The Arms Maker of Berlin

SIXTEEN

BERTA’S HEAD RESTED against Nat’s shoulder as their flight crept up on a Zurich sunrise. She had been asleep for three hours, close enough for Nat to smell her hair. Shampoo and cigarettes, the same blend that had scented his pillow when she’d tossed it to him on the floor of the B&B. It had triggered a few dreams he would rather keep to himself.

Was she flirting now, wanting something, or just being human? He chalked it up to the cramped seating—the Bureau wouldn’t spring for business class—and also to her gratitude. No matter how much she knew about Bauer and the White Rose, she needed his reputation and credentials. Nat could open doors that had been slammed in her face. He was sympathetic to this need. Without Gordon to shepherd him through the early years, he, too, might have grown frustrated enough to do something stupid like stealing a document. Not that he wasn’t still wary of her. But as long as she kept coming up with new leads, they were better off working in tandem.

He hated long flights, but after the ordeal of the memorial service he had welcomed the idea of eight hours of enforced boredom. The muffled roar of the engines, the headset chatter of the in-flight movie—all of it helped him decompress. Grief wasn’t the problem. Viv’s tears, and his own, had been cathartic. The harder part had been enduring the hypocritical maundering from the podium and the unseemly congratulatory tone of his peers, who kept reassuring him with smug nods and arch asides that he had at last inherited the mantle of succession.

The day’s bright spot was Karen, who remained at his side throughout. She comforted him after his mess of a speech, which he rushed ungracefully and finished in tears. At the reception she helped ward off the supplicants who seemed intent on paying tribute. He supposed part of her reaction was simply a young person’s discomfort over a proximate death. She was also still a little spooked by the two hang-up calls she had received from Nat’s stolen cell phone, one of them only hours before Gordon’s passing—as if some angel of death had tuned in to her wavelength on its way north.

But she seemed most disturbed by the realization that this was the eventual fate of all aging scholars—done in by their passions, then relegated to postmortem dissection by tipsy peers at a dreary gathering around cold cuts and a punch bowl. Nat noticed her watching sympathetically as poor Viv was cornered repeatedly by the same colleagues who only weeks ago had been gloating over Gordon’s takedown in the Daily Wildcat.

“Is this all there is?” Karen asked, and he knew she didn’t mean the buffet.

“His work will be remembered,” Nat said, patting her arm, although he, too, worried for Gordon’s legacy. Soon the old man might be better known as a thief and a blackmailer, or even as some sort of blundering spy. Worst of all, Nat’s work for the FBI might play a big role in the revision.

“He never had children, did he?” Karen asked.

“No. I guess that’s one way I’ve already outdone him.”

He smiled, keeping it light, but she seemed grateful all the same. It had been nice, having her stay in his house the night before and knowing she would still be there in the morning, bleary-eyed by the toaster as they ushered in the new day. It made him feel like he had finally been readmitted to the fraternity of Fatherhood. After years of associate membership, he again had full rights and privileges, even if those included compulsive worry and constant concern.

He saw her look toward Viv with a tear in her eye.

“She’d love to see you if you could drop by while I’m away,” he said. “It would do her good.”

“Sure. But you’re the one I’m worried about.”

“Me? I’ll be okay.”

“Mom said it was hard enough when you lost him the first time, after the bad review. Now he’s gone for good, and you never won him back.”

“You keep forgetting the benefits of my field of endeavor. I’m a historian. I may find him yet, out there in some lost archive. With his help, even.”

“All that old stuff worries me,” she said. “Sometimes it’s more dangerous than it’s worth.”

“Let me guess. You came across some warning from the Belle.”

She nodded, but didn’t return his smile. This was serious.

“I’ll bet you can recite it from memory.”

