The Zurich Conspiracy
Page 28
“The cops confiscated everything in the car. But you’ll get your things back. They must—”
There was a knock at the door. Franz Kündig stuck his head in. Helene withdrew discreetly, promising to come back.
“He tried to kill me, didn’t he?” Josefa asked the investigating officer as soon as Helene closed the door.
“That’s something we still have to clear up, Frau Rehmer. Can you tell me what happened?”
First she told him she suspected Pius might have been involved with Schulmann’s murder. Kündig watched her closely as he made notes. Then she began to recount the events in the cave.
“Why did he want to kill me?” she asked. “Why did he think I posed a threat?” The question was burned into her brain.
Kündig gazed out the window onto the wintry scene before him. He resisted the temptation to tell her about the CI’s most recent discoveries, replying instead, “We still know too little. His car was found at the cave entrance. We don’t know if he really wanted to kill you. What we know from the woman who rescued you, Valérie Mabillard—a researcher on caves—was that he left you in the safest place in the cave, an area that’s never flooded. Maybe he got lost and a surge of water caught him unawares so that he couldn’t turn back. Until we find him, dead or alive, we won’t know for sure. But one way or the other he put your life in peril.”
There was no way that Josefa wanted to hear that Pius did not plan to kill her or that he—or his dead body—was trapped somewhere in the icy water of the cave. “And Westek? Did Pius kill Westek too?” She was persistent although shivering. She wanted an explanation. She needed to hear something that would make sense of the fear she’d felt down there.
“No, as far as we know he had nothing to do with it.” Kündig cleared his throat. “We hope to make an arrest in the Westek case soon. Maybe you can help us there, Frau Rehmer.”
She felt all along the cool metal, caressing its curves and edges. Her hands were on the small side, fingers slender, elegant, nails polished in a pale pink. They were hands that disclosed nothing—that she knew.
Before returning to her workplace she’d get a manicure at the friendly Vietnamese lady’s around the corner who never asked tedious questions.
She huddled in front of the stove and put on more wood. The fir branches outside were bending low, heavy with snow, and gentle flakes danced before the windows. She made coffee in an old-fashioned metal pot and sat down on an old sofa covered in a colorful patchwork quilt. She tucked her legs under and began to unwind.
At last she had time to dwell on her thoughts. Sweet thoughts of revenge.
Nobody would make the mistake of underestimating her and not be punished. Not even a man like Werner Schulmann. How could all the tearful scenes she made have sucked him in so? He thought she was a helpless, passive, silly creature. How dumb was that?
Schulmann was a brilliant hacker. Had been.
And she was a brilliant parasite. She’d made use of him for her own ambitious plans. He wanted to make a play for Loyn. But she wanted to be Loyn’s figurehead.
A woman who makes it to the top. Who shows them all up.
Werner used her apartment computer so that nobody could find any trace of his secret shenanigans. And he unwittingly presented her with the very trail she needed. What that data pirate raided from the company’s network—that was what she was after too. He compiled files with documents he’d stolen from Loyn’s secret electronic databases. And she…she had surreptitiously fastened a little mirror over the desk. (Women are known for putting mirrors everywhere, aren’t they, Werner?) She cracked his password in a few days; after that it was child’s play.
She got up to pour herself another cup of coffee. Then she went to the window and looked at the drifting snow.
Schulmann. She never was afraid of him. She knew him, all right; he was just like her—unscrupulous. But he wasn’t good enough. He didn’t have the right stuff to reach the top rungs on the ladder. Made too many enemies. She despised him with every bone in her slender body.
How good it was that she’d put her money on another guy in the nick of time. Karl Westek. He had his own schemes. And Westek was once a powerful man in a huge corporation. She courted Westek. He needed her.
Then Schulmann was murdered, and that confused her. No, not confused—bewildered was more like it. Pleasantly bewildered. She’d never have believed Francis Bourdin, that slob, could carry out a murder so carefully. And Bourdin had to be the murderer, no question. But then he got scared. Wasn’t up to it. Though the cops couldn’t pin anything on him. Can’t even today.
