The Zurich Conspiracy (6 page)

“Are you just doing the washing?” she inquired. The woman raised her hands and said something Josefa didn’t understand.

“Washing?” she repeated, feeling rather stupid. The woman laughed in embarrassment, a bit intimidated. She was missing a few teeth, which made her look older than she probably was.

Josefa gave a shrug of resignation. The woman rushed ahead of her and disappeared behind a door. The aroma of exotic food poured from the apartment, filling the entire stairwell.

Josefa took the streetcar through the downtown and then the mountain line up to the Dolder. The silhouette of the luxury hotel with its picturesque little towers jutted into the gray sky. The sun’s sparse rays had vanished long ago.

Men in stylish uniforms attended to black limousines in front of the hotel entrance, and Josefa proudly recognized some elegant Loyn pieces being unloaded.

At the entrance steps she changed from her running shoes into suede pumps. She didn’t dare leave dirty tracks on the carpet of a five-star hotel, where butlers would iron guests’ newspapers. Helene didn’t seem to have any similar compunction, however. She came tearing into the bar shortly after Josefa arrived—in knee-high hunting boots and green Gore-Tex pants, carrying a large basket. A cluster of formally dressed ladies and gentlemen turned in her general direction, eyeing her surreptitiously. Helene’s cheeks were glowing red, a deeper red than her short hair; her glasses were slightly fogged up; and she was boyishly slim, with the austere face of a Buddhist monk. Although Helene was always outside in wind and weather, her skin was amazingly smooth.

Josefa looked over at her basket, anticipating what it held. It would be some small creature Helene had found abandoned in nature or in the asphalt jungle of Zurich and taken under her care, no doubt. She only hoped it wasn’t one of those chirpy birds like the one Helene had fed
—
more specifically had
stuffed
squashed worms into the little orphaned alpine swift’s maw
—
in a restaurant last summer. Josefa had wanted to sink through the floor when curious people at other tables turned to watch.

But after all, she’d come to know her friend years ago during a similar rescue operation, in the middle of Zurich, in Centralplatz. A small crowd had gathered at the entrance to the Polybahn. Puzzled passengers were standing around a brownish thing that Josefa approached and identified as a young swan. Suddenly somebody pushed through the crowd, a young woman wearing a colorful Moroccan cap and a loose windbreaker.

“Get back,” she’d commanded, her quick hands picking up the injured bird. When she turned around with the swan in her arms, the crowd parted like the Red Sea for Moses. The woman crossed the square, went to the railing overlooking the Limmat River, and threw the swan into the water where it gently landed and paddled off. “Bravo,” Josefa shouted, simply blown away, and made her way over to the woman. “You were magnificent!”

The woman looked at her in bewilderment, and Josefa impulsively invited her for a hot chocolate at the Café Schuster.

“Apparently it pays to have birds in your belfry,” Helene had replied with a grin.

But today Helene had a scowl on her face after Josefa relayed the looming catastrophe at Loyn to her. Helene drank some of the cognac they had each ordered in a fit of daring and cleaned her glasses with the damask napkin lying beside the silver peanut bowl.

“Who actually brought Schulmann in? Walther?”

She was sharp as ever, for that was a question that had been bothering Josefa since she heard the news.

“Francis Bourdin most certainly gave his agreement; Walther won’t do anything without him. Bourdin must have wanted Schulmann; I’m convinced of that. But I wonder why. Why did he go and get a person like him? It doesn’t make sense. Schulmann will only bring him grief.”

“Maybe it hasn’t entered dear Franz’s head yet,” Helene countered (she could not bring herself to call him “Francis”). “Maybe Schulmann turned on all his charm, and little Franz fell for it because it so flattered his colossal ego.”

Josefa swirled her cognac so that it almost splashed out of the glass.

“His job is redundant,” she protested. “I’m doing it all myself anyway.”

“Yes, at the same salary and without bragging rights. You simply rode out that other loser and never asked management to discuss it with you.”

“Discuss?” Josefa snorted. “Those guys don’t even know the word. They’re egomaniacs, monomaniacs…” Josefa searched for something stronger. “Autocrats!”

Helene was not impressed.

“Schulmann will make life difficult for you. He’ll tear a strip off your back if you don’t look out, and there’s nobody who’ll stand up for you. You should’ve really gone at it after that fiasco with Schulmann’s predecessor, Josefa! And you should’ve dealt with Franz right at the start. And yet…somehow you admire him in spite of it all. The marketing genius. The doer. The maverick. ‘He’s just so spontaneous, got nutty ideas. The whole business is nuts in fact.’” Helene had Josefa’s voice down to a T.

Josefa said nothing. She’d been expecting Helene to console her. Solace. Encouragement. And now she was holding a mirror up to her. Revealing her cowardice, her lack of consistency, her willingness to adapt. Helene didn’t have a clue about the workings of a company like Loyn. It wasn’t some forest filled with warbling little birds; it was a cage full of hyenas, and Josefa was smack-dab in the middle.

But what was she supposed to do? What should she have said to Walther? And what was she to do
now
? Expose Schulmann’s sexual harassment? She had no witnesses; and what if they accused her of trying to get her new boss kicked out by starting a vicious rumor? She wanted most of all to pack it in. And she’d already decided not to tell Helene one word about the mysterious e-mails; she wouldn’t take them seriously anyway.

“First, go take your vacation and don’t give the company any thought for a while,” Helene said, as if she could read Josefa’s mind. “Where are you going anyway?”

“Don’t know,” Josefa replied, like an obstinate child. “It just has to be warm, and I want to swim in the sea.”

“How about Tenerife?”

“What! Those concrete tourist castles?”