She nodded again, solemnly, then obliged him, keeping her voice low so no one else would hear. It gave her words more impact, as if the poet herself were speaking through his daughter, a resurrected Cassandra:The Past is such a curious Creature

To look her in the Face

A transport may receipt us,

Or a disgrace—Unarmed if any meet her

I charge him fly

Her faded Ammunition

Might yet reply.

“That’s good,” Nat replied. “A little too good.”

“I thought so, too. Be careful.”

You, too, he wanted to say. But didn’t, for fear of alarming her. He hoped Holland’s men were still on the job.

THE JOLT OF JET WHEELS against the tarmac brought Berta’s head upright.

“Zurich?”

He nodded. Her scent lingered on his shoulder. They were finally in Europe, the place where all the old things hide best.

“Assuming they didn’t lose our luggage, we should make the 8:40 train to Bern,” he said. “What’s our plan of action?”

Berta had begun courting her archival source by telephone, hoping to finagle a look at the Swiss surveillance reports from the war years. She proposed to go see him right away, and Nat agreed. He would check them in at the hotel and stash their bags while she visited the archives. Then they would reconvene at the Bahnhof at 11:30 to pay a joint visit to the doorstep of Gustav Molden, the Swiss flatfoot who had been assigned to Gordon during the war.

In the meantime, Nat would get his bearings with a brisk walk through the medieval heart of the city. He wanted to shake off the jet lag, stop for a double espresso. Then he would begin collecting images to go with all the names and facts jammed in his head.

It was his favorite way of making old documents come to life, and the best part was that central Bern looked much as it had sixty-four years ago. That made it easier to imagine the young Gordon Wolfe slouching along the arcaded sidewalks, hands stuffed in the pockets of his leather bomber jacket as he headed to a meeting with Dulles, the pipe-smoking spymaster in a rumpled overcoat.

It was Nat’s imaginative powers that had eventually given him an edge over Gordon as a historian. In fact, Gordon’s envy of those powers had contributed to their falling-out. Nat could make the old characters from the archives live and breathe. It was one reason he enjoyed his craft. The more vividly he began to see an era, the easier it was to tease out its secrets.

They easily made the 8:40 train, and upon arrival Berta set out for the State Archives while Nat secured their rooms. Earlier he had decided that, like Gordon, they would stay at the Bellevue, the posh hotel on a bluff above the River Aare. During the war it was a notorious den of spies, which to Nat made it the perfect starting point. Pricey, but the FBI was paying.

Bern was named for a bear, as if the city had crawled out of a crease in the Alps to lie down on its horseshoe bend. Its bluffs sheltered a medieval grid of narrow arcaded streets marked by grand clock towers and cathedrals and lined by timbered buildings along bustling market squares. While the arcades gave the city much of its charm, they also lent a certain hooded aspect, a shadowy sense of concealment.

Nat set out for the town center. He tried seeing the place through Gordon’s eyes by thinking back to an item he had found in the archives, a Dulles memo to his mistress and Girl Friday, Mary Bancroft, which described how he had taken their newest operative out for an introductory stroll.

Gave 543 the grand tour. Christened him Icarus, seeing as how he literally fell to us from the sky. He finds it quite a lark being here in Shangri-la and comes across as a sharp tack. A Princeton man, and his German is first rate. We’ll start him slow and see how well he learns to walk—or fly, as the case may be with our Icarus. Let’s hope he doesn’t emulate all of his namesake’s destiny. The sun is very hot in our business.

Dulles described their progress stop by stop, and Nat followed their route. He proceeded with an odd sense that at any moment he might spot them up ahead or catch a whiff of pipe smoke. Reaching the Nydegg Bridge, he gazed down at the green river, swollen by spring melt, and then crossed to the city’s famed bear pit, where shaggy beasts loped in the sunlight, craning their necks toward the moms and children at the rim.

I told Icarus those bears were like us, hemmed in by every border, unable to roam. Yet see how everyone approves of their presence and smiles down on them? He, too, would receive such favorable treatment, so long as he lived by their rules and didn’t stray. Try breaking free and they would hunt you down. So work hard, but behave.

