The Little Black Book

I held the old, tattered, small black book in my hands as I caressed its shiny oiled leather cover. It had been amongst my late mother’s things, hidden away in the corner of the dusty attic in some long-forgotten boxes. Apparently, it had been with my Grandad’s things when he had been reported as killed at the beginning of WW2 and was returned as part of his personal effects to my grandmother, and my mother had then inherited it after she had died. Now that my mother had died, I had now inherited her things.

When I had first spotted them, I had not thought much about the old boxes and had put them aside together with her other things to sort out later. I had moved what I wanted to keep to my small flat and had spent the following weeks cleaning up my mother’s house and adding a lick of paint ready for it to be sold on the market. There were still bills and taxes to be paid off and so I had to sell the property. It was not a place that I would have liked to live in anyway, as it was situated far away from where I now lived which was convenient for getting to work, and to visit friends nearby.

So, it was sometime later that I managed to go through the old papers and personal belongings. I had made myself a large mug of strong, sweet assam tea, and was now sitting on the couch with the boxes in front of me on the living room floor.

As I sifted through them, I found one box of paintings and drawings that I had done as a child at primary school, together with home-made cards that I had crafted for Mother’s Day, Birthday and Christmas, and photos of when I was small. Mum had been sentimental and had kept these things which I had long forgotten about and seeing them was a walk down memory lane through my childhood.

Most of the boxes were filled with old bills and receipts that were no longer needed, but in another box, there were some photo albums of when my mother had been small, and I recognised my grandmother in them holding a small baby, my mother. Next to her stood a tall, handsome dark-haired man with a moustache in army uniform who I presumed to be my grandfather.

I had never met Grandad, and knew very little about him, just snippets here and there from my grandmother and mother. I had been told that he was a soldier during the first world war and then how afterwards he had worked abroad a lot. Apparently, he and my grandmother had then separated, but what he did and why he had left was all shrouded in mystery.

I had tried before to research my family history online but when I had typed in Grandad’s name into the search engine for military records, it said that his files were closed for 100 years! Why, and what had Grandad done that was so secret? I looked again through the photo album at the kind, smiling face staring back at the camera lens and tried to imagine what it could be.

The little black book had been right at the bottom of one of the boxes and it was so well camouflaged that I could easily have overlooked it. I picked it up and undid the leather strap around the 3”x 5” notebook and began to read. The pages were now yellowed, old and worn and there was a crack and small hole going right through the book near to one of the edges. Thankfully, it did not obstruct the writing. Although faded, most of it was still legible and written in a small, spindly copperplate hand, in black ink.

It seemed to be written in some sort of code, as I couldn’t make out what it said, and on some of the pages there were initials followed by dates and then rows of numbers laid out in columns down the pages. What did it all mean?

At the back of the book there was a blank page except for the initials C.S. and Zurich, followed by a ten-digit number. Something was tucked into a pocket on the inside back cover. I carefully opened it to find a small key hidden with the same initials and a number engraved down its shaft on one side.

That evening, I met up with some friends and I took the black book and its contents along to show them. Maybe they would have some ideas about what it all meant?

My friend Natasha suggested that the long number could be a Swiss bank account, as the initials C.S. in the notebook also matched the engraving on the side of the key. She reminded me of the scene in the film of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” when they discovered the key to the Swiss bank account, and maybe this was the same? Charles suggested that the columns might be phone numbers, co-ordinates, or payments for something, but what? Meanwhile, Jen looked up names of Swiss Banks on her phone, and sure enough, there was the “Credit Suisse” bank which matched the initials C.S.

We all decided that the only way to find out more would be for me to go to Switzerland. Jen said that she could get some time off work and I had some holiday due me anyway, and so we booked our tickets for the following week.

The day eventually came round and Jen and boarded our flight to Zurich. After a good night’s sleep at The Glockenhof Hotel, we made our way the next morning to the Paradeplatz square a few streets away, where the Credit Suisse headquarters was situated. It was a large imposing square building of several floors, adorned with the Swiss flag.

On arrival we explained to the clerk at the reception desk why we were there and were told to wait until someone could come and see us. A few minutes later, a plump middle-aged man approached us and shaking our hands, introduced himself as Herr Letterman and guided us into his office. Once the door was shut and we were comfortably seated, we again explained the reason for our visit and showed him the key. He looked at it carefully and then looked up the details on his computer and verified that there was indeed a bank account and safe deposit box held with them under that passcode and that it had not been opened or claimed for some time. We were informed that the bank account which had been accruing interest, now contained $20,000. I was told that as the sole claimant, that this could be transferred to my bank account.

Next, we were taken down in the lift to the safe deposit vault room and shown which door the key would open, and then left alone to examine the contents in private. My hand was shaking with excitement as I inserted the key into the lock, turned it and heard a click. I opened the locker and found a large steel drawer with a lid inside that I then lifted down and put onto the table in the middle of the room. It was heavy.

I carefully opened the lid and was amazed to find inside some bundles of different currencies, some now obsolete due to the Euro being used since throughout Europe, but there were also bundles of old government bonds, deed papers for various properties, and some gold sovereigns. Underneath, there was a stack of different passports of various nationalities and with different names on, and the photos inside them appeared to be Grandad in different disguises.

Suddenly it all made sense now; the secrecy about what he did, why his military files were closed, and why he had been away so much on ‘business.’ The gold sovereigns, the bundles of banknotes in different currencies and the various passports; he had kept them here for when he might need them. Even the tear and hole in the black notebook, which I now suspected had been a bullet hole. (Maybe it was from the fatal bullet that had ended Grandad’s life?)

We then looked at each other as I gasped, “Grandad was a ……SPY!!?”