Poets and Chess Players #7-2: In Which Mr. Echevarria Confesses A Certain Distaste For The Swiss

It was the wrong approach, but Echevarria couldn’t take it back. He could only watch Siegert blanch.

This is chapter 7 (part two) of Poets and Chess Players, a WWII spy adventure and drama serial. Previously, Jeanne put aside her reservations and agreed to help Matia chase down their contact in Switzerland. This time, he finally gets to try his hand properly at spy games.

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“So, boss, I got an ignorant question,” Jeanne said, swinging her hands in small circles without taking them out of her coat pockets. “What’s a port franc?”

“Huh?” Matia fell silent for a minute in thought as they walked together along the twilit quay; he didn’t immediately recognize boss as indicating him, and once he did, he didn’t like it. He’d have to get onto her about that later. “Oh, is’sa freeport.”

She shook her head. “Not that ignorant, geez. I know what the words mean - I just ain’t heard of a freeport before.”

“Well, excuse me.” He pointed ahead at their destination, a squat and unadorned building along the waterfront annexed to a far more ornate set of streetside offices. “That’s a freeport.”

Jeanne tensed, then pulled her arms in more tightly and glared over at him. “I oughta slap you.”

“Glad you could restrain yourself,” Matia said, smirking. “No, basically, a freeport’s just a warehouse - well, more like what you would get if you cross’ a warehouse with a bank. Speculators love them because they don’ count as a destination for tax purposes, so you just keep reporting the goods as ‘in transit’ until you can sell them to somebody who doesn’ mind paying the duties to get them out. Siegert mus’ have an office down here for dealing with some kind of business the bank does. I bet they rent at least a few storage areas on behalf of the clients.”

“I gotcha.” She was turning her head subtly as they passed into the business side’s drive, clocking everything between the streetlights behind them and the painted lettering on the glass doors. “Shouldn’t there be more security than this, then?”

He shrugged. “Eh, it’s still just a warehouse - it don’ need a big show of force. There’s probably alarms on everything inside.”

“Probably so,” Jeanne agreed. “You’d better not touch anything.”

Matia pulled a juvenile face over his shoulder and stepped past her to open the door. He hadn’t initially been sure how seriously Jeanne was taking this - he’d practically had to twist her arm just to get her to come along - but as he held the door back, he noticed that she reached to catch it with her left hand while the right remained firmly settled in her pocket. Very seriously, then.

They walked slowly through the empty, darkened lobby while he adjusted to his expensive but understated surroundings. He’d spent plenty of time dockside, but this was the nice half, where ship’s rats like him tended to be frowned on. 

“You sure this is the place?” Jeanne asked, peering down a hallway where the only light was a soft glow coming from around a corner. “They look closed up.”

He was squinting at the writing on the paper. “Yeah, I’m sure. This says to turn left on the way in and then go all the way to the end.”

She nodded silently toward the light she’d been looking at, and turned off to follow it. Matia came behind, trailing the click-clack of her low heels on the tile. As they rounded the corner, he found the light’s source shining through the frosted glass of a door bearing the title Wegelin & Co. Banque Privée: J. Siegert. The edge of a business card had been tucked into the narrow space between glass and frame, and he pulled it out to see writing on the back.

UNITÉ 45.08 

Clunk-unk.

He looked up, startled, to see Jeanne releasing the doorknob. “It’s locked,” she said. “Whatcha got?”

“Directions to a private unit,” Matia said, holding up the card.

She frowned, chewing her bottom lip. “One mysterious redirection wasn’t enough for this guy?”

He shrugged. “We’re spies now, Jeannie. That’s jus’ how things work.”

“I’ll bet somebody’s watchin’ us,” she grumbled.

They both stood very still. Mat wondered for a moment if he should have told her about the secretary’s admonishment of the usual precautions, then discarded the thought. Nothing further happened. He checked his watch. “Shit, it’s five ’til already. Let’s go.”

Uncertain of which way to go, Echevarria quickly found himself lost as they jogged past darkened offices through hallways that all looked the same. It was Jeannie - he was going to have to keep that girl around for her sense of direction, if nothing else - who detected a draft in an intersection and followed it back to an imposingly solid door propped open by an inch or two. She waved him ahead of her, and he pushed it open just far enough to slip through. They had found an interior entrance to the warehouse, emerging under a flight of stairs. Through the open metal grates of the steps to his right, he could see a much more familiar sight: an open storage area, or at least the edge of one. Tarps and the crates they covered blocked much of the view, but he knew from experience that multiple convoluted passages would lie beyond the first row, despite the warehouse manager’s best efforts to keep them orderly. Distantly - there was too much interference for him to pin down the direction - there came the echoes of slow, regular footsteps.

