“It must be terrible for you,” Josefa said politely.
“Yes, it is bad. My goodness, who would want to do anything bad to Werner? Do you know, I did not know him particularly well. I married his father after Werner’s mother died.”
So that was the connection between Verena Rehmer and Anita Schulmann. The two stepmothers were sitting in enviable harmony on the Biedermeier sofa, one talking nonstop, the other listening patiently.
“Werner had already moved out and was living in Dietikon. He did not come to visit very often, even when Armin, my husband, was bedridden. I am sorry to say he never brought a girlfriend home. Armin wanted to have grandchildren, but a career was more important to Werner. Ah, well, that is how it is today, and one must accept it…Werner never told us about his problems. Never mentioned any enemies.”
Frau Schulmann was wearing red lipstick and had outlined her lips with a dark pencil. Josefa felt stuck, not knowing what to say or think. Verena didn’t do anything to help her out of the situation either. Werner’s mother, on the other hand, did everything possible to hang on to Josefa.
“Who could have done such a thing?” she asked again. “And with a hypodermic needle of all things.”
“With a needle?” Josefa straightened up.
“Yes, an injection, imagine that. The murderer first anesthetized Werner, presumably put something in his glass. Then he pumped poison into his blood stream with a needle. Werner died right away. The police discovered the injection point on his body but will not say where, as the investigation is ongoing.”
Her blood-red mouth was quivering.
“Would you like another cup of coffee, Anita?” Verena asked.
“Yes, please, but decaffeinated,” her friend replied.
“Of course, my dear. Josefa, your father is expecting you in his office, if that is all right with you.”
Josefa was now reluctant to say goodbye to Frau Schulmann. Maybe she could pick up some more interesting pieces of news. But Verena escorted her with a firm step down the long, dark hallway. “Sometimes he’s better, sometimes worse,” she whispered to Josefa, “but you’ve caught him on a good day; he’s not so tired today.”
Diabetes. Something else Josefa had successfully repressed. But she was reminded of it by the sight of the needle in the open case on her father’s desk. “Do you have to inject the insulin yourself?” she asked by way of a greeting. That saved her from having to hug him.
He took off his glasses and turned around in his wooden office chair to look at her. Verena’s father, a corporate lawyer in his day, had done his accounts in that chair.
“Yes,” Herbert Rehmer said. “But that’s not the worst of it.” He rubbed a flat hand over his forehead. “I have to stay on a diet. Weigh everything, not one gram too much. You can lose your lust for life over it.” This confession almost took the wind out of her sails. But then she heard her father say, “And what catastrophe brings Josefa Rehmer to her parents’ house this time?”
This comment allowed her to regain her usual objectivity. “I’d like you to read this.” She handed him the printouts. Her father was a connoisseur of English literature, so a translation was unnecessary.
Rehmer put his glasses back on. Josefa studied him more closely as he read; he’d aged quite a bit in the few weeks since her last visit.
Her father looked up at her, irritated. “What’s this? What am I supposed to do with this?”
“I got these messages from an anonymous sender. I want to find out who it is.”
“So what? What do you want from me?” Herbert Rehmer was as impatient as ever.
“Somebody says there are quotations in there. Quotations from famous people. I’d like to know what those quotations are and who sent them.”
Her father gave her a curious look. He opened his mouth as if to say something but refrained from doing so.
“I recognized two quotations straight off,” he said after a while. “One is from Tennessee Williams: ‘We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.’” He translated it into German for her, then went back to the page. “The other is from Oscar Wilde, but somewhat changed. The others, let me see, I’ll have to look them up.” He got up with great effort, dragged himself over to the bookcase, and selected a thick tome.
“What’s that?” Josefa asked. Her father looked at her again with that strange expression.
“A reference work,” he grunted. And then, in a somewhat more animated tone of voice, “Here, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘The devil’s most devilish when respectable.’ That’s my translation. I’ve improvised a bit.” After thumbing some more he found another quotation: “‘An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.’ Lord Chesterfield in a letter to his son.”