Nat followed their trail to the Cathedral of Bern, or Münster, where the young spy and his master had inspected the magnificent central portico, a profusion of painted characters carved against a colorful tableau. The Archangel Michael stands tall with his sword as he fights a demon worthy of the Axis Powers. On either side are teeming mobs—to the left, robed in white, the Chosen; to the right, naked and wretched, the Damned.

That will be us up there someday, I told him, cast among the winners or losers. Your work may well decide which.

From there they proceeded to the Dulles bachelor digs on Herrengasse, eluding a flatfoot by detouring to the back entrance through a small park behind the Münster, with its sweeping view of the river. Today a small orchestra was playing in the gazebo, just as Swiss musicians had played throughout the war. Shangri-la indeed, Nat thought, when you could stroll to your boss’s house to the tempo of a Strauss waltz.

With dusk falling, Dulles had prepared a crackling fire to ward off the October chill. He then brought out the port, sherry, and brandy. They must have talked tradecraft, because two days later Dulles sent Icarus a typewritten checklist, 1 through 9, headlined “The Technique of Intelligence.”

Some high notes from our discussion, he scribbled in the margin.

Most of it was standard fare: 3—Assume that every phone call is over-heard, and so on. But the last item seemed just as appropriate for a prowling historian as for a budding spy, not only for its wisdom but for its strong sense of foreboding:

9—Be skeptical of everything, everybody. Don’t let pride of discovery blind you as to worth of individual or info.

Nat checked his flanks, half expecting to notice several people watching from behind newspapers and hat brims. But his untrained eye saw only shoppers on their way to market.

Before heading to the Bahnhof he pulled from his pocket the faded old matchbook Gordon had left in the wooden gun box. Nat had brought all of the strange items with him, partly out of superstition. The matchbook advertised the Hotel Jurgens on Aarbergergasse. Not a single match had been used. Obviously a keepsake, but why? There had been no reference to the place in his tourist guidebook, which made Nat wonder if it still existed. But when he turned the corner a few minutes later, there it was—middle of the block with a modest sign over the entrance.

He stepped into the small lobby, barely big enough for a couch and an easy chair. The place wasn’t particularly modern. Yet, at least on this floor, it was clean and well kept. He figured it for one of those hotels where the floors squeaked, the radiators whined, and the windows stuck, but you always had clean linens and ample heat for the rawest winter night. No one was at the desk, but when he cleared his throat a chambermaid poked her head out of the office. She held a stack of towels.

“Is the manager in?”

“Nein. No. Back soon, one hour. But the rooms, they are not free.”

Her way of saying there were no vacancies, probably. He wasn’t sure what he would have asked the manager anyway. He supposed he had naively believed that in some strange way he would know right off what to do, but this time his intuitive powers failed him. Not a single vibe. Maybe jet lag was to blame. Or maybe there was nothing to find.

He glanced again around the lobby, and when it became clear that he was making the maid uncomfortable he said good-bye. Halfway down the block he turned, feeling he must be missing something. But before he could determine what it was, his new cell phone rang. He had bought one in Wightman that would also work in Europe.

“Success,” Berta said. “Karsten has arranged for a viewing.” A male. Of course. “He’ll have Molden’s and Visser’s surveillance reports ready for us at 3 p.m. Since I’m done early, why don’t I meet you at Molden’s house? Maybe you should go up first to break the ice. It’s a nice sunny day. We could invite him to lunch.”

“You should be there, too, when he opens the door. With an old fellow it never hurts to show a pretty face.”

Molden seemed grateful for the company and invited them in. He certainly wasn’t dressed for visitors—droopy brown sweater frayed at the elbows, wool pants dotted with lint, white socks, house slippers. A bald spot like a tonsure gave him a monkish air, and his apartment smelled of dust and old cheese. On the other hand, a state-of-the-art sound system blared a Debussy prelude, and his coffee table brimmed with new magazines.

