The Zurich Conspiracy

by Calonego, Bernadette

  “You don’t need to justify yourself, Claire,” Josefa interrupted. “I can very well understand why you stayed. I didn’t expect the entire team to quit out of loyalty to me. That would’ve been stupid.”

  “It’s not just what happened to you; it’s Werner too. I feel I’ve been so deceived. But then I tell myself, he’s not going to be there forever. I can stand up to him. I’m tough. People like Werner come and go. Bourdin’s certainly not going to let him go any higher. And if Werner’s not going to get ahead, he’ll leave, and I’m next in line. So it doesn’t pay to give up.”

  Josefa remained silent. She really didn’t have any desire to talk about Schulmann. Besides, she was rather exhausted from the steep climb. But Claire pressed on undaunted.

  “I can make something of myself at Loyn, I know that. I’ll go far. I won’t let it all go to hell; I’ve sworn I won’t let that happen.” Claire’s normally high voice sounded shrill now. She cut herself off, like an unruly child fearing punishment.

  Josefa knew the feeling well—the feeling that you can take on the world and win every battle. She had it at the beginning of her career too. She heaved a sigh. Claire would have her own inevitable disappointments, and she was so young.

  “It’s OK, Claire,” she said, handing her the thermos of tea. “You’re right, people come and go. And we ought to get going before it’s dark.”

  Josefa got up and zipped up her rucksack. Then they took the skins off their skis.

  “Now the fun begins,” Claire shouted once they were on their sticks. And after a mighty push they went whistling over the powder, churning up white clouds left and right.

  By the time they reached the car it was already dusk. Josefa was glad that Claire knew the area well and would get them safely to the bumpy, ploughed main road. They were just coming out of the valley basin and had stopped briefly at a turn-off when the motor died. Claire tried the ignition again. Nothing. She tried once again, but the engine wouldn’t turn over. Shit, Josefa thought, but was careful to keep her thoughts to herself. Claire, on the other hand, was completely calm.

  “You’ll have to help me,” she said.

  “Help you? I know next to nothing about car motors.”

  “Just hold the flashlight so I can see.”

  Snow flurries were falling. Josefa wrapped a scarf around her head and joined Claire a moment later as she fiddled around under the hood in the weak beam of light.

  Shit, shit, shit, Josefa thought to herself again. This is all I need. To be trapped out here, miles from any human habitation. If Claire can’t fix the car, we’ll have to go ahead on skis, she reasoned.

  “More to the right,” said Claire, who kept poking around under the hood.

  “Maybe it’s the electronics,” Josefa offered, fearing the worst: a cold night in the car. What if they were standing under an avalanche slope?

  “No, this is an older model; it’s almost all mechanical. A kid could understand it. Try to start the motor up again.”

  Josefa climbed in the car and turned the ignition.

  Nothing.

  Claire disappeared under the hood again, holding the flashlight herself this time. Josefa didn’t have the faintest idea what Claire was doing.

  “Try it again,” she told her a moment or two later. Lo and behold! The motor kicked in.

  “You deserve a medal,” a relieved Josefa gushed when her companion got into the car.

  Claire maneuvered them safe and sound through the snow squall. “My father once went three weeks without speaking to me, not a single word, after his car died on our way home from hiking in the mountains. I was twelve at the time, and we had a four-wheel drive. The motor just went on strike. My father tried to figure out what had happened, thinking of everything it could possibly be but nothing worked.”

  She geared down. “I finally said, ‘Maybe it’s the ignition problem Uncle Konrad was talking about the other day at our place.’ My uncle was a car mechanic and owned a garage. He’s long dead. You know how kids can have such acute hearing, picking up the weirdest things. That must have been what I had done because it just popped into my head.”

  The snow flurries were lighter now and Claire stepped on the gas.

