Poets and Chess Players #9: In Which Mr. Echevarria Demonstrates The Use Of A Lockpick
“Huh,” he said to himself. “Good ol’ Swiss bankers.”
This is chapter 9 of Poets and Chess Players, a WWII spy adventure and drama serial. Previously, Matia and Jeanne went to a meet-up with Siegert, the formerly missing banker, only to find out the hard way that he didn’t intend to help them. This time, they finally uncover the truth about the letter they were sent to investigate.
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Geneva, Switzerland
As an alarm shrilled somewhere back in the vault halls, Matia put everything he had into sprinting across the warehouse floor in his best approximation of their route in. From behind him, at an increasing distance, Jeanne shouted directions he couldn’t process through the overwhelming flood of adrenaline. It couldn’t last for long. He vaulted a piece of loose cargo in the wrong direction and took the long way back to correct himself, starting to stumble; by the time he’d reached the door back into the office area, realizing too late it had closed and was locked, Jeannie had seen his struggles and was thundering up the open-grate stairs above his head. Mat hauled in a long, reluctant breath and heaved his burning legs after her, two steps at a time. The only chance they had was to get out as quickly as possible, and for that, they had to keep moving.
Upstairs were more storage areas, larger open rooms with no outlets and no place to hide. He and the girl ran past them, trading off the lead in bursts and nearly tripping each other every time. There was no time, no breath to snap at her. The alarm was still going off and it could only be a matter of time before they once again had the police on their heels. He found another flight of stairs and climbed over the railing to hang for a second or two, gauging the height. While Jeanne was running down the steps above him, he dropped once to catch the rail at the landing, then straight to the floor.
“Show-off,” she spat over the side.
“Just come on,” he gasped, pulling himself up.
They burst out together into a familiar-looking hall, and the door shut on the alarm and muted it, leaving them standing and shaking in what now seemed a surreal pastiche of an office corridor. Echevarria leaned over, catching his breath while he oriented himself in the diffuse light coming from inside one of the offices.
A hand clutched his arm again suddenly, and he turned so fast he nearly smashed its owner into the wall. It was only Jeanne. “D’you hear that?”
Yes, he did now: slow footsteps - more than one set - echoing down the corridors, between them and the only way out. Matia looked at the light again next to them, recognizing the letters on the door now, and made a split-second decision. “Cover me,” he said, hitting the floor on his knees.
He had his own overcoat back, and that meant his own pockets. The world narrowed to one small cone of concentration as he fumbled past toothpicks and a forgotten cartridge or two to find his pocket knife and, guessing from the profile of the lock, a bent steel wire. He flicked the knife blade out to serve for tension. One pin, two pins, three -
He was out of practice, and the lock was stuck. He pulled the wire out and reset it, then tried again. One, two, three - four - five. As he turned the knob and tumbled into Siegert’s second office, his awareness telescoped back out to include the now-approaching footsteps, and Jeanne lowering her gun and dashing in to put out the light and pull the door shut behind them. Matia pressed himself up close to the door and reached up, feeling for the lock, to find it was keyed on both sides. He held the wire over his head and jiggled the pins blindly until they clicked back into place. As he turned and crawled into the darkened room, he followed the sound of Jeannie’s hard breathing around the back of a desk, and felt her pull her feet up out of his way as he curled his body to fit into the remaining space beneath it.
He lost track of the time listening to the footsteps going around outside. Doors opened and shut and voices mumbled in the distance. From closer in came the sounds of his angry, dinnerless stomach, and then of paper softly crinkling just before the smell of mint hit him in the face.
“Take it,” Jeanne muttered.
Mat groped for her hands in the blackness and found a strip of gum she must have brought all the way across the Atlantic. He accepted it gratefully and tried to chew as quietly as he could while she unwrapped a piece for herself. “Thanfksh.”
She didn’t respond, and he tried to content himself with the distraction. It didn’t work. Matia forced himself to listen for the very last sound and then count to sixty under his breath before pulling out his lighter. The small warm flame illuminated the girl’s squinting face and a little half-circle of carpeting just to the right of them, worn down by the scraping of a chair. A series of little gleaming shapes beyond its reach seemed to indicate a set of tall filing cabinets, securely barred against prying eyes. Curious now, he leaned out and turned to examine the desk drawers to see if they’d open any more easily. “Huh,” he said to himself, pulling fruitlessly at one and then another. “Good ol’ Swiss bankers.”
“What’s that?” Jeanne said.
