the occasion (or a note from Ursel Lange) demanded. He had spent his school years constrained in a conservative preppy carapace and so it was understandable that his fixie bike, and the collection of outrageous messenger-look hipster clothing it entitled him to wear, was an understandable rebellion. Black stretch Spandex cycling shorts, however, he wore only seldom although he had them on the first time I saw him in the Bookshop. Go figure.
But in a blue blazer and sand-coloured chinos he looked every inch of what he was, the son of a well-situated senior executive in the car industry playing at being an investigative journalist. He looked well dressed for that key interview, or today for an expedition to Zurich which, when planned by Ursel Lange, always included an excellent lunch in the august surroundings of the Kronenhalle, Heugümper or on the Rive Gauche Terrasse of the Baur au Lac hotel.
Bea was unhappy. My shoes didn’t fit her, she had to make to with black ballerinas of her own. They went fine with the black-and-orange checked Max Mara wrap-over dress of mine. Had I not tossed it into the back of the car with Louie Lessinger at the wheel?
No, of course not.
I had expected Bea to go for my big Bottega Veneta bag which was the right shade of orange. Funny that she preferred her well-worn shoulder bag from Mulberry which she wore strapped inelegantly across her body.
We joined the Intercity train which would make two further stops during the hour it would take to reach Zurich, settling in a first class compartment for four. There was some small talk about our evening at Cherie-Bar, giving Aunt Ursel the chance to share gossip about the way Ludmilla and Yulia turned the heads of otherwise upstanding Weinfeldeners.
“Not quite the place for people like us,” Aunt Ursel opined, as if in spite of her years qualified to judge.
“An occasional walk on the wild side, a bit of madness on my board or blades… I quite like a frisson of risk in my life,” I said unwisely.
That got long looks from both Ursel Lange and from Bea, the latter looking disapproving. Her ladies-who-lunch look annoyed me. Seeking to be different I had gone for a two-year-old colourful Prada schoolgirl-ish ensemble. I had had a real shopaholic phase, yes, but that’s pretty much in the past now.
Dirk, not chastened by the failure of his direct questions in the past, tried again.
“After your short marriage to Heinrich Lange did you move out of Säntisblick?”
Aunt Ursel responded with no delay.
“No, I did not. There was tittle-tattle about our ménage à trois, but there always is when three people seem very close. However when Heinrich got religion it was assumed that there could not be anything really wicked going on at Säntisblick. Even our enthusiastic espousal of heliotherapy was accepted after a while.”
Dirk looked puzzled and reached for his cellphone.
“The beneficial effects of sunlight on bared skin. Dr Auguste Rollier at the Clinique La Riondaz in Leysin, his ‘sun cure’… I checked a lot of stuff out to find intellectual excuses for my own love of being butt-naked!” I interjected with a straight face.
“Heinrich was a man of contradictions. He was very much opposed to the notion of celibacy. I think my continued… presence was a help for Theodora’s grandmother, who had a lot to put up with.”
“But staying married to a Nazi… that was something you were not prepared to tolerate… and so you divorced,” Dirk persisted.
“Yes, so it must have appeared.”
Aunt Ursel was not in fact answering Dirk, she was prefacing the remarks she had decided to make. We needed, she stressed, to know what she and Louie Lessinger had found out about the Fortezza file forty years before.
“With war looming as a possibility when the thirties were ending there was a lot of posturing and hand-wringing and even the most preposterous strategies were taken seriously.”
The Swiss plan for the defence of the nation might have seemed mad to many. The idea involved giving up to invading Germans the low-lying areas of the country and retreating to the impregnable fastness of the high Alps. The Réduit strategy meant the reduction of Swiss territory to what amounted to the natural fortress of the highest mountains, invulnerable to attack with miles of underground tunnels and caverns, from which guerilla style actions could be launched to wear down the presumed occupier.
Bea nodded, impatient, all of this well known to her from her conflict studies in Texas.
There had been many other ploys mooted which were in a bewildering variety of ways crazy. The gravity of the condition of the proponents ranged from mildly deluded to almost certifiably mad.
The authors of the Fortezza scheme? Perhaps schizoid, unswerving in their belief in the tenets of National Socialism but also sure that Hitler Germany would suffer defeat.
“Already in ’39 predicting that the Germans would lose?” Bea wondered.
“Nazis, yes, but they were also calculating and pragmatic Swiss,” Ursel Lange emphasized.
The Swiss have lived for centuries in peace and have thus been permitted to think in the longer term, not limited like many of their neighbours to measuring time in terms of the periods between intervening hostilities.
“A ‘Thousand Year Reich’… but vanquished by 1943, that was what they foresaw and they worried a lot about the consequences for Switzerland.
“Call me dumb if you like, but if Germany was going to be beaten how could the consequences for the Swiss be bad?” Dirk asked.
“The gold, of course, the pile of gold accumulating here but arriving from Germany, stolen from Jews, looted from the exchequers of occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Nazi-governed Danzig.”
Wiki confirmed that these three sources boosted German official gold reserves by seventy-one million dollars between 1937 and 1939. The pile was growing to become a mountain.
Aunt Ursel pointed out that the Réduit plan had been conceived by an authoritarian Swiss general who at one time had even been an admirer of Benito Mussolini. But his idea was one which involved taking the high ground not only topographically but also morally. It was patriotic, virtuous and high-minded and most assuredly did not include the evacuation of tons of tainted booty from the bank vaults in Bern, Zurich or Basel.
“And so the Fortezza file was about providing a home for that gold, even if the authors were betting on a German defeat?” I suggested.
“Yes. With Germany beaten, all that treasure moved by the Nazis to a neutral country like ours could become a huge embarrassment, no?”
“My recollection is that it did… and indeed still does,” said Bea, waiting until the uniformed conductor had finished checking their tickets and left the compartment.
“Fortezza was intended to spare Swiss blushes.”
That had been the conclusion reached by Ursel Lange and Louie Lessinger in 1972.
At the time, in ’38 and ’39, there seemed to be little probability that Mussolini and Hitler would make common cause, there was no mighty Axis on the horizon. In retrospect the two dictatorships may seem logically and irrevocably linked, but at the time very different flavours of authoritarianism were in play. Italian Fascism rooted in the presumed glories of ancient Rome was very different from a Nazi dogma which repurposed Nordic mythology and derived from it a justification of Aryan supremacy, the entitlement, even the sacred duty to rule the world. Mussolini had even signed up to a treaty with the British and the French which had been meant to thwart German territorial expansion. Then came the annexation of Austria and Il Duce’s campaign to bring Abyssinia back into the Roman embrace. And Britain and France were still believing armed conflict could be avoided.
“Chamberlain… after his meeting with Hitler,” Bea said to herself.
“We regard the agreement signed last night