My husband gave Claire money for a business college. Emil found out about it immediately, unfortunately, from a post office employee, because the money went through our postal savings account. There are no secrets in a small village like ours. I always suspected that Emil had something improper going with that woman in the post office. He ranted and raged, not at Konrad, he didn’t have the courage to do that, but at Claire. She then secretly took all her things out of her room and put them in the shed because she was going to run away. Her boyfriend Lukas was going to pick up her things for her. But Emil found out and set the shed on fire. We were never able to prove it, but Konrad and I were convinced he did it.
After that Claire could never go back home, and I think she did not want to. She was just seventeen at the time.
But she did finish business college, and she kept on with further training. She always wanted to be something, and she managed to do just that. I have to congratulate you, dear Frau Rehmer. You helped Claire so much, and she so liked it at the company. I want to aim high, she told me once. I want to aim high. Then they’ll get an eyeful. She meant her parents, naturally. We had a nice chat in the kitchen once. I can still see her standing before me as if it were only yesterday. She was wearing a pretty, bright purple dress and looked so elegant! She was a delight for the eyes. That was the only time she came for a visit after Konrad died.
And now she is in jail. And Martha and Emil are living in Spain, in the sun, living the good life of retirees. They have never once written to Claire. Or phoned her. As if she were not their child.
I think it all had something to do with men. She always latched onto the wrong men. Those men they talked about on television, they were certainly a bad influence on her. They were criminals, if you want to call them what they were. They surely promised Claire the moon and did not keep their promises. And she believed them.
But she did not really need that. She was such a hard worker, such a smart woman. Her teacher always said, Claire is so highly gifted. And she was right at the top. Herr Walther made her his right-hand man. Those men would definitely have wanted to stop that. Because Claire had no need of them anymore. That is how it looks to me. Believe me, Claire is not a bad person. Luck was simply not on her side.
Frau Rehmer, do pay Claire a visit, maybe later when things have settled down a little. She has such respect for you. If you had stayed with Loyn, all this would surely not have happened. Claire was very angry at the way they treated you at Loyn. She told me on the telephone: they are not going to treat me like that.
But a person can be wrong.
I have never written such a long letter in my life, but it is for Claire. After all, she is my niece, and I am really the only person she has.
May the Lord give you strength to bear these difficult times.
I wish you the best with all my heart, Frau Rehmer, and please, do not forget Claire.
Respectfully yours,
Berta Fetz
Holding the letter, Bianca Schwegler let her hands sink; she shook her head. Leaning back in the soft upholstered chair, she looked out Josefa’s living room window and studied the façade of the hotel across the street.
“I feel sorry for that good woman. First she loses her husband, and now her niece is a murderer. Berta Fetz would certainly never have dreamed that she’d have to cope with a nightmare like this at her age.” She looked at Josefa, who was lying on her yellow sofa wrapped up in a soft blanket. “But then…two years ago we’d never have dreamed of the things that have happened in just a few months, would we have?”
“Never, not in a thousand years,” Josefa replied pensively, twirling one of her black-and-gray curls around her index finger. She was wearing a comfortable velvet lounge suit and warm wool socks. She didn’t exactly know why she was showing the letter from Claire’s aunt to her former secretary, of all people. Maybe because Bianca Schwegler was a woman with so much life experience, someone who had raised her son all by herself. Someone who had been working for Loyn for thirteen years. She’d survived a long string of bosses thanks to her down-to-earth temperament.
Bianca Schwegler had sent her a sweet card with a homemade cut-out and offered to come for a visit “as soon as you’re better and would like to see me.” And one day Josefa did indeed phone her. They had never found time for a good long chat since she left Loyn, and that was Josefa’s fault, not Bianca’s. She had never really found time for people she basically liked a lot.
But now, she found that people were her salvation. Salvation from death and salvation from fear.