“So you want to talk about my work during the war?” he asked, smiling wistfully. “Now those were enjoyable days. Bern was the spy capital of Europe, you know. And my job kept me out of the army. No marching through the mountain snow for me, thank God. With my luck the Germans would have invaded the day I arrived at the frontier.”

He placed a hand on the small of Berta’s back as he spoke, having warmed to her right away, as Nat had predicted. It was easy to see why. Rather than suiting up in her usual ensemble, Berta had worn a button-up silk blouse the color of fresh cream. It was tucked tightly enough into a trim pair of black slacks to show every contour.

When they suggested lunch, Molden steered them toward a café in the sunny Bärenplatz, only blocks away. They took a table bordering the square, where vendors sold vegetables and cheeses beneath colorful awnings. Molden and Nat ordered tall glasses of lager and platters of Röstí—fried potatoes piled high with melted cheese and two eggs, sunny-side up. Berta got mineral water and a salad.

“What were conditions like during the war?” Nat asked, still hungry for atmospherics.

“Well, there were all the shortages. The bumpkins in the hills didn’t have much beyond their kitchen gardens and their cows. Cheese on the table, morning, noon, and night. But here? Not so bad. And there was a strong sense that we were the last light left on in the whole house of Europe. Everyone else had rolled up their awnings and put things under lock and key. Hiding under the bed until the last bomb fell.”

“While you fellows partied on.”

“The ones with expense accounts did, anyway. I mean, look at Dulles. The man had gout. All of us laughed about that. But for a young fellow like me, it was a strange way to come of age. Working in a trade where nobody was who he said he was and everyone had something to hide.”

Berta sighed and gave Nat a look that said, “Enough small talk—this fellow could drop dead at any moment.” Nat reluctantly took out his notebook.

“Something tells me you’re going to ask next about that slippery American I followed for two years.”

“How’d you know?”

“Well, he was one of only three people I was assigned to, and he was the only American. Plus he damn near cost me my job. Him and that fucking German. No offense to you, my Liebchen.” He winked at Berta.

“You may say whatever you wish about my countrymen from that era,” Berta said. “But to which one in particular are you referring? Kurt Bauer?”

“All in good time,” he said, sipping his lager. It left a foam mustache on his gray stubble. “First I must tell you about my adventures with Icarus.”

“You called him that, too?” Nat said.

“We knew his real name, of course. Gordon Wolfe. He made it easy to find out, the way he operated. Sloppy and reckless, at least at first. Always in a hurry.”

No wonder Dulles had sent the laundry list of advice.

“Give me an example.”

“Well, the thing with the phone, for starters. Back then Swiss phones didn’t cut off when you hung up. That made it possible for the central exchange to plug in to almost any room, using the phone as a microphone. The only way to stop it was to unplug the phone between calls. Dulles discovered this right away, of course. But not Icarus.”

Molden told a few more tales like that. Slipups and bumbles that made his job easy. But with experience, Icarus became increasingly elusive. Berta, who seemed impatient with the talk of tradecraft, tried to move the conversation forward by mentioning the name of Kurt Bauer’s Swiss shadow.

“Your colleague Lutz Visser,” she said. “Did you work with him much?”

Molden flicked his hand dismissively, as if to shoo a fly.

“Visser is dead. And good riddance. An overbearing liar. Spinning so many stories about every German he tailed that toward the end they just put him on a few Belgians and let him say whatever he pleased.”

“What kind of stories?”

“You are interested in lies? I thought you were historians.”

“Sometimes even a lie contains a grain of truth.”

Molden shook his head in irritation.

“What did Visser say about Kurt Bauer?”

“Same sort of claptrap he said about every German. That Bauer was mixing with Gestapo bad guys. Cooking up plots. Hell, he was a boy barely eighteen. Not that youth ever kept any Germans from behaving badly. Bauer was lost here, mooning about with nothing to do. Probably left a girlfriend behind, that’s what I always said.”