He turned back and grinned at her. “Say - as long as we’re here, you want to learn how to pick a lock?”
“Sounds swell, boss,” she said, crawling out after him. “Let me get the light.”
Miss Martin was a quick study, but even if she hadn’t been, the locks were simple enough for anybody to learn on - and there were a damn sight more of them than Matia had guessed from his first look. Once she had the desk drawers open, he dismissed her to work her way around the cabinets while he pulled out the contents and rifled through them shamelessly.
“Jeannie, how’d you like to know where this guy got all his government contacts from?” he asked, holding up a folder.
“I dunno,” she said from her corner. “That sounds like it’d fall under political stuff we ain’t supposed to mess with.”
“Would it?” Echevarria paused to consider this, then set the folder aside and picked up the next one. “See, I tol’ you I needed a conscience.”
“Common sense is more like it.”
He smirked, initially just happy that he’d dragged another sentence out of her, but then his smile widened as he saw what he had now. “Hey! Hey, forget all that an’ come here. I need you to translate this - it says in Wien.”
Jeanne slid the cabinet drawer closed and locked it back before coming to take a look. “Let’s see. 4 May ‘41. Met in Vienna with Maj. S. Jundt of ‘Defense’. Contracted…hmm.”
He raised his eyebrows pointedly. “What’s hmm mean?”
“It means I ain’t surprised now that you spooked him,” she said, pushing the paper aside and picking up another one. “You weren’t far off the mark. From what he’s got in those cabinets, he’s getting paid very well to keep the international back channels open for business - that’s besides whatever he makes out of the deals themselves. On top of that, German counterintelligence seems to have thought they could buy his cooperation too.”
“Capitalistas de mierda,” Mat said reflexively.
“Keeps the world running, don’t it?” Jeanne ran her finger down the page. “Here it is: Major Jundt asked Siegert to use his connections at Krupp AG to keep an eye out for attempted American espionage. Then in July, he made some notes about a phone call…there a letter in there?”
He flipped through the pages in his hands to find one on Krupp letterhead, the words all put down by typewriter except for the loopy blue signature: Perditus. “There sure is.”
“There’s one question answered, then. Haber’s real enough. He and Siegert ran into each other at some point, and Siegert agreed to try to get him to America.”
“And did Siegert happen mention this to any of the Germans who'd paid him to make sure that didn't happen?”
“You may be shocked to learn that, actually, he did. That's what the phone call was about. Jundt told him to go ahead so they could use it to trace the rest of a spy network the Abwehr thought Haber was involved in.”
“Shit.” He snapped the almost-forgotten chewing gum against his teeth, remembering Otsoa’s warning that their defector was also threatening Vik’s network. “Let me guess, then: it gets worse?”
“Maybe,” she said, still flipping. “As far as he knew, it doesn't look like it ever came to anything. Haber never wrote to Siegert again, and here's another phone call in August where Jundt says they couldn't find him in Vienna. By the time COI finally picked up the trail from the other end, our banker seems to been immersed in some other deal that he didn’t want to jeopardize. That's why Mr. Brennan couldn't reach him.”
And here he'd actually hoped he was going to get some closure out of this. Matia completed the mental reassignment of Siegert from victim of politics to part of the problem and pushed himself to ask the damn question. “All right. Well - did he find out anything else about the spy network?”
“Soviets, of course,” Jeanne said. “The last thing in here is from about a month ago. Jundt mentioned someone called Heinrich Graner, who he suspected to also be a Soviet agent. Siegert wasn't familiar with him.”
Matia sighed. No, of course he wasn't going to get out of this easily. He'd gone too long refusing to commit, and now the world was going to force him to play a hand.
“Now what?” she asked, propping her elbow against the desk and palming her cheek.
“Now we try to put this stuff away and break out of here, I guess,” he said. “Then we go switch hotels. Put together a cable to send to New York in the morning.”
“I figured that much,” Jeanne said levelly. “But after that, are we going to Vienna?”
Mat blinked, surprised a little by her casual use of we. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “The job was to get that information back to the US, right? An’ we don't have it yet. If it's going to be anywhere, I’d guess it’s still in Austria.”
“Okay.” She slid the papers back into their folder and began stacking them up again.
“What - just like that, you're on board with this?”
“I told you I was gonna owe you,” Jeanne said, dropping the folder back into the drawer. “Ain’t like you can do this by yourself anyway, is it?”
“True enough,” he admitted. “All right, Jeannie girl. Let’s go see what these fellows have to say for themselves.”