Herbert Rehmer couldn’t resist this kind of riddle, and Josefa knew it.
Finally he found another quotation: “As a matter of fact, I was glad to hear you lose your temper. It’s a good sign when sick people are cross.” He raised his eyes. “A passage from Dorothy Parker. She goes on: ‘It means they’re on the way to getting better.’”
That gutless bastard left out the last sentence, Josefa thought to herself. Of course, it would have changed the sense completely. Or did the mysterious writer assume she’d discover the continuation one day? But she couldn’t worry about that now. She noted the title of the reference work in which her father had found the quotations.
“Thanks a lot. That really helps.”
“Josefa, are you trying to tell me something with these quotations?” Her father once again took the bull by the horns.
She shook her head. “I told you: I got these e-mails from an anonymous sender. He wants to tell me something.” And she got all bristly again.
Her father kept turning his ballpoint pen around in his fingers and said nothing. This annoyed her.
“Maybe you can imagine—or maybe not—that it’s not particularly nice to get these warnings. It’s not…even edifying to be pursued by the media just…just because somebody at a company was murdered where you once happened to work. And then to lose your former boss through suicide. And while it was all happening…trying to start up your own business.”
Herbert Rehmer coughed a little and shuffled the papers on his desk. “I don’t know if this will help, but I can tell you one thing: English is most certainly not the writer’s native language, unless he or she is crafty enough to distort some sentences with non-English expressions, which I don’t believe…I hope that helps you get somewhere.” He handed the pages back.
She stood in the room, undecided as to how to end the encounter.
Then Josefa spoke up one more time, keeping her eyes lowered as she talked. “There is something else. As a kid…As a teenager I had a lot of questions, and very few were ever answered. You know that there were many things that weren’t discussed. Now…now I’ve started to look for the answers. I know…that is, I am convinced I can find them if I’m persistent enough.” She took a deep breath. “I want to know what’s behind certain things. What’s going on behind the scenes. I don’t want to be excluded anymore, do you understand? I want to know what’s happened. What my part is in the whole picture…What role I’m going to be assigned.” She raised her head and looked out the window. “So what I want to know is…why did my mother say in the hospital, ‘Josefa belongs to me’? And why did you say, ‘She belongs to both of us’?”
Now she looked at her father, who gingerly lowered himself back into his chair. He rubbed his eyes for a long time and with some effort, as if that could somehow blot out the sight of his rebellious daughter.
“She was confused,” he said at last, in a halting voice. “The medications confused her. She was dying. She didn’t know what she was saying anymore.”
Josefa waited. But her father didn’t have anything to add.
“I want to know,” she insisted doggedly. “There are still a lot of things I don’t know. I’ve a right to know them. I was there, wasn’t I? It co
ncerns me too. It’s…it’s not only about your life, it’s about mine too. I’m not going to let go, Papa.”
She turned to the door and looked back at her father. He sat there with shoulders drooping, his head lowered. She waved the papers in her hand. “Thanks.”
“Have Verena get you a coffee,” she heard him say. She was dismissed.
Josefa found her stepmother upstairs, sorting out her spring wardrobe. A half-filled clothes bag for charity lay on her dressing room carpet.
“Anita is a very private person, you know,” Verena said right away. “And now media gossip is spreading everything about. It’s not a simple matter. But I think Werner was not a simple person.” She straightened out the collar of a lilac-colored blouse lying on her lap. “I met him once briefly.”
“You met him?” Josefa asked in astonishment.
“Yes, I visited his father in the hospital. He was in the clinic where I was working at the time. And Werner Schulmann was visiting him at that very moment. He thought I was a nurse and treated me accordingly.”
“What do you mean, accordingly?”