“How did you happen to get a look at him?” Nat asked.

“Easy. He met with Icarus. Several times.” Another swallow of beer. Another mustache. Then he laughed. “Bauer didn’t like our man Icarus one bit, I can tell you that! But of course Visser only took that as a sign that Bauer must be up to no good.”

“And you’re certain he was wrong?” Berta asked.

“Oh, as you say, there is often a grain of truth. The Gestapo contact, for example. You couldn’t be a German in Bern without having the Gestapo look you up, especially if you were as prominent as Bauer. Naturally they wanted to know his whereabouts. But by that late in the war I would say he was the one with more influence in that relationship.”

“How so?” Nat asked.

“Well, this was late ’44. Even the Gestapo knew the war was lost. Their people here were well beyond the orbit of Berlin, and they weren’t interested in fighting to the last man no matter what the Führer said. A few began placing their bets on the Americans. Some of them probably figured Bauer would be a good middleman for meeting Dulles. But people like the Bauers were already too preoccupied with looking out for themselves.”

“Of course they were,” Berta said. “And the Bauers came out of it quite well.”

“People like them always do, and with good reason. They’re more interested in making money than ideology. So you see? Visser was a lying shit.”

“But even you said Bauer didn’t like Icarus,” Berta said. From her aggressive posture, you could tell she wasn’t thrilled with Molden’s conclusion that Bauer was an okay guy.

“This is true. And the feeling was mutual. You saw it in their body language whenever they met. Shoulders turned away from each other. Never face-to-face, unless it was confrontational. Visser wasn’t exaggerating that part.”

“Bauer must not have been that much of an opportunist,” Nat said, “if he couldn’t even bring himself to butter up a small player like Icarus.”

“He felt he had been pawned off. He wanted an audience with the big boss and thought if he sulked enough they might let him see Dulles himself. When that didn’t work he tried making big promises to the errand boy.”

“What kind of promises?”

Molden shrugged.

“I don’t know for sure. I only have theories. Offering to spy on his Gestapo contacts, perhaps. Or his Nazi friends. Stuckart was also in Bern by then, you know.”

“Wilhelm Stuckart?”

“Wilhelm’s son, Erich. He arrived in late ’44, toward the end of summer. He and Bauer were school chums.”

Well, this was news. Wilhelm Stuckart was a high official in the Nazi Interior Ministry, best known for cowriting the Nuremberg laws, which codified German anti-Semitism. He was also one of fifteen muckety-mucks who attended the Wannsee Conference in 1942, where the murderous Reinhard Heydrich laid out the basis for the “Final Solution” of the Jewish Question. Stuckart was convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg but got out of prison in 1949. He died four years later in a suspicious car accident.

Nat hadn’t even known Stuckart had a family. But Berta seemed to know all about Erich. Nat could see it in her eyes. Perhaps it was one of her jealously guarded secrets. She was watching Molden carefully, as if worried about what might spill out next.

“What was Erich Stuckart doing in Bern?” Nat asked.

“Same thing as Bauer. Trying to cut deals for his family. Leaving messages for Dulles and anyone else who would see him. Visser, of course, claimed Stuckart had bigger plans, and was hatching them with Bauer.”

“Did Icarus know about Stuckart?” Berta asked.

“Who can say for sure?”

Nat sensed that at times Molden was still covering for past shortcomings. Maybe he had been a lousy spy. To watch him now, tucking into his Rösti, Nat could easily imagine him wearying of the chase on a nice spring day opting instead for a Bier and Schnitzel at some establishment like this.

“Even if Icarus had known about Stuckart,” Molden continued, “why should he have cared? There were other operatives assigned to the likes of Stuckart. And by then, of course, Icarus had far bigger concerns in Adelboden.”

“Adelboden?” Nat asked.

