The Zurich Conspiracy

by Calonego, Bernadette

  Unfortunately her condition rapidly worsened in the next few months. It was her express wish that we not tell you children how bad she was. Maybe that was a mistake. I think she could not even admit it to herself. She never gave up hope for a cure, to the end. But as a result her death must have been a much greater shock for you children.

  As the end neared, she needed stronger and stronger painkillers. They changed her personality more and more. As I told you earlier, she was exceedingly confused. Shortly before she died, her mind reverted to the time when she wanted to go to Italy and take you with her. That is why she insisted that “Josefa belongs to me.”

  I have never told you and your brother about how confused she became because I did not want to cloud your memory of your mother in that way.

  I hope this answers your question.

  When you have children yourself, you will see that it is easy to make mistakes in difficult situations. I was certainly not immune to them then and am still not. But I do not want to carry guilty feelings around with me my whole life long because of it. And I am just not able to anymore.

  All best wishes from

  Papa

  Josefa folded the pages and put them back in the envelope. She stared out the window for a long time. The chain of hills on the horizon dissolved into white clouds. The sky was pleasant in spite of the gray. Josefa wanted to have a question answered, and here was an answer at last. One answer. But would she ever get answers to all her questions?

  Claire came to mind. What could have happened to her? Franz Kündig had left for Zurich four days ago…

  The phone on the night table rang. That must be Helene.

  But somebody else’s voice was on the line. A husky whisper.

  “Josephine, how are you? I feel so sorry for you!”

  She almost dropped the receiver. It was Joan Caroll.

  “Josephine, I heard about those awful goings-on. It’s just terrible, the things that happened to you!”

  Josefa tried to sound as unruffled as possible. “So nice of you to call, Joan. I’m feeling pretty well, under the circumstances.”

  “Is it true about Pius, Josephine? People are saying he tried to kill you.”

  That surprised her. Word got around fast. “No, probably not. He might well have got lost in the cave and couldn’t find his way back. Some water flooded in, you know. The people who rescued me think he drowned.”

  “Oh, Josephine, that must have been so dreadful for you. I absolutely had to talk to you. I owe you an explanation.”

  Josefa burst out, “Because of the earrings.”

  “Yes,” she heard Joan say. “It wasn’t very clever of me, and I hope you’re not angry because of it. Pius gave them to me as a present.”

  “Pius?” Josefa sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Yes, he always paid so much attention to me, he…was after me and…there was nothing between us, believe me. But sometimes a woman needs a little consoling when she’s tired and down. I didn’t put Pius in his place firmly enough. That was unprofessional of me. He gave me those earrings, and I accepted them. Afterward I saw pictures of Pamela Hartwell wearing the same earrings. I caught on right away. I was furious. Do you see what I mean, Josephine?”

  “Not quite, but please go on, Joan.”

  “Oh, it’s so humiliating, Josephine. I sent you the earrings because I wanted Pius to see them. So that he’d get the message. I thought you’d tell him about them or wear them when he was with you. It was a stupid, petty act of revenge. I’m so sorry.”

  Helene peeked into the room. Josefa gave her a sign and her friend tiptoed over to the chair by the window and sat down.

  “I was enraged at the time, especially at men. I felt used and deceived. I wanted to let him have it right back.”

  Josefa looked at Helene apologetically. “No need to explain. We all have those feelings,” she replied.

  “Josephine, there’s something else you must know. The jewels are genuine. Pamela must have been wearing copies.”

  “Copies?”

  “Yes. Pius said the earrings were his great-aunt’s. Wealthy women often have copies made of their expensive jewelry. They keep the real ones in a safe and wear the imitations. Pamela Hartwell got the imitations. The genuine ones are worth twenty thousand dollars.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I had them appraised, of course. If the earrings were junk, I wouldn’t have given them to you. I’d have thrown them away. My revenge would have been perfect only if Pius would have seen that I’d rejected his twenty-thousand-dollar gift, with no regrets. Do you understand?”