“Haughtily and arrogantly, I can’t describe it any other way. Until his father cleared up the mistake. Then he took his leave very quickly.” Verena removed her slippers and began to rub her feet together. “Werner made life difficult for Anita. He wanted to prevent his father from changing his will in her favor. He threatened her with lawyers, imagine that! He called her a gold digger, although she was married to Armin for eight years and besides that gave up her job in order to take care of him. Oh, do let’s have another coffee.”
She got up and looked at Josefa expectantly. She knew this piece of news had her stepdaughter on the hook.
“Tea, please.”
They went down to the kitchen and Verena put the kettle on. “Werner did in fact threaten Anita with a lawyer,” she repeated. “His lawyer didn’t want to hand over Werner’s documents and tapes at first.”
“Tapes?” Josefa repeated, her ears pricking up.
“Yes, surely you know about the tapes from the golf tournament. Werner gave them to his lawyer for safekeeping. But you can’t fool around with the police like that. The lawyer ultimately had to hand them over.” They sat down in the little parlor with their teacups.
“So Schulmann deposited the tapes in his lawyer’s safe. I thought he kept them at home,” Josefa said, surprised.
Verena nodded energetically. “The police got the tapes from the lawyer. Mind you, it’s likely that Werner had copies at home—but they’ve vanished. That’s what Anita told me.”
“Copies? There were copies of the tapes? And how does Frau Schulmann know that?” Josefa struggled to hide her impatience.
“Very simple. Werner told his lawyer that he’d copied everything he’d given him to deposit safely.” Verena looked at her stepdaughter; she could very well figure out what thoughts were going through her head. “From everything Anita told me, I have come to the conclusion that the police are only in possession of the originals and are still searching for the copies. Otherwise they would not have asked Anita if Werner had a safe somewhere. Or a holiday home. Or a girlfriend.”
“Questions like that are routine,” Josefa objected.
Verena did not let herself get distracted. “The police explicitly asked Anita about the tapes. That was after the lawyer had given them the originals. Why should they ask her about them if they already had them? They wanted to know for certain who has the copies. That does make sense, after all. They probably thought Werner gave them to Anita for safekeeping. Many mothers would do anything for their sons.”
“I don’t know,” Josefa said upon reflection. “Sounds to me it’s all a bit confused. Suppose Schulmann was blackmailing somebody with the tapes. Suppose that’s why he was murdered. And suppose the murderer found the tapes in his house and took them.” She shook her head. “They might easily have guessed that Schulmann had copied them. Or that the originals were somewhere else. Then why the murder? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Verena had folded her arms across her chest. “Maybe someone just went crazy. Maybe it was a panic reaction. And the police want to find the copies—because they might lead to the murderer.”
Josefa found it extremely humorous all of a sudden that she was sitting with her stepmother in the small parlor spinning out murder theories.
“Possibly,” she said. “Oh well, in any case we’ve got something to think about. Thank you for the tea, but I must be getting on home.”
Her stepmother seemed a bit disappointed that the parlor mystery novel ended there. But she regained her composure at once and smiled. “You have a lovely coat,” she said in the vestibule. “I can recommend a good dry cleaner, right nearby.” Nothing really escaped Verena’s sharp eye.
An avalanche in the Alps in the Canton of Wallis buried thirty-nine of the fifty-one houses in a single mountain village. Josefa heard it on the morning news. More bad tidings came at noon: A steel company was closing its doors because the bank had cut off its credit. Five hundred people would lose their jobs. When Josefa turned on the TV that evening, the announcer reported three top items: the avalanche, the mass firing—and Karl Westek’s fatal accident. “A car driven by Karl Westek, the former CFO of Swixan AG, rolled over several times on the autobahn near Düsseldorf. Westek was found dead at the scene. No other cars were involved. Police are investigating. Foul play has not been ruled out.”
Karl Westek. A fourth man connected to Swixan dead. The third man at the table in St. Moritz. Only Curt Van Duisen’s left. What must be going through his mind right now? Nobody could claim now that these were accidents. Lost in the Canadian bush. Drowned off Tenerife. Killed by a shot from his own hunting rifle. And now this weird car accident.
