The Zurich Conspiracy

secret was intact.
    He reached for the beer bottle on the table in front of him and let the cool brew run slowly down his throat. He put the bottle down, contented, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
    At that moment he heard a loud scratching noise. Where did that come from?
    The transmission suddenly cut out. An eerie silence set in.

The translator acknowledges with much gratitude the indispensable help of the following people in making this translation possible. Barbara Perlmutter was instrumental in the early planning and negotiations; Gabriella Page-Fort of AmazonCrossing navigated the manuscript through the publishing process with steady encouragement and unfailing good humor; Jenny Williams and Ingrid Emerick did a superb job with the copyediting, as did Kara Mason with the proofreading; and the translator’s wife and patient first reader, Nina, gave as always the fledgling manuscript an insightful scrubbing. Special tribute is due the book’s author, Bernadette Calonego, for giving the translation a scrupulous examination and providing a host of improvements and corrections. Any remaining infelicities are the responsibility of the translator. Finally, AmazonCrossing deserves a particular accolade for publishing not only this translation but so many others in its enterprising new series.

Photograph by Rae Ellingham
    Bernadette Calonego was born and raised in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, on Lake Lucerne, a very picturesque area with mountains and lakes. She grew up in a house full of book lovers, where she was encouraged to try her hand at writing. Her first publication was a fairytale, which appeared in a Swiss newspaper when she was eleven years old.
    She has a teacher’s diploma from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where she focused on German, French, and English literature. Her career has included working as a reporter/editor for Reuters news agency in Zurich, and her time covering financial news for Reuters inspired The Zurich Conspiracy .
    From 1990 to 2000, she was the foreign correspondent for Süddeutsche Zeitung , the largest-circulation daily newspaper in Germany, reporting from Switzerland. Bernadette Calonego’s stories have also been published in magazines such as GEO , Vogue , SZ-Magazin , natur + kosmos , foto magazin , Börse Online , EMMA , abenteuer + reisen , and Häuser, and in newspapers such as Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Weltwoche .
    She now resides and works as a freelance foreign correspondent near Vancouver, Canada, writing regularly for such newspapers as Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich, Der Standard in Vienna, and Tages-Anzeiger and Finanz und Wirtschaft in Zurich.
    She has published three novels in German, beginning with Nutze deine Feinde (literally “Use Your Enemies,” published here as The Zurich Conspiracy ), Unter dunklen Wassern (“Under Dark Waters”), and Oh wie schön ist Kanada! (“Oh, How Beautiful Is Canada!”).
    Read Bernadette Calonego’s blog on her website
www.bernadettecalonego.com

Photograph by Nina Chapple
    Gerald Chapple is an award-winning translator of German literature. He received his doctorate at Harvard and went on to teach German and comparative literature at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He has been translating contemporary German-language authors for over thirty-five years. His recent prose work includes two books by the Austrian writer Barbara Frischmuth, The Convent School and Chasing after The Wind , completed with cotranslator James B. Lawson; Michael Mitterauer’s probing history of Europe from 600 to 1600, Why Europe? Medieval Origins of Its Special Path ; and Anita Albus’s wonderfully idiosyncratic book, On Rare Birds. Bernadette Calonego’s gripping thriller set in Zurich marks his return to longer works of prose fiction and his debut for AmazonCrossing. After choosing early retirement, he lives in Dundas, Ontario, with his wife, Nina, an architectural historian, and two Labradors. When not translating, he can usually be found studying birds, butterflies, and dragonflies; reading; or listening to classical music.