The Zurich Conspiracy

all her might and runs out of the ward. She runs down the corridor, past the nurses, down another corridor, and another. Where’s the exit? I want out of here!
    Josefa suddenly had the feeling she was suffocating. “It’s far too warm in here. I can hardly breathe.” She turned to Sauter, who was standing behind her; she could tell from his look that he saw something troubling in her expression. But what?
    He quickly cleared a path through the mob, escorting her through the door and outside. They walked past the compounds and rocky parks without saying a word. Josefa felt a lump in her throat.
    She was only fourteen years old when her mother died. A confused and angry girl left to her own devices. She hadn’t even cried, not at her mother’s burial, not afterward. She had been rock solid, steadfast, reliable, reasonable. Her father had told their relatives, “If it weren’t for Josefa, our family would fall apart.”
    The tantrums came later. Her only safety valve. Kept under wraps with great effort, time and again. She kept the lid on her pain with incredible strength. And for what?
    Ultimately everything was turning sour, that she realized very clearly. Her relationships. Her career. All sorts of bad people were making her life difficult. Josefa suddenly felt overwhelmed by it all. Maybe she should just give up. Be weak. Not fight it anymore.
    But then what would become of her?
    A silent Sebastian Sauter was walking beside her. What was he thinking? Josefa wondered, taking a deep breath. “It was so hot in there I was practically sick to my stomach.”
    Sauter cleared his throat. “We should walk some more in the fresh air, maybe you’ll feel better.”
    He said nothing for a while and then, “The last time I was here with my son he felt sick too because he’d eaten too many roasted almonds. It was my fault. I let him get away with so much because I don’t see him very often. When we’re at the zoo, he always bombards me with questions: Why do snakes molt? Why are penguins black and white? I ought to have been a zoologist.”
    Josefa listened to him chatter on with his stories—smoke signals of hope from a normal world where kids cry because their ice cream cone isn’t as big as last time and because they’ve just missed feeding time at the lion cage.
    They were walking toward the exit when Josefa stopped and looked at Sauter. She knew he was able to guess more than he let on.
    “I can imagine you’re not accustomed to this change of roles, I mean, when your boy asks all those questions. Usually you’re the one who asks all the questions, right?”
    Sauter exchanged glances with her and then looked off into the distance. Or maybe just at the billboard advertising cough drops across the street. “After my divorce I discovered that the most important questions are the ones you ask yourself,” he said.
    “And—did you find the answers?”
    Sauter studied the cough drops once more. “Some, yes, others take longer. Maybe a lifetime,” he chuckled. “But I think that’s easier to live with than continuing to just look the other way, at least in the long run. I…I still find myself a riddle, in many respects, but a…a…er…friendly riddle.”
    Sauter looked self-conscious. Josefa decided to rescue him from this awkward situation by glancing at her watch.
    “It’s getting late. I think I’ll take the streetcar.”
    “May I go with you to the stop?”
    Josefa hesitated and then nodded.

It was five thirty in the morning when Josefa arrived at Loyn’s head office—probably for the last time in her life. She wanted to avoid running into anybody, thus the early hour.
    The “talk” she’d had with Walther was now behind her and she didn’t care to answer to anyone else about her decision to leave. Her conversation with the company president had only amounted to wrapping up a few formalities anyway. He hadn’t tried to persuade her to stay, and she resented that. Auer probably spread it around that Klingler had poached her. Let them think what they wanted to think.
    She’d already said goodbye to the members of her team. The flood of good wishes, the sad words of farewell, and the gifts—everything had moved her deeply. Most of her coworkers thought her decision was just a matter of time even before the golf course “incident” (the official company euphemism for it). Schulmann was making her life difficult every which way, and neither he nor Bourdin, who was still in hospital,