  No, Josefa thought, not really. Why did Pius give Joan a gift worth twenty thousand dollars? Why didn’t he bankroll his photography book with it? Or did he want to curry favor with Joan? Did he hope she’d help him in his career? Or that she’d let herself be photographed in the nude like Pamela?

  “I sincerely hope you’re not mad at me, Josephine.”

  “I appreciate your frankness, Joan,” Josefa replied in her benumbed state, “and many thanks for the present.”

  “Lots of luck, Josephine, and all the best.”

  Helene was observing her with curiosity the whole time. “So who was that?”

  “If I tell you, can I ask you a question?” Josefa responded.

  Helene nodded.

  “Joan Caroll has given me a twenty-thousand-dollar present,” Josefa said, and then without a pause, “What’s the story with Claire?”

  The corpse made for a horrible picture. Blood was seeping onto the rough wooden floor. Given the choice, Claire would have loved to show Thüring to the public in this state—in his long johns. The erection he’d gotten while planning to rape her would have made him look even better. That was probably his routine at Swixan, banging female employees and then dumping them.

  How did Thüring find out she was here? He must have followed her. He knew she had tampered with the Porsche’s brakes. He knew a lot of details—but where did he get them? Only from Westek? Or did he have an accomplice, somebody who might have tailed her in Düsseldorf? Maybe he didn’t have her shadowed but Westek instead. Maybe he didn’t trust Westek as far as he could throw him. She’d never find out the truth. But one thing was certain: He wanted to get his revenge on her, wanted to find out how much she knew about everything and who else might know. That’s why he tracked her down.

  Why hadn’t she detected anything suspicious? Maybe he was simply following in her tracks at a safe distance. That wasn’t hard to do in the new snow that fell the night before.

  She had to bury the body, but the ground was hard as a rock. And she couldn’t imagine doing it with her burned hands. It was better to drop the body into the lake, and Thüring’s car along with it. She felt around in her pockets and took out the key. Then she paused. What if she couldn’t break through the ice on the lake? Or the ice gave way under the car’s weight before she found a good spot?

  Wouldn’t it be better to take off and leave the corpse here? Nobody could prove she was the murderer.

  She looked around. She’d have to make her workshop disappear. Too bad. But what if they’d think that it was Thüring’s hideout? That he had tinkered with Westek’s Porsche? But her footprints were in the snow. And her fingerprints all over the chalet. She’d have to deal with that later. She’d find a solution to everything. One thing was for sure: There were no witnesses to the murder. Nothing was over yet.

  First she’d have to take care of his car. She put on her jacket and her boots. Then she eased her gloves over her reddened skin.

  The crackling and crunching of snow underfoot was the only sound breaking the silence of the valley. Good that she was so far from civilization. After a quarter of an hour’s march she saw the glint of her car in the woods. But Thüring’s car was nowhere to be seen. She walked back along the road through the forest, up to the curve and then spotted it, a white SUV.

  She opened the passenger door and went through the glove compartme
nt. All she found was the registration—under a fictitious name. She looked under the seats. Nothing. A flashlight, tissues, and a road map lay on the rear seats.

  She walked around the car, opened the tailgate, and found a black suitcase. She searched through Thüring’s key ring until she found a little key. It fit. She rifled through clothing and other personal belongings until her hand hit a hard surface. She unearthed a file folder, made herself comfortable on the driver’s seat, and started the motor to warm the car up.

  The documents were in English. Her gloves made paging through them difficult, but she quickly realized that they had to do with a declaration of intent, involving the Loyn Corporation in Zurich and Kerikko International Investments based in the Bahamas. But how did these preliminary contracts fall into Thüring’s hands? Not even Schulmann had gotten his paws on documents like these.

  She started to examine the pages more closely. It was instantly obvious what she had in front of her: a preliminary contract for the sale of the Loyn Corporation to Kerikko International. She felt hot all of a sudden, her heart was pounding. That couldn’t be! That simply wasn’t true—but there it was, in black and white: Hans-Rudolf Walther was flogging his tradition-rich company to an ominous investment company in the Bahamas.