It was a town in the Alps, about an hour south of Bern. By the end of the war, its hotels had been overflowing with interned American airmen who hadn’t been lucky enough to get jobs like Gordon’s.

“Yes, Adelboden. Did you not know about Icarus and his little Fräulein, his pretty little waitress?”

“I’ll be damned.”

“You knew this?” Berta said. Her tone was accusatory.

“Not really. But there was a memo in the archives from Gordon to Dulles, ‘The Case of the Pretty Waitress.’ All about some Swiss damsel in distress in Adelboden. I copied it, but I didn’t think it meant much at the time.”

“Oh, she was quite important to him,” Molden said. His smile was a leer.

“Wasn’t she charged with something?” Nat asked.

“The security police believed she was helping American airmen escape. She supplied them with civilian clothes, and on her holidays she drove them to Luzern, where they made their way across the border into France.”

“Do you remember a name? The memo seemed to make a point of not mentioning it.”

“Good for Icarus. Purposely keeping her out of the official record. Yes, I remember her well, and in the end we all agreed she was a pretty good egg. She did all right for herself with tips, of course, but she never charged a penny for taking anyone to the border. That’s one reason the charges were dropped. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Icarus intervened. He got some American lawyer to take her case.”

“And her name?” Nat prompted again.

“Sorry. It was Keller. Sabine Keller.”

“You’re joking.”

“You know of her?”

“Not really. But I have seen the name.”

Amazing, Nat thought. Sabine Keller. The signature in the book Gordon had put under lock and key. Even Berta looked startled. Nat now recalled the most striking thing about the “pretty waitress” memo—its affectionate tone. Gordon had not only given her the benefit of the doubt, he had taken her side. Quite a contrast to his dismissive reaction to other sob stories. No pity for anyone until the pretty waitress came along, toting her Swiss murder mystery with a wild-flower tucked between the pages.

“At first we were a little surprised when Icarus started spending so much time down there,” Molden said.

“You were surprised by love?” Berta asked, oddly animated. “The oldest and strongest emotion in the world? How could that have surprised you?”

Such an unlikely question, coming from her. Nat wondered what could have triggered it. Molden also seemed taken aback, but he recovered with a shrug and a sip of beer.

“Then maybe it is true what they say about us Swiss, that we are a cold and precise people, a nation of watchmakers. Whether or not he was in love, I cannot say for sure. But it certainly made my life easier, because my bosses didn’t care in the least about the doings of some mooning young couple. So it was always a breeze for me when Icarus went courting. I had some nice outings, down there in Adelboden.”

“When did all this take place?” Nat asked. “The memo was from July of ’44.”

“He really wasn’t down there much until November. But by Christmas, well, I am surprised he kept his job. A shame, really, because by then he had gotten quite good. Bad for the Americans, but good for me.” He raised his glass in tribute.

“So is that how Icarus almost cost you your job? Some minder found you lazing in an Alpine café?”

“Oh, no. He disappeared on me. I lost him completely.”

“For how long?”

“For the rest of the war. He went down to Adelboden one night just after the New Year, walked into her door, and, poof, I never saw him again.”

“So this was in January of ’45?”

“Yes.”

It was the same time Gordon had disappeared from OSS account books and official correspondence. His name hadn’t resurfaced until late April, in Loofbourow’s cryptic memo alluding to Gordon’s presence in a Zurich safe house, due to someone or something called “Fleece.” Eight days later, the war in Europe ended.

During the same blackout period, Kurt Bauer had been terminated as an OSS source. And Erich Stuckart had also been in the neighborhood at the time. Bauer’s file had then been sent straight to the top of the OSS—or would have been if it hadn’t disappeared, perhaps courtesy of Gordon.

“Any theories on where he went?” Nat asked.

“I argued at the time that he must have decided to escape. Along with his girlfriend, of course. She certainly would have known how to help him pull it off.”

“Except Gordon kept working for Dulles. In Germany, during the occupation.”