“Berta Fetz will get another rude awakening,” Bianca continued, pulling up her sleeves. “What she says about men, I think she’s got that wrong. Sorry to gossip like this—but Claire beguiled and manipulated men every which way. I know, Frau Rehmer, you must think I’m jealous, but I’ve often watched how Claire would turn on the charm. That coquettish look, that Marilyn Monroe whisper. That’s how she aroused men’s protective instincts—but we both know that Claire could very well take care of herself. She knew exactly what she was doing and why.”
Josefa wrapped the blanket more tightly around her. “Isn’t it crazy that she conned Schulmann? Claire had no fear of him at all…She outclassed him.”
“Outclassed? I’m not so sure. But you’re right, there was more to her than we thought. After Schulmann was dead and Herr Bourdin…you know already…she really ran the show, I mean communications and event marketing and everything. Walther relied on her totally. I saw a totally different side of her. Even her voice got lower.” Bianca sighed. “But she was already going down the wrong road, and that was the beginning of the end…Now we don’t know what will happen to Loyn. What the new owners have in mind—the Americans. They don’t give a damn for Switzerland, and they probably haven’t any serious interest in our products. But there’s where you see Herr Walther’s true character. Money. It’s always and only about money.”
She was rocking back and forth. “I’ve got to give Claire credit for one thing. I don’t think it was money that mattered to her. I think she simply wanted to be the queen of Loyn. What would have happened if you’d stayed? She would never have rebelled against you, right? Don’t take this the wrong way, Frau Rehmer, but you and Claire always were a team that gave me the creeps.”
Josefa raised herself up, irritated. “The creeps? How so?”
“Because you never argued. There was never really an angry word between you and Claire.” Bianca toyed with her necklace. “It would have only been normal for you to get in each other’s hair now and then, with all that stress.”
“We had our conflicts, Frau Schwegler, even if they weren’t as noisy and wild as Francis Bourdin’s, for example.”
Bianca leaned forward. “It often crossed my mind that at some point one of those two volcanoes had to erupt.”
“So? Which one did you think would blow first—Claire or me?”
“I couldn’t say at the time, Frau Rehmer.” Bianca smiled. “But it turns out that you were the first to erupt.”
“Me?” Josefa looked dumbfounded.
“Yes, of course, all of a sudden you just up and left Loyn.”
“Oh…that’s what you mean. Yes, of course, you’re right,” Josefa said in a wobbly voice.
Spring blossomed at the end of April with a force that Zurich hadn’t experienced that early in years, and everybody streamed outdoors to savor the end of the cold season. Ducks sunned themselves on the edge of the pond, a safe distance from dogs, small children, and young football players.
Girls in skin-tight tank tops baring their stomachs stretched out on the rough-hewn stone blocks beside the stairs to the university buildings; wild grass was shooting up among the stones. A few punk teenagers were banging their mountain bikes together in a sort of bullfight.
Farther along the footpath old folks from the nearby retirement home were sitting on wooden benches every few yards, reading the paper or offering remarks on what was taking place on the green lawn
in front of them. Families spread out their picnic paraphernalia—big and little Tupperware containers with potato salad, pickles, nuts, dried fruit, sliced tomatoes, and cream cheese with herbs. Chicken thighs, steaks, and bratwursts were poked and turned on barbecues, often by gesticulating men in fluttering T-shirts.
Even Paul Klingler had taken on this task. He considered himself a barbecue specialist, and his homemade marinade was the best-kept secret on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse. “After the banking secrets, of course,” he’d assure everybody with a wink.
The potatoes wrapped in foil were still a long way from soft so Paul could abandon his observation post for a couple of minutes and cool his feet in the pond.
But then he spotted a Labrador headed single-mindedly for his grill.
“Go away,” Paul roared, storming toward the dog. The dog’s owner came running from the opposite direction and grabbed the animal by the collar. Then he looked up at Paul, who in the meantime had picked up the tongs and was brandishing them in a threatening manner.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” the man said and took off his sunglasses. “How come you’re not at the office? It’s Sunday, after all.”
