The Zurich Conspiracy

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