Legacy of a Spy Read Online Free PDF Page B

ago.”
    “I knew it.” The inspector looked pleased with himself. “I thought I had seen you before. You Americans,” he shook his head, “you never grow old.”
    “What do you mean? Look at that gray in my temples.” Slater put his head to one side and invited closer inspection.
    “Ach! Your hair is too light for it to show. No one would ever know.”
    Slater laughed. “Tell me, where did we meet?”
    “Oh, we didn’t meet, Mr. Slater! I only checked your passport in Basel.” He chuckled. “I pride myself on remembering faces. I remember you because you tried to speak German with me. My English wasn’t so good then, and I was pleased that an American had taken the trouble to learn our language. Well, I must go. I will see you again, I hope. Auf Wiedersehen.”
    “Auf Wiedersehen!” Slater was amazed. You never knew. If he had lied about himself, the officer might have sent in his name to the Swiss authorities; and he would have been watched. By telling the truth he avoided suspicion. After all, he mused, he really was William A. Slater, and Slater had nothing to hide. Anyway, he hoped not. How outgoing he must have been then—in spite of a war. Well, he thought, I’ll never be that way again.
    Slater got off the train and jostled his way through a crowd of skiers who were waiting for the Thursday-night trains to Davos and St. Moritz. Some would go north to the Schwarzwald, to Garmisch in Bavaria and to the Austrian Tirol. Prices were lower there. Slater loved to ski and had been to all of these places. He hadn’t had time for skiing in the last two years.
    He stood by the currency exchange booth and watched the skiers laughing and shoving, their bright costumes forming a contrast to the gray concrete of the station. He wished he could go along as one of them. The girls all looked beautiful in their tight-fitting ski pants. He turned away from the crowd and changed some greenbacks for Swiss francs. As he left the station, one of the girls winked at him, and her friends shouted for him to come along. Slater waved and smiled and headed for the street. He crossed over to the Schweizerhof and checked in. He went straight to his room, took a bath and went to bed.
    He awoke at eight, refreshed but terribly hungry. He pushed off the great white feather quilt and dressed. The only thing he added to his wardrobe of yesterday was a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He didn’t like to wear them. He didn’t need them, and he had a very high-bridged nose which the frame irritated. He remembered that his oxygen mask during the war had nearly driven him crazy. He had wanted to rip it off, even at 24,000 feet. The only time he hadn’t been aware of it was during actual combat.
    Slater was an eater. It was one of the few pleasures he permitted himself. He ordered croissants with Swiss butter and jam, milchkaffee, and roesti with ham and eggs. Breakfast took over an hour, and the waiter marveled in silence at the still trim figure of a man who could eat like that. When Slater had left, the pale-faced waiter shrugged his shoulders. “That one can eat, because he is rich and has nothing on his mind.”
    He turned to a fellow waiter. “Glück and Geld sind nur für Amerikaner.” Fortune and money are only for Americans.
    Slater bought the Nue Züricher Zeitung and walked along the Bahnhofstrasse. He stopped at a fashionable men’s store and purchased a green Tyrolean hat, complete with a Gemsbock ornament. All he needed now was a camera slung over his shoulder, and the perfect picture of an American tourist would be completed. He decided to forego the camera.
    He sauntered along the main streets of the town he knew so well, trying to recall his student days when his irrepressibility had gotten him into one minor scrape after another. Zurich was a beautiful city, the modern blended with the medieval, the old city with its narrow, winding streets clinging to the side of a hill, the new city in the valley split by the Limmat