from, originally. But she’s a schoolteacher at a girls’ school in Berlin.”

“Was it a sudden thing?” she asked.

“It was rather.”

“Well, I wish you all the luck in the world.”

“Thanks, but we won’t need that much. Besides, I think the general is going to need quite a bit of luck himself if he’s going to pull off this plan he was talking about. I’d like to hear some more about that, if I may.”

Schellenberg nodded. “Yes, I think you deserve that.” He shrugged. “The deals done by the Nordhav Foundation with the Swiss Wood Company weren’t just designed to provide Switzerland with much-needed foreign currency, and to demonstrate my good faith to Swiss Army intelligence. They were also meant as a useful cover for me. So that I could work on Operation Noah with Paul without attracting too much suspicion. Although it doesn’t seem to have worked where you were concerned, Gunther.”

I nodded, but I was just beginning to understand the complexity of Schellenberg’s existence and how carefully he was obliged to tread. By contrast my own life seemed almost carefree, not to say somewhat feckless. While the little general had been devoting himself to ensuring Switzerland’s continued neutrality so that peace negotiations between the Allies and the Axis might finally get under way, I had been dallying with a beautiful actress. And it seemed the least I could do was offer him the respect he deserved.

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry about that. I can see that now.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow, for Berlin and then Rastenburg,” he said. “With Mussolini’s overthrow imminent, I’m afraid there’s not a moment to lose. While Paul is in Bern, presenting these genuine plans to his masters in Swiss Army intelligence, I’m going to be at the Wolf’s Lair, giving these fake ones to mine. Quite possibly to Hitler himself. Whatever people say about him, Hitler always listens to his generals. Even me, I have to confess. And being so much younger than the others, I am allowed a certain licence to speak freely.”

“Is Hitler a monster?” asked Patrizia. “One always imagines that he must be.”

“To be honest with you, Patrizia, he is the most extraordinary man I have ever met,” said Schellenberg. “Had he died in 1940 he would have been the greatest German who ever lived. If only he had been more interested in diplomacy he might have been better served diplomatically and we could have avoided war altogether. It doesn’t help that von Ribbentrop was Germany’s foreign minister. The man is a fool. Not that this ever mattered much to Hitler, who always seems to prefer military solutions to almost every problem. That’s what you have to remember about Hitler. He favors getting what he wants by violent means. Which means that speaking to him — giving him advice — is a prospect that always makes me nervous. I feel a little like that fellow Franz Reichelt, who jumped off the Eiffel Tower to demonstrate his new invention: a parachute. It didn’t work, unfortunately for him, and he was killed. I can still remember as a small boy seeing the newsreel footage of Parisian newspapermen using a ruler to measure the depth of the hole in the ground made by his body.”

“Please be careful,” said Patrizia, touching his hand. “We’ve grown very fond of you, Schelli. And you, Hans. Haven’t we, Paul?”

Meyer nodded. “Absolutely. Considering he’s my enemy, he’s also one of my best friends.”

“Thank you, Paul.”

“Before you throw yourself off the Eiffel Tower, General, I’d like to hear some more of these fake plans,” I said.

“Good idea,” said Eggen. “I think a healthy degree of Berlin skepticism is just what we need around here.”

“That sounds like you’re not convinced this plan will work, sir,” I said. “Are you? Do you think it will work?”

“If anyone can make it work, it’s Schelli,” said Eggen. “In my experience there’s no one better than him at the practice of maskirovka.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Schellenberg. “I think Captain Gunther himself does quite a job of concealing what he really is.”

“That’s not what I asked, sir,” I told Eggen. “I asked you if you think his plan will work.”

“Then let me say this. I think Hitler and his generals will believe the plans, yes. I think the Operation Noah plans are quite plausible. What Paul and Schelli have done is create a rather brilliant scenario in which it would seem like folly and madness to invade this country at all. The trouble is that folly and madness rule right now. The folly and madness of continuing this war for another week is there for all to see in the person of our leader, Adolf Hitler. Hitler doesn’t live in the real world. He has an absurd faith in the German Army. He still believes that the impossible can be achieved. That’s the real problem with these plans. Not that they are wrong or inadequate or even too far-fetched, but that Hitler is wrong and inadequate. He might think the destruction of this country is a price worth paying for its daring to oppose his will in the first place. I’ve an awful feeling that he has something similar in mind for Germany if we dare to let him down.”

“Nevertheless,” I said, “I would like to hear more about Operation Noah. I’m still just a little sheepish that I didn’t have more faith in you, General.”

“Faith has never been your strong suit, has it, Gunther?”

“Faith is for people who believe in something. I don’t believe in anything very much. Not anymore. After all, look where belief has got us now.”

Schellenberg and Meyer looked at each other. “Do you want to tell him?” asked the Swiss.

“You’re the storyteller, Paul,” said Schellenberg. “You tell him.”

