The Zurich Conspiracy (42 page)

“Oh, really?” the man said sarcastically. He took his cap off with his left hand and his sunglasses as well but kept his leather gloves on.

Claire stared at him, mystified. She knew the man from somewhere—and yet she wasn’t sure. Was it
him
? But that was impossible! No, it must be a delusion. A nightmare.

The man gave her a vaguely smug smile. “Good camouflage, huh? The miracle of plastic surgery. Nobody recognized me in Düsseldorf.”

His face was contorted in a sardonic grimace. “A little cocaine can’t wipe out a terrific plan like Westek’s and mine. I can pull strings behind the scenes too. Things actually turn out better if you’re out of sight, as you know well, my pretty one. Nobody knows who I am. It’s a more comfortable life anyway, living in secrecy. Am I right, Dorita?”

Claire instinctively bit her lip. Her muscles were aching from the tension.

But Westek’s treachery hurt her even more—another betrayal. And it pained her that she couldn’t kill him a second time. He’d handed over her pseudonym to him. Why had she used the same password for Schulmann and for Westek? Dorita. A serious blunder.

The man on the sofa ran his leather fingers through his blonde hair. His hair used to be dark. He must have dyed it, Claire thought to herself. And his eyebrows too. His tinted contacts were a bright blue, a good disguise for anybody trying to hide his true eye color. His nose wasn’t as fleshy as before, and his teeth were white, straight—perfect. Only his shoulders were as broad as ever, his figure bullish, like in the pictures in the papers.

Why hadn’t she recognized Beat Thüring’s voice right off? But she’d only had one long conversation with him, in St. Moritz, when she could hardly shake him off. She couldn’t think straight. She needed a new strategy; she had to play for time. For space.

She had to play to win.

“Dorita?” she heard herself say in a soft voice. “A pretty name, isn’t it? Westek didn’t tell me the big secret until Düsseldorf—that you didn’t drown at all. Just disappeared from view. And that you were rather dependent on Westek’s good graces.
Poor Beat
. That’s what he called you. Sure he confided in me, everything. He was proud of me. It made him proud to have a mole at Loyn. Dorita. I gave Westek all the key information. Well, he suddenly decided it would work better without you, Herr Thüring. Westek didn’t want to split anything with you; you were just a nuisance to him.”

The man opened the top of his ski suit and peeled his sleeves off. The pistol lay beside him on the sofa.

“Westek should have rubbed you out right away, you piece of shit,” he said. “But he was too cautious; he always wanted to make absolutely precise plans so he would be safe and above suspicion. Well, I don’t bother with those things.” He stood up and slipped off his boots, not letting Claire out of his sight. “But first let’s have a little fun.” His smile was unambiguously lewd. “Westek said at least Dorita’s useful in bed.”

“Westek faked you out beautifully on that one,” Claire said with feigned ease. “He wanted to move ahead with the Walther business. He wanted to buy the company from him for a pile of cash. And throw you to the wolves.”

Thüring’s laugh was rough and dry. He opened his zipper down to his belt, snaked out of his overalls, and stood in front of her in his long underwear.

Claire kept on talking—talking to save her life. “I knew all about the locker in Düsseldorf. Karl told me everything: that you’d leave him a lot of money in a locker. And you’d leave the key at stand 412 at the convention, hiding it behind the coffee machine. He didn’t want to meet you face to face. That might’ve been too dangerous.” She took a deep breath. “He also gave me the combination for the lock on the briefcase with the money. He wrote it down for me, just in case. Everything he told you on the phone was a decoy. He wanted to con you, Thüring. That’s why you killed him, right?”

“Aren’t you laying it on a bit thick, you lousy little bitch? Why should he pick you of all people to tell all of this?” Thüring was still standing in front of the sofa and looking down at her. It was clear that he didn’t believe her. Or not completely. But at least she’d unsettled him a little—and got him distracted. He had to wonder how she knew about the locker. How she knew the number of the stand. And maybe the combination too. His face was twitching a bit. She could read his uncertainty: Maybe she’d seen compromising bank documents at Westek’s? The secret accounts for illegal transactions? He had to find out how much she actually knew. She and any potential accomplices.

“I’ve got proof right here, in this chalet,” Claire said.

Thüring’s eyes narrowed into slits. “You’re lying, you dirty rotten whore.”

“Westek gave me the number. The paper with the combination on it is in the bag under the sofa.”

“You sneaky little slut. You think I’m going to fall for that?”

“Just stick your hand under there. You’ll see I’m telling the truth.”

He hesitated a moment. Then reached under the sofa without taking his eyes off her and pulled out a green leather handbag.

“The note’s in the little side pocket.”