  Walther must have been planning this for a long time! He must have been negotiating for weeks with this company, maybe months. Walther had led all his employees to believe something else was in the wind.

  And she guessed who was behind Kerikko: none other than Beat Thüring. He had put his straw men up front until he felt he was safe. Karl Westek was one of them—that was perfectly clear to her now. His Trojan horse. Thüring wouldn’t come out of the woodwork until the sale was in the bag—maybe not for several years—and he’d pop up as the owner of Loyn. Thüring was one sly fox. He bet on the fading memory of the public, the courts, the shareholders. And with good reason. What did she once say to Josefa? People forget so fast; nobody will care a fig for it in a few years.

  But maybe he wanted to break up Loyn without ever revealing his identity. Maybe he wanted to milk the company for everything he could, sell off the brand to the highest bidder to make a lot of money. And Walther was going to let all this happen.

  She hadn’t picked up on any of this. She hadn’t seen through Walther, and he had deceived her along with all the rest.

  She was so close to reaching her goal, and now it seemed it would burst like a soap bubble. Nothing could stop Walther, she knew that now. He wanted to sell, that filthy toad! She crumpled up the paper in a rage.

  There was only one thing she could do.

  She shifted the car into first and stepped on the gas. She looked back instinctively in the rearview mirror. There was a car. Getting closer. She was stunned. She’d never seen anybody here before Thüring.

  Did he have an accomplice? She hit the gas and fishtailed around the curve. When she got near her own car, she saw some movement. Two men on skis, with radios and armbands. Police!

  Claire gunned it again, crossing to a smooth, white clearing in the fading daylight. The car bucked and rocked, but Claire kept her eyes firmly focused on the open path ahead. A mad hope had seized her. If she could just make it to the other side before they did, where she knew the terrain, then she could gain a few precious minutes. Nobody would know who’d taken off in the SUV. Maybe the ice would hold, maybe—

  Josefa was staring out the car window. Desolate patches of countryside and industrial buildings bordered the heavily traveled autobahn between Bern and Zurich. She hadn’t uttered a word since hearing Helene’s incredible account. The truth was hard to grasp. Two people she trusted, two people she knew well, were murder suspects.

  Helene saw no point in keeping these dramatic events from Josefa. She’d find them out sooner or later anyhow, she said. It’s better to hear about them from a friend.

  Then Josefa broke her silence. “That must be awful. The ice-cold water, the darkness down there, the fear. She must have been terribly afraid.”

  Helene didn’t answer right away.

  “The police risked their lives to get her out of the water. Claire wouldn’t be alive without them. They could easily have fallen through the ice themselves.”

  But Josefa wasn’t listening. “She must have been very desperate to drive out there. She didn’t see any other way out so she just drove out onto the ice,” she added in a weary monotone.

  “Josefa.” Helene spoke in an unusually gentle manner. “Claire probably killed two people. Yes, they were bad guys, but people nonetheless. And on the face of it, she did it without any scruples, maybe even planned it all. You mustn’t forget that.”

  Josefa sat up straight in the passenger’s seat. “But what drove her to it? What was going on inside? Where did she get this…this decisiveness? What was she trying to achieve?”

  She didn’t dare ask the question Helene was expecting: Why had she been so mistaken about Claire? Instead she said, “She was so excited to be entrusted with so much responsibility. That they gave her some management jobs. That Walther needed her. Pius said she was really doing a great job.”

  Pius. She stopped talking.

  Helene said after a while, “I think a lot of people are under enormous career pressure. They want everything immediately—money, fame, fortune. And if they don’t get it, if somebody’s standing in their way, then they go and get it any way they can. A lot of them say they’d kill for it, and some of them do.”