In spite of the bugs. Schulmann used them to blackmail Bourdin for sure. Werner would never have dreamed Bourdin could pull off a thing like that without telling him. Probably hadn’t been paying enough attention. Must have rankled a hell of a lot. One hell of a lot. And Bourdin—you’ve got to hand it to the guy—simply put Schulmann away.
“Josefa?”
“Sebastian!”
“Am I interrupting you—bothering you?” he said, switching to the more intimate form of address.
“Sebastian, I’m so happy to hear your voice. I thought maybe…maybe we’d never ever—”
“Josefa, everything’s OK now; it’s all over. You’re safe, do you hear? That will never happen again. Never.”
“It was terrible down there. So cold and still…It was scary. I felt so lonely.”
“I know. It must have been horrible. You’re very brave, Josefa. Everybody’s very impressed with you. I wished I could have… Esther Ardelius phoned me because she was so worried. I was… Your father moved heaven and earth.”
“Papa?”
“Yes, I heard from a colleague that he called up somebody in the canton government to urge the police to get a move on. He used all his pull to get them to look for you. And your friends, Helene and Esther—what terrific friends you have, Josefa. They’d move mountains for you. They—”
“Sebastian.”
“I’m talking too much, right? I know, I ought to let you rest, I—”
“Sebastian. I thought about Rigoletto when I was down there. And that we wanted to go to the opera. Isn’t that crazy? I thought Sebastian’s sure to have bought tickets already. I can’t now…I can’t just simply go like this…like…like…Do you understand?”
“Yes, yes, I understand. Oh, Josefa. You can’t imagine how I… When are you back in Zurich?”
“Soon, Sebastian. Very soon.”
She heard thunder in the distance. It lasted several seconds. She listened hard. An avalanche. It must be an avalanche.
But she was safe here. The hut had stood here for fifty years. Her father had told her that on a family picnic.
The snow was thinning out, might even stop completely. Suddenly she was shivering, though the heat from the fire was intense. Remembering Karl Westek must have caused her uneasiness.
How angry she was during those weeks when it looked like Westek was letting the whole thing slip through his fingers. He was extremely nervous; Thüring and Salzinger had been rubbed out, Feller-Stähli was no longer in the land of the living either, Van Duisen wasn’t in the game anymore. And to make their misery complete, Westek was right in the middle of expensive divorce proceedings.
That wimp. Her hopes were dashed; her climb to the top of Loyn looked like it was in the utmost danger.
She got madder and madder every time she thought about it. She kicked a piece of wood across the room. That son of a bitch. That backstabber. Westek had wanted to drop her and go it alone. That bastard thought because his pals were dead that maybe his hour had come. Westek, going it alone. He sniffed an opportunity because he had good reason—good information—to suspect that Loyn was buried in debt, that Walther would be forced to sell. Westek supposed as much, thanks to information he had from her. That vulture. She’d given him all the data, and now he was cold-blooded enough to cut her out.
It took great effort back then to keep her anger in check. How she�
��d loved to have drowned him in boiling water! Like a farmer in her village used to do with June bugs. But she knew she had the upper hand, and that kept her calm enough to deal with it.
How stupid Westek was to think she wouldn’t find out about his plans. Now that she was so close to Hans-Rudolf Walther, now that she was indispensable to the old boss, everything had changed. She’d never been so high up before.
No doubt about it: she was coming down to the wire.
Westek had thought he could exploit Walther’s dicey position. He wanted to present himself as a savior in time of need. A white knight. And this was all going on behind her back. A rank amateur, that Westek. She had to ditch him; he was getting in her way.
It had been so simple. They went to the Düsseldorf Investors Convention in his Porsche. She wore a wig, and they registered under an assumed name—he didn’t want to make his divorce any more complicated than it already was. And while he was off on business, she had time, a lot of time, to take care of the Porsche’s motor and brakes. He thought she was going shopping. (Because that’s what women like to do most of all, don’t they, Herr Westek?) And she did do it, afterward. After all, she needed an alibi—and shopping bags with impressive names on them. Just in case.