“All right. Well, as Napoleon himself observed—”

Schellenberg grinned. “Paul is a great student of Bonaparte.”

“He said that nature had destined Switzerland to become a league of states and that no wise man would attempt to conquer it.”

“That lets Hitler out, then,” said Eggen. “He hasn’t acted like a wise man since the summer of 1940.”

“We’ve always had the largest percentage of soldiers in the world compared to overall population — six hundred thousand soldiers out of a population of just four million. Quite possibly we could mobilize the entire population in our defense. Everyone in this country knows how to shoot. Hitler knows to his cost just how stubborn the people of Russia have been in their country’s defense. Switzerland has always maintained that we would be no less stubborn. You can see this demonstrated in the way that we have set up the defenses of our country’s key mountain passes: Sargans in the east, Gotthard in the south, and Saint-Maurice in the west. Each area has a series of huge fortifications stretching across some of the most rugged and impassable mountain terrain in Europe. Any invader would be greeted by heavy artillery fire over many kilometers. In short, this is not panzer country. No more are these defenses vulnerable to Luftwaffe attacks. And as if all this were not enough, there is also the threat that we would blow up these mountain passes to deny them to the enemy. In other words, the very thing that makes this country worth invading — namely, as an easy route to Italy — would be rendered useless. Germany’s would be a Pyrrhic victory of epic proportions. And having sacrificed many thousands of troops to secure Switzerland, the German Army would find itself landlocked with nowhere to go. And not just landlocked, but quite literally bogged down. You see, all of the land you can see between here and Lake Constance was once swampland and a system of canals was constructed to drain it. But these same canals can release all of that water back onto the floodplain. Three years ago — and much to the irritation of local farmers, myself included — this was actually tried as an experiment by the Swiss Army. It was very successful, too. It became clear that an invading German army would soon find itself unable to move.

“Schelli and I simply decided to take those plans a stage further. What we’ve done is create some fictitious but entirely feasible and convincing plans — code-named Operation Noah — which amount to nothing less than a Swiss doomsday scenario that is based on the dynamiting of Switzerland’s biggest glacier lakes, including Geneva, Zurich, Neuchâtel, Maggiore, Lucerne, Lugano, and Constance. The idea is that by destroying the terminal moraines of all these glacier lakes, we would turn Switzerland’s only major natural resource — water — into a weapon that would devastate the whole country, in much the same way that the RAF achieved a few months ago when they bombed and breached your Möhne and Edersee dams, causing catastrophic flooding of the Ruhr valley. A moraine is a sort of glacial bath plug that keeps all the water in the lake. There are over fifty Swiss lakes occupying an area of more than one square kilometer. We estimate that if the terminal moraine of just the biggest lake — Geneva — were destroyed, then almost ninety cubic kilometers of water would be released over the surrounding area. If the moraines of the largest ten lakes were blown at the same time as the major passes, then we could turn Switzerland into one vast European sea. No army on earth could deal with something on that kind of scale.”

“The trick,” added Schellenberg, “will be to convince Hitler that the Swiss really would go through with a plan like this. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the generals in Berlin believe that the Swiss would go ahead and blow up the passes, which is why Operation Province-in-Waiting was shelved. But with Mussolini gone, it’s clear to me that we’re going to need something else to dissuade them more finally — something even more determined that will convince them that any kind of lake-landing by German seaplanes would be suicide, not just for them, but for the Swiss, too. So, I shall simply tell Hitler and the generals that my bravest and most resourceful agent — code-named Tschudi — who is employed in the Technical War Unit of the Swiss General Staff, in Bern — has stolen these plans from the office of Colonel von Wattenwyl. Plans that could make the whole Russian campaign look like a stroll in the Tiergarten.”

“We have compiled a feasibility study of Operation Noah,” said Meyer, “as if written by Colonel von Wattenwyl himself. I’ve met this man. He’s a member of one of Switzerland’s most distinguished families; he’s also a very highly gifted military tactician. We also have a memorandum from the chief of the Swiss General Staff, General Henri Guisan, which describes this operation as part of the National Redoubt or mountain fortress concept that he outlined in an address to the Swiss Officer Corps in 1940. We even have fake reports from the army’s maritime branch on Lake Zurich which purport to indicate the underwater mining of the lake’s terminal moraine at Zurich and plans for the partial evacuation of the city, which would of course be inundated. The report describes the previous effect of the breach of the moraine that runs between Pfäffikon and Rapperswil and which can be seen in the shallow upper part — the Obersee — and the lower part — the Untersee.”

“We certainly hope we’ve thought of absolutely everything,” said Schellenberg. “If we haven’t, then I’ve a feeling that they won’t need a ruler to measure the depth of the hole in the ground I make in the forest at Rastenburg. That swine Ernst Kaltenbrunner will dig my grave himself.”