THE SPYMASTER & ME: 22) THE COUNTESS & BARON ALLIGN
A Throwback Thursday Memoir of Intrigue & Lunacy
Summer 1994
Clair George flew to the French Riviera for a week visiting with Greek friends on Cap Ferrat then joined me for a jaunt to St. Moritz for a double-header: I planned to meet both the countess and the baron (albeit separately, of course).
“Are you sure you want to do that?” asked Clair, concerned about cover.
"I do. Been there, figured out how. And you’re just trying to weasel out of having to meet that lunatic baron again.”
We flew to Zurich, made our way to the train station and 90 minutes later glided into Chur for connection to the Glacial Express to St. Moritz.
As we crossed the platform, a hot dog vendor sold me a frankfurter, hard roll, dollop of mustard and a bottle of beer. I relished this snack as much as anything ever served on Concorde as the train careened through scores of tunnels, up up up into the mountains.
We slid into St. Moritz at two o'clock on the dot and our client’s driver met us at the station.
Countess Bossi stood at the entrance of her large chalet to welcome us inside her splendid world of wooden beams and Engadine charm, the living room constructed around a large three-century Dutch master painting of a skating scene.
A balcony view at this altitude took our breath.
The countess relished in pointing out a hot tub the size of a swimming pool. “We heat it to 80 degrees in winter,” she explained. “The steam rises and the water is framed by snow banks.”
A servant appeared to say pasta would be served.
Fresh linen, bone china, silver cutlery and crystal glasses had been laid, along with the best ravioli ever conceived, followed by coffee in the Grand Salon.
The countess beamed. “I have news,” she said gaily.
Clair and I hunched forward, all ears.
“Madam Goddam and her husband, the chauffeur, will leave at the end of the year.” She shrugged, all innocence. “It may have been over money,” she slyly added. “Come, I’ll show you around.”
We toured the chalet and all its memories.
The countess and her count were the original jet-setters—and all their jet-setting memorabilia had been laid to rest here for dust collection.
The chalet’s lower floor had been Party Central, where Stavros Niarchos, Gianni Agnelli and Pamela Harriman on countless occasions had whooped it up and danced until dawn.
On the wall: a portrait of the count, the countess—and Lara as a nine year-old.
Now the count was dead and the daughter estranged—leaving the countess with servants, memories and souvenirs dripping with sadness. I contemplated our client’s nostalgia as we rolled down the mountain to Suvretta House, our lodging.
Clair told me her situation reminded him of the Billy Wilder classic Sunset Boulevard, a 1950 movie in which Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) drags Joe Gillis (Richard Holden) into her fantasy world.
And, speaking of fantasy, once in my hotel room I connected by phone to Baron von Biggleswurm, who was lodged nearby at The Kulm. “Is this the famed baron?”
“Yaa. You are here?”
“Remember my investor? He’s here too. May we buy you a drink?”
Fast forward two hours to The Palace Bar.
“Here he comes,” Clair said out the side of his mouth, enjoying his Scotch & soda… until this moment.
Did Biggleswurm have 50 pages of book material?
No, he did not.
“I have a meeting with Kohl,” he bottom-snorted, seating himself.
“Helmut Kohl?” said Clair, feigning astonishment.
“Yaa, Helmut. I have an idea he wants to hear. Did Robert tell you about my ideas?”
“No,” replied Clair. “But he told me he had the most wonderful time at your castle.”
The baron beamed. “Yaa—you must come.”
“Yes, you must,” I added.
“I will,” said Clair. “Robert and I will visit together.”
“Yaa, you must see my library.”
“You really must,” I said to Clair before reverting my attention on Biggleswurm. “How’s the writing going?”
“Yaa! It goes well. You know, Nietzsche lived in the next town. You must come to Nietzsche’s house with me.”
“I already did, remember?” I said. “Maybe you’ll take Clair.”
The spymaster shot me a dirty look.
“What are you doing tonight?” Biggleswurm asked Clair.
“We have to get back to the hotel for an important dinner,” Clair fibbed.
“I see.” Biggleswurm frowned, then brightened. “Tomorrow! I take you to Nietzsche’s house tomorrow!”
Clair shook his head. “We’re catching a train first thing in the morning.”
Next morning, a hotel omnibus wheeled us to the train station.
“You know,” I said to Clair. “We’re living a Ralph Lauren Polo ad.