Only then did Paul recognize the dog’s owner. “You should talk, Bruno. You’ve got every reason to be poring over your files.”
“No cynical remarks, my good man, there are enough of those in the newspapers. And that’s why I have to listen to constant complaints from my family.” Bruno Zicchun, a man in his midforties in jeans and a crocodile shirt, took a look around. “Do you have family here?”
“My daughter’s over there,” Klingler said. “There’s a whole bunch of us. The kids like it; there’s lots of room.” He wiped his hands on the striped dish towel on his shoulder. “You guys have landed another hopeless case,” he said as a gambit.
“Hopeless?” Bruno emitted a loud laugh. “You might be in for one hell of a surprise. I’m telling you, my client will walk out of that courtroom a free woman.”
“Dream on. Everything’s stacked against her. The cops caught her red-handed. Even the murder weapon was there, a gift for the crime scene investigators.”
Bruno Zicchun leashed his dog—it was still greedily sniffing the air—before answering. “Nothing’s ever as it seems, you know that yourself.”
The lawyer looked around. A woman in wide, colorful pants and an embroidered vest was sitting on a bench several feet away. Her graying, black, curly hair was tied back by a wildly patterned scarf. A young boy, who looked Eastern European and had big jug ears, was watching her repair a kite. Although Bruno assumed the two didn’t speak German, he lowered his voice anyway.
“This is completely confidential, Paul, between you and me, but we’re building a case that’s rock solid. There’s only circumstantial evidence for Westek’s murder. No evidence, no witnesses. Sure, she was with him in Düsseldorf, but no way does that make her a murderer.
“I grant you she worked as a teenager in her uncle’s car repair shop now and then. But is that proof that sabotaging the Porsche was her work? OK, she had top-secret documents from Loyn on her home computer. But Schulmann and Westek both used her computer, and she was naïve enough to give them her password.”
When Paul gave him an ironic smile he took him by the arm. “So who says that it wasn’t Thüring who knocked off Westek? Westek was a confidant, a potential danger. He knew Thüring’s new identity. And Thüring knew a thing or two about automobiles.”
Paul raised his eyebrows in feigned horror. “And you want to sell that to the court and the public? Just a few too many coincidences need explaining, don’t you think? And then she knocks Thüring off in an isolated chalet and is sitting in his car when the cops arrive. How do you guys explain that one?”
“Sit, goddammit!” Bruno’s dog was pulling so hard on the leash that the lawyer had trouble controlling it. “That was self-defense, pure and simple. Thüring’s a criminal, after all; even you must admit that. Drugs, white-collar crime, who knows what. He’d have certainly shot her dead if she hadn’t defended herself. It was his gun that was lying there.”
“And the lady just happens to be running around with Westek’s gun? Ahhh. Very, very tricky, Bruno. Lots of luck, that’s all I can wish you.”
“You watch, we’ll wangle it. Your steaks are certainly blacker than my prospects in this trial.”
“It’s all in the marinade, the marinade.” Paul patted his friend on the shoulder. “But take this hungry wolf away so I can get the meat onto the plate safely.”
“That is not wolf, that is dog,” the jug-eared boy, who now stood before them, announced. “I have hunger,” he shouted when he saw the sizzling steaks.
“See ya soon,” Zicchun shouted, dragging his Labrador behind him.
Paul put an avuncular hand on Sali’s shoulder. “Who’s the hungry wolf here, hmm?”
The woman with the scarf and the wide pants joined them. “Sali, your kite’s fixed.” She handed him the colorful, shimmering trapezoid, and he ran off, his hunger forgotten.
Paul grinned at her. “Interesting, isn’t it? All the things you find out on a nice green meadow. You got all that, right?”
“Yes,” Josefa said, checking the dark brown steaks.
“You know,” Paul went on, “I wouldn’t put it past him to actually get her off. He’s a good one, that Zicchun.”