“Go find a nice hotel on a private beach. You can get a really cheap five-star hotel with Last-Minute Deals. I just heard about them.” She emptied her glass in one gulp. “Come on; let’s go to a travel agency right now.”

Josefa sighed. Helene was simply overpowering. “Where’s
your
next trip to?”

“Maybe to visit Greg in Prince George, but nothing’s definite yet.”

All Josefa knew about Helene’s boyfriend was that he worked in the Canadian Northwest as a nature guide for tourists from all over the world. Helene let on very little about her relationship with the Canadian, and Josefa was careful not to push her on it. Helene could at times be very unapproachable.

Josefa got home at eight that evening, after stopping at the travel agency and booking her trip to the Canary Islands. She took a quick look in the laundry room—and her arms dropped to her sides. With a determined stride she headed up to the second-floor apartment and rang the doorbell. She heard some shouting behind the closed door and things being moved around. Someone was surely eyeballing her through the peephole. When the door opened, it was the same woman with the headscarf who was now silently staring at Josefa.

“Both washing machines are in use again,” Josefa said, knowing it was hopeless. The woman didn’t understand a word she was saying. Josefa was thinking about taking her to the laundry room when a little boy of perhaps seven appeared in the doorway. Josefa wasn’t any good at guessing kids’ ages; she hardly knew any actual children. The boy’s ears stuck out, and he had a round face and pale skin; he eyed her with unconcealed curiosity. Josefa smiled, but the boy kept staring at her while the woman stroked his tangled hair. Josefa muttered something, excused herself, and retreated back to her apartment.

Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door. Josefa looked through the peephole and saw a man she’d once passed on the stairs. He had a strong build and a deeply furrowed face. Josefa opened the door and the man began speaking to her in broken German. The woman with the headscarf, apparently his wife, had told him about Josefa’s visit, and he wanted to know what the problem was.

“The washing machines are always in use,” she stammered. “I have to use them too.”

“Washing machines?” the man asked.

“Yes,” Josefa repeated. “They are always taken, and I’d like to do some laundry.”

“I go look about washing machine,” the man said, raising a hand as if making a promise, and then he was gone.

Josefa sat down at the computer and checked her e-mail. A message from Stefan: “I’m still in New York. It’s time for us to see each other again. I want to know how the last few days have gone.”
Then take the next plane
, Josefa said to herself, before replying with the news that she was going to Tenerife in two days, and then leaving him the hotel phone number.

She opened the rest of her e-mails. One from Bianca looking for the receipts for the flowers from the event. One from her brother, Markus, in London announcing his impending visit in the fall. Would Markus honor their father with a visit too? Things had been tense between Markus and their father, Herbert Rehmer, professor and writer, ever since Markus, a musician, had confessed in a Swiss magazine that he was bisexual. Josefa would have preferred to have closer contact with her brother, but London was far away and the music scene was foreign territory for her.

There was another knock at the door, which Josefa opened impatiently. The man from the second floor proudly declared, “Washing machine free,” and Josefa gave him a curt thank-you. She returned to her computer to read her last e-mail before doing the laundry. And there it was again—her stomach suddenly tightened up. A message from the ominous
[email protected]
, again in English:
A physical injury is forgotten more quickly than an insult. Arm yourself for the very worst-case scenario.

Josefa held her breath. This wasn’t a nasty joke anymore; there was “method in it.” Her mind was spinning in confusion: Who was behind all this? And who would be writing
her
in English? Wouldn’t it have to be somebody in the company? They often used English in meetings because some people didn’t speak German. What was the insult mentioned in the message? Did it refer to the confrontation with Schulmann in San Francisco? But who besides him knew about it? Josefa could only think of Helene. And Stefan.

Maybe Schulmann was behind it, maybe he was already trying to intimidate her with his dirty tricks. But why? His new position was surely victory enough. It seemed more likely that the message was trying to warn about something. But what? What was she to guard against? What was the “very worst-case scenario”? Wasn’t that…her death?

She closed her eyes for several minutes; her nerves were shot. She needed to recuperate as swiftly as possible.

The airport terminal at Tenerife was a flat structure filled with excited crowds of people pushing their way along. Josefa had only seen this many passengers en masse at big-city airports before. Umpteen busses were waiting in front of the building to pick up vacationers. Josefa emerged into the sultry evening air and spotted her driver stowing baggage into the belly of his bus. The Loyn brand was nowhere to be seen, she noted. Climbing onto the rather full bus, Josefa found a seat next to a man of barely twenty who was already sporting a beer belly in spite of his youthful years.

The bus made its slow progress toward town, stopping to unload passengers at their hotels. The seats gradually emptied until the only person left with Josefa was a young blonde immersed in a book, no doubt a travel guide of some sort. Josefa arrived at her hotel in just over an hour; it was a splendid structure with an enormous number of columns and red-and-gray-veined marble slabs. The blonde followed Josefa to the reception desk; the woman, a German she surmised, was traveling solo too. The hotel lobby was crowned by an impressive glass dome, and every room had a kind of balcony where guests could see the patio below, which featured a man-made waterfall, smelling of chlorine, in its center. Josefa’s room was large and comfortable, just what she’d hoped for. (She had to admit that Helene had done an excellent job selecting this hotel.) Josefa stepped out onto the balcony and was confronted with the immense void of the dark, murmuring sea stretched out before her. Guests were dining by lantern light on the beach patio below. But Josefa was too exhausted to join them; instead she tumbled into bed.

The next morning she stood vacillating at the entrance to the extensive patio dining room dressed in a turquoise blouse and white linen pants. A waiter came and escorted her to a little table against the wall some distance from the breakfast buffet and even farther from the sunny patio. Josefa, marshaling her knowledge of Spanish, asked the waiter if she could be nearer the light.

Scowling, the waiter looked around and shrugged. “There is no table available.”