  Josefa thought about how Claire always supported her, how no assignment was ever too much for her. “Claire must be very talented in ways I never recognized. Meticulous planning, timing, determination, that criminal energy—she had all that in her. And she moonlighted, worked really hard. And she was completely fearless. She followed through on everything and—”

  “Now let’s stop all this, Josefa. Claire did—”

  “I know, I know—but if she’d had the opportunity to apply that energy, that potential in an appropriate job…Helene, there’s nothing she couldn’t have become!”

  “Oh, she still can,” Helene countered with sarcasm. “She’s not dead yet, only in intensive care. She’s got a fifty-fifty chance of becoming Mother Teresa in the future.”

  “I know avenging angels, cold as ice, who rescue poor little birds,” said Josefa calmly, keeping her eyes on the road. “I know seemingly dear, sweet, innocuous women who know a lot and pretend they know nothing. I know respectable people capable of putting poison into somebody’s bloodstream. And I know—”

  “By the way,” Helene interrupted her, unmoved, “it said in the paper that Schulmann didn’t die from an injection of poison but from a so-called date rape drug the murderer put into his whiskey. I think the drug’s called Rohypnol, or ‘roofies’ for short—a guy hanging around a bar with malice aforethought, for example, might slip it into a woman’s drink. In no time at all it makes the woman unable to resist and practically unconscious. They are raped and can’t remember a thing afterward.”

  Josefa was thunderstruck and stared at her. “But the needle… They found the hole where the needle went in.”

  “That’s another thing. Schulmann had blood drawn shortly before—supposedly for an AIDS test, if you can imagine that. The police are just now coming out with the whole story. They found the Rohypnol in his glass; there were traces in the whiskey. But the drug wasn’t the cause of death. Pius apparently smothered Schulmann with a plastic bag while he was unconscious.”

  Bürglen, in March

  Dear Frau Rehmer,

  You do not know me, and Claire might never have told you about me. My name is Berta Fetz, and I am Claire’s aunt. Konrad, my husband, died a year ago. He had a weak heart, but a good one, that much is certain.

  Now Claire is in a detention center, and she is supposed to have done some bad things, but nothing is proven yet, and I hope justice will be done. Only the Lord God knows what really happened and why Claire knew no other way out and went astray.

  But I
do know one thing for certain: Claire is not a bad person. She had a hard life, and she has always had to fight for everything and never got anything for free. I must explain it to you some more. Martha, Claire’s mother, is my younger sister by six years. I had good luck with Konrad, but Martha married a bad man, and that destroyed her character.

  And yet they had such a pretty, clever, diligent daughter, a “Wunderkind,” Konrad used to say (we have no children of our own unfortunately.) My sister Martha is not pretty, nor am I, but Claire was such a sweet girl, with her blue eyes and her strawberry blonde hair and her delicate features. She probably got them from our grandmother Jeanne—a Swiss Frenchwoman from Geneva who married down, unfortunately, but Jeanne was always something special, like Claire.

  When she started school they quickly saw that she was ahead of everybody else. She always had the best grades. And could she draw! Frau Rehmer, you should see the drawings she made for Konrad. And she was also very good in arithmetic. But Martha and Emil were never pleased with Claire. Many were the times I asked my husband why they were not happy about their Wunderkind. Konrad always said she was outgrowing them. Not physically, because Claire is rather small. But I think because she was smarter than her father was. And prettier than her mother. Many parents would have wished for a child like Claire.

  They never praised Claire, they criticized everything about her. She could never please them. But Michi, her brother, he was three years younger, was spoiled rotten. And he was a ne’er-do-well. He could not even finish his apprenticeship; they threw him out. But he tore around in the most fantastic cars, a new one every year. Where does he get the money from, I would ask Konrad. Well, where do you think, is all Konrad would say. Is that not mightily unfair!

  Claire often worked with Konrad in his garage. She was interested in motors. She was interested in everything. Konrad would have taken her on as an apprentice but Claire’s teacher talked to my sister and my brother-in-law. He said she should go to an advanced high school; such a good pupil must be encouraged. But Emil and Martha would not hear of it. They wanted to make a secretary out of Claire. That is of course a good job, but not for Claire.