November 29, 1941 - the next day
Vienna, Greater Germany
“Yes, Herr Siegert, I’m aware…” Major Jundt of Abwehr inhaled slowly to keep an even temper as he was interrupted again, rolling his neck and shoulders silently until the angry man on the telephone finally stopped for breath. “That must have been quite the imposition, but I fail to see how it's my fault.”
“You told me you were going to handle all this business at Krupp, Major. Well, it’s not handled.”
“I told you that I would handle Dr. Haber if he ever turned up on our side of the border. What precisely do you expect me to do about the Americans?”
“I expect you to provide compensation commensurate with the risks I’m running on your behalf!”
Jundt tightened his throat to suppress a groan. If it wasn’t Reichsmarks with this man, it was Swiss francs. He’d often thought his family name must have been changed from something Jewish. “I already paid you what we agreed on.”
“I did not agree to have some cowboy turn up in the middle of a private business deal. God only knows what that fallout will be. My office was broken into, sir! Do you understand what that means for…”
He pulled the receiver away from his ear a little and waited for Siegert to finish again. Shit, he didn’t have time for this. “All right, eh,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “I’ll double the last payment, but that’s it. And I want to see hard results from your Swedish associates on that ‘mackerel’ business.”
They arranged the details and talked shop a little longer, and then Jundt returned the phone to its hook and allowed himself a moment to stare moodily out over the street, watching agents and civilians come and go. He briefly considered and then decided against lighting a cigarette, and returned to his desk in thoughtful silence.
The reappearance of the Americans in the Krupp matter, however distasteful to the banker, was nothing less than a relief to him. It was the first thing that had gone right all week, in any of his work - let alone in the case of the Berndorf facility. He still bitterly regretted not going after their aspiring traitor directly, the minute Siegert had put him on notice. The missing technical dossier plagued him. His military superiors insisted on total secrecy for the Geheimwaffen1; that dossier, if it really existed, contained information that even the German public shouldn’t know. At the very worst, American involvement would provide him someone to blame for fabricating any resulting leaks on Mammut’s2 development. Who could be expected to believe, honestly, that Krupp’s engineers proposed to build a tank weighing ten times more than anything else ever fielded? At best…well, they might know something he didn’t. Jundt’s hand moved to his pen and he made a note for Monday’s agenda, to conduct another check of the border crossings.
His chief difficulty there - as in everything - would be to get there before the Gestapo did. Political and state surveillance’s cooperation was one of those pretty fictions he’d become used to in life, a fig leaf that hid an array of backstabbing and finger-pointing behind the scenes. He had only one contact in the secret police’s office, and the man he called Sauer had an interactive range that started at unhelpful and went all the way down to smugly obstructive. For the last several months Sauer had been hovering near the ‘smugly obstructive’ end, which usually meant that Gestapo was succeeding in scooping one of his cases. Recently, he had started to suspect that it was Krupp; and, if so, that probably meant that they had Dr. Haber in custody. But why would they have waited so long to make any move? Or was Herr Graner one of their men, after all?
Graner was a difficult man to keep tabs on, but Jundt had finally pinned down enough of his movements to believe he was connected to Haber through the Soviets. The Major frowned to himself at the thought that, instead, Gestapo might be ahead of him even there.
Well, according to a breathless check-in this morning, one of his men was going to be able to make another run at tracing Graner’s rare daytime excursions. Maybe he’d learn something by tonight that would clear up this mystery.
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Secret weapons.
Mammoth.
“Should I serialize?” has been coming up on Notes an awful lot recently. Well, one of the features (bugs?) of serializing Poets is that you get to watch me integrate various component drafts in real-time. Mammoth was an early general designation for the super-heavy tanks Krupp began developing in 1941 - none of which were remotely advanced enough by December to fill the role I originally needed, which meant that that draft ended up in the weeds fangirling over technical specs and speculative engineering. Thing is, I completely forgot to finish walking it back into something a little more historical. While working up the next draft, I ran across the real-life spy work of Fr. Heinrich Maier & co., realized I’d accidentally duplicated quite a lot of history, and reflexively bounced off into this business with Dr. Weiss. (And I digress, but I want to know everything about Helene Sokal Legradi. Mother of three, lawyer, lifelong Communist - and if she had to join up with the monarchist reactionaries in order to resist Nazism, it was a small price to pay.) Now I’ve come to a crucial point in my hybrid draft and realized that while a more coherent narrative could handle this many factions and antagonists…the story themes are a dreadful mess.
Oh, well. Experiment, live, learn.