“So I heard, as did my bosses. That’s when they nearly fired me. They were convinced I must have missed something major.”

“And what do you think?”

“Maybe I did. Like I said, he was good by then.”

“Did the name Fleece ever come up? Either as a code name or an operation?”

Molden shook his head.

“No. Is that what he was up to?”

“I don’t know.”

They sat in silence a moment, the three of them drifting with their thoughts. Sensing that the conversation had nearly run its course, Nat took a shot in the dark.

“Tell me, Herr Molden, in all the time you followed him, did Icarus have any favorite mail drops? Any secret places where he liked to stash things?”

Berta moved forward in her chair, and Molden seemed to sense the sudden tension. He swiveled his eyes from Nat to Berta, then broke into a broad grin. He milked the moment by swallowing the last of his beer.

“You’re looking for something, aren’t you?” he said. “Is that what this whole thing is about, something Icarus left behind? Is this some sort of treasure hunt?”

Berta narrowed her eyes, but Nat didn’t mind. Maybe the old fellow had been a decent operative, after all, if he was this perceptive.

“Might be,” he allowed. “So?”

“No place special, I’m afraid. The one mail drop I knew of was in an old church, a small chapel that burned down maybe twenty years later. So that wouldn’t help you.”

“What about a place called the Hotel Jurgens?”

Berta perked up at this new reference and shot Nat another accusatory glance. Well, too bad, because she was certainly still holding back items.

“Dulles used to house some of the American airmen at the Jurgens, but I never saw Icarus go there. The crewmen stayed there the night before catching trains into Germany for prisoner exchanges. As far as I know, it was never a mail drop. But I’m surprised at you two, especially since you think that the Swiss know nothing about love.”

“What do you mean?” Nat asked.

“Well, the woman, of course! This Sabine Keller. If you’d seen the two of them together, you’d know that anyplace Icarus would choose for stashing something would somehow be connected to her.”

It made sense, especially in light of the book. But who knew if Sabine Keller was even alive, much less her whereabouts.

“Do you know what became of her?”

“No idea. Because she disappeared, too, you see. Around the same time as Icarus. Except in her case, she never turned up again.”

Interesting, Nat thought, and definitely worth following up.

They were startled suddenly by a loud noise from a nearby table. Two couples of middle-aged Americans in shorts and polo shirts had burst into laughter, enjoying a joke at a waiter’s expense. Nat had overheard them earlier, groaning about sore feet and tram routes, and now they were even drawing stares from the neighboring café.

“Americans have become the new Germans,” Molden said with a frown. “Blustering their way around town, asking loudly for menus in English. The swagger of conquerors.”

Or maybe just the nature of noisy tourists, Nat thought, especially ones with plenty of money. Like the Japanese family at the next table, shooting video of everything that moved. Or that man standing in the square, snapping pictures of their café. In fact, he seemed to be aiming his lens at their table. Or had been, until Nat started watching. Now he was lowering his head and walking briskly away.

“That man,” Nat said. “Do you know him?”

Molden followed his stare.

“What, you mean that Arab fellow?”

“Arab?”

“Well, that was my impression. But I suppose he could be Turkish or Greek. All I know is that he’s been watching this place quite a while. I kept expecting him to ask for a table. Maybe it’s just my old training, noticing him like that. Funny how those habits never really leave you.”

“Maybe,” Nat said, keeping an eye on the side street where the man had disappeared. “Or maybe you still know tradecraft when you see it.”

Molden’s smile faded. He shoved his plate away and put his napkin on the table.

“This business you’re pursuing. I won’t pretend I know what it’s all about, but maybe it would be best if you left me out of it from here on. I do thank you for the lunch, though.”

From then until they dropped him off at his apartment, Molden was wary and watchful. Exactly how he must have carried himself during the war, Nat figured. Back when nobody was who he said he was and everyone had something to hide.

Back when Bern was the spy capital of Europe.