  “My father went into a terrible rant, screaming: ‘You keep your nose out of it, you damn smartass!’ He was totally flustered… But I’ll keep it short: It turned out to be an ignition problem after all.” Claire turned up the heater. “After that he didn’t say a word to me for three weeks, didn’t give it a second thought. Three weeks. That’s a long time, Josefa. It was absolutely awful. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. I was just trying to help.”

  “Yes, fathers can be like that,” Josefa said pensively. She could imagine that kind of silence could hurt like hell, even if her own father never gave her the silent treatment. He preferred verbal punishments, acid sarcasm, and allusions sharp as knives.

  Claire was looking straight ahead. “It was probably better he said nothing. Because whenever he did open his mouth, it was usually to tell me that I couldn’t do anything. But he was the real loser.”

  “And your mother? What did she say?”

  “Mother? She never came to my defense. My mother never ever stood up for me, not one single time. It just wasn’t done. Even when she knew I was in the right. Yeah, well, that’s how I learned that you had to help yourself.”

  “So how did you help yourself?”

  Claire braked carefully to take a sharp curve. The road was getting icy in spots.

  “Well, for one thing, I wanted to go to a commercial college, but my parents refused to pay for my training. They thought that being a secretary was good enough. So I went to my uncle, the one with the garage, and he gave me a loan.”

  Josefa thought that was a peculiar kind of self-help. “Did your parents know about the loan?”

  “Somebody told them almost as soon as it happened, might have been my aunt trying to stick it to them. From then on they never ever spoke to me again, not even my mother. A home? I didn’t have one from that moment on. Who gives a damn. At least I finally got to show them I could get along just fine without them. Some people you can simply leave behind.” Claire glanced at her. “What was your mother like?”

  Josefa watched the snowflakes dancing in the headlight beams. “I can’t really remember her much,” she said. “I was only fourteen when she died of cancer.”

  “I despise my mother,” Claire stated bitterly. The words sounded all the more bitter in Claire’s bright, bell-like voice.

  “Why don’t you despise your father? After all, he was the one who always put you down.”

  “She should’ve called him on it, faced up to him. She should’ve fought for me. But her submissiveness made her his accomplice—against me, against her own daughter.”

  Claire had worked herself up into such a rage that she hit the gas pedal too hard and the car skidded. Josefa seized the grab bar in fright, but Claire skillfully maneuvered the car back into her lane.

  “Sorry, I’d better concentrate on the road instead of ancient history. I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m a grown woman and I don’t have to take any more crap from anybody. I can take on anybody today, can’t I?”

  Josefa couldn’t tell if Claire was being ironic or serious, so she answered with a vague, “Mmmm.” She sensed that they had ventured into unknown territory; something had shifted in their relationship. Josefa was no longer the boss and Claire was no longer her subordinate. They were something else now, but what exactly that something was, Josefa couldn’t put a name to yet.

  The beautiful weather was gone when Josefa went for a stroll by Lake Zurich the next day. It was two in the afternoon, but a thick fog had already darkened the sky. To top it off, it began to rain, and muddy water splashed on her new suede boots with every step she took. She walked past the Chinese Garden and turned into the Seefeld District where Paul Klingler had his consulting firm in a Biedermeier villa, where they regularly had their meetings. Today, th
ough, she had something completely different in mind, and she’d already let him know it by phone.

  She pushed the intercom button at the back door, and Paul appeared in person. Hardly a Sunday went by that he didn’t spend at least part of the day at the office.

  “What sun were you lying in?” he asked, his gigantic figure leaning down to greet her. Josefa told him about her skiing trip with Claire but was unable to describe the way there or what mountain they’d climbed.

  “Can I offer you something?” Paul inquired, always the proper gentleman (at least when he was in the mood) as he showed her into an office with a view of Lake Zurich. While his secretary (obviously she had to work Sundays too) was getting Josefa some orange juice, Paul opened his electronic archive for her and retreated to another room.

  After two hours of on-screen searching, her eyes were burning. But she found what she was looking for.