The snow was getting heavier. Her rage had subsided, she noticed with a smile. She fished out a hard, anise-seed stick out of a tin can and nibbled on it, lost in thought. How easily things had gone afterward! The big row with Westek just before the trip home to Switzerland, along the lines of: I’m just your sex kitten, a cheap lay. You don’t love me, et cetera. The sort of things men hate. Naturally he wanted to get rid of her, so she just had to burst into tears, pack her things, and run off. And all it cost her was a ticket to Zurich on the Intercity Express.
Nobody had better get in Claire Fendi’s way. You don’t stab her in the back just like that.
Who would ever suspect that such a dainty, angelic woman was behind the sabotage on the brakes? Westek was only another link in the chain, along with the “accidents” involving Thüring, Salzinger, and Feller-Stähli. They’d be sure to look for the perp, or perps, among the victims of the Swixan bankruptcy.
She warbled away to herself:
For no one knows my little game,
That Rumplestilt—I mean—
That Death’s Angel is my name!
“No, she said a little lake.”
Kündig’s voice echoed around the white tile walls. He was sitting on the rim of a bathtub. The head nurse had summarily shipped him off to this bathroom when he asked where he could use the phone undisturbed.
He had his cell phone in his right hand, a piece of paper in his left with a sketch that Josefa Rehmer had made. It had occurred to her that Claire might have gone to that out-of-the-way mountain valley, the cirque where they’d gone skiing together. The sketch showed mountains, firs, and a road leading into a valley. “Frau Rehmer didn’t actually see the lake. It was frozen over and under a blanket of snow. A kind of small mountain chalet was somewhere near the lake, in the firs.”
Kündig was dying for a cup of coffee, but his colleagues in Zurich were keeping him tied up.
“It’s an isolated part of the woods, looks like a barrier forest against avalanches.” A barrier forest in an isolated valley? Why? For one lousy chalet? Kündig didn’t even want to think about it. He was a city man, body and soul.
He squirmed on the hard edge of the tub that was digging into his behind. Lucky his colleagues couldn’t see him right now.
“The chalet? It’s right in the middle. No, not the valley, the middle of the woods. So you don’t have her sketch in front of you; I made a point of faxing it, it’s all on there. What? You need more details? No, I can’t disturb her now, she’s sleeping. I can’t see her for an hour. What does the geographer say? So what if it’s a geographer or a mountain guide, the main thing is he knows the area!”
Kündig adjusted his sitting position again.
“Did Düsseldorf come up with anything yet? OK, getting the people in the hotel there is critical. The name Karl Westek assumed he lifted from his former tax adviser. Isn’t that a doozie? Well, thank God I don’t have an expensive divorce hanging around my neck like Westek did. Yeah, and no girlfriend twenty years younger than me if that makes you happy. Is the mountain guide getting somewhere? What’s he say? Yes, yes, I’ve got all the time in the world, I’m in a hospital, you know.” He gave a sigh of resignation.
“What photos? Anonymous sender? Oh, those photos, the ones Westek’s wife got of his sexual escapades. No, that was another bed bunny; that wasn’t the woman in Düsseldorf. No, not Claire Fendi, that’s obvious. The man really couldn’t stop himself, one after the other; he had his brain between his legs. Well, drop it. Let him rest in peace. Too bad we haven’t any witnesses from the convention. Doesn’t matter. But Fendi’s home computer is a genuine gold mine. Wonderful documents, Zwicker says. Sounds good. Seems she wasn’t so clever after all. I’m curious to hear what the lady’s going to tell us.”
He struggled to his feet. That was enough sitting for a while; his rear end was sore.
