The Zurich Conspiracy

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.