The Zurich Conspiracy

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