Even with Siegert waiting for them, something told Matia that they couldn’t afford to be caught here by themselves. He motioned for Jeanne to follow him out and led her straight across to the first stack, hoping to find a good viewpoint between two of the wooden containers. She shook her head and pointed to the top, too high above their heads to reach. He exaggerated a frown and tilted his head, to show his confusion, but remembered when she looked back blankly that Miss Martin was bad at this game.

“What?” Mat whispered, leaning in.

“Gimme a hand up,” she whispered back.

There was no time to argue. He crouched down and wrapped his arms around Jeanne’s shins, and tentatively straightened back up, wincing a little as she gripped his shoulders too-tightly for balance, to lift her overhead. It was a relief when she let go so that she could straighten up herself and see over the top. He shifted his feet a little to steady them while the girl looked, and let out a slow breath at the thought that he’d grown stronger over the years.

Jeanne walked her hands back down the side of the tarp and held onto his neck less roughly this time while he lowered her to the floor. Matia thought one more time of Nerea, small and gleeful, and then - as Jeannie nodded to one side, indicating the safe route to follow - he put those thoughts away. 

Moving as quickly as they could on tiptoe, they just made it past the last row of crates and through the doorway as Matia heard the footsteps circle behind them - but finally, it seemed like they were back on track. Reinforced doors lined the walls of this hallway, and every number began with 45. In the half-light, he could just see the form of a man at the very end.

“Díaz?” the man said as they came closer, his voice hushed but no less irritated.

“Si. M. Siegert?” 

“Yes, of course,” the banker said, tapping the placard behind him which read 45.08. He was a small stout man in his fifties, and spoke Spanish with a heavy and distinct German accent. “I thought you understood the constraints we are working under? You’re two minutes late, my man! I nearly left you.”

Roberto Díaz swiveled his head back to look rhetorically over the string of obstacles that had brought them here, before turning to address the girl beside him in English. “Mad Madge” Jolicoeur, he decided on the spot, could be the Esmeralda’s chief engineer. He’d marry her off to another fictional brother the next time he got to pick the names. “Two minutes late, he says.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me if we were,” she drawled.

“And that was enough to throw off the whole thing? It’s what I get for letting you talk me into dealing with the damn Swiss.”

Siegert twitched his nose in annoyance and switched into English himself. “You’re fortunate that I added five minutes to the schedule, from my experience dealing with Spaniards.”

“Basques,” he said, out of habit.

The banker made a small, dismissive wave. “Call yourself what you like. Now, you are prepared to receive the shipment that our mutual contact agreed upon?”

Echevarria, thrown out of his cover now, furrowed his brow slightly. “Well, yeah - I guess we are. But do we really have to do this in code? I like to know exactly what I’m getting into.”

“What do you mean?” Siegert asked, changing his tone halfway through his sentence from confused to suspicious. Out of the corner of his eye, Mat saw Jeanne tuck her hands casually back into her coat pockets. “You contracted with Van Maren to get all fifty kilos down the Rhȏne, didn’t you?”

It was only then, with the fatal clarity of hindsight, that Matia heard himself saying Díaz Martínez - not García, but close enough to be misheard over a poor connection. It was just his luck to pick a cover that some real smuggler had already taken. He chuckled uneasily. “See…uh, I think we’ve had a misunderstanding here. Whatever you arranged with Mr. Van Maren has nothing to do with me.”

Siegert stepped back toward the safe door, squinting at them. “If you're not here about…that…then what do you want?”

“This may be hard to believe, but we’re from the US government,” Mat said. “I’m s’posed to talk to you about a letter the State Department got with your name on it.”

The banker stared. “You?”

“Yeah, us,” he said, too offended by the tone to remember the very professional phrasing he’d made himself memorize earlier. “And that was you trying to pawn off a visa applicant, wasn’ it - for what, so that somebody would look the other way from your collaboration with the likes of Van Maren and Díaz García?”

It was the wrong approach, but Echevarria couldn’t take it back. He could only watch Siegert blanch. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said, clenching his jaw between sentences. “This conversation is over.”

Mat felt Jeanne pulling his arm back and realized she was moving behind him, pulling the pistol from her pocket, but it was too late. The old man was already moving too, and far faster than he'd expected, before she could get it high enough to threaten him into holding still. 

“Sécurité!” he yelled.

Jeanne shoved the gun away again and let go of his arm, cursing. Matia looked back and saw the way they'd come in still clear, and took off running with her on his heels as, overhead, an alarm bell began to ring. 

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This is actually it for this week! The story is transitioning into shorter chapters right now, and next week’s shouldn’t need to be split at all. I’ll see you on Tuesday…in Vienna.
- EB