  She closed the archive and asked Paul’s secretary for a phone book. Despite the popularity of the surname Meyer, the exact name she was looking for was easier to find than she expected. Evidently Athena Meyer-de Rechenstein was so proud of her name she had it helpfully printed in full. Josefa scribbled down her number, packed up her documents, and bid Paul a quick goodbye.

  The air seemed even colder than before. She took her cell phone out of her purse and entered the number she’d written down.

  “Hello,” a woman’s melodious voice answered at once.

  “This is Josefa Rehmer, a friend of Helene’s.”

  It was so quiet on the other end Josefa thought the connection had been lost. But then she heard Helene’s mother again.

  “Josefa, what a surprise! I may call you Josefa, yes? How are you?”

  This time it was Josefa’s turn to be startled. The lady spoke High German. Why hadn’t Helene ever said her mother was German?

  “Am I talking to Helene’s mother?” she replied.

  “Of course,” the friendly woman’s voice answered. “You have the right number, Josefa. When can you come to see me?”

  “Whenever it’s convenient,” Josefa replied in a wooden voice.

  “Do you have time today?”

  Maybe it really won’t be as difficult as I was afraid it would be, Josefa thought, riding the rapid transit to Küsnacht, a wealthy village on lower Lake Zurich, on the shore popularly referred to as the “Gold Coast.” How will Frau Meyer-de Rechenstein react to my indiscreet questions, questions that will necessarily evoke unpleasant memories? Her head was spinning from all the reports she’d just gone through in Paul’s database.

  Seven years ago, when Swixan collapsed like a house of cards, those matters didn’t particularly interest her. It wasn’t in her job description to engage Loyn’s guests in conversation about things that happened in the past. Quite the opposite—it was better to ignore these topics. There were many details about the Swixan affair she didn’t understand; everything was so intricate, convoluted, intertwined. Swixan AG was, as she now knew, a bewildering conglomerate that manufactured machines and vehicles, made specialized chemical products, and was even involved in real estate. She also knew that many employees had not only lost their jobs when Swixan folded but their pensions—and more. Just before the bankruptcy one company executive had encouraged the eight thousand workers to invest in Swixan stock. Many others were already receiving the maximum number of stock options month after month, unknowingly digging a grave for their retirement savings. The corporation’s executives, however, put their own pension money into private partner companies to shield themselves from creditors should Swixan go under.

  That was shortly before the top executives began selling off huge blocks of stock because they saw the catastrophe coming. They left employees, shareholders, and business partners in the dark until the very end, assuring them that there were no grounds for concern—even when the stock price dropped and then kept dropping.

  The people in charge of the corporation had been artificially inflating profits for years and kept the growing debt load concealed by a series of complicated transactions. Nobody rang any alarm bells—not the journalists, not the stock analysts, not the market experts, not the regulators—even though the balance sheets and profit and loss statements of the convoluted empire had become mystifying (the annual report concealed more than it revealed) and even though no one could really say how Swixan actually made its money. Nobody pulled the emergency brake—including the auditors, whose job it was to ask the crucial questions.

  The head of the auditing firm at the time was Henry Salzinger, now deceased. He was absent from the table in St. Moritz where Beat Thüring, Karl Westek, and Curt Van Duisen were dining. And Feller-Stähli was mixed up in the whole affair too. (Feller-Stähli, the guy Helene claimed she didn’t know, though her father, as Josefa had now read in detail, was one of the most prominent victims of the whole tragedy.) Ultimately the bubble burst, and Swixan’s top management had to put its cards on the table; whereupon the share price plummeted, and the company declared bankruptcy.

  And Peter Meyer’s life’s work collapsed along with Swixan AG. Helene’s father had a lucrative company that made precision instruments; he’d sold it to Swixan a few years earlier because no one in the family wanted to take it over. Meyer hoped his firm would have a bright future in the bosom of a financially powerful corporation like Swixan. And they sweetened the deal by offering Meyer a seat on the administrative board, where everybody who was anybody in Zurich’s world of finance already sat.