“Not quite,” Clair replied. “I don’t think that crackpot baron belongs in Ralph Lauren. I suggest St. Elizabeth’s [a Washington, D.C. psychiatric hospital].”
Devolvement
Somehow, soon after this trip, Countess Bossi's daughter Lara discovered that her mother was the invisible paymaster behind the spymaster and me.
She was not happy about it.
And she responded by running away from home.
The countess phoned me in a state of shock after she received one of two letters Lara had sent, postmarked Geneva airport.
One, addressed to her ex-husband, announced she was moving to the United States and, henceforth, their son would not visit come summer, in fact, not visit anytime.
The other was addressed to her mother: “I’m leaving forever, don’t try to find me.”
“Don’t worry,” I reassured the countess. “We’ll find out where she went."
Within an hour our dataveillant nailed it: Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Lara had bought a house there.
The Gray Fiduciary feigned surprise when asked about this by the countess. But his participation must have been necessary to transfer $2 million to purchase the house for cash. And it was probably he who had confessed our client’s secret sponsorship of our ongoing mission.
Baron von Biggleswurm was as shocked as his ex-mother-in-law.
At first he went ballistic, spluttering to me over the phone about how he intended to track down his ex-wife, whatever the cost, and put her behind bars “for this outrageous kidnap.”
A day later he resolved to do the opposite. “I give up," he told me. "If my son wants to see me, he will come. If he does not, well, I cannot keep spending money on lawyers.”
Biggleswurm then telephoned his ex-mother-in-law to protest his predicament—and was surprised to learn that the two of them were swimming in the same soup.
I heard about it from the baron, not the countess. “I talked to the hedgehog,” Biggleswurm told me.
“Who?”
“The hedgehog. She’s also in the soup.”
Incredibly, the conniving countess and the barmy baron then forged an alliance, she pressing her former archenemy to take legal action against her own daughter.
Clair and I cautioned her against such tactics. Not only was Biggleswurm unpredictable and quite likely mentally insane, Lara would never forgive such a collaboration.
Our warning fell on deaf ears.
A few weeks after Lara’s bombshell departure, Biggleswurm received a letter from a Santa Fe lawyer stating that if he wished to visit his son, he must do so in New Mexico, on his ex-wife’s terms, which included not being allowed to take the boy out-of-state.
The countess then actually paid for Biggleswurm to fly to New Mexico so that he could retain a lawyer, also at her own expense.
The baron took the opportunity to visit his son’s private school where he raised a ruckus because the boy had been enrolled under the name Bossi, not Biggleswurm.
Santa Fe’s sophisticated community, which had seen just about everything, never saw anything quite like the baron, who left a trail of incredulity ten miles wide.
Upon his return to Germany, Biggleswurm wailed at me over the phone about his woeful predicament. “Can you believe, my son needs a bodyguard to spend time with me?”
Motions got filed, parties deposed. As usual, the lawyers cleaned up.
Ultimately, Biggleswurm was able to establish visitation rights, but only after his lawyer instructed him to “shut up” after he attempted a bout of bottom-snorting before the judge.
The baron cut his ex-mother-in-law a slice of visitation—her reward for paying legal costs.
This resulted in Biggleswurm bringing the boy to visit his grandmother on the French Riviera for five days.
Lara must have known her mother and ex-husband were in cahoots and that she was underwriting his expensive legal action against her. But whatever she felt about this odd alliance was tempered by her brain trust (including the Gray Fiduciary), which counseled her to sweet-talk her mother—or risk potential disinheritance.
And so Lara commenced a campaign of weekly telephone calls to her mother to exchange pleasantries, neither mentioning their prior estrangement nor the issues that had prompted her runaway from Europe.
Clair and I did not deign it our place to tell the countess she was being conned. We reasoned that if Lara’s turnaround, however deceitful, made the countess happy during her autumn years, so be it.
When Clair and I met the baron during a visit to New York City, he blamed me for his never having produced a single manuscript page “because you did not apply enough pressure on me.”
Biggleswurm then insisted that the spymaster and I visit his room in the Carlyle Hotel to watch a one-hour video of him conducting a Russian orchestra.
The performance was out of sync, like an old Japanese Godzilla movie, as if the musicians had decided in advance to perform at their own speed and ignore the baton-waving mental case.
Clair phoned the countess and conveyed our daffy evening with the baron.
“I see,” she replied, tired and bored.
Then she pulled the plug.
Our mission was over.
Until several months later when we received marching orders from the countess to get our butts, pronto, to Santa Fe, New Mexico...