“No, the sun was in her eyes. At one o’clock, when they were on the slope. So you figure out where south is. We could save ourselves a lot of trouble if we could ask Fendi’s parents. They’re somewhere in Spain, Heinz says. And Spain’s big. Her brother died five years ago, car accident. He was a speed fiend. And her father must have been a real tyrant, the genuine article. There was a court case a few years back because the guy’s supposed to have burned all his daughter’s belongings. And you know why? Because she wanted to move out! Yeah, burned them, tutti quanti—clothes, books, papers, even her skis, can you imagine? Must have been a royal asshole. And then he got off. Witness versus witness, and the mother claimed she didn’t see anything. Case dismissed, you know the drill. Those characters act like Mongolian chiefs in their own home. And you can never pin a thing on them. What? No, I’m not getting worked up, why should I, we know all that. Heinz is looking for aunts, uncles, distant relatives as we speak. But we might get there first. What—” Kündig came to life. About time! “What, three? How are they different? Yes, the minute she’s awake. Bye now.”
Happy to be sprung from his uncomfortable white prison, he took the elevator to the cafeteria.
He was knocking back his third espresso when his cell phone rang.
“I’ve got to find the note first,” he said, thumbing through his notebook. “Shoot. What? Spell that, please.” Kündig wrote down three names and put a slash after the first before adding one more word.
She looked out the window. Blue-gray snow clouds covered the sky. She lit a second oil lamp. She’d finally have time to read the newspapers she’d brought along, including the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times—she knew what she had to do for Walther in her new position. Josefa would be amazed at how far busy little Claire had gone. And would still go.
There was a time when she looked up to Josefa, admired her, would have done anything for her. But she was wrong about Josefa—how quickly an idol can fall from its pedestal! Josefa gave up without a struggle, simply pitched everything overboard that the two women had built up over four years. She betrayed her team, hung her assistant out to dry. What a pathetic defeat!
How spineless women are! Women like Josefa. Women like her mother, who would always lay down her arms in front of her husband. Who would never give it right back to him. Who would never defend her daughter, never offer to protect her. A mother who betrayed her daughter. But you don’t know me, my dear sweet mother. Your daughter has learned to take what’s rightfully hers. By hook or by crook, at any cost, because you don’t get anything without paying a price. That’s exactly what Josefa had never realized.
Claire angrily wiped some crumbs from the anise-seed stick off the table. She had gotten it so wrong.
They both were obsessed and angry and plotted revenge. But only she had enough determination. The little assistant.
Josefa had let he
rself be pushed out so easily. She wasn’t made for a no-holds-barred fight. She wasn’t the right caliber for the climb to the top. No elbows and skin that was far too thin. And she couldn’t use men for her own purposes, didn’t know how a woman could deploy the art of seduction properly, could bring sex into play. Josefa had nothing to fight Schulmann with. Simply hoisted the white flag. She was too naïve and far too easily intimidated. They both had a spiteful Fury hidden within, but Josefa just turned into a sensitive plant. And so her little assistant had to implement what the boss couldn’t achieve.
I know how to use my enemies. The thought filled Claire with great satisfaction. She put the papers on the plain wooden table and pulled up a chair. Then she thought she heard something. An odd sound. She listened intently. Nothing, only the crackling of the fire.
She sat down and opened up the first paper. One day her name would be in these pages. Her picture. The woman who made it. Who didn’t let herself get pushed around. Who couldn’t be shoved into a corner like some old umbrella. Who was craftier than all the rest, stronger, tougher. A warm, intoxicating feeling filled her. But before she could read the first paragraph, she heard it again. That noise. Only closer this time. Menacingly close.
When Kündig came back to the ward, Josefa greeted him with a worried look. Her face was abnormally flushed. “Have you found her yet?” she asked.
Kündig shook his head and pulled out a piece of paper. “But we’re moving ahead.”
“Is she in danger? What could happen to her?”
Kündig shuffled his feet, embarrassed. He hadn’t told the patient the whole truth. She’d been led to believe that the police were looking for Claire Fendi as an important witness. Apparently that meant to Josefa that her former assistant could be a threat to somebody and for that reason could be in danger herself.
“There’s no reason to worry,” Kündig assured her. “We’re doing all we can. As far as that valley is concerned, I have here three names, and maybe you can recall something about them.” He read the names: Mattental, Glaubiger Berg, Velten-Höhe.