He sat down on the sofa and rummaged around in the bag. A white piece of paper surfaced in his hand, folded over several times.

Claire’s muscles tensed. This was her one chance. Thüring would need both hands to unfold the paper. The gun was lying on his thigh.

Claire bounded over to the stove, grabbed the hot, half-full coffee pot, and threw it in Thüring’s direction. She heard him scream. She ducked down, grabbed her jacket, pulled out the pistol, and took aim. Her burned fingers brought tears to her eyes.

She saw Thüring’s face as if through a veil; it was stained with the brown liquid. Her opponent stood up and waved his arms. Claire fired.

His large body sagged and hit the floor. Claire prepared to shoot again. Thüring lay before her with his legs twisted. She came a little closer. He was holding his stomach; blood was gushing out. She couldn’t see his gun.

“Don’t shoot,” he pleaded. “Don’t shoot.”

“Keep nice and still. Or else…” She kept watching him, tense and alert, her fingers trembling on the trigger.

“Westek never wrote the combination down,” she said scornfully. “You dickhead. Why should he? That weasel. I taped him in the parking lot. We were all set to drive away when his cell phone rang and he told me to get out of the car.” She was talking more to herself than to the man whimpering and bleeding on the floor.

“Ordered
me
out of the car, the bastard. As if
he
shouldn’t get out and take the call. I said I wanted a cigarette in my handbag. I had a tape recorder in there and secretly turned it on.”

Claire laughed dryly. “That idiot never could learn anything new. Always being spied on and never even noticed. The person on the phone gave him the stand number and the combination for the attaché case. There was talk of a lot of money. Westek repeated everything out loud as he wrote it down. In exact detail. So that he would understand everything perfectly. Now I know who the caller was. Thank you, you rat.”

Suddenly Thüring kicked out at her with all his strength. He caught her on the shin. Claire lost her balance and fell against the stove. But she kept a tight grip on the pistol.

He couldn’t get up as fast as she did.

She fired. And fired.

Until Beat Thüring lay lifeless on the floor.

The ward looked like a flower shop. Josefa had already arranged to give the bouquets to the nursing staff. She sat by the window waiting for Helene to pick her up. The doctor had finally discharged her but prescribed therapy in Zurich for post-traumatic stress symptoms. “The effects of experiences of this kind always show up later; it’s important to take care of them with specialized treatment,” she explained.

Take care.
It would be nice, Josefa thought, if everything could be taken care of, like a bad dream. If she could only wake up and find it had merely been a nightmare. She thought of the people in Kosovo. What was it like for those Muslim women who bore children by the men who’d raped and tortured them? Did they get specialized treatment too; did that take care of everything? Josefa looked at the flowers, the white bedcovers she’d slept under for the last time, the leftovers from lunch on the tray. Her packed travel bag was beside her.

But she hadn’t packed the letter lying on the night table.

Esther had forwarded her mail to the hospital. There was a letter from Herbert Rehmer; it had been postmarked one day before Josefa’s trip to Crans. Verena Rehmer, who’d called the hospital daily, knew about the letter and expressed some concern about how she would cope with its problematic contents in her “fragile condition.”

“We don’t want to burden you with more worries,” she said. That “we” is what struck Josefa. She thought it was actually none of her stepmother’s business. She exchanged a few words with her father on the phone—Josefa had expressly forbidden him to come to the hospital—but all she said was, “Thanks for the letter.” It was still too fresh, too early; there would be time later for getting things straight. She had to sort out her own feelings first.

She took the handwritten pages out of the envelope and read the lines that by now she almost knew by heart:

Dear Josefa,

This letter is for your eyes only, and I want to expressly request that under no circumstances will you ever make it public knowledge.

It is not easy for me to reopen the painful past. But if it helps you cope with the present, I cannot deny you your wish.

When the doctors told your mother that she had an advanced stage of cancer, she reacted by repressing it. Filomena did not want to hear one word about chemotherapy and radiation but sought help from a miracle worker in her homeland. You might remember that she often went to Italy in those days. But she did not visit her relatives, as she told you two kids, but one of the slickest of quacks instead.

Please excuse my blunt language, but I have my reasons. Your mother came increasingly under the sway of this miscreant, mainly whenever there was a clear, but temporary, improvement in her condition. I tried to hold her back but couldn’t; I wanted to give her the liberty of dealing with her disease in the way she wanted to. And I felt powerless against that tumor.

But one day when she came back from Italy, Filomena started talking about a separation. She wanted to move to Italy and take you with her. That’s when I began to defend myself. I did not want to lose you. I sought help from doctors and psychologists. Filomena and I gradually became closer again; we talked long and hard, something we had done all too rarely in our marriage.

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.”