  In spite of many “irregularities” in the run-up to the bankruptcy, the company’s managers—CEO Thüring and CFO Westek among them—got away with token fines—thanks to their crackerjack lawyer Feller-Stähli and their highly selective memories on the stand (“I don’t remember”). The auditors, including Salzinger, just washed their hands in innocence.

  How different for Peter Meyer! According to the archive Josefa looked at in Paul’s office, he spent much of his personal fortune trying to help long-time employees from his former company get through the emergency. At least he had some sense of responsibility. One of the consequences: Eleven months after the disaster Meyer—without leaving a suicide note—shot himself in the mouth. With his own hunting rifle.

  Josefa arrived at the Meyers’ by five o’clock. There was little light left by this hour so she didn’t fully appreciate how stately the Bürgerhaus she stood before really was until she was inside the premises. The front room where Frau Meyer-de Rechenstein took her was paneled to the ceiling. A huge, ancient stove with blue and white tiles stood in the corner—a magnificent antique. The whole room exuded history.

  Frau Meyer-de Rechenstein had given her an effusive welcome at the door.

  “Josefa, I have been hoping you would come visit for such a long time! I am delighted you are here. Helene has told me so much about you.” The words tumbled out of her as if she hadn’t talked to anybody for days.

  “Shall we sit?” she said and escorted Josefa to two armchairs upholstered in white chintz.

  The Black Forest cake and expensive porcelain were already set out on a black, polished, inlaid wooden table.

  “You have to do something nice for yourself in this weather,” her hostess remarked as she poured her guest a cup of coffee without asking Josefa whether she preferred tea or a decaffeinated drink.

  This tall, elegant lady with silvery gray hair looked nothing like her friend. Josefa calculated that she must have had Helene, her only child, rather late in life. And her language! Josefa automatically switched to High German, but Athena Meyer corrected her at once.

  “I understand Swiss German of course,” she said. “But as a German one should under no circumstances attempt it. It sounds frightful, and the Swiss cannot stand it. But let’s talk about you! What is it you are doing at Loyn just now?”

  It took Josefa a moment to collect her thoughts. Oh, yes, the company. “I have recently left Loyn and am working for a consulting firm,” she explained.

  “Oh, really,” Athena M
eyer-de Rechenstein replied, a little disappointedly, it seemed. She toyed with the neckband of her mustard-yellow silk blouse. Josefa knew that Helene’s mother loved Loyn handbags. When the company produced a limited edition of Napa leather handbags for special friends of the house on their jubilee, Josefa had wangled one for her. No doubt part of the reason Frau Meyer-de Rechenstein invited her for coffee and cake: to thank her for the gift.

  “I wanted to go independent,” Josefa added. “I can work at home now.”

  “How wonderful!” her hostess exclaimed, as if she had just been given another beautiful handbag.

  “This room is most appealing,” Josefa said, changing the subject and thereby giving Helene’s mother occasion to describe in detail the history of the building and the tile stove.

  “At least we have managed to keep the house,” she said with a sigh, out of the blue. “My poor husband lost almost our entire fortune because of Swixan. The others at the head of the corporation looked out for themselves beforehand, but not my husband; my Peter had principles. He was a good man, much too good for the likes of them.”

  Josefa was surprised that Frau Meyer-de Rechenstein broached the subject so frankly. But she was a distinguished lady who clearly made no bones about her belief that she was somehow betrayed by fate.

  “He was, after all, on Swixan’s administrative board,” Josefa cautiously interjected. “Didn’t he have to know what was going on with the company?”

  “No, my husband knew nothing, absolutely nothing,” she replied at once and a little defensively. “Those people kept everything secret and hushed up. The man responsible for finance…”

  “Karl Westek?”

  “Yes, precisely, Karl Westek. The entire business world considered him a genius. How was my husband supposed to be suspicious of him? But Peter had his pride, you know. He did not wriggle his way out of anything, unlike the others. Honor still counts for something in our family.”

  She folded her hands in her lap. Josefa put her coffee cup down.