She’d seen Westek recently at the bar in the jail, with the young woman in the black chiffon blouse. And now he was dead. Josefa felt as if she’d been in an earthquake and the aftershocks would never end. Everything in her life suddenly felt as if it was beginning to totter.
Then she saw a picture of the red Porsche on the screen. A write-off, demolished beyond recognition. The reporter said that Westek was alone in the car. A retrospective of his life followed: His relentless rise and then his merciless fall. His attempt at a comeback by starting up a venture capital company. Westek, a “close friend” was quoted as saying, had never gotten over his failure at Swixan. And “the public,” she continued, never forgave him for cushioning his fall with money he’d sluiced off beforehand. Then came some earlier sequences of Westek going before the cameras to state that there was no way he could have known how things stood at Swixan AG, his massive jaw trembling a little as he lied. He then made the claim that it was malicious slander to say he had inside knowledge that enabled him to profit from his timely dumping of Swixan shares before the price sank like a stone. Another interview from the TV archives showed the ousted manager complaining that he was the victim of a conspiracy.
Josefa’s phone rang, interrupting the televised retrospective.
“Have you heard yet?” Paul asked. Josefa could nearly feel his excitement. He went right on talking. “By the way, Van Duisen has gone into hiding.”
“Who says so?”
“On the radio today. He’s said to be in an unknown location to escape the media.”
“The media? Hasn’t the man got other things to worry about?” Josefa couldn’t believe her ears. “Now there are six people dead. What’s going on anyway?” Her voice cracked a little. Why am I so worked up? Why should all these dead bodies be any concern of mine?
“That’s what I’d like to know too. There’s never been anything like it. It’s as if the bad guys in the economy are being picked off one after another.”
“Stop it, Paul. I don’t want to thank, er, think that far down the road. That’s—”
“A Freudian slip,” he broke in.
Josefa said nothing.
“You still there? Josefa, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.
I apologize, most sincerely. The whole thing just seems so absurd to me.”
“It’s OK,” she said in a husky voice. “Will you still be holding your Open Doors Day anyway?”
“But of course. It’s the end of the world twelve times a day. I’m not about to turn away clients every time that happens…I really hope I can count on you.”
“I’ll be there,” Josefa promised, automatically. She didn’t know how she was going to get through it under these circumstances—making superficial conversation and buttering people up while munching tapas. What she wanted most was to pull the bedcovers over her head right now and forget everything.
When she hung up with Paul, she pulled the phone wire out of the wall. And hesitated only a moment before fetching her old teddy bear out of the closet—no one was looking anyway. She needed something squishy to cuddle up to. Something that didn’t pose any riddles.
Flashes of light bombarded Josefa’s head as she set foot on the waxed floor in the hallway of Klingler & Partners.
“Are you nuts? Letting the press in!” a stunned Josefa croaked.
Paul was standing before her, beaming. He raised a hand to calm her down. “We’re taking every guest’s picture to stick on the thank-you notes.”
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” she exclaimed.
“It was supposed to be a surprise,” Paul said, taking her gently by the sleeve. “Come on, a nice smile for Franziska, our star photographer.”
Josefa forced a smile, the flash blinding her. Klingler smiled too, showing his teeth—he was very good at posing—and took her into the large meeting room where a stand-up buffet was lavishly set. Maybe this wouldn’t be all bad, Josefa thought, taking in the array of goodies.
“Come and meet René Hinkel, for starters,” Paul said, relieved. “René,” he called, and a short man turned quickly around. “René, this is Josefa Rehmer, my esteemed colleague. She’ll turn the company’s anniversary into an event that will be the envy of all Zurich.” The man eyed her with curiosity; he had a glass of wine in one hand and a napkin in the other, which he quickly wiped his lips with.
The Zurich Conspiracy Page 19