“But the people want blood, Paul. They can’t get at Pius, because he’s probably dead in that cave somewhere. And not at Thüring and his consorts anymore either. So that only leaves Claire.”
Paul was unimpressed. “In a trial like this one, anything’s possible. Just you wait. And you know, in the final analysis nobody’s going to think she was capable of doing it, the murders and all that. She looks so innocent. Have you gone to see her in jail yet?”
“No, it’s still too soon. First I’ve got to figure things out for myself. You know, sometimes I think it might have happened to me.”
“How so? That Claire would have killed you?”
“No, no, that’s not what I mean. But sometimes…How quickly you can lose control of yourself when you’re under pressure. I mean, under constant pressure. At times something comes over you that’s stronger than anything else. Feelings you never thought you could have. They come from who knows where and overwhelm you.”
Paul shook his head in amusement. “My dear, you’re a model of self-control. I’ve seen you really lose it only once, and that was after the meeting with Van Duisen and the cops in the hotel. But that was a tempest in a teapot. Speaking of water, could you please get me something to drink? I can’t leave the grill unmanned.”
“Yes, or wolves will appear,” Josefa said, shaking off her dark thoughts. “When are we going to get something to eat?”
Josefa dropped Sali off at his apartment; his aunt and uncle had been invited to the picnic but had declined. Then she went to her apartment, took a long, hot shower, and rubbed her body with a subtly scented lotion afterward. She washed and dried her hair, even applied a little eye shadow and lip gloss. She deliberated before choosing a white blouse and a full white skirt, knotting a large, purple silk scarf around her hips to finish it off. She put on a CD on the spur of the moment and danced barefoot over the parquet flooring.
When the doorbell rang downstairs, she was completely out of breath and her cheeks were flushed. She heard footsteps in the stairwell and soon saw the pronounced shape of a head with fine blonde hair, then two broad shoulders. He finally rounded the last flight of stairs, and she saw his narrow gray eyes darken when she met his gaze. He was still shy in his serious way, and that appealed to her.
“Are you going out?” he asked, now standing opposite her.
“Why?”
“Because you’re so elegantly dressed. And then those sparkling stones, they look good on you,” he remarked, noticing the rubies on her earrings.
She drew him into her apartment. “To translate: Does that mean you’re happy because I’ve made myself look prett
y for you?” She turned a coquettish pirouette. He let his jacket and briefcase slide onto the floor and wrapped her in his arms.
“And how happy I am,” he said and kissed her. He liked to kiss and kiss often—she hadn’t thought he was like that. But Sebastian Sauter was, as she’d discovered recently, a man full of pleasant surprises. He still behaved somewhat cautiously, to be sure, and until now he’d only given her a few glimpses into his inner life, but she found him on the whole an utterly delightful package of a man. Even if she’d only admitted it to herself so far.
“You’re here earlier than I expected,” she said. “I was going to bake a quiche Lorraine for you, but I haven’t even started.”
“Do you have any fresh bread?” Sauter picked his jacket up off the floor and hung it in the closet. Then he took a flat metal tin out of his briefcase and a plastic container.
“Caviar!” Josefa exclaimed in delight. “And sour cream! I’ve some baguettes in the freezer. We can bake them.”
Sauter brushed his thin hair back. “Wine, woman, and wow!” he teased and promptly got a poke in the ribs.
“Wine, weird, and wow,” Josefa retorted.
They sat in the living room afterward, on a blanket that Josefa had spread out on the rug. Their stomachs were full of caviar, sour cream, and crusty white bread. Sebastian Sauter lay on his side, his head propped up in his hand. He was listening to Josefa tell him about the picnic in the park and how she had repaired a kite with tools from her handbag.
“I didn’t know how nice it was to fly a kite. It’s as if your soul were flying along with it; I felt so light and exhilarated. I don’t think I ever flew a kite as a kid. I felt a little today what it’s like to be a happy-go-lucky kid.”
The Zurich Conspiracy Page 31